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Inference Making Skills in Young Learners and Educator Knowledge: Connecting Research to Practice
No full textAdding to the current body of research on inference making skills and young learners, this study examined the knowledge base of classroom teachers, speech-language pathologists, and other literacy specialists. Specifically, educator knowledge was considered in relation to the extant literature on the inference making abilities of young children. Using a survey design, educator knowledge to accurately identify an inference, knowledge of young learners’ capabilities for constructing inferences, and knowledge of instructional strategies for teaching inference making was explored. Descriptive statistics, correlational analysis, and analysis of variance were used to explore the close-ended question responses of general education teachers, special education teachers, reading interventionists, and speech-language pathologists working with preschool through third grade students. Additionally, open-ended questions were considered through qualitative inductive and deductive coding of responses. Statistical analyses of survey results revealed no statistically significant relationships among educator experience, role, or trainings, and educator knowledge to accurately identify an inference (EK), knowledge of young learners’ inference making abilities (EKYL), or knowledge of inference making instructional strategies (EKIS). However, descriptive analyses aligned with previous educator knowledge studies and indicated educators may lack evidence based knowledge regarding inference making, young learner ability, and instructional strategies. Mean differences among groupings demonstrated classroom educators (general education teachers and special education teachers) scored higher on EK items than itinerant educators (reading specialists and speech-language pathologists), but itinerant educators scored higher on EKYL and EKIS. Whereas 28% of educators answered all eight questions comprising the variable EK correctly, 43% of respondents were unable to provide an accurate response on five or more EK items. Likewise, only 26.5% of respondents strongly agreed that young learners who are good at forming inferences from a picture will likely be good at inferencing from other sources such as read alouds. Finally, although 78% of respondents recognized small group instruction as a way to teach inference strategies, only 12% reported actually using small group instruction. Study limitations discussed included sample size and limited response. Future directions were noted as further survey development, professional development applications, and the addition of a student component to the study.Ph.D
Early Modern Nuns and the Preservation of Medieval Manuscripts: Anne Cary and Julian's Long Text
No full textCatholic women religious who fled England with their communities during the dissolution of the monasteries (1536-41), many of whom were practicing scribes and writers, have not received the extensive scholarly attention for their cultural contributions that their Protestant counterparts have been afforded. Living in France, the Low Countries, and Portugal, the communities of exiled English nuns endured war, economic hardship, and isolation from their extended families at home in England. As the sixteenth century progressed to the seventeenth, among leading thinkers, poets, and philosophers, religious and cultural divisions mingled, multiplied, and emerged more sharply. In England, Jesuit poet Robert Southwell (?1561-95) influenced authors such as Catholic-born, increasingly anti-Jesuit John Donne (1572-1631) and Catholic convert Richard Crashaw (1612/1613-49). In France, Blaise Pascal (1623-62), influenced by Jansenism (centered at the convent of Port-Royal, which he entered in 1655), composed his Lettres provinciales (1656-7) attacking Jesuit casuistry, Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe (1651-1715), archbishop of Cambrai (from where a group of English nuns moved to Paris) promulgated Quietism, a spiritual practice condemned by Rome. Civil Wars stemming from confessional divides in England and France affected the early modern populace by creating unrest and overall cultural instability. Despite suffering difficulties while living in foreign countries, the displaced communities of English nuns thrived culturally. Scholars such as Caroline Bowden, Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Jaime Goodrich, and Jenna Lay have examined chronicles, life-writing, death-notices, and correspondence to deepen understanding of the lives of exiled women religious and their works. Building on this research, my study further contextualizes seventeenth-century English Benedictine Anne Cary (1614-71) and the copy of Julian of Norwich’s Long Text preserved in Anne Cary’s convent Our Lady of Good Hope in Paris. Judging from the location of the manuscript copy and analyses of her handwriting (Anne wrote the constitutional documents for the Paris house), scholars have identified Anne Cary as the manuscript’s scribe. Anne’s copy of Julian’s Long Text was intended to conserve the manuscript for the devotional use of her community. Serenus de Cressy, chaplain to the community at Our Lady of Good Hope, supervised the 1670 English printed edition made from Anne’s copy of Julian’s Long Text. Through de Cressy’s 1670 printed edition, Julian’s work reached a wider audience in England and beyond, restoring continuity to Julian’s reception and securing her prominence in a literary history extending from before Anne’s work to today.Ph.D
The Forgotten Tennessee Kids: Race, Patriotism, and A Tennessean Man’s Supremacist Youth Movement
No full textThe Cold War was a tumultuous time for many American citizens and coping mechanisms varied based on the region and person. While most students were forced to watch the 1952 film Duck and Cover, a man in West Tennessee named Cecil Lewis Parris took the Cold War preparations to another level by establishing the Kadets of America program. His intentions were to teach patriotism and military-style discipline. By forming an organization that puts into practice the examples from Duck and Cover, a Southern man produced a nationwide anomaly. The short lifespan of the Kadets of America was filled with many programs and had a group in almost every state, yet was usually always attached to a military affiliated institution, and usually always white. The following thesis will attempt to contextualize how, despite good intentions, this organization spawned from the Cold War fear became an institution that upheld white supremacist values.M.A
Dogmatism, Negotiation, and Wittgensteinian Therapy
No full textKEYWORDS: Ludwig Wittgenstein; language; public discours
Arithmetic Triangles and Pascal-Type Recurrence Relations
No full textThe Arithmetic Triangle, commonly known as Pascal's Triangle, has been an object of interest for mathematicians since antiquity. The entries in the Arithmetic Triangle display interesting patterns while also having much combinatorial significance. We recount some of these patterns and exhibit a new construct on the Arithmetic Triangle: alternating products. Then, we generalize the construction of the Arithmetic Triangle by applying the same Pascal-type recurrence relation to different sets of seed values. We show that these Generalized Arithmetic Triangles still display many of the same interesting patterns as The Arithmetic Triangle, but with slight modifications determined by the seed values. By creating an order on the elements of Pascal's Triangle which captures the Pascal-type recurrence relation, we consider Pascal's Triangle through the lens of Order Theory. We conclude by considering the algebraic super-structure of the collection of all Generalized Arithmetic Triangles and see that there is a natural way to form the Arithmetic Triangle Group.M.S
The Threats Posed to Freedom of Speech by use of Deplatforming on College Campuses
No full textThis project is an examination and argument concerning the possible dangers the
use of deplatfonning poses 10 the princip!es of rree speech. Deplatforming is the act of
ensuring a speaker or speakers have no pl.atfonn from which to exercise their speech.
