Digital Commons Network^™

Learners’ Use And Perceptions Of The First Language Across Writing Stages: A Mixed-Methods Study In A Saudi Efl Context, Abdulrahman Ali Alqahtani

UB Journal for Humanities

The role of the first language (L1) in second-language (L2) writing has been widely debated; however, empirical research examining learners’ perceptions of L1 use across different stages of the writing process remains limited in the Saudi EFL context. Addressing this gap, this mixed-methods study investigates how EFL undergraduate students at the University of Bisha use their first language (Arabic) during the English writing process (pre-writing, drafting, and post-writing) and how they perceive its impact on their writing development. Participants were 36 undergraduate EFL learners with advanced English proficiency who completed a Likert-scale questionnaire measuring the frequency and the purposes of …

Multimodal Construction Of Ideational Meaning On Opening Pages Of English Textbooks In China, Yudie Wei, Uti Aryanti

Jurnal Pendidikan: Teori, Penelitian, dan Pengembangan

This study aims to examine how ideational meaning is multimodally constructed on 31 opening pages through the interaction of theme images and Look and Share questions in four newly published junior high school English textbooks by People’s Education Press. Adopting the multimodal discourse analytic approach, the study analyzed representational processes in 32 images using Visual Grammar and ideational processes in 97 verbal interrogatives through transitivity patterns. The findings show that opening page images are predominantly narrative, frequently foregrounding action and reactional processes. The verbal questions, in contrast, show a strong tendency toward mental processes, while material and relational processes also …

Conference Proceedings Of The 2025 Lec Teaching And Learning Conference, Martha Snyder

LEC Conference Proceedings

No abstract provided.

From Data To Direction: Advancing Special Education Teacher Preparation Through The 2025 State Of The Profession Report, Jennifer J. Lesh, Mary Lynn Boscardin

Faculty and Staff Publications & Presentations

Dr. Lesh and Dr. Boscardin Presented on The State of the Special Education Profession Survey Results from 2025

Social Determinants Of Health And Quality Of Life Among Korean Americans With Chronic Hepatitis B, Cindy Xin Fang, Yoonjin Nam, Ann C. Klassen, Hee-Soon Juon

Department of Medical Oncology Faculty Papers

BACKGROUND: Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection disproportionately affects Korean Americans, who often experience persistent social and structural challenges that may influence quality of life. Recent community studies showed most Korean Americans with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) were disengaged from clinical care, emphasizing the need to better understand factors affecting their well-being. This study examined associations between social determinants of health (SDOH) and physical and mental health related quality of life (HRQoL) among Korean Americans with CHB.

METHODS: A total of 365 CHB patients completed the enrollment survey. SF-12 was used to measure quality of life, calculating physical and mental components …

On Message Encryption And Enhanced Security Using Protein Structure Information, Daniel Graham

Chemistry: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is a lecture packet focused on several well-established encryption procedures. Included is a discussion of security enhancements brought about by incorporating protein structure information into the procedures.

Artificial Intelligence And Atrocity Prevention, Cardozo Law Institute In Holocaust And Human Rights (Clihhr)

2025–2026 Flyers

What does it mean to engineer atrocities without killing everyone?

Abduweli Ayup, writer, linguist, and chronicler of the Uyghur crisis, joins human rights and tech experts from Access Now, Isedua Oribhabor, and Peter Micek to examine how China's surveillance state has weaponized AI, biometric data, and algorithmic policing to erase a people from the inside out. When the instruments of genocide are bureaucratic and technological, what does accountability look like.

Activation-Guided Layer Selection For Lora, Aditya Dawadikar, Pooja Shyamsundar, Rashmi Vishwanath Bhat, Navrati Saxena

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) technique for large language models (LLMs). LoRA’s benefits stem from its light weight and modular adapters. Standard LoRA applies adapters uniformly across all Transformer layers, implicitly assuming that each layer contributes equally to task adaptation. However, LLMs are found to have internal substructures that contribute in a disproportionate manner. In this work, we provide a theoretical analysis of how LoRA weight updates are influenced by a layer’s activation magnitude. We propose Act-LoRA, a simple activation-guided layer selection strategy for selective Low-Rank Adaptation. We evaluate this strategy for both encoder-only …

Reasoning In Large Language Models Across Multilingual, Long-Context, And Symbolic Settings, Sina Bagheri Nezhad

Dissertations and Theses

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as general-purpose reasoners, yet their reliability degrades in three settings that frequently arise in practice: multilingual inputs, long contexts, and symbolic or formally constrained domains. In multilingual settings, uneven training coverage produces substantial performance disparities and uncertain generalization to languages with little or negligible pretraining exposure. In long-context settings, relevant evidence may be sparsely distributed, and models exhibit the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon, undermining retrieval and multi-step synthesis. In symbolic settings such as mathematics, small arithmetic or logical slips invalidate solutions, and prose rationales are difficult to verify automatically.

