Digital Commons Network^™

Unlimbited Recreation: Access To Resources For Improved Wellness & Wellbeing For Individuals With Ull/D, Alyssa Daniels

OTD DEx Reports - College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

"The doctoral experiential (DEx): Unlimbited Recreation explored the multifaceted aspects of upper limb loss and difference (ULL/D), focusing on recreational therapies and nonprofits' role in supporting affected individuals. This project highlighted the challenges individuals face with upper limb loss or difference and the therapeutic potential of recreational interventions. Additionally, it examined the contributions of nonprofits in providing comprehensive support and facilitating community integration for those individuals."

Implementation Of Driving Services Into A Student-Run Pro-Bono Occupational Therapy Center, Amanda C. Hill

OTD DEx Reports - College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

"This doctoral experiential capstone project focuses on the implementation of driving services into the BEAR PAW Center to offer a free driving program to members of Springfield, Massachusetts (MA) and the surrounding community. In conjunction with implementation into the BEAR PAW Center, the Western New England University (WNE) Doctor of Occupational Therapy (OTD) curriculum will be reevaluated to incorporate the driving component into the existing requirement. This will allow current and future students to learn more about occupational therapy’s role in driving and serve as an additional experiential learning opportunity. The overall goal of the project is to increase access …

Increasing Occupational Engagement For Individuals With Partial Hand Loss Through Telehealth, Amelia T. Lee

OTD DEx Reports - College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

"Individuals with partial hand loss have diverse needs and experiences. Skoff & Skoff (2022) found that individuals with partial hand loss experience symptoms of anxiety, anger, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder for at least three months following amputation. For this Doctoral Experiential Capstone, the student researcher sought to expand the existing Unlimbited Wellness© telehealth program created by Dr. Debra Latour, OT, PP-OTD, M.Ed., OTR, to include individuals with partial hand loss in the population and add additional educational modules regarding returning to work. The program was a mixed-methods research design with a pre and post-program survey and Quick DASH. The …

Perceptions Of Individuals Participating In Bear Paw Center Life Skills Program: Persons With Health And Wellness Goals, Isabella Lagos

OTD DEx Reports - College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

"Data shows that the state population of Massachusetts was 6,915,688, with 11.7% of these individuals, or 808,474 people, identified as having a disability in 2021. Among those individuals, 56.5% had both self-care and independent living disabilities (Paul et al., 2021). In Springfield, Massachusetts, 15.7% of individuals under the age of 65 years old were identified to have a disability in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Numerous life skills programs are accessible during high school; however, these opportunities often become scarce for individuals beyond their graduation. Due to the lack of life skills programs provided to individuals with disabilities, …

Perceptions Of Individuals Participating In Bear Paw Center Life Skills Program: Persons With Social Skills Goals, Olivia Nappi

OTD DEx Reports - College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

"Across the United States, there are a limited number of pro-bono life skills programs available for adults with disabilities. Oftentimes, free of cost life skills special education services are provided through the public education system but then terminates upon high school graduation. This leaves young adults with disabilities at a disadvantage when attempting to develop independent living skills during a transitional phase of life. This study explored the lived experiences of young adults participating in pro-bono, occupational therapy student-run life skills group program through the Bear Paw Center at Western New England University. The purpose was to gather the perceptions …

Implementation Of Pediatric Services At A Pro Bono University Ot Center, Deanna Padilla

OTD DEx Reports - College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

"With a focus on bringing equity, accessibility, and rehabilitation to all people, and achieving wellness in the Greater Springfield area, a student-run Occupational Therapy (OT) center should serve all populations. The completion of this Doctoral Experiential (DEx) capstone project allowed the BEAR PAW OT Center (BPC) at Western New England University (WNE) to officially provide services to all populations within the community. The process of implementing pediatric services at the BPC included redesigning and organizing the designated pediatric space, which meant designing the space to be appealing for the pediatric population, ordering supplies and equipment, and ensuring the space is …

Writing For A “High Purpose”: Examining Charles Chesnutt’S Antiracist Manipulation Of Genre And Language In The Conjure Woman, Sheniah Lanier

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Dialogic Teacher Inquiry: The Case Of A Preservice Teacher Learning To Facilitate Class Discussion, Sergio L. Sanchez, Steven Z. Athanases

Benerd College Faculty Articles

Developing knowledge and practice for high-quality K-12 class discussion remains challenging, especially for new teachers juggling other classroom responsibilities. Our study reports the case of a preservice teacher learning to lead discussions while enrolled in a teacher education inquiry course, simultaneous with semester-long supervised practice teaching in a seventh-grade class (12-13-year-olds) in a high-poverty urban community. The work is guided by a complex teacher learning process for developing complex practice of facilitating discussions in culturally and linguistically diverse high school English classes. Countering popular approaches to “talk moves” as useful but often generic facilitation practices, the teacher education pedagogical innovation …

Validity And Reliability Of Spanish Version Of The Eq-I: Yv[S] In Colombian Children And Youth, Claudia Patricia Navarro Roldán, Sandra Mateus Gómez, Catalina Botero, Gabriel M. Velez

College of Education Faculty Research and Publications

Objective: To examine the psychometric properties of EQ-i:YV[S] with a Colombian’ sample.

