Digital Commons Network^™

Learning At Scale As Infrastructure: Lms Platforms, Data Pipelines, And Language-Based Evidence For Educational Measurement, Danielle S. Mcnamara, Michelle Banawan, Renu Balyan, Rod D. Roscoe, Tracy Arner

Chinese/English Journal of Educational Measurement and Evaluation | 教育测量与评估双语期刊

The increasing scale of digital learning environments has transformed the data available for educational measurement, learning analytics, and the learning sciences. However, learning at scale is often treated as a matter of sample size or novel analytic methods rather than as the outcome of institutional infrastructure that governs how learning data are generated, curated, transformed, and accessed. This paper offers an infrastructure-centered description of learning at scale, focusing on learning management systems (LMSs), platform-integrated tools, and data pipelines that produce research-ready educational data. As an illustrative exemplar, we draw on the design and operation of the Arizona State University Learning@Scale …

The Item Response Warehouse: What It Is, How To Use It, And Targets For Potential Improvements, Savira D. Nadela, Hansol Lee, Nishka Jain, Ayaan Gupta, Xingyi Zhang, Benjamin W. Domingue

Chinese/English Journal of Educational Measurement and Evaluation | 教育测量与评估双语期刊

The Item Response Warehouse (IRW) is a repository of harmonized item response datasets designed to support secondary analysis and methodological research in psychological and educational measurement. This paper serves as a practical guide for researchers interested in using the IRW. We describe the structure of IRW datasets and the quantitative and qualitative metadata available for dataset selection, and we demonstrate how researchers can navigate the IRW website to explore and compare available tables. We further show how the IRW R and Python packages can be used to filter datasets programmatically, download response-level data, and generate standardized citations for reproducible research …

Publication News

Journal of East Asian Libraries

No abstract provided.

Lists Of Selected Full-Text Databases By Subscription In East Asian Studies, Anlin Yang, Michiko Ito, Ellie Kim, Jian P. Lee

Journal of East Asian Libraries

No abstract provided.

The Taichung Polyglot, Mårten S. Saarela

Journal of East Asian Libraries

No abstract provided.

The Power Of Cult Rhetoric, Daniel Murphy

Liberty University Research Week

What moves individuals to leave families, sell businesses, and reconstruct their identities in devotion to a charismatic leader? This study explores the communicative movement at the heart of cult recruitment, persuasion, and retention. Grounded in social identity theory, this qualitative phenomenological research investigates how cult leaders strategically mobilize identity, language, and belonging to attract and sustain followers.

Existing literature that applies social identity theory to persuasive language will be examined, alongside documentary and textual analysis, to understand how individuals interpret and internalize these communicative strategies. Drawing from existing literature and rhetorical analysis of leaders such as Marshall Applewhite, Warren Jeffs, …

Profanity In Public Address And Its Influence On Audience Perception, Emma Witler

Liberty University Research Week

Profanity is not a novel addition to the context of language and communication. While words themselves or the connotation and severity surrounding them has assuredly evolved, the presence of profanity in society is just as significant now as it has always been. Geography, culture, religious beliefs or affiliations, politics, and even age can be determining factors of what is considered “too far” and when or where this boundary has been crossed. Due to the nature of profanity and its inherent impact on society, it is essential that the use of profanity is analyzed contextually with the intent of increasing communicative …

Analysis Of Instructional Asl Resources For Ddeaf Children, Rayah Finstad

Liberty University Research Week

Living in a digital age, online resources are commonly used to teach, entertain, develop skills and build connections for both Hearing and dDeaf1 children around the world. However, no research has been conducted to determine what makes these videos successful in reaching their goals. Literature in the fields of education, dDeaf education, American Sign Language (ASL), and dDeaf spirituality is limited in scope. The current research demonstrates that dDeaf individuals primarily learn through visual means, namely, ASL. In communicating, consideration must be given to culture, language preferences, and visual methods. While educational studies mention some effective strategies for teaching literature …

Assessing Communication Within Education For Students Who Are Deaf With Additional Disabilities (Dwd), Lisa Grane

Liberty University Research Week

There is a growing number of Deaf students diagnosed with additional disabilities (DWD) who have a diverse range of needs. Yet there is also a prevalence of misdiagnosis that leads to educational and developmental challenges. Due to this fact, there is a shortage of evidence-based research regarding beneficial support for DWD students. Parents and educators often report a lack of sufficient information about services and resources that could be implemented to further communication support for DWD individuals. This research will investigate how schools in Illinois assess and meet both the educational and developmental needs of DWD students. This will be …

Effects Of Morphosyntactic And Phonological Environments On Persian Ra-Marking, Alyssa Gilliland

Liberty University Research Week

No abstract provided.

