Education Commons^™

Come On In, The Writing's Fine: Preserving Voice And Generating Enthusiasm In My English 100 Syllabus, Elisa Leah Berry

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis explores the potential for creating a composition syllabus that presents a model of good writing, is an enthusiastic invitation to the discipline, and provides a clear roadmap to success, not only for the course, but also for the students’ college career. This is especially useful for an increasingly diverse student community that arrives to college with a varying knowledge of the academic institution, with its specialized language and systems. The project explores the existing research on syllabus crafting, uses current composition studies and a survey of English 100 students to interrogate the rhetorical situation of the author’s own …

Understanding Posttraumatic Stress And Academic Achievement: Exploring Attentional Control, Self-Efficacy, And Coping Among College Students, Ashley M. Cantrell

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The present study examined differences in attentional control, attentional control self-efficacy, and coping as self-regulatory mechanisms among students with varying grade point averages (GPA) who experience posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Subjects included 58 college students from one large comprehensive university in the Mid-South who met the criteria for diagnosis of PTSS based on the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R). Three groups were created based on college GPA and graduation requirements at the university (at-risk for graduation, on-track for graduation, and ontrack for graduating with honors). Participants completed a survey that included demographics and measures of PTSS, attentional control, attentional control …

An Adaptive Visual Learning Approach For Waterborne Disease Prevention In Rural West Africa, Jonathan Le Mar Oglesby

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Depleted water supplies, along with industrial and human waste, are driving a world water crisis that poses a growing risk to food markets, energy production, political stability, and human health (Global Water Security 2012). One obvious example of the this crisis is the more than 1 billion people who obtain their drinking water from contaminated sources (WHO/UNICEF 2006; Clasen et al. 2008). With a projected increase of 1.3 billion people between now and 2050, Africa will add more to the global population than any other world region (Haub and Kaneda 2013). For this research, visual learning design factors were incorporated …

Development Of A Questionnaire To Identify Barriers And Facilitators To Academic Careers For Women In Stem, Charles Leonard Bolton Iii

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The purpose of this research was to develop a questionnaire to be used to identify barriers and facilitators to women faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) academics. The phenomenon known as the leaky pipeline, a theoretical model describing why women are underrepresented in STEM disciplines, was examined. Women have long been underrepresented in STEM professions despite an increase in the number of women earning STEM degrees, suggesting women are faced with barriers that prevent them from achieving equal representation with men. The literature has identified several potential barriers, both historical and new, such as biological inequalities, family responsibilities, …

Impact Of Assumption Violations On The Accuracy Of Direct Range Restriction Adjustments, Austin J. Hall

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

For decades researchers, analysts, and organizational professionals have utilized correction equations to adjust for the effects of various statistical artifacts. However, every correction method has certain assumptions that must be satisfied to work properly. These assumptions are likely rarely satisfied for range restriction corrections. As a result, these correction methods are used in a manner that can lead to incorrect results.

The current study employed a Monte Carlo design to examine the direct range restriction correction. Analyses were conducted to examine the accuracy of adjustments made with the direct range restriction correction when its assumption of perfect top-down selection was …

Optimal Motivation And Cognitive Load For Enhanced Math Performance, Manooch S. Saeedi

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Educational research has a long history of investigating factors that are linked to improved academic performance. Here I examined research on three factors that impact academic performance—working memory (WM), cognitive load, and motivation. Although each of these factors were known to impact academic performance, there were no studies that examined the combined effect of these three factors on performance. The current study attempted to examine the potential connections between these factors, and their collective impact on strategies for learning in the context of math performance. Experiment 1 tested the impact of WM, cognitive load, and motivation for a math task …

Improving Head Start Teachers' Concept Development: Long Term Follow-Up Of A Training Program And Differences In Program Impact, Amanda Kr Lipp

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Children from a low socioeconomic status (SES) home environment are typically exposed to less vocabulary during the first few years of life and experience higher rates of poor school readiness, particularly in emergent literacy skills, when compared to middle-class peers (Bowey, 1995; Hart & Risley, 2003; Whitehurst, 1997). Early childhood education programs designed to expose this group to cognitively challenging utterances have found that low SES children tend to make greater gains in vocabulary development compared to middle-class peers (Justice, Meier, & Walpole, 2005).