Method: We randomly selected a sample of 1355 children and adolescents between 8 and 14 years old (Mage = 10.80;SD = 1.41). We conducted exploratory (n1 = 416) and confirmatory (n2 = 939) factor analyses (EFA, CFA), reliability, internal consistency, and predictive validity.

Results: The EFA explained 27.6% of the variance. The AFC indicated a multidimensional structure with four factors and 21 items obtained the best fit (χ 2 = 334.358; df = 183; RMSEA=0.030; CFI=.951; TLI=944; NFI=.899) with acceptable internal consistency (ω = .57,.75). EQ-i: YV[S] factors …

Pragmatically Appropriate Abstractive Summarization Of Jtac Radio Conversations, Spencer M. Seals

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

In this work, I explore the development of computational methods for automatically creating after-action reports of JTAC radio conversations. Prior research has investigated related issues of sentence compression, text summarization, and conversation summarization (Banerjee, Mitra, & Sugiyama, 2015; Clarke & Lapata, 2008; L. Wang & Cardie, 2012; Raffel et al., 2020). However, this work makes limiting assumptions about what features are relevant to a summary and what sources of information should be included. I propose methods that combine knowledge from linguistic, procedural, and domain sources to address these limitations. Results indicate that the proposed model performs better than some of …

Data-Driven Strategies For Disease Management In Patients Admitted For Heart Failure, Ankita Agarwal

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Heart failure is a syndrome which effects a patient’s quality of life adversely. It can be caused by different underlying conditions or abnormalities and involves both cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular comorbidities. Heart failure cannot be cured but a patient’s quality of life can be improved by effective treatment through medicines and surgery, and lifestyle management. As effective treatment of heart failure incurs cost for the patients and resource allocation for the hospitals, predicting length of stay of these patients during each hospitalization becomes important. Heart failure can be classified into two types: left sided heart failure and right sided heart failure. …

Professional Development In Phonological Awareness For Early Childhood Educators In Low-Income, Urban Classrooms: A Pilot Study Examining Dosage Effects, Jayne E. Jaskolski, Maura Jones Moyle

Speech Pathology and Audiology Faculty Research and Publications

Providing high-quality literacy instruction in early childhood may positively affect the long-term outcomes of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Previous research has shown that educators are generally lacking in their own phonological awareness knowledge and skills which could negatively impact the provision of effective instruction in code-focused early literacy skills. The purposes of this pilot study were to examine the effects of differing dosages of professional development in phonological awareness on early childhood educators’ (ECEs) own phonological awareness skills and instructional practices, and to examine the effects on child outcomes. The comparison group consisted of 10 ECEs who were receiving professional …

Reshaping The Narrative, Crystal Little Owl

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Proceedings Of The 10th Geia Seminar (2023), Patrícia Tosqui Lucks, Juliana De Castro Santana

GEIA Seminar

No abstract provided.

How To Get Away With Discrimination: The Use Of Algorithms To Discriminate In The Internet Entertainment Industry, Sumra Wahid

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

In July 2021, Ziggi Tyler posted a video on TikTok, a popular video sharing platform, where he expressed his frustration with being a Black content creator on TikTok. The video showed Ziggi typing phrases such as “Black Lives Matter” or “Black success” into his Marketplace creator bio, which the app would immediately flag as inappropriate content. However, when Ziggi replaced those words with “white supremacy” or “white success,” no inappropriateness warning appeared. Although a TikTok spokesperson responded to the video clarifying that the app had mistakenly flagged phrases without considering word order, Ziggi refused to let an algorithm absolve TikTok …

Umkämpfte Erinnerungskultur: Historikerstreit 2,0, Das Humboldt Forum Und Die Neue Deutsche Geschichte, Jonathan Hogan

Lawrence University Honors Projects

The Humboldt Forum, a reconstructed Prussian palace, is uniquely entangled in the ongoing debates around Germany’s relationship with its colonial past. As early as 2007, NGOs such as “NoHumboldt21!” formed to protest the palace, which would house the state’s ethnography collection, entailing an estimated 500,000 stolen artifacts. Upon opening in 2020, the Forum had come to embody the controversy surrounding its construction. Words adorned the façade of the building contrasting enlightenment ideals with colonial exploitation and a permanent exhibition—“Berlin Global”—sought to address the nation’s colonial past.