Evaluating Social Vulnerability In Livingston County, Ny, Charles Canero Iii, Daniel Noone

Proceedings of GREAT Day

Social vulnerability refers to the differential capacity of communities to prepare for, respond to, and recover from adverse events such as natural disasters, public health emergencies, and economic disruptions. While national indices like the CDC/ATS-DR Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) offer standardized frameworks to quantify this concept, their application often overlooks critical intra-county disparities, especially in rural areas. This study applies the 2022 SVI dataset to analyze social vulnerability in Livingston County, New York—a predominantly rural county in upstate New York. We integrate geospatial analysis, correlation matrices, and Lasso-regularized regression to assess how vulnerability varies across census tracts and to identify …

Senegalese Community Through Media, Genesis Flores

Proceedings of GREAT Day

This paper builds off another paper detailing the media representation in Dakar, Senegal. This paper will discuss the extent in which the media representation in Dakar represents the daily culture, the sense of community, and how the media in Dakar transfers over to the diaspora/ america (if such a thing even occurs). In order to engage in this discussion, the top popular newspapers and news channels will be used as primary sources, coupled with clips of interviews, social media, and scholarly articles. This paper will then discuss the effectiveness of media in Dakar and assess if the media has any …

Polite But Simple: Social Perception And Morphosyntactic Variation In Southern American English, Jamie Forgey

Liberty University Research Week

Southern American English (SAE) occupies a unique sociolinguistic paradox: it simultaneously evokes warmth and regional identity while serving as a target for stigma tied to perceived lack of education. This mixed-methods study examined whether morphosyntactic variation in SAE functions as a strategic response to that stigma. Combining diachronic and synchronic corpus analysis — drawing from COHA, LAMSAS, and CORAAL — with a between-subjects matched-guise perception survey of 36 participants, this study investigated both the structural integrity of SAE and listener attitudes toward its speakers. Corpus data revealed near-total erasure of high-frequency nonstandard features such as leveled was/were and completive done …

Probabilistic User Intent Modeling Based On Time-Window Gaze Analysis, John D. Hurwitz, Yaaseen Mahomed

Defensive Publications Series

ABSTRACT

A single-shot gaze vector often fails to accurately reflect user intent during multimodal queries due to saccadic noise, visual competition in dense environments, and the temporal lag between visual fixation and vocalization. This disclosure describes a method for multimodal query disambiguation using a temporal gaze buffer that maintains a rolling history of gaze vectors. After receiving a query, a probabilistic spatial-temporal heatmap can be generated from the buffered data. This heatmap represents attention density over a variable time window, which may be adjusted based on the query context or environmental classifications. To identify specific objects of interest, image frames …

Church, Mosque, And State: The Impacts Of Sectarian Politics On Lebanon’S Democracy, Tonia Attie

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

As Lebanon seeks to reform multiple sectors of the country, it is crucial to understand how its consociational government, centered on religious identities, interacts with its citizens. Electoral accountability is the process by which an electorate holds politicians liable for their actions while in office. While previous studies, such as Vincent Hutchings’ “Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability,” have shown how electoral accountability functions within traditional party systems based on political ideology, there is little research on how accountability mechanisms operate in confessional party systems based on religion. This paper posits that within countries with confessional systems, voters are less able …

Husky Paws S-Stem Summer Bridge Program Dataset (2024 Cohort), Michelle Jarvie-Eggart, Kathryn L. Hannum, Karlee J. Westrem, Lincoln Sorenson, Briana C. Bettin, Adrienne R. Minerick

Michigan Tech Research Data

This dataset was collected as part of the Husky PAWS (Pathways for Academic
Wellness & Success) S-STEM program at Michigan Technological University. It
includes anonymized quantitative and qualitative data from a three-week
pre-semester summer bridge program in 2024, designed to support low-income,
STEM-bound students. Data sources include pre- and post-program Likert and
open-ended surveys and daily written reflections aligned with instructional
modules on metacognition and Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth Model (CWM).
The dataset supports research on how bridge programming influences
students’ sense of belonging, metacognitive development, and engagement
with institutional support systems during the transition to college.

