Digital Commons Network^™

“Failure Is Not An Option”: Sub-Saharan African International Graduate Students’ Experiences In U.S. Higher Education Institutions, Alfred Acquah

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The rapid growth of international students, particularly from Sub-Saharan Africa, in U.S. higher education institutions calls for more critical research to understand their nuanced experiences in these institutions. So often, international students are homogenized and put under one umbrella, which shadows their unique experiences, especially those from developing countries and regions like Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, the paucity of literature on these students makes it even harder to hear their voices. Therefore, there is the need to disaggregate international students to become aware of some of their subtle challenges. This study aims to explore the experiences and community cultural wealth (CCW) …

"Is He Not A Maker Of Parables?": Restorative Poetics And Magical Realism In Ezekiel 40–48, Matthew Wells Sapp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The thesis demonstrates that Ezek 40–48 functions as a unified narrative of restoration and that it is profitable to understand its fantastic realism and postcolonial rhetoric as early precursors to the modern magical realism genre. The tools of narrative criticism are utilized to exegete the literary features of Ezek 40–48 and uncover its poetic elements and rhetorical thrust. After this analysis, Ezek 40–48 is viewed as a precursor to modern magical realist texts in a comparative study with Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, paying special attention to the thematic emphases …

Allegories And Alleles: A Narrative Policy Framework Analysis Of The Debate Over Animal Bioengineering, Betsy Presgraves

All Dissertations

With the USDA’s recent takeover of animal bioengineering regulation, public comments have been reopened about the issue, with the Biden administration seeking more information about public opinion. The debate over U.S. regulation has raged for decades with a pro-genetic modification coalition seeking more efficient approvals and the anti-genetic modification coalition seeking labelling, more open and strict approval processes, and even outright bans. Each side has employed a variety of communication approaches, chief among them the use of narrative.

This study aims to determine how narrative structures affect this debate. Using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), I seek to examine this …

Coding Christianity: Negotiating Religious Dialogue In Online Participatory Spaces, Shauna Chung

All Dissertations

This dissertation examines rhetorical conditions and internet-mediated communication strategies that open and close dialogue between individuals with diverse and conflicting worldviews. The author illustrates this tension through sacred-secular interactions in college composition classrooms and online environments, positing that navigating conflict between these discourses—namely those espoused by religiously committed students and public university instructors—often requires stepping outside of adversarial communication frameworks. This project makes a case for models of civic engagement that use more deliberative rhetorical approaches prioritizing empathy over defensiveness and understanding before persuasion. To develop these non-adversarial communication approaches for the composition classroom, the author looks to participatory media …

Parent Perceptions Of Elementary General Music Instruction, Hali Shepard

Music Education Theses

The purpose of this study was to explore parent perceptions of elementary general music instruction. This was a qualitative, multiple case study (Fraenkel & Wallen, 2009) in which the perceptions of elementary general music were gathered from a parent from each of the three geographical areas (rural, urban, and suburban) within Western New York. This study sought to determine how parents perceive elementary general music, as well as what types of perceptions of elementary general music exist in all geographical areas (i.e., rural, urban, and suburban districts).

Performance, Theatricality, And Identity In Shakespeare’S The Taming Of The Shrew, Nina Masin-Moyer

College Honors Program

William Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew is a curious and often controversial play due to its depiction of spousal abuse and female subordination. But despite that charged reputation, it continues to be produced on stages around the world, with creative choices that suggest an attempt to change a supposedly un-feminist play into a feminist one. My thesis argues that this play already features notable feminist elements at the level of the text itself, stemming in particular from its thematic and structural investment in performance and theatricality and in the roles that these elements play in constructing gender and …

A Case Study Examining High-Achieving Black And Latinx Students’ Reasons For Using Or Not Using Academic Support Services, Nafeeza Uddin-Schmidt