This dissertation first characterizes these failure …

The Emotional Construction Of Religious Experience: Senitmentalism And Moral Motivations, Yvonne Candelario

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper addresses the growing prevalence of reported religious experiences across diverse religious and spiritual traditions, alongside the persistent absence of such reports among many adherents within the same communities. This asymmetry poses a challenge for both supernaturalist and reductively skeptical accounts of religious experience. I develop a naturalistic constructivist framework to explain why some individuals choose to interpret and report some human experiences as religious experiences or report having religious experiences at all, while others do not. Drawing on a post-modern revision of moral theory, an account of constructive sentimentalism, I argue that religious experience is shaped by socially …

Mall For Lifelong Learning: Older Adults’ Self-Directed Language Learning Via Duolingo, Jihye Kim

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) has proliferated due to rapid technological advancements, enabling language learning anytime, anywhere. Among these technologies, commercial applications such as Duolingo have achieved global popularity across diverse age groups. Despite this, research examining efficacy and User Experience (UX) has predominantly focused on undergraduate populations or formal educational settings. While a limited number of studies have explored populations outside university contexts (e.g., Puebla et al., 2022; Rosell-Aguilar, 2018), there remains a scarcity of research regarding the MALL experiences of older adults (aged 60 and above) in informal settings.

Taking a concurrent mixed-methods approach with an emphasis on qualitative …

Full Issue

Newsletter of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA & UK

No abstract provided.

The (Non-) Protection Of Indigenous Rights In Isds, Dr. Kevin W. Gray

Pace International Law Review

International investment law largely flows from the protections afforded foreign investors under bilateral and multilateral investment treaties.  Until recently, few of these treaties required investors to comply with human rights provisions in national constitutions or in international law, or preserved the ability of states to regulate to protect constitutional rights.  As a result, critics have argued, investor-state dispute settlement fails to protect human rights or preserve the ability of states to regulate in the public interest, and that arbitral awards rarely consider, let alone give effect to, rules of human rights.

This article considers the question of how Indigenous rights, …

Analysing Numeracy Demands In Alberta Curriculum: A Focus On High School Mathematics, Asia Majeed, Kwesi Yaro

Numeracy

In recent years, numeracy has been recognized as a key educational priority across the curriculum in many international jurisdictions, including almost all Canadian provinces. In Alberta province, Canada, for example, the Teaching Quality Standard (TQS) #3 explicitly states that all teachers are responsible for fostering literacy and numeracy skills, regardless of the specific subject areas they teach. This expanded focus reflects a broader understanding of numeracy not merely as a subset of mathematical skills, but as a fundamental competency that supports informed participation in civic, economic, and personal life. This paper applies the 21st Century Numeracy Model (Goos et al., …

Entropy-Gated Probabilistic Inference For Optical Financial Identifier Recognition, Jack Ngare

Defensive Publications Series

Recognizing financial identifiers from variable or degraded optical inputs can be challenging, as conventional deterministic scanners may fail and general-purpose optical character recognition systems may lack semantic logic. A system can employ a cascaded inference pipeline that first assesses the visual entropy of an optical input. Based on this assessment, the input can be routed to either a fast, deterministic decoder for low-entropy signals or a probabilistic inference engine for high-entropy signals. The probabilistic engine could generate multiple candidate identifiers and use a reasoning model, constrained by financial domain logic, to evaluate a plausible candidate. A validation layer can then …

Promise P R O G R A M Providing Opportunities For Mathematics And Science Enrichment, Illinois Math And Science Academy

Promise Programs

IMSA’s PROMISE Program aims to address the challenges of culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse (CLED) students. PROMISE is a proven model of success for realizing the vision of a highly diverse and creative STEM workforce. Eligible students will be in 7th-9th grade in Illinois and demonstrate high academic achievement. This grantfunded program is open to all students, especially those from culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse backgrounds, including Black or African American students, Latinx students, students who qualify for the National Free or Reduced-Price Meal Program, and students from rural Illinois counties.

