Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Commons^™

Examining The Performance Of The Metropolis-Hastings Robbins-Monro Algorithm In The Estimation Of Multilevel Multidimensional Irt Models, Bozhidar M. Bashkov

Dissertations, 2014-2019

The purpose of this study was to review the challenges that exist in the estimation of complex (multidimensional) models applied to complex (multilevel) data and to examine the performance of the recently developed Metropolis-Hastings Robbins-Monro (MH-RM) algorithm (Cai, 2010a, 2010b), designed to overcome these challenges and implemented in both commercial and open-source software programs. Unlike other methods, which either rely on high-dimensional numerical integration or approximation of the entire multidimensional response surface, MH-RM makes use of Fisher’s Identity to employ stochastic imputation (i.e., data augmentation) via the Metropolis-Hastings sampler and then apply the stochastic approximation method of Robbins and Monro …

Youth Empowerment As Demonstrated By The Jóvenes En Acción Program, Kirstin French

Capstone Collection

This paper uses a review of relevant literature on empowerment and youth empowerment theories and models to develop a comprehensive understanding of key elements that are found in youth empowerment programs. Through the literature review, there are five themes identified which can be used to analyze youth programs for the presence of empowerment. The five themes considered are: a power sharing adult-youth relationship, an individual and community level orientation, a safe and supportive environment, peer collaboration, and reflection. A World Learning youth program, Jóvenes en Acción (Youth in Action, or JenA) is used as a case study to understand the …

Spoken Language To Be Embraced And Avoided Around Disability: Words That Impact Identity And Sense Of Achievement, Jessica M. Rodrigues

Capstone Collection

The focus of this capstone is verbal language spoken to or about persons with disabilities. Language in this case study is discussed as words and phrases that are supportive and less supportive of how students see themselves, their identity, and sense of achievement. Three focus groups were held with students at Landmark College in Putney, Vermont to collect samples of their experiences and input their voices into this case study, adding value and depth to the existing literature. Disability is looked at through the lens of multiculturalism; as experiences that people with disabilities have with others and their environment are …

Comparing Schools: From Value Added To Sound Policy, Jeffery Richmond Dean

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over the last twenty years, value added measures (VAMs) have proliferated in education research and policy. Whether applied to teachers, schools, or districts, VAMs have attempted to measure the contribution made by a unit of interest toward observed student outcomes, typically test scores in literacy and math. At the same time, a small number of states have developed methods to formally compare schools on those outcomes, and such methods may be used and intended in ways that qualify them as a kind of VAM. My primary interest is to evaluate the properties of a similar schools model I develop in …

Green Chemistry As A Tool For Understanding The Toxic Substances Control Act: A Lecture Module For Undergraduate Students, Molly R. Blessing

Honors Scholar Theses

The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) is the central form of chemical regulation existent in the United States today, yet scientists are often unaware or uncertain of its provisions. Violations of TSCA by unknowing chemists set industry and government unnecessarily at odds. A lecture on TSCA was developed for undergraduate students that uses the concept of green chemistry to promote interest and incentivize learning. Green chemistry methods are cleaner and less wasteful than traditional chemical ones, and many companies using them are at the forefront of technological innovation. The lecture explains both green chemistry and TSCA, includes company case studies, …

Measuring A Cognitive Apprenticeship Model Of Instruction In Statistics Education, Amanda Dawn Leimer

Dissertations

Research has continued to support the need for investigating the role of pedagogical models in relation to students’ statistical anxiety, statistical self-efficacy, and academic performance within statistics education. Although models in the literature such as the Cognitive Apprenticeships Model of Instruction (CA-MOI) have emerged and have shown positive educational outcomes for teaching disciplines that involve the use of complex tasks (Kuo, Hwang, Chen, & Chen, 2012; Poitras & Poitras, 2011; Wegner, 2011), only one study has actually measured the degree to which this model was implemented, using the Maastrict Clinical Teaching Questionnaire (MCTQ) (Stalmeijer et al., 2008). Consequently the problem …

Muddling Through Or Knee Deep In The Big Muddy?, Howard Thomas

Asian Management Insights

A widening gulf between thepractice of managementand academic organisationscharacterises the stateof affairs in business schools today.

