Digital Commons Network^™

From Unprepared To On Track: Closing The Kindergarten Readiness Gap By Using A Team-Based Approach To Implement A Multi-Tiered System Of Supports (Mtss) Framework With Fidelity, Erica Filipiak

Theses and Dissertations

We live in a world where preschool and even kindergarten are optional years in schooling, only perpetuating the problem of incoming kindergartener students systemically lacking foundational skills necessary to successfully begin their academic careers. Access to quality preschool is an equity problem that needs to be discussed and researched. Preparing a student to enter kindergarten with the appropriate foundational academic skills does not just set them up for kindergarten success, but also for success in future grade levels. Therefore, a co-design team focused a problem of practice at an elementary school to provide the kindergarten teacher with additional support by …

Implementing Reading Mastery As A Component Of Tiered Literacy Instruction, Kristen R. Rolf, Peter Ehlen, Teresa Buttars

Special Education and Rehabilitation Counseling Faculty Publications

Despite attempts at reform over the decades, many students with and without disabilities in the United States struggle to learn to read. Bear River Charter School is a K-6 public charter school in Utah that has effectively used Reading Mastery Signature Edition to teach most students to read at grade-level by the end of third grade. Data from the 2022-2023 school year show that over 80% of students in kindergarten, over 70% of students in Grades 1 and 2, and over 90% of students in Grade 3 met grade-level reading benchmarks by the end of the year. This chapter describes …

Observations In Writing, Education, And The Internet In The Ai Era, Jacob Westberry

Master's Projects

Artificial intelligence (AI) has reached a point in society where it is difficult to ignore or find integrated into everyday life. To keep up with AI’s rapid growth, modern workplaces and educational institutions are scrambling to identify the best practices that align with ethical guidelines, causing unexpected uncertainties. Still, the path to achieving such standards has been nonlinear, leading many to reconsider how AI can best fit their environments, if at all, especially in pedagogy. This portfolio is a compilation of projects, published articles, applied use cases, and supported research created within the MAPW program at Kennesaw State University to …

Between Prompt And Page: Writing, Reflection, And The Rise Of A.I. Collaboration, Mallory Bowen

Master's Projects

This Capstone examines how generative AI reshapes the act of writing by treating co-writing itself as a site of inquiry. Using an autoethnographic method, I document my collaboration with ChatGPT across months of drafting, tracing how the model’s predictions influence tone, syntax, and rhetorical choice. The project argues that large language models are not neutral tools but participants in a shared writing process shaped by the linguistic hierarchies embedded in their training data. Through examples of prompting, revision, and negotiation, I show how AI leans toward standardized English, simplifies sentence structure, and reproduces dominant linguistic norms, often in ways that …

Identifying, Organizing, And Prioritizing Ideas On How To Support The Entangled Relation Between Theory And Practice In Occupational Therapy Education: A Group Concept Mapping Study, Rina Juel Kaptain, Jacob Østergaard Madsen, Anna Marie Lassen, Kristina Tomra Nielsen

Journal of Occupational Therapy Education

Transfer of learning from an academic setting to clinical practice and vice versa represents a challenge. The aim of this study was therefore to identify, organize, and prioritize ideas on how to support the entangled relation between theory and practice in occupational therapy (OT) education. To gain broad perspectives on the topic, Group Concept Mapping (GCM) was applied among OT students, lecturers, and fieldwork educators. GCM included six phases: Preparing (formulating a focus prompt), Generating ideas (brainstorming based on focus prompt: “To support the relation between theoretical and practical elements in the OT program there is a need for.. …

Factors Influencing Reflection And Self-Assessment Of Simulation Performance: Comparing Student And Preceptor Ratings, Kaitlin R. Sibbald, Diane E. Mackenzie

Journal of Occupational Therapy Education

Simulation with simulated patients is increasingly used in occupational therapy. Ensuring the debrief component meets student needs to develop their self-assessment skills for participating in a self-regulating profession is essential. This explanatory mixed-methods research sought to explore factors contributing to accurate and inaccurate self-assessment of simulation performance for novice occupational therapy learners in a part-time introductory fieldwork course. Self-ratings and preceptor-ratings of performance on eleven simulation objectives were compared for sixty-five novice occupational therapy students. Factor analysis was used to explore contributors to differences in ratings between students and preceptors. Students’ written plus-delta debrief reflections were analyzed to explore what …