The Humboldt Forum can thus be conceptualized as a reactive object, one that resituates …

Barriers To And Solutions For Representative Inclusion Across The Lifespan And In Life Course Research: The Need For Structural Competency Highlighted By The Covid-19 Pandemic, Madison N Lecroy, Ebony B Carter, Sarah S Farabi, Dominic N Reeds, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Exclusion of special populations (older adults; pregnant women, children, and adolescents; individuals of lower socioeconomic status and/or who live in rural communities; people from racial and ethnic minority groups; individuals from sexual or gender minority groups; and individuals with disabilities) in research is a pervasive problem, despite efforts and policy changes by the National Institutes of Health and other organizations. These populations are adversely impacted by social determinants of health (SDOH) that reduce access and ability to participate in biomedical research. In March 2020, the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute hosted the "Lifespan and Life Course Research: integrating …

Weplay Denver: The Why And How: Background And Implementation Manual, Lauren Gross

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

WePlay Denver (WePlay and Nosotros Jugamos; see glossary) is a program providing caregiver-infant playgroups designed to teach families with young children the value of play as well as provide information and resources on topics related to child development, family wellbeing, and mental health. WePlay and Nosotros Jugamos are a collaboration between the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Professional Psychology (GSPP) and the Children’s Museum of Denver, Marsico Campus, and are based on a similar program from the Chicago Children’s Museum. WePlay offered its first playgroup in 2019, while Nosotros Jugamos began in 2020.

A Reader Response Approach To Storytelling And Tabletop Games: The Player's Experience Of Dungeons And Dragons And Its Pedagogical Applications, Noah Hansen

English

Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is a role-playing game (RPG) that has exploded in popularity since its conception in the 1970s. This paper aims to examine how D&D, and other RPGs like it, can be utilized within an academic setting by utilizing Reader Response theory. This theory, pioneered by theorists Louise Rosenblatt and Wolfgang Iser, would serve to measure the impact that D&D has on the players. Using an IRB approved study, this paper views the emotional impact, literary experience, and individual connections that participants make while playing D&D to show the worth that D&D has as a literary tool and …

Chatgpt: Future Directions And Open Possibilities, Mohammad Aljanabi

Mesopotamian Journal of CyberSecurity

ChatGPT, the cutting-edge language model developed by OpenAI, is one of the most exciting advancements in the field of artificial intelligence. With its ability to generate human-like text and respond to complex questions, ChatGPT has already made a significant impact and is poised to continue its rapid progression in the coming years. As we look to the future of ChatGPT and large language models, there are many exciting possibilities and open opportunities for this technology to enhance our lives and change the way we interact with technology

Chatgpt And Big Data: Enhancing Text-To-Speech Conversion, Hatim Abdelhak Dida, Dsk Chakravarthy, Fazle Rabbi

Mesopotamian Journal of Big Data

Converting text into voice (TTS) has many important uses in fields as diverse as accessibility, instruction, and recreation. As big data continues to expand at a dizzying rate, TTS conversion systems must adapt to new difficulties in terms of data amount and variety. To improve TTS conversion for huge data, we propose here to employ the cutting-edge language model ChatGPT. We begin with a brief history of text-to-speech (TTS) conversion and big data, before discussing the current state of TTS conversion technology and its limitations. We then go on to detail how ChatGPT was built and how it was taught …

Navigating The Metaverse Of Big Data: A Bibliometric Journey, O. S. Albahri, A. H. Alamoodi

Mesopotamian Journal of Big Data

The advent of the metaverse, an immersive digital universe, has caused a sea change in how people experience and share knowledge, fun, and community. This bibliometric study examines the vast realm of big data research into metaverses. We analyse the development, trends, and major players in this cross-disciplinary subject using bibliometric methods applied to a large database of academic publications, conference proceedings, and journals. Our study covers the years 2021–2023 and incorporates the most recent discoveries in the metaverse. In doing so, it sheds light on the intellectual landscape of metaverse-related studies by identifying the most relevant authors, publications, and …

Chatgpt In Waste Management: Is It A Profitable, Thaeer Mueen Sahib, Hussain A. Younis, Osamah Mohammed Alyasiri, Ahmed Hussein Ali, Sani Salisu, Ameen A. Noore, Israa M. Hayder, Misbah Shahid

Mesopotamian Journal of Big Data

No abstract provided.

