With the increase of technology in day-to-day lives, online college education is sweeping the nation as numbers of students enrolling online is consistently on the rise. Unfortunately, because of the nature of open enrollment at the community college level, students often enroll without necessary skills to be successful at the college level,…

Time management of undergraduate college students has long been studied as it relates to student success outcomes such as retention, GPA, and more. However, less is known about the way college students actually use or allocate their time and how these patterns affect student success. To address this problem, the purpose of this study was to…

Even with extensive retention research dating from the 1960s, community colleges still struggle to identify the reasons why students do not return to college. Data mining has allowed these retention models to evolve to identify new patterns among student populations and variables. The purpose of this study was to create a predictive model for…

This dissertation focuses on developing and evaluating hybrid approaches for analyzing free-form text in the medical domain. This research draws on natural language processing (NLP) techniques that are used to parse and extract concepts based on a controlled vocabulary. Once important concepts are extracted, additional machine learning algorithms,…

Due to the rapid advances in computing and sensing technologies, enormous amounts of data are being generated everyday in various applications. The integration of data mining and data visualization has been widely used to analyze these massive and complex data sets to discover hidden patterns. For both data mining and visualization to be…

A basic and classical assumption in the machine learning research area is "randomness assumption" (also known as i.i.d assumption), which states that data are assumed to be independent and identically generated by some known or unknown distribution. This assumption, which is the foundation of most existing approaches in the literature, simplifies…

Meaning making is central to transformative learning, but little work has explored how meaning is constructed in the process. Moreover, no meaning-making theory adequately captures its characteristics and operations during radical transformation. The purpose of this dissertation was to formulate and specify a multiperspectival conceptual model of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the organization of associations among college-aged women's perceptions of individual and family-level separation-individuation difficulties and two subtypes of depressive vulnerability proposed by Blatt. One type is focused on achievement and issues of self-worth; the other type is focused on…