Narratives, Neurons And Narcotics: The Neurological Impacts Of Biased Crime Media And How It Disproportionately Impacts Black And Brown Drug Defendants, Jade Celestine

Honors Theses

This thesis examines how crime media and neurological bias shape the experiences of Black and Brown drug defendants in the United States criminal justice system. Drawing on existing research in psychology and neuroscience, this explanation outlines the role of perception and threat detection in the formation of implicit bias while also emphasizing a need to expand the use of neurocriminology to all legal actors. Particular attention is given towards the influence of media portrayals of criminal cases, especially for drug-related offenses and how that impacts the audiences on a neurological level. An analysis of historical factors, such as the War …

Censorship And Human Rights Violations: The Suppression Of Freedom Of Expression, Press, And Assembly In Cuba, Nicaragua, And Venezuela, Elisabell Laura Velázquez

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

As the days, months, and years go by, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela continue to violate the fundamental human rights of their citizens. Despite worldwide technological advancements and increased access to the digital world, these regimes continuously monitor and censor their citizens, depriving them of the fundamental rights to freedom of expression, press, and assembly. This article explores how censorship can represent a systemic violation of human rights. This article argues that strengthening cooperation between different international organizations is necessary because censorship in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela is a human rights crisis that impacts civil society. Furthermore, this article explains the …

2026 Undergraduate Research Symposium Program, Coastal Carolina University

Undergraduate Research Symposium Programs

17th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, April 21-22, 2026.

The 2026 CCU Undergraduate Research Symposium included 72 oral presentations, 127 poster presentations, and 22 team pitch presentations comprising 50 students who participated in the Wall College’s Chant’s Tank Pitch Competition.

Presentations at the Undergraduate Research Symposium were judged by almost 90 faculty and staff, and prizes were awarded in three categories: Best Oral Presentation, Best Poster Presentation, and Best Chant’s Tank Pitch Presentation. Here are the following award winners and their mentors in their respective categories:

Best Oral Presentation:

• 1st Place: Ryan Ryan Avallone, Applied Mathematics. Faculty Mentor: Bong Jeong (Management …

Answers “Go By Water”: Felt Knowledge As An Alternative Epistemology In Othello, Annalisa Gulbrandsen

Theses and Dissertations

William Shakespeare's Othello is fundamentally a play about epistemology--how does one know what he/she knows amidst the sea of words, evidence, and misdirection? Traditionally, the problem of knowledge in Othello has been treated as an intellectual problem of the mind. However, this thesis argues that the play purposefully draws attention to the limits of what the mind can know by way of the eye (what is seen) and ear (what is spoken or heard), instead offering an alternative epistemology that is felt through embodiment. When Desdemona's words no longer have the power to affect what Othello believes, Desdemona's answers to …

Early Childhood Educators’ Experiences Teaching Literacy Acquisition Skills, Dena Renee Crews

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The problem investigated through this study was that early childhood educators struggle to help students with literacy acquisition skills in a Title 1 elementary school. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate early childhood educators’ experiences with the challenges of teaching literacy acquisition skills and their suggestions for improving resources and training for teaching literacy acquisition skills. The study was grounded in Clay’s emergent literacy theory and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory. For this basic qualitative design, semistructured interviews with 14 participants were conducted with the following themes emerging: Early childhood educators were challenged due to (a) students’ background …

The Roots Of Reasoning: An Analysis Of Irac’S Reductive Framework And The Restoration Of The Rhetorical Foundation, Leslie Patrice Culver

Seton Hall Law Review

No abstract provided.

Journey Of Becoming: Risk And Self-Determination In The Story Of Self For Adults With Intellectual, Developmental, And Learning Disabilities A Phenomenological Case Study Employing Narrative Inquiry And Thematic Analysis, Christopher R. J. Worth

Dissertations

This phenomenological case study, employing narrative inquiry and thematic analysis, captured the first-person voice of emerging adults (ages 20–28) with intellectual, developmental, and learning disabilities to explore how experiences of risk and self-determination shaped their personal narratives, or story of self. Guided by Critical Disability Theory, Foucault’s concept of relational power, and Shogren’s Causal Agency Theory, the study challenged the systemic bubble-wrapping that denies this population the "dignity of risk" (Perske, 1972). Data were collected from six participants through semi-structured interviews, adapted photovoice submissions, and participant selfreflections. The findings revealed that the phenomenon of becoming, catalyzed by intellectual adaptive risk-taking, …

