This study addresses the underexplored terrain of conceptualizing and operationalizing race and ethnicity as grouping variables in Differential Item Functioning (DIF) studies within the context of psychometric research. The investigation extends beyond the identification of DIF and delves into the theoretical framing and communication of findings…

The results of an industry research survey showed, understanding Dissertation Research categories has not been the focused on many researchers and institutions. This research expands on machine learning methodologies using two similar datasets to answer these three questions: 1. Is there a way to track the trends of Pace University's Doctor of…

With decreasing state funds, a sluggish economy, and increased competition, universities are finding new ways to recruit prospective students to their institutions (Campbell, 2013; Sandlin & Pena, 2014). One way to create relationships and recruit prospective students to a university is through the use of social media platforms (Han, 2014;…

The increasing amount of available subjective text data in internet such as product reviews, movie critiques and social media comments provides golden opportunities for information retrieval researchers to extract useful information out of such datasets. Topic modeling and sentiment analysis are two widely researched fields that separately try to…

While access to images in general has improved in the last 20 years, due to both advances in electronic storage and dissemination and to improvements in the intellectual provisions of them, access to editorial cartoons lags behind access to other types of images. While there have been piecemeal or ad hoc efforts to organize large cartoon…

The use of literary criticism has served to provide different lenses to analyze, evaluate, and interpret the content and context of the written text in all its forms and varieties, especially in children's and young adult (YA) literature. This study was aimed at analyzing the way in which "Feminist Criticism" may be applied to young…

Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is implementing a large scale exploration of digital pedagogies, including connected learning and open education, in an effort to promote digital fluency and integrative thinking among students. The purpose of this study was to develop a classroom assessment toolkit for faculty who wish to document student…

Rater variation in performance assessment can impact test-takers' scores and compromise assessments' fairness and validity (Crooks, Kane, & Cohen, 1996). Rater variation can also undermine a test's validity and fairness; therefore, it is important to investigate raters' scoring patterns in order to inform rater training. Substantial work has…

The construction industry is a knowledge intensive industry. Thousands of documents are generated by construction projects. Documents, as information carriers, must be managed effectively to ensure successful project management. The fact that a single project can produce thousands of documents and that a lot of the documents are generated in a…

This study focused on the 28 institutions that are members of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and offer Master's in Teacher Leadership programs that they describe on their websites. Those programs were researched looking for similarities and differences across programs, specifically researching their…

Today's Internet-based crime reporting systems make timely and anonymous crime reporting possible. However, these reports also result in a rapidly growing set of unstructured text files. Complicating the problem is that the information has not been filtered or guided in a detective-led interview resulting in much irrelevant information. To…

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,…

With the pressure in education to develop a 21st century learner with higher-level thinking skills, many educators connected previous state curriculum to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Missouri's Department of Education experts paired the previous state's curriculum known as the Missouri Grade Level Expectations (MO GLEs) with a…

Al-Kashi's 1427 "Key to Arithmetic" had important use over several hundred years in mathematics teaching in Medieval Islam throughout the time of the Ottoman Empire. Its pedagogical features have never been studied before. In this dissertation I have made a close pedagogical analysis of these features and discovered several teaching…

Research in the area of academic writing has demonstrated that writing varies significantly across disciplines and among genres within disciplines. Two important approaches to studying diversity in disciplinary academic writing have been the genre-based approach and the corpus-based approach. Genre studies have considered the situatedness of…