Using Dynamic Lndicators Of Basic Early Literacy Skills (Dibels) Oral Reading Fluency Data To Predict Michigan Educational Assessment Program Outcomes, Lisa Lockman

Dissertations

Schools are under legislative pressure to ensure students make adequate progress each year, and therefore, must identify students in need of intervention at early grade levels. Educators use diagnostic tools to measure student progress, attempting to determine which children may be most at risk for future reading failure. The Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) is widely used for early identification of students who have risk factors. This study incorporated a quantitative, correlational, ex post facto design to examine the relationship between students’ third grade scores on the spring DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) assessment and their fifth grade …

Teacher Narratives And Student Engagement Testing Narrative Engagement Theory In Drug Prevention Education, Michelle Miller-Day, Michael L. Hecht, Janice L. Krieger, Jonathan Pettigrew, Young Ju Shin, John L. Graham

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

Testing narrative engagement theory, this study examines student engagement and teachers’ spontaneous narratives told in a narrative-based drug prevention curriculum. The study describes the extent to which teachers share their own narratives in a narrative-based curriculum, identifies dominant narrative elements, forms and functions, and assesses the relationships among teacher narratives, overall lesson narrative quality, and student engagement. One-hundred videotaped lessons of the keepin’ it REAL drug prevention curriculum were coded and the results supported the claim that increased narrative quality of a prevention lesson would be associated with increased student engagement. The quality of narrativity, however, varied widely. Implications of …

The Impact Of Latino Growth On Educational Institutions In Northwest Arkansas From 1990- 2010: Two Decades Of Change In Curriculum Design, Educational Resources And Services For Latino Students, Aíxa García Mont

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the changing demographics nationwide of Latinos moving from urban traditional

settlements sites to non-traditional settlement sites such as Arkansas (Pew Hispanic Research Group, 2013; Smith, 2014; Smith and Furuseth, 2005) Arkansas is now part of the new south or El Nuevo South (Smith and Furuseth, 2005). Although Arkansas is a non-traditional receiving state it is one of the states with the largest growing Latino population (Pew Hispanic Research Group, 2013). Northwest Arkansas in particular has the largest concentration of Latinos to date with the area being host to some of the largest companies in the United States, such as …

Teacher Survey: Common Core Standards, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary W. Ritter

Policy Briefs

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for K-12 English language arts (ELA) and mathematics were adopted by the Arkansas State Board of Education in July 2010. Teachers have been implementing CCSS in their classrooms for several years, and this spring students across the state are being assessed on CCSS through the PARCC assessments. In February 2015, Governor Hutchinson announced the formation of a Council on Common Core Review, and the Office for Education Policy began a survey of Arkansas public school teachers to gather their opinions on this important topic. In this brief, we will share the preliminary findings from …

Can They Teach Each Other? : The Restructuring Of Higher Education And The Rise Of Undergraduate Student “Teachers” In Ontario, Jennifer Massey, Sean Field

Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs

Changes to public funding regimes, coupled with transformations in how universities are managed and measured have altered the methods for educating undergraduate students. The growing reliance on teaching fellows, teaching assistants, and increasingly undergraduate peer educators (administering Supplemental Instruction [SI] programs) is promoted as a means toachieve a greater “return on investment” in the delivery of postsecondary education. Neoliberal discourses legitimating this downloading of teaching labour suggest it offers a “win-win” solution to the “problem” of educating growing numbers of undergraduate students. It proposes universities can deliver the same curricula, and achieve the same “outcomes” (primarily measured through grades and …

The Rise Of Adhd And Effects Of Alternative Treatment In Adolescents, Jennifer Villarina

Scholarly and Creative Works Conference (2015 - 2021)

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a syndrome that makes it difficult for people to focus, control behavior and regulate activity. Many with ADHD move constantly and are impulsive. They cannot seem to follow directions and are easily bored or frustrated with tasks. Although these behaviors are normally observed in children, they are more severe in those with ADHD. The symptoms of ADHD make it difficult for children to function at school and home. Exposure to toxins, injury to the brain and imbalance of neurotransmitters can affect the development of the brain (LeFever, Arcona & Antonuccio, 2003). The most common …

Developing An Understanding Of How College Students Experience Interactive Instructional Technology: A Ux Perspective, Adam Wagler

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Technology is increasingly mobile and social, resulting in dynamic digital and interactive environments. The ubiquitous nature of interactive instructional technology presents new paradigms for higher education, creating challenges for instructors to compete for time and attention as students are bombarded by information in a digital, media rich world. The problem being studied, with all of these technological advancements, is how instructors can approach these challenges from a user experience (UX) perspective. A macro level view sees college students taking multiple courses at a time, over many semesters, and using different interactive instructional technology that mix with other forms of online …

2015 Legislative Summary, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary W. Ritter

Policy Briefs

The 90th General Assembly opened its Regular Session on January 12 and recessed on April 9. Meetings of the House and Senate education committees were usually standing room only for discussions of a broad range of bills on early childhood, K-12, and higher education issues. The purpose of this policy brief is to review the K-12 bills that garnered the most attention and have been signed into law by firstterm Governor Asa Hutchinson. These highlights are organized into several categories as shown in This Brief

Grading Arkansas’ Schools, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary W. Ritter

Policy Briefs

Report Cards for Arkansas schools released by the Arkansas Department of Education contain valuable information for stakeholders. As in past years, the report cards outline student demographics and academic achievement, as well as rates of attendance, graduation, dropout, grade inflation and college remediation. Report cards also contain information on teacher quality and school environment indicators. There are a few new pieces of information provided this year, specifically a school rating which assigns a letter grade to schools.