Theses & Dissertations

Black and Latinx students are completing college at lower rates compared to White and Asian students. Many studies have documented the role of academic support services in helping students successfully complete college. Yet, many of the support services are built into students’ course schedules during freshman year to help transition to college. During the sophomore year, many of those supports are no longer built in, and students must seek them out themselves. Therefore, the purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the reasons high-achieving Black and Latinx students opt in or opt out of using academic support services …

Prompt For Extraction? Paie: Prompting Argument Interaction For Event Argument Extraction, Yubo Ma, Zehao Wang, Yixin Cao, Mukai Li, Meiqi Chen, Kun Wang, Jing Shao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose an effective yet efficient model PAIE for both sentence-level and document-level Event Argument Extraction (EAE), which also generalizes well when there is a lack of training data. On the one hand, PAIE utilizes prompt tuning for extractive objectives to take the best advantages of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). It introduces two span selectors based on the prompt to select start/end tokens among input texts for each role. On the other hand, it captures argument interactions via multi-role prompts and conducts joint optimization with optimal span assignments via a bipartite matching loss. Also, with a flexible …

An Exploratory Study On Code Attention In Bert, Rishab Sharma, Fuxiang Chen, Fatemeh H. Fard, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many recent models in software engineering introduced deep neural models based on the Transformer architecture or use transformerbased Pre-trained Language Models (PLM) trained on code. Although these models achieve the state of the arts results in many downstream tasks such as code summarization and bug detection, they are based on Transformer and PLM, which are mainly studied in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. The current studies rely on the reasoning and practices from NLP for these models in code, despite the differences between natural languages and programming languages. There is also limited literature on explaining how code is modeled. …

Sentiment Analysis Of Weather-Related Tweets From Cities Within Hot Climates, Yuliya Dzyuban, Graces N. Y. Ching, Sin Kang Yik, Adrian J. Tan, Peter J. Crank, Shreya Banerjee, Rachel Xin Yi Pek, Winston T. L. Chow

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Evidence exists that exposure to weather hazards, particularly in cities subject to heat island and climate change impacts, strongly affects individuals’ physical and mental health. Personal exposure to and sentiments about warm conditions can currently be expressed on social media, and recent research noted that the geotagged, time-stamped, and accessible social media databases can potentially be indicative of the public mood and health for a region. This study attempts to understand the relationships between weather and social media sentiments via Twitter and weather data from 2012 to 2019 for two cities in hot climates: Singapore and Phoenix, Arizona. We first …

The Rage, Spring 2023, Brittany Davis, Luciano Castro

The Rage Zine

The Rage zine is published in collaboration with Students Advocating Gender Equality and CCU Women's and Gender Studies. Volume 1, Issue 2.

Leadership In Sustainability: Collective Wisdom, Conversations, Creativity, Contemplation And Courage, The Five Pillars Of A Master’S Teaching Unit, Mike Mouritz, Peter Newman, Renée Newman, Jayne Bryant, Aimee Smith, Elaine Olsen

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This paper provides an overview of insights and lessons learned from nearly 20 years of running a Master’s unit called Leadership in Sustainability and how it has been used to foster change agents in small business enterprises, as well as other parts of our economy and community. The unit is based on five ‘C’ pillars, which are discussed in this paper to show how the teaching was able to assist potential leaders in their journey towards sustainability. Collective Wisdom is the theory of how leaders have used their imagination to solve collective ‘wicked problems’ and how sustainability requires such wisdom. …

Results Of The Compare Trial Of Constraint-Induced Or Multimodality Aphasia Therapy Compared With Usual Care In Chronic Post-Stroke Aphasia, Miranda L. Rose, Lyndsey Nickels, David Copland, Leanne Togher, Erin Godecke, Marcus Meinzer, Tapan Rai, Dominique A. Cadilhac, Joosup Kim, Melanie Hurley, Abby Foster, Marcella Carragher, Cassie Wilcox, John E. Pierce, Gillian Steel

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Background:

While meta-analyses confirm treatment for chronic post-stroke aphasia is effective, a lack of comparative evidence for different interventions limits prescription accuracy. We investigated whether Constraint-Induced Aphasia Therapy Plus (CIAT-plus) and/or Multimodality Aphasia Therapy (M-MAT) provided greater therapeutic benefit compared with usual community care and were differentially effective according to baseline aphasia severity.