A Multiethnic Approach Of Stakeholder Involvement To Set Priorities For Oral Health Research, Sumanth Kumbargere Nagraj

Peninsula Dental School Theses

Setting research priorities is a key component of an effective research system. Stakeholder involvement, both formal and informal, is crucial in this process. Only few studies focus on the challenges of engaging diverse populations, particularly those from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, or how their values and priorities may align or differ.In Malaysia, a multiethnic and multilingual country, significant oral health disparities have been reported across ethnic groups. For example, the Malaysian National Oral Health Survey (2017) documented a higher prevalence of dental caries among Chinese children (30.7%), the highest oral cancer rates among Indians (46.2%), and the lowest prevalence …

Uncertainty In Decision-Making Within The Dental Context Of Malaysia’S Multi-Ethnic Population – A Mixed-Methods Study, Prashanti Eachempati

Peninsula Dental School Theses

Background:Uncertainty is an inherent part of healthcare, particularly in decision-making. Shared decision-making in many Asian contexts faces challenges due to language barriers, religious practices, hierarchical clinical norms, and collectivist approaches to decision-making. Under uncertain conditions, these challenges become even more complex and may be influenced by individuals’ tolerance of uncertainty. Understanding how both patients and dentists of multi-ethnolinguistic groups experience and respond to uncertainty is therefore essential to support context-sensitive, culturally responsive dental decision-making.Aim:To explore how multi-ethnic patients and dentists in Malaysia, with varying levels of uncertainty tolerance, perceive and respond to uncertainty in oral health decision-making, and how they …

The Impact Of Socioeconomic Status On Substance Use Amongst The Hispanic Maternal Population, Emily C. Olivo

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Aim: To explore and synthesize existing research that focuses on the relationship between socioeconomic status and the use of substances amongst the maternal Hispanic population. By examining research and these factors, interventions can be identified to lower reported substance use rates amongst Hispanic mothers of childbearing ages.

Background: Minorities such as Hispanic women deal with a myriad of struggles, especially during motherhood. Socioeconomic status and substance use can contribute to a large part of the struggles faced by this population. Hispanic and Latina will be used interchangeably throughout this review of literature.

Method: A comprehensive electronic review of 3 databases …

Intelligent Tutoring Systems In The Age Of Llm-Based Agentic Frameworks - Adapting Small On-Device Language Models For Fact-Checking And Student Compliance Detection, Evan Vahid Naderi

Honors Undergraduate Theses

As large language models (LLMs) demonstrate increasingly sophisticated language understanding capabilities, they offer transformative potential for educational technology, particularly in developing more responsive intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). To develop these systems, a synthesis that balances theoretical frameworks with practical, cutting-edge, and deployable technology would be useful. This thesis aims to advance the field of ITSs theoretically by viewing the modern advancements in natural language processing within the context of the foundational frameworks important to the fields of self-regulated learning, ITSs, and cognitive agents. Then, building on prior research on the ITS MetaTutor \citep{Azevedo2022}, this research focuses on how functions of …

Insights In Adaptation: Examining Self-Reflection Strategies Of Job Seekers With Visual Impairments In India, Akshay Kolgar Nayak, Yash Prakash, Sampath Jayarathna, Hae-Na Lee, Vikas Ashok

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Significant changes in the digital employment landscape, driven by rapid technological advancements and the COVID-19 pandemic, have introduced new opportunities for blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals in developing countries like India. However, a significant portion of the BVI population in India remains unemployed despite extensive accessibility advancements and job search interventions. Therefore, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 BVI persons who were either pursuing or recently sought employment in the digital industry. Our findings reveal that despite gaining digital literacy and extensive training, BVI individuals struggle to meet industry requirements for fulfilling job openings. While they engage in self-reflection …

Quickque: Enabling Quick Access To Information In User Reviews For Screen Reader Users, Mohan Sunkara, Akshay Kolgar Nayak, Sandeep Kalari, Yash Prakash, Sampath Jayarathna, Hae-Na Lee, Vikas Ashok

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Efficiently perusing online customer reviews is presently challenging for blind users, who rely on a screen reader that supports predominantly one-dimensional narration of content via keyboard shortcuts. To address this, with restaurant reviews as seminal case study, we developed QuickCue, a browser extension prototype that enables screen reader users to quickly obtain the positives and negatives regarding different aspects of a restaurant (e.g., food quality, hygiene, ambiance), without having to sift through numerous reviews containing redundant information. At its core, QuickCue utilizes a large language model to perform aspect and sentiment-based joint classification of reviews to group them based on …