A Verification And Extension Of Students' Motivations, Financial Orientation, And Identity Salience As Predictors Of Likelihood To Withdraw From A University, Matthew I. Quinn

Undergraduate Distinction Papers

Broadly, this research examines a student’s likelihood to withdraw from a university based on the relationship between motivations, financial orientation, and identity salience. Specifically, this study empirically examines the relationship between extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, and apathetic motivation, perceived opportunity loss and lifestyle activities related to financial orientation, and satisfaction and reciprocity related to identity salience, as predictors of a student’s likelihood of withdrawing from a university.

A questionnaire was designed by extending scale items related to the constructs of interest. First-year students at a private university located in the upper Midwest were sampled. A hypothesized model was tested using …

Broadband Access In Arkansas Schools, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary W. Ritter

Policy Briefs

With the computer-based Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) test, the Arkansas Digital Learning Act, and Governor Hutchinson’s efforts to increase participation in computer science courses, the Arkansas Legislature is discussing actions to take in order to close the “digital divide” in the state. This brief will explore the technological requirements of providing the recommended bandwidth to schools, the barriers to the provision of that service, and potential steps for the Arkansas Department of Education to take in order to ensure that every Arkansas student has fast, consistent access to the Internet to support their learning.

Research And Education In Parallel: Scientific Outreach Through On-Site Experiments At The Museum Of Science Boston Living Laboratory, Vivian Ciaramitaro, Hiu-Mei Chow

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

Our world is multisensory, as is our perception of it: we see lips move while we listen to what is being said, we smell food as we taste it, we touch a surface as we feel its texture as we look at. Cross-modal sensory processing, the way information from our different senses interacts and influences our conscious perceptual experience is ubiquitous in everyday life, yet, it is not well understood, compared to unimodal sensory processing, processing information from a single sensory system. One of our research goals is to standardize a set of computer-generated stimuli and procedures to study sound-shape …

We Get To Carry Each Other: Using The Musical Activism Of U2 As Framework For An Engaged Spirituality And Community Engagement Course, Marshall Welch

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

This article describes a January term community engagement service-learning course that used the musical and spiritually-based activism of the rock group U2 as an example of engaged spirituality using activism and advocacy. In addition to learning about the history, music, and activism of the band, students were taught a specific set of skills for activism, advocacy, and community organizing that included creating goal statements, developing and implementing action plans, and coordinating logistics for advocacy-based events on campus. Students were assigned to apply these skills as the service-learning component of the course. These activities were conceptualized as indirect service that reflected …

Interfacing Catholic Social Meanings, Sociology, Self, And Pedagogical Practices, Daniel J. Myers, Andrew J. Weigert

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

What connects Catholic Social Tradition with Sociology? How do each inform the other and how do they, together, flow through and animate the sociologist? Within a student-driven learning community pedagogy, this course builds on the humanistic aspects of Sociology as a scientific perspective a la Peter Berger’s Invitation to Sociology. This foundation is then filtered through a social psychological understanding of self with a sense of vocation through which persons’ deepest passions meets humans’ greatest needs. Biographical vignettes of sociologists’ careers of study that address issues of racial and gender inequalities and psycho-social shifts in values over the life course …

Journey Into Shame: Implications For Justice Pedagogies, Roger C. Bergman

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

Being formed for justice can be a painful experience. Sometimes that pain takes the form of shame and contributes to the formation and exercise of conscience. But shame in other forms can be opposed to human flourishing and social justice. Psychologist James Fowler provides a spectrum of two forms of healthy shame and four forms of unhealthy shame, to which the author adds four other varieties, strategic shame and spiritual shame, at one end of the spectrum, and murderous shame and genocidal shame, at the other. Various experiences of shame are dramatically illustrated in Black Like Me, John Howard …

Prophetic Imagination: Confronting The New Jim Crow & Income Inequality In America, Cornel West

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

On October 11, 2014, Cornel West delivered the keynote address to nearly 600 students at the regional Leadership & Social Justice Conference, hosted at Saint Mary’s College of California. The conference occurred two days before West was arrested in Ferguson, Missouri, during a demonstration to protest the killing of young Black men by White police officers, as in the case of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson. Speaking of the students, West said, "I would like to see these precious young people commit themselves to lives of integrity, honesty and decency, where they are vigilant against all forms of evil—White supremacists, …