Methods:

We conducted a three-arm, multicentre, parallel group, open-label, blinded endpoint, phase III, randomised-controlled trial. We stratified eligible participants by baseline aphasia on the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised Aphasia Quotient (WAB-R-AQ). Groups of three participants were randomly assigned (1:1:1) to 30 hours of CIAT-Plus or M-MAT or to …

Social (In) Justice, Climate Change And Climate Policy In Western Australia, Naomi Joy Godden, Doreen Wijekoon, Kylie Wrigley

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Climate change is a social justice issue, and people who experience disadvantage and marginalisation are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. In 2019–2020, the government of the state of Western Australia (WA) held the world’s first inquiry into climate change and health. The Inquiry report, submissions, and hearing transcripts make an important contribution to a small but growing body of evidence that climate change exacerbates and reinforces existing social inequalities in WA in areas such as health, economics, gender relations, and access and inclusion. However, in late-2020, the WA government released its 38-page Climate Policy, with very limited …

Translate-Train Embracing Translationese Artifacts, Sicheng Yu, Qianru Sun, Hao Zhang, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Translate-train is a general training approach to multilingual tasks. The key idea is to use the translator of the target language to generate training data to mitigate the gap between the source and target languages. However, its performance is often hampered by the artifacts in the translated texts (translationese). We discover that such artifacts have common patterns in different languages and can be modeled by deep learning, and subsequently propose an approach to conduct translate-train using Translationese Embracing the effect of Artifacts (TEA). TEA learns to mitigate such effect on the training data of a source language (whose original and …

On The Transferability Of Pre-Trained Language Models For Low-Resource Programming Languages, Fuxiang Chen, Fatemeh H. Fard, David Lo, Timofey Bryksin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A recent study by Ahmed and Devanbu reported that using a corpus of code written in multilingual datasets to fine-tune multilingual Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) achieves higher performance as opposed to using a corpus of code written in just one programming language. However, no analysis was made with respect to fine-tuning monolingual PLMs. Furthermore, some programming languages are inherently different and code written in one language usually cannot be interchanged with the others, i.e., Ruby and Java code possess very different structure. To better understand how monolingual and multilingual PLMs affect different programming languages, we investigate 1) the performance of …

Examining The Association Between Fictive Kin Care, Parental Attachment And Emotional Distress In College Students, Roxanne Watts

Master's Theses

Having a supportive and secure relationship with parents can predict less emotional distress in college students. In addition to parental support, many families leverage fictive kin caregivers to provide support. This is especially true in communities of racial and ethnic minorities. The present study investigated the association between fictive kin care, parental relationships, and emotional distress in college students. One hundred fourteen (N = 114) college students completed measures that assessed parental and fictive-kin relationships, social support, and emotional distress. A COVID-19 pandemic-related distress measure was also administered. Three hypotheses were tested. First, it was hypothesized that fictive kin …

Improving The Beginning Teacher Induction Program Experience For African American Teachers Within The Green Pastures School District: An Applied Study, Uvonda Marie Willis

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this applied study was to improve the BTI program for African American teachers in the Green Pastures School District by gathering information on the BTI program and formulating solutions. A multimethod design was used consisting of both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The first approach was semi-structured interviews with district and school site administrators. The second approach was conducting a focus group with African American beginning teachers. The third approach involved the development of a survey completed by district and school site administrators and African American beginning teachers. Based on the findings, this applied study identified several recommendations …

How Organizational Leaders Are Challenged As Their Organizations Move To More Virtual Or Digital Work Environments, Brian Anthony Ziroli

