Digital Commons Network^™

Rural Stem Teachers: An Oasis In The Desert, Ryan G. Zonnefeld, Valorie L. Zonnefeld

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Teacher preparation programs for STEM education should prepare teachers for all settings, including rural schools. Students across geographic locales show equal interest in STEM fields, but rural students often lack access to highly qualified STEM teachers. UNESCO (2014) notes that the disparity in education between rural and urban schools is a concern of many countries. In the United States, the National Center for Educational Statistics confirms that twenty percent of students are educated in rural schools and the STEM teachers in these schools are often the only STEM expert. These teachers become backbone teachers that set the foundation and direction …

Teacher Experiences And Perceptions In Implementing Instructional Strategies For Fostering Student Engagement In Upper Elementary Mathematics, Gail Willis

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological research study was to investigate the factors that influence mathematical instruction of upper elementary teachers in school districts within Southern California. More specifically, this research study examined teaching strategies of upper elementary teachers’ experiences and perceptions regarding implementing student engagement in mathematics in school districts within Southern California. This qualitative phenomenological research study involves teachers who utilize instructional strategies based on their best practices that foster students engaging in upper elementary mathematics. In this research study, the participants explained their lived experiences and perceptions of utilizing their chosen strategies to engage students in mathematics …

The Relationship Between Engagement And Tactile Learning In A Math Classroom Setting, Mikayla Mcbride

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

math setting. I will be teaching a student two similar lessons of multiplication. One lesson will be taught completely with manipulatives. The other lesson will be taught with pencil and paper. The level of engagement between the student and the lesson will be measured for each lesson. I will be using formative assessment to measure student engagement through observation. I will also use a checklist to check multiplication accuracy at the end of the lesson. My hypothesis is that the student will have a higher level of engagement when tactile learning is used. I believe the student will have a …

Mathematical Reasoning: Writing And Proof (Pretext Edition), Ted Sundstrom

Open Textbooks

Mathematical Reasoning: Writing and Proof is a text for the first college mathematics course that introduces students to the processes of constructing and writing proofs and focuses on the formal development of mathematics.

Mathematical Reasoning: Writing and Proof (PreTeXt Edition) was developed as part of the Accelerating Open Educational Resources Initiative at Grand Valley State University, with support from the University Libraries and the President's Innovation Fund.

Mathematical Reasoning: Writing and Proof was written by Ted Sundstrom, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Grand Valley State University. This textbook was converted into PreTeXt by Ian Curtis, Editorial Assistant for the …

Grade K-5 Teachers’ Perceptions Of Professional Development That Supports Mathematics Instruction, Shannon Annette Manley

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Many Grade K-5 teachers in the United States do not receive the mathematics support they need from the professional development (PD) activities offered by their school districts. The purpose of this qualitative research was to explore the perceptions of Grade K-5 teachers on the PD activities they received from their school district to support mathematics instruction. The conceptual framework that supported this study was andragogy, an adult learning theory that takes the learner’s needs into account and values the connection to real-world situations. The research question addressed how Grade K-5 teachers perceive the PD that they were offered by their …

Stroke Clustering And Fitting In Vector Art, Khandokar Shakib

Senior Independent Study Theses

Vectorization of art involves turning free-hand drawings into vector graphics that can be further scaled and manipulated. In this paper, we explore the concept of vectorization of line drawings and study multiple approaches that attempt to achieve this in the most accurate way possible. We utilize a software called StrokeStrip to discuss the different mathematics behind the parameterization and fitting involved in the drawings.

Backlog Burner: An Adventure Into Automated Scheduling, Anjolaoluwa J. Olubusi

Senior Independent Study Theses

The focus of this independent study is to explain the nurse scheduling problem (NSP) and use it as a basis to create an automated scheduling program. The nurse scheduling problem is an operational research problem that sets to find an optimal hospital schedule that fulfills the needs of the hospital and the personal requests of the nurses. The majority of solutions for the nurse scheduling problem are often designed within a hospital setting. The objective of this independent study is to use the solutions of the nurse scheduling problem to develop an automated scheduling program for the College of Wooster …

Gaming The System: A Game Theoretic Approach To Risk Management And Cybersecurity, Abigail Breitenbucher

Senior Independent Study Theses

In this independent study, we detail two fields of game theory, traditional and evolutionary. After establishing foundational concepts in both, we explore risk management and cybersecurity through a game theoretic lens, focusing on some current applications in both fields. The research culminates in an application case of a game theoretic model for the 2017 Equifax data breach. To conclude, we discuss the implications of this model and future work involving evolutionary game theory in cybersecurity/risk management.

