19614 research outputs found
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Latent Iisights into measurement of academic challenges: An examination of perceived academic challenges scale
Get PDFBackground: Students often face diverse challenges throughout their educational journey that can significantly impact their learning process. While extensive research has explored self-regulatory perceptions and behaviors that promote student success, there remains a notable gap in understanding and measuring the specific challenges students encounter during their studying.
Objectives: To conduct a comprehensive psychometric examination of the Perceived Academic Challenges scale, a self-assessment and diagnostic tool which measures six dimensions of perceived academic challenges: motivation, initiating and sustaining engagement, goal and time management, cognition, metacognition, and social and emotional challenges. These dimensions correspond to key self-regulatory areas linked to success in self-regulated learning.
Methods: Four university student samples from six Canadian institutions (total N= 3293) were used. The psychometric process employed both item-level and scale-level analyses, including polytomous item response theory (IRT) and advanced structural equation modeling techniques. Multidimensionality was explored using bifactor and second-order measurement models, and Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM). A complementary person-centered study examined intraindividual profiles of challenges. The scale's predictive utility was examined through associations with criterion constructs: students' GPA expectations, self-efficacy for GPA, and actual end-of-semester GPA.
Results: IRT analyses confirmed the precision of individual items in assessing various levels of the intended constructs and flagged imprecise items for potential revision. A bifactor ESEM approach demonstrated the best fit to the data, revealing a general factor underlying responses, with cross-loadings enhancing construct interpretability. The general factor and metacognitive factor were found to be highly overlapping, leading to modifications on the measurement model to anchor the general factor to metacognitive challenges. Findings confirmed the measure's adequate psychometric properties, the adequacy of its total score, and its relevance to the criterion constructs.
Conclusion: The Academic Challenges scale was found to represent constructs as intended and to be reliable for assessing students' academic challenges across the six dimensions. This dissertation underscores the critical need to refine self-reported measures of students' experiences, emphasizing their unique insights into subjective experiences that other types of data cannot capture. Recommendations for further improvements of the scale are provided, emphasizing the need for continuous refinement of measures in educational research.Graduat
Evaluation of Ride Comfort and Road Holding for Heavy Vehicle Suspension (HVS) through Model Predictive Controller (MPC) based on Hybrid Semi-Active Damping Strategy
Get PDFThe continuous expansion of industrial demand in various countries has increased the need for large commercial vehicles to transport products between locations. As a result, freight transportation has become a key driver of economic growth, contributing significantly to a country's GDP, typically accounting for 6-12% of the total. However, this rapid growth in road transportation has also brought about a rise in traffic congestion and a higher probability of road accidents. According to a European Union assessment, large vehicles are a significant factor in these incidents. Nevertheless, the primary cause of road accidents remains driver negligence.
Work-related injuries and disorders caused by whole-body vibration have been extensively studied worldwide. To address this problem, researchers have developed a pitch plane model of a large vehicle using a Lagrangian approach coupled with various hybrid semi-active damping schemes based on the model predictive control (MPC) framework. The MPC-based suspension controller is designed to optimize comfort and handling by minimizing a quadratic cost function.
The focus has been on reducing the vertical accelerations experienced by the vehicle due to variations in the vehicle and road profile to improve the vehicle's stability and ride comfort level. Additionally, managing the changes in vertical force encountered by each tire during its interaction with the road has been crucial. The ride comfort of the driver has been evaluated by analyzing the vertical accelerations at the center of gravity of the pitch plane model, both with and without the MPC-based controller, using the guidelines specified in ISO 2631-1/2.
Simulation results have demonstrated the impact of the MPC-based controller, with and without its implementation, on the ride comfort level and road-holding capability of the heavy vehicle system. These findings highlight the potential of the MPC-based controller to enhance the overall performance of heavy vehicle systems in terms of ride comfort and road holding.Graduat
Machine learning techniques for the preservation of data privacy
Get PDFMachine learning has been successfully applied in various domains in recent years. Still, its use is limited since training or testing data may contain sensitive information which cannot be shared with model owners due to privacy concerns. For example, healthcare providers may be bound by patient privacy laws. Without large publicly available datasets, useful models become impossible to train. Therefore, ML methods that preserve the privacy of private training data are required. One solution is to use homomorphic encryption to carry out mathematical operations on encrypted data without compromising the privacy of said data. However, sometimes a large dataset that is difficult for a single institution to obtain is needed for complex learning tasks. In such a case, federated learning can be used to learn from private data distributed across multiple owners without compromising the privacy of each owner’s data.
However, federated learning carries its own risks. For example, exchanging even the minimum information needed for training can compromise privacy, and rogue participants in a federated learning network may attempt to sabotage model performance. Further, data that is not independently and identically distributed hampers the convergence of federated learning techniques. Additionally, once training is complete, regardless of the means, extra steps must be taken to ensure model privacy during the inference phase. Such steps are needed to ensure the model owner(s) can retain sole proprietorship of the global model. Further, if a model’s parameters are leaked, then an adversary may be able to reverse engineer them to compromise the privacy of the training data. Keeping a model private eliminates this risk.