Morphology Extraction And Analysis Of Primary Soot Particles And Aggregates And Aggregates In Soot Tem Images Using Machine Learning, Timothy Paul Day

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Accurate characterization of soot morphology is crucial for understanding soot’s physical and chemical properties and their effects on climate and public health. Morphological characterization requires manual identification and segmentation of individual primary particles and aggregates, a labor-intensive and time-consuming process limits scale and reproducibility and contributes to uncertainty in climate models. Therefore, automated approaches are needed to reliably quantify soot morphology. This work develops SAGE (Soot Aggregate Geometry Extraction), an instance segmentation model and framework to segment primary particles in TEM images and extract morphological properties. Four key questions are addressed: (1) can the model achieve segmentation quality comparable to …

Holding The Line: The Existential Threat To Dei Language And Values, Terrance Fitzsimmons, Larry Martinez, Jennifer Bishop, Darryl Rice, Florence Villesèche

Psychology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose – This article critically analyses and critiques the operationalisation of the Trump administration’s anti- DEI policies on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the United States of America and beyond. It specifically examines the attempt to silence DEI scholarship and practice, assessing the broader implications for social justice and global progress towards equity. The article also positions these attacks as an existential threat to DEI scholarship, scholars and practitioners, with the potential to reverse progress made since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The article serves as a call to action, urging the …

More Than Treating Errors: Bridging The Gaps And Expanding The Agenda For Scholarship On Teacher Written Feedback For L2 Writers, Lynn Goldstein, Robert Kohls

Journal of Response to Writing

Teacher written feedback is a central area of L2 scholarship and writing teacher education yet considerable research has focused on written corrective feedback (WCF) with considerably less attention paid to discourse-level (DLF) teacher written feedback. Our article identifies the gaps in the current teacher written feedback scholarship, explains why these gaps are problematic, and provides detailed recommendations for an agenda that examines teacher DLF and students’ use of this feedback. Our goal is to encourage scholars to explore new avenues of research that better take into account what writing “is” and “does” as well as take into account the linguistically …

Composing In Relation: Rethinking Multimodal Feedback As Rhetorical Design, Angela Laflen

Journal of Response to Writing

This qualitative study investigates how writing instructors compose feedback in multimodal digital environments, focusing on the rhetorical and relational dimensions of their design choices. Drawing on social semiotics and multimodal composition theory, the study analyzes feedback artifacts, instructor interviews, and student surveys from six first-year writing courses. Findings reveal that instructors engage in complex feedback design work across communication modes, often without formal training or shared frameworks. Instructors tended to default to text-based habits shaped by genre memory but adapted their strategies in response to communicative breakdowns and student needs. The study identifies three core themes: reliance on print-era conventions, …

Examining Automated Writing Evaluation Error Coverage In Relation To Uptake And Retention, Mohaddeseh Mehrzad, Mohammad Rahimi, Stephanie Link

Journal of Response to Writing

Despite the current widespread use of Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) feedback, many issues regarding its efficacy still remain unresolved. Recent studies mainly focus on correctly detected errors with a lack of attention on the comprehensiveness of error detection, or error coverage. Error coverage is interesting because little is known about the capacity of AWE systems to fully detect common second language (L2) errors. It is also important to investigate the potential effect of such capacity on student uptake and retention, which are important constructs in fostering L2 writing development. To this end, the present study compared teacher feedback and AWE …

Navigating Feedback In Collaborative Writing: The Impact Of Student Backgrounds And Expectations On Transitions To New Academic And Social Spaces, Lindsey Gruber, María Fernández–Agüero

Journal of Response to Writing

This article examines how international students navigate feedback from a supervisor while working on a group writing project in a diverse English medium of instruction (EMI) bachelor’s program at a public university in Denmark, where no formalized writing or language support resources are offered in the students’ first year of instruction. Data were collected in qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 11 students who were identified through a survey of a first-year bachelor of arts cohort. Results from the survey showed that despite using a supervision model of education, few students perceived changes in feedback compared to their secondary school experiences, and …

Editors' Introduction, Betsy Gilliland, Lucie Moussu

Journal of Response to Writing

No abstract provided.