From Philosophy To Nlu: Evolving Definitions Of Research Hypotheses, Jian Wu, Sarah Rajtmajer

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Over the past decades, alongside advancements in natural language processing, significant attention has been paid to training models to automatically extract, understand, test, and generate hypotheses in open and scientific domains. However, interpretations of the term hypothesis for various natural language understanding (NLU) tasks have migrated from traditional definitions in the natural, social, and formal sciences. Even within NLU, we observe differences defining hypotheses across literature. In this paper, we overview and delineate various definitions of hypothesis. Especially, we discern the nuances of definitions across recently published NLU tasks. We highlight the importance of well-structured and well-defined hypotheses, particularly as …

Can Llms Beat Humans On Discerning Human-Written And Llm-Generated Science News, Dominik Soós, Meng Jiang, Jian Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Science news is increasingly important in connecting scientists and the public by sharing discoveries and innovations. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), there is potential to automate science news creation, but concerns exist about the quality of LLM-generated news versus human-written news. This paper explores whether LLMs can outperform humans in distinguishing between human-written and LLM-generated news. Inspired by the Chain-of-Thought prompting method, we designed a simple yet effective variant called Guided Few-shot (GFS), which encodes the characteristics of news of two types with examples. Our experiments indicated that GFS with just a single example effectively boosted the …

Nexus: Network Exploration For Exploiting Unsafe Sequences In Multi-Turn Llm Jailbreaks, Javad Rafiei Asl, Sidhant Narula, Mohammad Ghasemigol, Eduardo Blanco, Daniel Takabi

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks—particularly multi-turn jailbreaks that distribute malicious intent across benign exchanges, thereby bypassing alignment mechanisms. Existing approaches often suffer from limited exploration of the adversarial space, rely on hand-crafted heuristics, or lack systematic query refinement. We propose NEXUS (Network Exploration for eXploiting Unsafe Sequences), a modular framework for constructing, refining, and executing optimized multi-turn attacks. NEXUS comprises: (1) ThoughtNet, which hierarchically expands a harmful intent into a structured semantic network of topics, entities, and query chains; (2) a feedback-driven Simulator that iteratively refines and prunes these chains …

Position: Benchmarking Is Broken - Don't Let Ai Be Its Own Judge, Zerui Cheng, Stella Wohnig, Ruchika Gupta, Samiul Alam, Tassallah Abdullahi, João Alves Ribeiro, Christian Nielsen-Garcia, Saif Mir, Siran Li, Jason Orender, Seyed Ali Bahrainian, Daniel Kirste, Aaron Gokaslan, Carsten Eickhoff, Pramod Viswanath, Ruben Wolff

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The meteoric rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with its rapidly expanding market capitalization, presents both transformative opportunities and critical challenges. Chief among these is the urgent need for a new, unified paradigm for trustworthy evaluation, as current benchmarks increasingly reveal critical vulnerabilities. Issues like data contamination and selective reporting by model developers fuel hype, while inadequate data quality control can lead to biased evaluations that, even if unintentionally, may favor specific approaches. As a flood of participants enters the AI space, this "Wild West" of assessment makes distinguishing genuine progress from exaggerated claims exceptionally difficult. Such ambiguity blurs scientific signals …

An Analytical Review Of Preprocessing Techniques In Bengali Natural Language Processing, Sovon Chakraborty, Protiva Das, Shakib Mahmud Dipto, Md Aktaruzzaman Pramanik, Jannatun Noor

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Research in Bengali Natural Language Processing (BNLP) is rapidly expanding. Despite being one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, BNLP research remains insufficient, particularly in Bengali speech recognition. The languages rich morphology, agglutinative structure, and diverse dialects make text and speech processing especially challenging. However, these challenges can be addressed with effective preprocessing techniques. Various organizations in Bangladesh and West Bengal are integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) into their services, but without a thorough understanding of preprocessing, these implementations remain incomplete. Applying proper preprocessing techniques to the Bengali language will serve as a foundation for developing robust …

Rethinking Trust In The Refugee Resettlement Process: How Service Providers Can Enable Refugee Agency Through Diasporic Connections, Mahfoudha Sidelemine, Emily D. Campion