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Organizations are moving toward more virtual and remote work environments. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the need for organizations to be able to operate and grow while some or all their employees work remotely. While this change to work environments has provided some opportunities, it has also presented several challenges to organizational leaders. Research has demonstrated that leaders and managers are challenged with communication issues, including miscommunication, issues with clarity, and issues with information and knowledge sharing; a reduction or loss of employee satisfaction and motivation; lack of employee engagement; issues with onboarding and training; and a reduction in performance …

Integrated Model For Teaching Multicultural Competence: Incorporating Broaching As A Basic Skill For Counseling Students, Katie Askren

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This study is the critical first step in evaluating the Integrated Model for Teaching Multicultural Competence (IMT-MCC), which has the potential to completely revamp the way counselors are trained in multicultural competence (MCC) to be far more effective. By adding the domain of clinical interventions to the well-established MCC domains of awareness, knowledge, and skills, the model lays out a plan for countering current education deficits. Beginning with the Counseling Techniques and Helping Relationship course, this study adds MCC components to each course activity without adding additional work for students. Specific broaching prompts were provided, and each culture reference was …

The Effects Of Remote Learning On Slife Students From Central America During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Sarah Katherine Richter

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The Covid pandemic caused changes in education of which we may never know or understand all its repercussions to the public education system. One group of vulnerable students, newcomers from Guatemala and Honduras with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE), were negatively affected. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, one SLIFE program sent its students home in the spring of 2020 to quarantine and did not return to in-person learning again until a year later. The purpose of this quantitative, causal comparative study is to investigate the effects of remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic on SLIFE students’ education while attending …

Phonological Processing Of Stress By Native English Speakers Learning Spanish As A Second Language, Ramsés Ortín, Miquel Simonet

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

One feature of Spanish that presents some difficulties to second language (L2) learners whose first language (L1) is English concerns lexical stress. This study explores one aspect of the obstacle these learners face, weak phonological processing routines concerning stress inherited from their native language. Participants were L1 English L2 learners of Spanish. The experiment was a sequence-recall task with auditory stimuli minimally contrasting in stress (target) or segmental composition (baseline). The results suggest that learners are more likely to accurately recall sequences with stimuli contrasting in segmental composition than stress, suggesting reduced phonological processing of stress relative to a processing …

“We Do Not Know Which Path To Take” Mahieddine Bachetarzi, Music, Theater, And Salafist Nationalism In Interwar Algeria (1919 – 1939), Philip Devries

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Algerian nationalism in the interwar period did not emerge via a simple progression, nor as a unitary awakening; it was a polyvocal and multivalent movement comprised of disparate Muslim Algerian, Jewish Algerian, and European voices. The outward appearance of a singular movement is due in no small part to the cooption and monopolization of nationalist discourse by the Islamic reformist organization, the Association des oulémas musulmans algériens (AOMA), and their followers, including the Muslim musician and playwright, Mahieddine Bachetarzi. Indeed, while AOMA clerics and affiliated historians created the exclusively Arab-Muslim story of Algerian history that prevails today, cultural figures like …

The Effects Of Schema-Based Instruction On Students At Risk For Or With Learning Disabilities, Molly Daniels

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of schema-based instruction (SBI) on the correct response of 2 second-grade students at risk for or already determined to have a learning disability (LD) of comparison difference word problems. The study was a multiple probe across participants. Although the students did not use the RUN Strategy, one student’s ability to solve the word problems improved significantly after learning the strategy. Even though time was a factor in completing everything, the other student’s score did begin to improve after learning the RUN Strategy.