Bridging The Gap: Exploring The Educational Transitional Experiences Of Foreign-Born Ghanaian High School Students, Samuel Adusei Buabeng

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the gaps and limitations in language transition and the educational experiences of high school students born in Ghana who are English Language Learners. The research analyzed migration patterns within this group and how these experiences affect their integration into the American education system. It also examined whether culture and acculturation influence this transitional process. The study explored the language transition process, learning experiences, and cultural shifts within English-dominant educational systems, emphasizing participants' lived experiences and any challenges they faced during their transition. Although English is Ghana's official language, significant dialectal, exposure, and teaching-quality differences affect students' proficiency …

Warm-Ups To Works Of Art: How Engaging Choral Students In Fundamentals Of Music Leads To The Creative Outlet Of Songwriting", Clay E. Bradford

SPARK Symposium Presentations

When students typically participate in public school choir, they may learn songs from varying different cultures, genres, and styles spanning from different periods of music and countries. This music is incredibly important for the foundation of student learning; however, students are often consumers rather than generators of music. By then taking the basic music theory students may have, and applying it to songwriting parameters and practices, students are able to compose their own music! This not only teaches students to experiment with songwriting but encourages this creative outlet of composition - something they haven't previously encountered before in choir or …

It's Getting Hot In Here: The Heated Debate On The Censorhip Of Climate Change Education And Its Violation Of State Constitutions, Lilyan Jarreau

LSU Journal of Energy Law and Resources

No abstract provided.

Communication Challenges Experienced By Telephone Triage Registered Nurses Providing Assessment Of Health Symptoms, Stacy Huddleston

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Telephone triage nurses routinely assess symptoms and make clinical decisions without visual contact, which introduces complex communication challenges. Language differences, emotional distress, cultural misunderstandings, and the absence of visual cues may influence how symptoms are described, interpreted, and acted upon during telephone encounters. The purpose of this qualitative interpretive description study, guided by Peplau’s theory of interpersonal relations, was to explore how RNs experience and manage communication barriers in telephone triage practice. Six RNs with recent experience in telephone triage participated in semistructured interviews, and the data were analyzed using interpretive description and thematic analysis. Findings indicated that participants relied …

Precision In Words, Precision In Warfare: Terminology And Control In Military Discourse On Unmanned Systems, Elise Annett, John Bitterman, James Giordano

Strategic Insights

This commentary is about how inconsistent terminology surrounding unmanned and intelligent systems can create confusion in military planning and policy discussions. Terms such as automatic, remote, and autonomous are often used interchangeably in defense discourse, despite describing distinct technological capabilities and levels of human control. This ambiguity can hinder effective evaluation, governance, and operational use of unmanned systems in modern warfare. As machines increasingly support sensing, decision-making, and action on the battlefield, precise terminology becomes essential for doctrine development, training, command authority, and ethical oversight. Clearer definitions and conceptual frameworks can ensure that emerging technologies are understood and integrated into …

Construction Of Chinese Identities And Community: A Linguistic Ethnographic Study Of A Chinese Culture-Sharing Club At A Us University, Yuxuan Mu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chinese identity has been viewed as a debated and contested notion in sociolinguistics (Wong et al., 2021). Existing sociolinguistic research, which has centered on Chinese identity-related questions, such as “Who can be or cannot be Chinese?”, has been closely involved with the current political tensions between mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as well as their associated linguistic tensions between simplified Chinese writing and traditional Chinese writing, and Cantonese and Mandarin. Building on these studies, this dissertation goes beyond the scope of Sinophone contexts traditionally examined in prior research (e.g., mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong) to examine how US …

They Find A Way: The Transnational Practices And Experiences Of Diaspora Conflict Journalists, Grace E. Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As global tensions continue to rise, media landscapes are changing. Diaspora communities play an integral role in this shift, as they search for verifiable news with a global perspective to keep them informed on crises in their home countries. In order to keep their communities informed, diaspora journalists step up to localize coverage, creating transnational networks to bridge home and host countries. They often work through intense situations, sacrificing normalcy for information. Building on the framework from Ogunyemi’s (2018) diasporic media observations, Fraser’s (1992) counterpublics theory, and D.K. Thussu’s (2006) contra-flow in global media theory, this study explores how diaspora …

Primordial Recognition And The Structure Of Human Cognition: Toward A Quranic Epistemology, Jana El-Boustani

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reconstructs a Qur’anic epistemological architecture grounded in narrative rather than abstract system-building. It argues that the Qur’an articulates a unified account of human cognition in which intelligibility is grounded in divine instruction, recognition is affirmed through primordial testimony, and knowledge is exercised within finite yet accountable faculties.