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

Current guidance for refugee resettlement agency workers encourages the simultaneous pursuit of trust-building and administrative tasks (e.g., housing, transportation and employment). This dual goal is resource-intensive, and focusing on the former may come at a cost to the latter. The purpose of the current research is to challenge the importance of trust-building by resettlement agencies. Drawing from our qualitative data from in-depth interviews with resettled refugees (N = 20) and agency workers (N = 15), we adopt a grounded theory approach and find that the burden of responsibility for both caregiving and administrative responsibilities can overtax agency workers …

Synthesizing Deception: Countering Large Language Model-Generated Phishing Campaigns Through Adaptive Semantic Anomaly Detection, Bekim Fetaji, Debabrata Samanta

Mesopotamian Journal of Computer Science

The paper fills in a gap in the literature that demonstrates an insufficient number of sturdy detection schemes that can recognize the small semantic aberrations inherent in LLM-generated deceptive text. Our proposed co-design hybrid model is Semantic Anomaly Detection with Isolation Forest (SADI) model that combines the synergistic mixture of a fine-tuned transformer-based LLM for deep semantic feature extraction with Isolation Forest algorithm that detects anomalies efficiently. This study introduces SADI, an adaptive semantic-anomaly detector for large-language-model phishing emails. Using a corpus of 10 000 messages, SADI attains an F1 score of 0.981 (95 % CI 0.978–0.984) and processes a …

War-Displaced International Students: A Qualitative Study Of Factors Influencing The Integration Of Ukrainians At A Midwestern Healthcare College, Ivan Riapolov

Dissertations

Problem

The war in Ukraine has disrupted the country’s higher education system, displacing Ukrainian students and affecting their mental well-being. These students encounter numerous challenges while adapting to new academic and cultural environments abroad. Higher education professionals must recognize and address the unique experiences and needs of international students by region of origin to better serve these populations. This study aimed to explore the factors that influence the social and academic integration of Ukrainian international students into a new culture and to inform institutions of the best practices for creating supportive environments for international students.

Method

The qualitative study explored …

Subdued Voices And Marginalized Lives: Reading R. K. Narayan’S Waiting For The Mahatma Through Feminist Standpoint Theory, D. Sundar Singh, S. Pressila Daissy, Roland Rencewigg P.

Journal of International Women's Studies

Standpoint feminism, based in second-wave feminist theory, insists that knowledge is situated in the social world and contends that marginalized groups, through their experiences of oppression and struggle, hold experiential understandings of power relations. This paper examines R. K. Narayan’s complex depiction of a young woman actively involved in India’s freedom struggle in his novel, Waiting for the Mahatma (1955/2004), through the lens of Sandra Harding’s feminist standpoint theory. The novel’s central character, Bharati, through her varied trajectories of resistance and accommodation within patriarchal structures, illustrates marginalized women’s understandings and their mirroring of social inequalities and power relations that are …

A New Melian Dialogue: Feminist Thinkers On Security Problems Of The 21st Century, Heather Rellihan, Michael Coffey

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay critically engages with two important works on feminist foreign policy— Kristina Lunz’s The Future of Foreign Policy is Feminist and Cynthia Enloe’s Twelve Feminist Lessons of War—both of which offer useful insights for the evolving field of critical security studies. The authors of this essay have divergent backgrounds—a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and a defense scholar—which reflect a central tension in feminist foreign policy between feminist principles and the paradigms and exigencies of defense policy makers. Through a constructed conversation between its authors, this essay engages the arguments of Lunz and Enloe to ask …

The B3 Scholar Seal: Designing And Implementing An Alternative To The Sobl At A Hispanic-Serving Institution In South Texas, Katherine Christoffersen, Dania López García

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter describes how the Bilingualism, Biculturalism, and Biliteracy (B3) Institute at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) developed the B3 Scholar Seal. Since its founding, UTRGV has provided a rare example of dual language education at the university level, offering courses taught bilingually or in Spanish across diverse disciplines. However, the language of these courses was not formally recognized upon graduation. The B3 Institute developed the B3 Scholar Seal to acknowledge students who successfully complete five courses, including at least three courses taught in Spanish or bilingually and at least one course, including culturally sustaining pedagogy. In …

Teaching Cuba In Georgia Today, Eric Kartchner

The Coastal Review

This essay details a college professor's approach to teaching a course on Cuban history and culture. The professor's pedagogical choices were influenced by Ada Ferrer's book, Cuba: An American History, and José Antonio Bowen's work on fostering independent thinking. The syllabus covered pre-Columbian Cuba, Spanish rule, the wars of independence, the Castro era, and significant cultural aspects like music and religion. The course emphasized multiple perspectives and encouraged student-led research, challenging preconceived notions about Cuba's complex relationship with the United States. The professor aimed to promote critical thinking and understanding through student-driven inquiry.