The Infinity Conundrum: Understanding Topics In Set Theory And The Continuum Hypothesis, Sabrina Grace Helck

Senior Independent Study Theses

This project is concerned with articulating the necessary background in order to understand the famous result of the undecidability of the continuum hypothesis. The first chapter of this independent study discusses the foundations of set theory, stating fundamental definitions and theorems that will be used throughout the remainder of the project. The second chapter focuses on ordinal and cardinal numbers which will directly relate to the final chapter. First, there is a clear explanation of the notion of order and what it means for a set to be well-ordered. Then ordinal numbers are defined and some properties are listed and …

Highlights Generation For Tennis Matches Using Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing And Audio Analysis, Alon Liberman

Senior Independent Study Theses

This project uses computer vision, natural language processing and audio analysis to automatize the highlights generation task for tennis matches. Computer vision techniques such as camera shot detection, hough transform and neural networks are used to extract the time intervals of the points. To detect the best points, three approaches are used. Point length suggests which points correspond to rallies and aces. The audio waves are analyzed to search for the highest audio peaks, which indicate the moments where the crowd cheers the most. Sentiment analysis, a natural language processing technique, is used to look for points where the commentators …

Environmental Socialization In College: A Survey Research And Network Analysis Of Changes In Climate-Conscious Concerns And Behaviors, Bijeta Lamichhane

Senior Independent Study Theses

Studies have established that socialization takes place in different stages of life. This study explores how political socialization occurs at The College of Wooster by examining changes in students' political identities as well as their perceptions towards a politicized issue, that is, climate change. These shifts in beliefs and concerns among students were evaluated by implementing quantitative research tools present in the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and constructing a similarity network using Gephi to explore similarities across students at this institution. The results revealed that students have become more liberal after joining this college. The study also found …

On Implementing And Testing The Rsa Algorithm, Kien Trung Le

Senior Independent Study Theses

In this work, we give a comprehensive introduction to the RSA cryptosystem, implement it in Java, and compare it empirically to three other RSA implementations. We start by giving an overview of the field of cryptography, from its primitives to the composite constructs used in the field. Then, the paper presents a basic version of the RSA algorithm. With this information in mind, we discuss several problems with this basic conception of RSA, including its speed and some potential attacks that have been attempted. Then, we discuss possible improvements that can make RSA runs faster and more secure. On the …

Counting The Moduli Space Of Pentagons On Finite Projective Planes, Maxwell Hosler

Senior Independent Study Theses

Finite projective planes are finite incidence structures which generalize the concept of the real projective plane. In this paper, we consider structures of points embedded in these planes. In particular, we investigate pentagons in general position, meaning no three vertices are colinear. We are interested in properties of these pentagons that are preserved by collineation of the plane, and so can be conceived as properties of the equivalence class of polygons up to collineation as a whole. Amongst these are the symmetries of a pentagon and the periodicity of the pentagon under the pentagram map, and a generalization of …

Wildfire Simulation Using Agent Based Modeling: Expanding Controlled Burn Season, Morgan C. Kromer

Senior Independent Study Theses

The United States is home to many different and unique forests. Prior to the 21st century, the United States Forests Service assumed that the best way to protect these forests was to put all efforts to keeping them alive. An enemy to these efforts were wildfires, thus the US adopted a complete fire suppression approach. At the turn of the century, the US realized that wildfires are a necessary part of a forest ecosystem, as they help return nutrients to the soil and reduce ground fuels. However, after suppressing all fires for over 100 years, the forests evolved into a …

An Investigation Of Mathematics Self-Efficacy, The Sources Of Mathematics Self-Efficacy, And Mathematics Achievement Among Primary School Students In Trinidad And Tobago, Ronald Sinanan

Dissertations

Purpose of the Study

This dissertation addressed two problems in the literature. Firstly, while many study findings have highlighted the critical role of self-efficacy in students' achievement, additional research was needed about the four hypothesized sources that influence the improvement of students' mathematics self-efficacy. Many studies on self-efficacy sources were conducted with measures not closely tied to social cognitive theory and have not demonstrated sufficient reliability. Using the Sources of Mathematics SelfEfficacy Scale, Usher and Pajares (2009) addressed this problem. They suggested several recommendations for future research (Usher & Pajares, 2008b, 2009), including exploring the validity of their scale in …

Mathematical Connections Established In The Teaching Of Functions, Vesife Hatisaru