Through close analysis of the story of Adam in Surat al-Baqarah, the primordial covenant in Surat al-Aʿrāf, and the verse of the Amanah in Surat al-Aḥzāb, the study demonstrates that the Qur’an presents human knowing as structured, oriented, and morally conditioned. Revelation functions not as the introduction of wholly new knowledge, …

Ai-Powered Reporting For Improved Hospital Efficiency, Joel C. Laskow, Chris Papesh, Srishti Awasthi, Jacquelyn Cheun

SMU Data Science Review

This study explores the feasibility of an AI-powered chatbot for HIPAA-aligned intake of emergency room patients seeking treatment for overdose and violence. The system utilizes AWS Amplify, an encrypted EC2 instance, and a secure S3 Bucket house on Amazon Web Services. Chat functionality is powered by a multi-agentic framework operating on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4. Manual evaluation and exact match testing reveal the system reliably obtains and records relevant information during intake. Future work will focus on expanding accessibility by integrating voice functionality, obtaining HIPAA compliance certifications, and incorporating the chat system into existing healthcare networks.

Bias Evaluation Of Healthcare Data With The Use Of Vbqa - A Vaers Inspired Bias Question Answer Dataset, Nolan Dulude, Renu Karthikeyan, Bivin Sadler, Faizan Javed

SMU Data Science Review

Abstract. Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used increasingly within the healthcare industry to summarize complex clinical information, but their outputs can often reflect biases inherited from their training data. In healthcare, these biases are not just technical flaws, but they can lead to distorted and false information about vaccine safety, compromise patient trust, and lead to potential harmful outcomes. This study investigates bias found in LLM-generated outputs to question-answer pairs inspired by adverse vaccine reactions using COVID-19 data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) from 2020–2024. We examined whether training the LLMs on a known Bias Benchmark …

Nlp Bias And African American English, Kenya Roy, Faizan Javed

SMU Data Science Review

African American English (AAE), also referred to as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), is widely used on social media, but most sentiment analysis tools are trained only on Standard American English (SAE). This mismatch can cause models to misclassify dialectal expressions—especially by labeling neutral or positive AAE as negative or toxic. These errors matter, since Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems are now central to content moderation and brand monitoring. This research will evaluate the VADER, RoBERTa, GPT-OSS, and Gemma’s handling of AAE in comparison to SAE using the TwitterAAE corpus, a public dataset of tweets with estimated AAVE usage. The …

Automating Cardiff Model Data Capture In Emergency Departments: Ambient Nlp Integration With Oracle-Cerner Fhir Systems, Simi Augustine, Marco A. Lopez, Jacquelyn Cheun, Chris Papesh

SMU Data Science Review

Violence and overdose events in Las Vegas occur at rates above the national average, with fewer than half of violent injuries reported to law enforcement [2,7]. The Cardiff Model offers a proven framework for standardized data collection and sharing between hospitals and public safety partners, yet many implementations still rely on manual entry. We propose an ambient triage pipeline integrated with Oracle-Cerner electronic health record systems to listen to nurse–patient dialogue, convert speech to text, extract Cardiff fields, and write standards-based FHIR Bundles for analytics. Using SMART on FHIR standards and Cerner Millennium APIs, the study evaluates whether ambient capture …

Virtual Ai Lifestyle Assistant, Solomon T. Mathew, Babu T. Mathew

SMU Data Science Review

Patients struggle with adhering to prescribed medication and leading a healthy lifestyle outside of clinical visits. A mechanism needs to be developed and deployed to constantly remind them about the need to take medication and to lead a healthy lifestyle in a non-intrusive way while watching for changes in vitals that can be collected using wearable devices. With these considerations, a Virtual Healthcare Assistant is proposed, built with a multi-agent system that is easily integrated with wearable devices such as Apple Watches, Fitbits, and Oura Rings. a LangGraph-based multi-agent workflow to mimic real-world continuous monitoring. The resulting system enables agent-to-agent …

Application Of Open-Source Small Large Language Models For Finance Report Analysis, Tue Vu, Mark Austin, Marcel Tuijn

SMU Data Science Review

The rapid integration of generative AI in finance introduces both opportunities and challenges, particularly when analyzing sensitive data such as Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. This study investigates the use of open-source Small Large Language Models (SLLMs), deployed locally through the Ollama and LangChain frameworks, combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for extracting financial insights relevant to index performance and reporting quality. Two key objectives guide this work: (1) benchmarking multiple open-source SLLMs for sentiment analysis, multiple-choice reasoning, and financial question answering, and (2) assessing the feasibility of locally deployed SLLMs for domain-specific financial queries. A standardized set of 50 …