In this dissertation, we provide an in-depth background to the problems of machine learning with encryption and federated learning. We propose novel techniques for private inference that maintain the privacy of both the model and the data the model performs inferences on. We propose a federated learning framework which, in addition to maintaining the privacy of the data used during training, is, to the best of our knowledge, the only approach that enables just a single participant to obtain the jointly trained model. We also present a secure method for distributed dimensionality reduction, which can be used as a preprocessing step to enhance the performance of the proposed federated learning framework. Finally, we combine these approaches and propose an end-to-end federated learning and private inference framework which maintains data privacy during the federated learning and private inference phase, as well as ensures the privacy of the trained model’s parameters during each phase.Graduate2025-07-3
Social influence on vessel behaviour around cetaceans in the waters of Northeast Vancouver Island
Get PDFWhen managing human behaviour around wildlife, regulations are often designed to mitigate disturbance to vulnerable species. Yet, patterns and drivers of compliance with such regulations are poorly understood. In partnership with the Marine Education and Research Society, we assessed local compliance rates and examined patterns underlying vessel-whale encounters by observing vessel behaviours around marine mammals. In the summers of 2022 and 2023 (n = 475 observation hours, 902 interactions between marine mammals and boats), we assessed motorized vessel compliance to Canada’s Marine Mammal Regulations and examined a suite of boater behaviours relating to humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) and killer whales (Orcinus orca) in Northeast Vancouver Island. Recreational and ecotour vessels had similar rates of compliance (85 and 87%, respectively), with the lowest compliance rates around killer whales (74%). Complementary modelling showed that closer distances between vessels and whales were associated with vessels that spent more time with an animal or that were idle. In contrast, greater distances from the whales were associated with interactions involving a higher number of vessels. Assessing other measures of potential disturbance, we found that the number of vessels surrounding an animal varied by study site and was higher in encounters after VHF radio communication about the focal whale compared to encounters without mention. Finally, the time a vessel spent with a whale was higher for vessels at idle and slow/medium speeds compared to vessels travelling at faster speeds. Results from this work can inform geographic and practical areas of focus for education, enforcement and policy development.Graduat
Forest stand hydrological recovery of snow accumulation and ablation investigated using simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) enabled LiDAR
Get PDFForest-snow interactions were analyzed using fine-resolution mobile terrestrial LiDAR in four stands representing increasing forest maturity ranging from a recently replanted clearcut to a mature forest in the interior cedar – hemlock biogeoclimatic zone of the southern Selkirk Mountain range in British Columbia, Canada. LiDAR-derived models representing peak snow depth and daily ablation were used to assess the impact of sampling intensity on stand-level averages and to determine sampling distances required to capture between-stand differences and within-stand variability. The process of hydrological recovery, a term which describes the return of snow accumulation and ablation processes in regenerating forests to pre-disturbance conditions, was investigated at the scale of individual trees and for the full stand. Outcomes from this study better quantify the influence of tree growth on peak SWE and ablation rate at both the tree and stand level for north aspect mixed conifer stands. The process of negative ablation recovery in early juvenile stands reported in previous studies is herein clearly observed. The methods used increase transferability of outcomes to stands where canopy characteristics (i.e., height, crown cover, and heterogeneity) differ from the reference sites considered here.Graduat
Humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) social calls in southern British Columbia
Get PDFHumpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) nonsong vocalizations, or social calls, are much more poorly understood than humpback song. We examined humpback whale social calls from a foraging ground in southern British Columbia (BC) and developed a catalog for humpback social calls in BC. We tagged four humpback whales on the eastern edge of Swiftsure Bank, BC, in early September 2020, with a passive acoustic and movement tag. We manually classified 32 call types in our data set based on comparisons with published classifications of humpback social calls. Many of the calls identified in our data set had similar characteristics to calls from other locations. We also used two statistical classification methods, a cluster analysis and a random forest. The cluster analysis grouped 20 of these call types into four categories, and the random forest classifier was able to accurately classify all 20 call types 87.6% of the time. This study fills a geographical gap of humpback whale social calls on foraging grounds and is a first step towards categorizing the social calls of humpback whales in BC.Funding was provided by grants from the NSERC Discovery program and the Liber Ero Foundation (to F.J.) and through a MITACS Accelerate fellowship in partnership with the Pacific Whale Watch Association and Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea, and the Eugene Maughan Scholarship from the Western Division of the American Fisheries Society (to R.R.).FacultyReviewe
Converging open science and respecting Indigenous knowledge to enrich capacity of zooarchaeological comparative collections: An example from the University of Victoria