Leer La Pintura Las Meninas: Niveles B Y C De Español L2, Nydia Jeffers

The Coastal Review

La pintura española Las meninas (1656) de Diego Velázquez ha sido examinada por especialistas de las artes y las ciencias. Esta propuesta didáctica invita a los estudiantes de español de los niveles B y C a practicar la lectura mediante las conexiones curriculares de la obra. Para ilustrar su potencial educativo, se conecta la pintura con más de veinte investigadores de distintas disciplinas. El diseño de las actividades se apoya en teóricos de la adquisición de segundas lenguas y en referentes de artes plásticas del Plan Curricular del Instituto Cervantes (2007) y abarca las competencias lingüísticas del Marco Común Europeo …

Navigating The Path: Understanding And Overcoming Challenges For College Students With Disabilities, Nahal Salimi, Bryan Gere, Elaine Mora, Roy K. Chen

School of Rehabilitation Services & Counseling Faculty Publications

Higher education can be challenging for many students, but for those with disabilities, it presents additional hurdles. Oftentimes, students with disabilities must navigate both their academic responsibilities and the unique challenges posed by their disabilities. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the most frequently reported challenges and barriers to academic success for students with disabilities in higher education. The chapter focuses on several key issues, including but not limited to societal attitudes surrounding disability and provision of academic accommodation, students' willingness to disclose their disabilities in their institutes, and difficulties with social integration. Each of these challenges is explored …

Navigating Big Data In Cyber Archaeology: An Updated Four-Field Approach Applied To San Miceli, Jared Wilson

Dissertations

Problem

This dissertation examines the evolving role of digital technologies in archaeological research, focusing on the management and interpretation of extensive digital datasets generated by modern excavations. Drawing on six years of comprehensive fieldwork at San Miceli, Sicily, this study critically evaluates and updates the established four-field methodology proposed by Levy et al. (2012), encompassing acquisition, analysis, dissemination, and curation. While traditional archaeological documentation methods rely heavily on analog techniques, these approaches increasingly fall short due to the rapid expansion and complexity of digital data.

Method

To address this gap, the dissertation refines and expands the current methodological framework by …

An Immanent Postfoundational Methodology For Researching The Violent Trans-Sections Of Ableism, Classism And Sexism, Elizabeth Done, Cara Baer

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper charts the unfolding of a small-scale qualitative study, presented at institutional ethical approval stage as drawing on posthumanist theorising and seeking to (re)configure the concept of intersectionality, and focusing on the lived experience of postgraduate students of lower socio-economic status with disabilities. The self-selected sample comprised six women, three of whom volunteered accounts of sexual violence that complicated their experiences of dis-ability and class, and highlighted the complexity of their lived experience of intersectionality. We describe a research process in which interviewing became intra-viewing, lived experience came to be understood through Deleuzian and Deleuzo-guattarian concepts and intersectionality became …

Exploring Islamophobia Through Intersectionality., Suparna Bagchi

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Patient Experiences And Prerequisites Of Collaboration As Partners In Person-Centred Care: An Interview Study, Lena Rosenlund, Sofie Jakobsson, Helen Lloyd, Anna Diffner, Åsa Lundgren-Nilsson, Anna Dencker

School of Psychology

Aim: To explore what characterises communication and collaboration within a patient and professional partnership in outpatient care settings garnered from the experiences of persons living with long-term conditions. Design: A qualitative descriptive study design. Methods: Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with 15 persons with long-term condition/s who experienced outpatient treatment or follow-up care. Data were explored through inductive thematic analysis. The COREQ checklist was followed. Results: The analysis revealed five themes: adapting and self-managing in daily life, handling and carrying information, building trust and continuity, acting in a flexible and transparent dialogue and sharing the way forward. The participants described …