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This study explores the types of mathematical connections established in the classroom in the teaching of functions. An extended model for mathematical connections (different representations (DR), procedural (PC), if-then (I-T), part-whole connections (PWC), feature/property (F/P), analogies, and instruction-oriented connections (IOC)) is used as the analytical framework. The context for the study is classroom observations of two secondary mathematics teachers teaching functions to Grade 9 students. The strength of teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) the concept of function is different: one has stronger MKT, while the other has weaker MKT. A total of 485 connections are identified in a sample …

Providing Virtual Mathematics Feedback: Connecting Research To Practice, David Glassmeyer, Mary Colclasure, Laura Alevy

Georgia Educational Researcher

Feedback is an essential form of communication between the student and teacher. Research has documented the importance of feedback in advancing student mathematical and critical thinking, with renewed recommendations to provide and use feedback in mathematical instruction during the era of COVID-19. Giving personalized feedback in an online environment can be a challenge – especially in a mathematics class. This article summarizes five core principles of feedback, associated strategies for mathematics teachers to provide students virtual feedback, and notes on how we have implemented these strategies in middle school mathematics classes.

Investigating Discussion Forum Impact On Students’ Social Justice Beliefs In Online Undergraduate Mathematics Courses: A Mixed Methods Study, Ashlee Lynn Akin Matney

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

While teaching math for social justice and equity has become a heavily researched topic in recent decades with Jo Boaler (2008, 2015, 2016), Rochelle Gutiérrez (2009, 2013), and Eric (Rico) Gutstein (2003, 2006, 2007, 2013) emerging as recent leaders in the charge, the focus has consistently remained on traditional classroom teaching (e.g. Boaler, 2008; Gutiérrez, 2009; Gutstein, 2003). This convergent design mixed methods study investigated the impact of teaching math for social justice in the online learning environment, specifically, the impact of discussion forums on students’ social justice beliefs in fully online undergraduate math courses.

Quantitatively, 56 students completed pre- …

Students' Mathematical Reasoning Ability In Solving Post-Covid-19 Pisa Model Math Problems, Linda Linda, Ira Asyura

Jurnal Riset Pendidikan Matematika

This study aims to describe the reasoning abilities of high school students in Pandeglang Regency, Indonesia in solving post-Covid-19 PISA model math problems. The subjects of this study were 80 students of two state senior high schools in Pandeglang Regency, Indonesia. The data collection used a written test consisting of four description questions in the form of PISA model math questions (levels 2, 3, 4, and 5), and were through interviews and documentation. The data analysis followed the steps of data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing. The results show that the reasoning abilities of Pandeglang Regency high school students …

What Effect Do Government Policies Have On The Transmission Of Covid-19?, Emily Prestige

The Plymouth Student Scientist

This investigation aimed to determine the effect of government policies on the transmission of COVID-19 during the period 30/01/2020 – 03/01/2021. This investigation used qualitative data from policy legislation and journals and quantitative data from official government pandemic figures. It also used central factors of successful government approaches to assess the efficacy of the UK Government strategy. The measure used to monitor transmission rates is the instantaneous reproduction number Rt. I have used summary statistics, data visualisation, and time series representations to conduct exploratory data analyses. I also investigated the change in testing capacity and positivity rate over time to …

Explaining Differences In One Teacher’S Instruction Across Multiple Tracked Fifth-Grade Classes, Corey Webel, Kimberly A. Conner, Christina Sheffel

Faculty Publications

In this article, we describe the case of “Keri,” a fifth-grade teacher who had completed an Elementary Mathematics Specialist (EMS) certification program. Drawn from a larger study investigating the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of EMSs, Keri's case was unique in that she was teaching mathematics to four classes in a departmentalized structure, where students were placed into different classes according to perceived mathematics ability. Observations from the larger study revealed that Keri's instructional practices did not align with her reported beliefs and knowledge. To explore this deviation, we conducted a case study where we observed Keri's instruction across multiple classes …

A Brief Treatise On Bayesian Inverse Regression., Debashis Chatterjee Dr.

Doctoral Theses

Inverse problems, where in a broad sense the task is to learn from the noisy response about some unknown function, usually represented as the argument of some known functional form, has received wide attention in the general scientific disciplines. However, apart from the class of traditional inverse problems, there exists another class of inverse problems, which qualify as more authentic class of inverse problems, but unfortunately did not receive as much attention.In a nutshell, the other class of inverse problems can be described as the problem of predicting the covariates corresponding to given responses and the rest of the data. …

Secret Sharing And Its Variants, Matroids,Combinatorics., Shion Samadder Chaudhury Dr.