Get PDFZooarchaeological comparative collections, like natural history collections, hold latent information, and are fundamental to archaeological research on human-animal relationships. Additionally, these collections can extend their capacity with linked data informing biodiversity research, conservation efforts, and related contemporary and Indigenous management practices. Accessible digital information about specimens in these smaller, and usually regional, collections remain rare but can advance integrative synthetic research through links to taxonomic classifications, languages, as well as geospatial, biometric data, and 3D models and imagery. My research presents a framework for open comparative collection curation, enhanced zooarchaeological practices, and transdisciplinary collaboration by transforming the physical archive describing the comparative osteology specimens at the University of Victoria Zooarchaeology Lab into open “extended specimens” for 2,922 individual animals representing 671 distinct species. This diverse regional collection influentially informs zooarchaeological identifications for assemblages from sites across the North Pacific Coast and western North America. My research synthesizes information about the comparative collection including the development and application of data management, annotation, and publishing methods following FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reuseable) principles to facilitate broader collection discovery and use. To achieve this, I adopt open data standards to uncover, broaden, and add depth to each skeletal specimen and enable integrative biodiversity repository publishing. This process creates citable “extended specimens” and ensures comparability by standardizing vocabulary and terminology, and annotating with life history stages, collection locations, and specimen specific details. Additionally, I develop a geocoding tool that connects Indigenous language areas and specimen collection locations. This work supports Indigenous data governance protocols following CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) principles and engages with Indigenous data platforms to confront how colonial practices are reflected in the creation and uses of anthropological and archaeological knowledge. This augmented collection helps bridge relationships with Indigenous communities whose legacies of engagement with archaeology has shaped, and continues to shape and enrich, landscapes and seascapes in the past, present, and future. This contribution to open science seeks to respect Indigenous data sovereignty by considering FAIR and CARE principles to create a digital resource that connects audiences and enhances zooarchaeological research capacity.Graduate2025-11-2
c̓atswiiʔats łim̓aqsti ʔaaḥʔasaquu c̓aʔak: It flows through my inner conscience like a river: Ancestral continuity and Hesquiaht Language Flow
Get PDFThis Indigenous Hesquiaht Participatory Action Research focuses on language acquisition for teachers and learners, co-creation of language teaching materials with fluent speakers, and the design and implementation of a 100-hour ḥiḥiškʷiiʔatḥa ‘Hesquiaht language’ revitalization camp by the researcher, a community insider to Hesquiaht First Nation. The research is presented within the metaphorical concept of c̓aʔakquu ‘the river’s path’ symbolizing the organic progression, obstacles encountered and the possible reaches of language revitalization and restoration. Efforts to align with ʔiqḥmuut ‘ancient and continuing’ understandings of the inherently reciprocal characteristics of ḥiḥiškʷiiʔatḥa and the Hesquiaht world are applied to this research.
Spiritual and emotional phenomena are essential components of ḥiḥiškʷiiʔatḥa learning; therefore, the researcher draws on the idea of Hesquiaht Language Flow [HLF]; a set of values drawn from learning with Hesquiaht fluent speakers in the planning and delivery of language lessons. HLF prescribes four overarching principles including oral traditions, active learning, cultural context, and connection as a primary influence over teachings at language camp. Choosing language domains and establishing camp daily speech routines in this manner, specifically within the context of Hesquiaht land and sea, the researcher centres Hesquiaht ways of knowing and being, while underscoring the communal obligation to continually restore, revitalize and sustain the interconnection between Hesquiaht language and Hesquiaht land. A few compatible Second Language Acquisition (SLA) elements are applied in camp to enhance pedagogical approaches. Additionally, experiences from the Hesquiaht language camp are shared in order to advocate for continual efforts to restrengthen intergenerational transmission of Indigenous languages on their respective ancestral lands.Graduat
“Don’t ditch the dialect”: Incorporating Learners’ Chinese Heritage Language Backgrounds in University Mandarin Classrooms
No full textAlthough research on heritage language (HL) in language classrooms is rich in the K-12 context, limited studies relate HL to additional language learning in university, a context with transformative potential for HL learners (re-)connecting to their heritage. This project considers the unique experiences of HL speakers of Chinese varieties as learning tools in post-secondary Mandarin classrooms using a qualitative research method. Three Mandarin teachers and four Chinese heritage language learners (CHLLs) from BC post-secondary institutions were interviewed about attitudes, practices, and challenges related to incorporating learners’ CHL backgrounds in university classrooms. Interview transcripts were then verified and inductively coded. The key findings highlight the importance of learning from CHLL perspectives and experiences, reflecting on linguistic backgrounds as teachers, and acknowledging the multi-faceted aspects of CHLL motivation, identities, and needs. Insights from the analysis offer pedagogical recommendations and inform practices for post-secondary Mandarin teachers with CHLLs.Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards (JCURA)UndergraduateReviewe
UVic Convocation November 14, 2023 – 2:30 pm
No full textStudents from the Faculties of Graduate Studies, Humanities, Fine Arts and Social Sciences. Dr. Linda Catlin Smith received an honorary degree.UndergraduateUnreviewe