The emergence of social networks and social media has resulted in exponential increase in the amount of data that link diverse types of richly structured digital objects e.g., individuals, articles, images, videos, music, etc. Such data are naturally represented as heterogeneous networks with multiple types of objects e.g., actors, video,…

Networks are of significant importance in many application domains, such as World Wide Web and social networks, which often embed rich topological information. Since network topology captures the organization of network nodes and links, studying network topology is very important to network analysis. In this dissertation, we study networks by…

This collected papers dissertation explores students' academic interactions in an active learning, introductory physics settings as they relate to the development of physics self-efficacy and interest. The motivation for this work extends from the national call to increase participation of students in the pursuit of science, technology,…

This study examined the digital and social media communication practices of nine urban universities including UMSL and compared those to known corporate best practices. The purpose of this study was to (1) research how these universities are using social/digital communications to engage with students and prospective students; (2) compare the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of leadership and its influence on innovation at a two-year college, paying particular attention to the network structure, the influence of leadership (formal and informal), and environmental influence. The goal was to learn about the nature of innovation at two-year colleges by studying the…

With increasing usage of social networking sites like Facebook there is a need to study privacy. Previous research has placed more emphasis on outcome-oriented contexts, such as e-commerce sites. In process-oriented contexts, like Facebook, privacy has become a source of conflict for users. The majority of architectural privacy (e.g. privacy…

As network research receives more and more attention from both academic researchers and practitioners, network analysis has become a fast growing field attracting many researchers from diverse fields such as physics, computer science, and sociology. This dissertation provides a review of theory and research on different real data sets from the…

Prior research shows that school leadership matters when it comes to instructional improvement. However, the common conceptualization of school leadership is typically associated with principals. Studies show that a large number of the nation's principals are predicted to retire or leave the profession. A potential shortage of quality school…

This dissertation examines the patterns and types of mistakes students make on a large-scale mathematics assessment, and puts these patterns into perspective based on the textbook used and the specific content covered in a student's classroom. In order to investigate the nature of these patterns, I employ a method of analysis originally designed…

A key component in the success of students' first-year experience is their successful academic and social integration into the college environment (Tinto, 1993). Researchers have specified integration in terms of student behaviors and perceptions (Berger & Milem, 1999; Hurtado & Carter, 1997) and also studied it in terms of engagement (Kuh, 2009)…