Doctoral Theses

The main focus of this thesis is secret sharing. Secret Sharing is a very basic and fundamental cryptographic primitive. It is a method to share a secret by a dealer among different parties in such a way that only certain predetermined subsets of parties can together reconstruct the secret while some of the remaining subsets of parties can have no information about the secret. Secret sharing was introduced independently by Shamir [139] and Blakely [20]. What they introduced is called a threshold secret sharing scheme. In such a secret sharing scheme the subsets of parties that can reconstruct a secret …

Blue Red Hackenbush Spiders, Ravi Cho

Master's Theses

One of the goals of Combinatorial Game Theory is to find provable winning strategiesfor certain games. In this paper, we give winning strategies for certain spider positions played using the rules of Blue Red Hackenbush and a variant. Blue Red Hackenbush and its variants are played on a graph of a bLue and Red edges that are connected to a vertex called the ground. We will represent the ground as a horizontal black line. In this paper, we study spider graphs played under two different variants: Blue Red Hackenbush and Reverse Blue Red Hackenbush. Both variants are played by two …

Linear Inverse Problems And Neural Networks, Jasjeet Dhaliwal

Master's Theses

We investigate two ideas in this thesis. First, we analyze the results of adaptingrecovery algorithms from linear inverse problems to defend neural networks against adversarial attacks. Second, we analyze the results of substituting sparsity priors with neural network priors in linear inverse problems. For the former, we are able to extend the framework introduced in [1] to defend neural networks against ℓ0, ℓ2,and ℓ∞ norm attacks, and for the latter, we find that our method yields an improvement over reconstruction results of [2].

Puzzling Failure In Life: A User's Manual/La Vie Mode D'Emploi, William Lambert

Fall Student Research Symposium 2021

From its founding by the poet Raymond Queneau and writer François Le Lionnais in 1960, the French OuLiPo sought to create new literary structures through the introduction of mathematics into the writing process. Among the works generated through the OuLiPian process is La vie mode d’emploi by Georges Perec, a novel of considerable depth describing the lives of residents in an apartment in Paris and weaving throughout numerous themes and leitmotifs. In his preface to the novel, Perec implicitly invites the reader to approach its elements just as they would a puzzle, fitting them together in a ludic search for …

Error Propagation And Algorithmic Design Of Contour Integral Eigensolvers With Applications To Fiber Optics, Benjamin Quanah Parker

Dissertations and Theses

In this work, the finite element method and the FEAST eigensolver are used to explore applications in fiber optics. The present interest is in computing eigenfunctions u and propagation constants β satisfing [sic] the Helmholtz equation Δu + k²n²u = β²u. Here, k is the freespace wavenumber and n is a spatially varying coefficient function representing the refractive index of the underlying medium. Such a problem arises when attempting to compute confinement losses in optical fibers that guide laser light. In practice, this requires the computation of functions u referred to as …

Properties Of Curriculum-Based Measurement For Mathematics : An Investigation Of The Average Growth, Variability, And Precision Of Three Forms, Arianna Doss

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

CBM for mathematics assesses growth in accuracy and fluency of basic math skills using content from a student’s curriculum. CBM for mathematics can include single-skill measures (SSM), skill-based measures (SBM), and general-outcome measures (GOM). Past research on growth rates in CBM for mathematics has focused on GOMs and has relied on estimations of weekly growth rates, but more information on expected growth rates and their precision for these measures is needed for practice. The current study addresses this gap in the literature by examining weekly growth rates and their precision for one SSM containing multiplication problems, one SBM containing addition …

Numerical Cognition And Autism Spectrum Traits In Adults, Benjamin Covington

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Evidence suggests that individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be particularly inclined toward math proficiency, especially in adulthood. There is also evidence, however, that many of those with an ASD struggle in math as children compared to their typically-developing peers. These ostensibly inconsistent findings may indicate that individuals with an ASD struggle with number sense, a precursor to formal math, rather than with formal math per se. This account is compatible with evidence of a specific form of neural dysregulation, excitatory/inhibitory imbalance, in ASD that results in reduced signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) for processes that occur in downstream …

Factors That Contribute To Motivation And Student Achievement As Adolescents Transition From Elementary To Middle School Or Junior High In One Urban District In The Rio Grande Valley, Lizette Villarreal Longoria

Theses and Dissertations

This study will examine factors that contribute to the decline in achievement scores in reading and mathematics when students transition from elementary to their first year in middle school or junior high school. It will test the hypothesis that motivation is not a function of mentors, academic support, teams, parental involvement, transition experience, math perception, and reading perception for students transitioning from elementary to middle school or junior high school. In this quantitative research study, data will be collected using a multiple linear regression analysis to examine the factors that contribute to motivation and the achievement score decline in reading …