Development Of A Fuzzy Logic Model-Less Aircraft Controller, Christopher M. Scott

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The Modeling and Control for Agile Aircraft Development (MCAAD) group at NASA Langley Research Center(LaRC) is developing techniques for Real-Time Global Modeling (RTGM) and Robust Learning Control (RLC) for NASA’s Transformational Tools and Technologies Project. This project seeks to develop a systematic approach to reduce the iterative nature of aircraft design by introducing a model-less control law and enabling inflight aerodynamic modeling and controller design. The development of the flight control system without prior knowledge of the aircraft aerodynamic model makes use of TakagiSugeno-Kang fuzzy logic inference systems for pitch and roll controllers and are tested in various simulations and …

Validation And Measurement Invariance Of A First-Generation College Student Identity Scale, Kelsie K. Allison

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

First-generation college students (FGCS) comprise approximately 56% of the U.S. post-secondary institution population, yet they face substantially more academic, financial, and additional unique issues than continuing-generation college students. Research on FGCS has been steadily growing in recent years, however, literature on identity for this population is sparse. To address these gaps in the literature, the aim of the current study was to adapt, validate, and establish full factorial measurement invariance across Black and White FGCS for a multidimensional quantitative measure of first-generation college student identity. The final sample included 425 current FGCS (81.2% female; M_age = 24.4 years, SD …

Pedestrian Evacuation: Vulnerable Group Member Influence On The Group Leaders’ Decision-Making And The Impact On Evacuation Time, Terra Lynne Elzie

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

As pedestrian evacuations of buildings, outdoor venues, and special events occur, dynamic interactions between pedestrians and vehicles during egress are possible. To model pedestrian and vehicle evacuations, simulation models have evolved to incorporate more realistic crowd characteristics and behaviors to provide improved results. Past studies using modeling and simulation, specifically agent-based modeling, have explored pedestrian behaviors such as decision-making, navigation within a virtual environment, group formations, intra-group interactions, inter-group dynamics, crowd behaviors such as queuing and herding, and pedestrianvehicle interactions. These studies have led to relevant insights helpful to improving the accuracy of evacuation times for normal and emergency egress …

Do Pre-Trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation And A Reasonable Approach, Xin Lv, Yankai Lin, Yixin Cao, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been shown to capture factual knowledge from massive texts, which encourages the proposal of PLM-based knowledge graph completion (KGC) models. However, these models are still quite behind the SOTA KGC models in terms of performance. In this work, we find two main reasons for the weak performance: (1) Inaccurate evaluation setting. The evaluation setting under the closed-world assumption (CWA) may underestimate the PLM-based KGC models since they introduce more external knowledge; (2) Inappropriate utilization of PLMs. Most PLM-based KGC models simply splice the labels of entities and relations as inputs, leading to …

Exploring And Adapting Chinese Gpt To Pinyin Input Method, Minghuan Tan, Yong Dai, Duyu Tang, Zhangyin Feng, Guoping Huang, Jing Jiang, Jiwei Li, Shuming Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While GPT has become the de-facto method for text generation tasks, its application to pinyin input method remains unexplored. In this work, we make the first exploration to leverage Chinese GPT for pinyin input method. We find that a frozen GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on perfect pinyin. However, the performance drops dramatically when the input includes abbreviated pinyin. A reason is that an abbreviated pinyin can be mapped to many perfect pinyin, which links to even larger number of Chinese characters. We mitigate this issue with two strategies, including enriching the context with pinyin and optimizing the training process to …

Rumorlens: Interactive Analysis And Validation Of Suspected Rumors On Social Media, Ran Wang, Kehan Du, Qianhe Chen, Yifei Zhao, Mojie Tang, Hongxi Tao, Shipan Wang, Yiyao Li, Yong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the development of social media, various rumors can be easily spread on the Internet and such rumors can have serious negative effects on society. Thus, it has become a critical task for social media platforms to deal with suspected rumors. However, due to the lack of effective tools, it is often difficult for platform administrators to analyze and validate rumors from a large volume of information on a social media platform efficiently. We have worked closely with social media platform administrators for four months to summarize their requirements of identifying and analyzing rumors, and further proposed an interactive visual …