Schools are frequently seen as the hubs of the community, providing resources and a gathering place for members of the community. The process of surveying the community in order to identify unique needs within the community, and then intentionally forging partnerships capable of ameliorating the specific needs, are strategies used by community…

Adjunct faculty have become the new majority faculty on campuses across the country. There are two theories why adjunct faculty are so relied upon: cost or contingency. Some institutions may employ adjunct faculty for cost-savings reasons. In contrast, other institutions may depend on the contingent, temporary nature of the employment contracts to…

Binary item response theory (IRT) models are widely used in educational testing data. These models are not perfect because they simplify the individual item responding process, ignore the differences among different response patterns, cannot handle multidimensionality that lay behind options within a single item, and cannot manage missing response…

The goal of biological sciences is to understand the biomolecular mechanics of living organisms. Proteins serve as the foundation for organisms functional analysis and sequence analysis has shown to be invaluable in answering questions about individual organisms. The first step in any sequence analysis is alignment and it is common that even…

Data visualization literacy can be defined as "the ability and skill to read and interpret visually represented data in and to extract information from data visualizations" (Lee, et al., 2017, p.552). Within the information science profession, data visualization literacy is an emerging and increasingly important competency within the…

Dialogue act (DA) classification plays an important role in understanding, interpreting and modeling dialogue. Dialogue acts (DAs) represent the intended meaning of an utterance, which is associated with the illocutionary force (or the speaker's intention), such as greetings, questions, requests, statements, and agreements. In natural language…

Data science is a broad, interdisciplinary field concerned with the extraction of knowledge or insights from data, with the classification of data as a core, fundamental task. One of the most persistent challenges faced when performing classification is the class imbalance problem. Class imbalance refers to when the frequency with which each class…

Paid employment is one of the most common extracurricular activities among full-time undergraduates, and an array of studies has attempted to measure its impact. Methodological concerns with the extant literature, however, make it difficult to draw reliable conclusions. Furthermore, the research on working college students has little to say about…

This dissertation examines the role of conceptions of data's value in data practices. Based on a study of three small teams of scientists carrying out ecological research at a biological station, my study addresses the following main question: How do scientists conceive of the value of their data, and how do scientists enact conceptions of value…

TIMSS and PIRLS assess representative samples of students at regular intervals, measuring trends in student achievement and student contexts for learning. Because individual students are not tracked over time, analysis of international large-scale assessment data is usually conducted cross-sectionally. Gustafsson (2007) proposed examining the data…

As the field of education continues to grow, new methods and approaches to teaching are being developed with the goal of improving students' understanding of concepts. While research exists showing positive effects for particular teaching methods in small case studies, generalizations to larger populations of students, which are needed to…

Large scale product and service reviews proliferate and are commonly found across the web. The ability to harvest, digest and analyze a large corpus of reviews from online websites is still however a difficult problem. This problem is referred to as "opinion mining." Opinion mining is an important area of research as advances in the…

This dissertation study explored the feasibility of using authenticated spoken texts to test L2 Chinese listening comprehension. The spoken texts used in the study were created using an "authenticating" technique, in which scripted spoken Chinese texts were infused with characteristics of real-world, unscripted spoken Chinese. In the…

New ways of managing schools that save money while providing the same quality of education is always a goal. The saving of money is always needed to assure that we make the most of our tax dollars without spending more than is required. The purpose of this quantitative study was to identify the relationship between student test scores from a…

This dissertation investigated citizen science, a tool that connects the public to the scientific community through research-based projects and education campaigns. Benefits include volunteers adding data to long-term data sets and improved scientific literacy among the public. Oftentimes, there is trepidation among scientists, managers, and…