Multidimensional Resilience In Honors Students At Bryant University, Haley Nicol

Honors Projects in Applied Psychology

College level honors programs are continuously working towards improvement of their programs and working towards improving the college experience for their students. Apart from recognition and developing a positive reputation for the university, the goals for these selective academic programs include better serving their students from both academic and professional perspectives, as well encouraging and increasing program completion retention rates. There are various ways of testing students to assess their mindset and personal drive as well as gauge the possibility of students graduating with successful completion of their Capstone project or thesis in their senior year. To better understand how …

A Question Of Perspective? Measuring Views On Equal Rights And Opportunities Among Minority Groups In European Large-Scale Surveys, Wolfram Schulz

Civics and Citizenship Assessment

Attitudes toward diversity and acceptance of minorities have increasingly become a focus of public attention due to the transition of the European region toward a more diverse society. In recent years, many studies have gathered and presented data on perceptions of tolerance or attitudes toward equal rights for social groups across European countries. Whenever respondents are asked about their views on diversity, tolerance and acceptance with regard to specific social group, it is always important to take into account whether they belong to this particular group or not. However, when studying attitudes towards smaller minority groups, comparing attitudes between majority …

Documento Conceptual Sobre Redes De Excelencia Para La Investigación Y La Educación, Suresh V. Garimella, David B. Janes, Anne Slaughter Andrew

PPRI Digital Library

“Redes de Excelencia” focalizadas permitirán que las instituciones en América Latina desarrollen ecosistemas de investigación y educación de un modo mucho más rápido que si siguieran procesos "orgánicos" o locales. Una vez implementados, estos ecosistemas no solo permitirán profundas transformaciones que lleven a economías basadas en el conocimiento, sino que también desempeñarán roles claves en las redes necesarias para los sistemas de innovación regionales.

Para acelerar el desarrollo de ecosistemas de investigación y educación en toda América, los autores proponen establecer “Redes de Excelencia” en las áreas claves. Cada Red de Excelencia será multiinstitucional, multisectorial (universidad, empresa, gobierno, ONG) y …

The Adequacy Of Programs In Nsw In Supporting Vulnerable Households To Transition To Renewable Energy, Madison Dell

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Rising electricity prices in Australia have caused low-income households to take drastic measures to reduce their energy consumption, cutting back on essential needs like food and heating. At the same time, prices for renewable energies like solar PV are decreasing, making renewable energy a more viable option for low-income households than grid electricity. In support of increasing the nation’s supply of renewable energy, the New South Wales government is funding the Zero Net Energy Town (Z-NET) project. The Z-NET project is a new initiative to create Australia’s first town that supplies all of its energy through renewable energy sources, using …

Sexual And Reproductive Health Education For Boys In Kapchorwa, Uganda, Meredith Colleary

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study examines the systems by which adolescent boys receive sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education in Kapchorwa, Uganda. Teenage pregnancy and early marriage are epidemics that hinder Uganda’s development. As girls have consistently been the targets of interventions, this study considers how boys are included in these strategies. The objectives of the study are three-­‐fold: to research the ways that boys receive SRH education, to identify the successes and shortcomings of these education systems, and to seek ways for these systems to be improved.

The study was carried out over a six-­‐week period in the spring of 2015. The …

University Of The Future Colombia-Purdue Workshop Report, Suresh V. Garimella, David B. Janes, Liliana Gómez Díaz

PPRI Digital Library

The University of the Future Workshop, a joint Colombia-Purdue event, was held at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, October 28-29, 2014. Participants included rectors and board members from six top universities in Colombia, along with executive directors of NGOs, government representatives from the U.S. and Colombia, and Purdue faculty and administrators. The workshop was focused on a dialog among participants on key programs and focuses that will allow universities to be responsive to the 21st century needs of the Americas.

This report is a summary of the workshop and is based on the contributions of all the participants. Key …

A Concept Paper On Networks Of Excellence For Research And Education, Suresh V. Garimella, David B. Janes, Anne Slaughter Andrew

PPRI Digital Library

Research and education ecosystems, foundational components of knowledge-based economies, are relatively underdeveloped in Latin America. The entire ecosystem of a research university — including resources, corporate partnerships, and research — must capitalize on a symbiosis between the research, education and commercialization missions. A university cannot transform unilaterally nor can universities sustain the required transformation without government and industry participation. Initiatives to accelerate the development of research university ecosystems are critical for the realization of knowledge-based economies and resilient civil societies.

To accelerate the development of research and education ecosystems across the Americas, the authors propose to establish “Networks of Excellence” …