Effectiveness Of In-Person Versus Online Negotiation Teaching For Practitioners, Patricia Oehlschläger, Michael A. Merz

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Most negotiation courses have been taught in person. However, online education has become more prevalent over the past decade due to its flexibility, cost and time efficiency, and new digital technologies designed to compensate for the lack of personal contact. The global pandemic has accelerated this trend, raising the question of whether negotiation courses taught online are as effective as those taught in person. The few studies that have examined the effect of teaching modality on student performance were limited to undergraduate and graduate student samples and the results have been mixed. To contribute to this discussion, we conducted two …

Sentiment Analysis Of Tweets For Hate Speech Detection Using Binary Classification Algorithms And Bert, Manveer Kaur

Computer Science

In the modern world, social media wields a lot of power. Twitter, particularly, has provided people a platform to express their opinions about everything under the sun from mundane everyday life to politics, race, religion etc. It has often come under scrutiny for unabashed propagation of hate speech. This project employs natural language processing techniques on a corpus of tweets to detect hate speech. A total of 3538 unique tokens are identified that appear only in tweets classified as hate speech. With the help of data visualization techniques like word clouds and frequency distribution plots, it became evident that the …

Enhancing Restaurant Dining Experience: Design And Evaluation Of A Mobile App For Personalized Menu Item Selection In Restaurants, Kimia Tuz Zaman

Computer Science

Picking the right food item from a restaurant menu can be challenging for people, specially for those who are unfamiliar with local cuisine and those with specific dietary requirements. Existing menus often lack essential information, making it difficult for diners to make quick and confident decisions. In this paper, we propose a mobile app that offers a user-friendly interface to allows users rank menu items based on their preferences and concerns. Using personalized ranking algorithms, the app analyzes the ingredients and nutritional content of menu items, providing users with valuable information to make informed choices. Preliminary tests suggest that the …

Bomb Body Politics: On The Tsa's Algorithmic Policing Of Gender, Kendra Albert, Avatara Smith-Carrington

University of Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy

Long before modern discussions of algorithmic policing, the Department of Homeland Security was using sexist and racist algorithms to determine which individuals to subject to additional screening. The algorithms are built into the Transportation Safety Administration’s advanced imaging technology, and they are used to justify the systems of policing already in place. In this Article adapted from remarks delivered at the Technology, Media, Privacy, and the Law Conference in 2022, the TSA’s discriminatory practices against transgender people serve as a cautionary tale for surveillance reformers who risk entrenching violence against the “wrong” bodies to protect the “right” ones.

Engaging Indigenous Community Towards A Talaandig Language Learning And Cultural Sustainability, Geraldine D. Villaluz, Rscj, Phd., Rita May P. Tagalog, Edd, Isrm, Aduna L. Saway Bai

ASEAN Journal of Community Engagement

The decreased use of indigenous language among the young generation of an indigenous community in the Southern Philippines has introduced apprehension among cultural practitioners, the chief administrator, and the community of elders. With the articulated need to strengthen language learning and sustain the culture among the young Talaandig members of the tribe, the chief administrator has proposed a community engagement process for addressing this concern. This study explores the Talaandig language learning and cultural sustainability through the active involvement of an indigenous community of parents–teachers, leaders, and culture practitioners of the Talaandig tribe in Bukidnon, Philippines. Indigenous research methods and …

Review Of Student Service-Learning Program In The Early Period Of The Higher Education System In Indonesia, Andi Sri Wahyuni

ASEAN Journal of Community Engagement

This study investigates the early formation and historical development of student service-learning in Indonesia from a global context. Employing a qualitative approach, it utilizes archival research methods for examining the inception of student service- learning, a community empowerment program conducted by the students in the country. It analyzed international documents sourced from Google Books archives, which are available through various online platforms and supplemented by the use of Google Ngram Viewer. The findings indicate that the concept of student service- learning was introduced in Indonesia during the academic year 1971/1972 and adopted by numerous universities before it became mandatory for …

Comfort, Contingency, And Writing Center Work: An Essay In Three Illusions, Loren Maria Guay

The Writing Center Journal

In this hybrid essay, I engage creatively with the illusory nature of contingent work, presenting three episodes from my personal experiences as a contingent writing program administrator (WPA) during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, I interrogate these experiences by building on past critiques of “comfortable” writing centers, applying Sara Ahmed’s work on the affectiveness of (dis)comfort in order to examine comfort and its uneasy relationship with labor. For whom is the writing center expected to labor to provide comfort? Whose comfort, and moreover whose safety, is jeopardized or made invisible in the process? In answering these questions, this …