whether officially, unofficially, or even by force. fts use and abuse can result in
detrimental e.ffects to the state of discussion and debate in a free country. To address this.
I studied books and papers on free speech issues and applied them to the act of
deplatforming. I e.xamine real cases of deplatfonning. review literature on free speech
and surrounding concerns, make an argument for the negatives of deplatforming. examine
the opposing arguments. and provide possible solutions in the face of these concerns
The Things We Leave Behind: A Study of Material Culture and Silenced Voices
No full textThe Singletons were a pioneer family of Bedford County, Tennessee that eventually took part in the Civil War with a son, Robert, serving on the Confederate side and an enslaved individual, George, serving on the Union side. Just prior to the beginning of the Civil War, the Singleton family lost their patriarch and thus became a home operated exclusively by women until the year 1900. During the immediate years after the Civil War and through Reconstruction, George, the formerly enslaved individual, became a husband, father, landowner, and Civil War pensioner, exemplifying the radical changes possible for African Americans in America after emancipation. The white Singletons left behind household items found within the home, as well as letters written by many generations of family members, some that even mention George. Through careful study of these objects, written letters, and local, state, and federal records historians can uncover more about life after the Civil War on rural, middle-class farms and how relationships between former master and former slave changed during this time. This research can be applied to public history literature by presenting general audiences with the material in the historic home and through various other approaches.M.A
Quantitative GC-MS Determination of Benzene and Toluene in the Ambient Air of Shelby County, Tennessee
No full textKEYWORDS: Aromatic; Benzene; Toluene; VOCs; Volatile; Factories; Emissions; GC-MS; Shelby County; Ambient Air; Toxicants; TRI; Memphis; EIC; TIC; Extract ion chromatograph; Total ion chromatograph; Environmental analysi
Success Through Inclusion: Impact of Honors Participation on Transfer Student Graduation Frequency at Four-Year Colleges and Universities
No full textNationally collected data reveals that transfer students encounter added difficulty graduating on time from four-year institutions than non-transfer students. Since transfer students traditionally graduate at a lower rate, targeting and improving transfer students’ graduation percentages is one way to augment an institution’s overall graduation rate and the total number of degrees conferred. Numerous studies have shown evidence of higher completion frequencies for first-time freshmen who participate in four-year honors programs. However, research has yet to reveal how honors programs impact transfer student outcomes.
Furthermore, a criticism often leveled at honors is that it can be elitist. One way to diversify honors programs is to promote the inclusion of transfer students within honors programs. Diversity will increase because transfer students, especially community college students, tend to include various socioeconomic backgrounds, underrepresented minority groups, first-generation, and non-traditional students. As such, this study is motivated by the dual need to increase graduation frequency (expressed as a percentage) and diversify honors programs by including transfer students.
Based on ex post facto data collected on transfer student graduation percentages at a large public university in Tennessee, the purpose of this non-experimental, quantitative, comparative study was to investigate if transfer student honors participation has an association with graduation frequency. Chi-square analyses were performed to investigate the association among graduation frequency and honors participation along with additional variables, including gender, age, race, and number of honors credits earned. The findings indicate that the association among honors participation and graduation frequency, as well as honors participation, graduation frequency, and age, was statistically significant for similarly abled transfer students. Gender and race had partial associations with honors participation and graduation frequency. Finally, the number of attempted honors credits had no significant association. Since the overall findings indicate that high-impact practices such as honors programs are associated with higher graduation frequency for transfer students, the study calls for more institutional support and an increased focus on integrating transfer students into honors programs.Ed.D
HEALTHCARE TEXT ANALYTICS USING RECENT ML TECHNIQUES AND DATA CLASSIFICATION USING AWS CLOUD ML SERVICES
No full textClassification of clinical texts has a significant impact on disease diagnosis, medical research and automated development of disease ontologies. Because they contain terms that describe medical concepts and terminology, the data set is quite noisy and the text in the transcriptions overlaps with the categories making clinical text difficult to classify. The clinical narrative, which provides a patient’s history and evaluations as well as data for clinical decision-making, is the main form of communication in the medical field. The aim of the study is to make disease diagnoses based on medical records using ML algorithms. The proposed clinical text classification model using weak monitoring to reduce the human efforts to create labeled training data and conduct feature engineering.
The primary objective is to contrast this approach with a logistic regression model to classify medical records clinical text and expect superior performance compared to the logistic regression model for an imbalanced medical transcriptions dataset. A promising intelligent data-driven health system to archive and classify healthcare records relies on the ability to extract and contextualize unstructured medical data in a form of a single easy-to-use API by leveraging Machine Learning (ML) services from Amazon cloud in a clinical workflow. AWS services such as S3, Textract, Comprehend Medical, and DynamoDB can be integrated to create a comprehensive solution for handling medical document processing, extracting medical information, performing medical text analysis, and storing the data in a structured manner.M.S