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,…

There are two primary challenges for instructors in offering a high-quality course at large scale. The first is scaling educational experiences to such a large audience. The second major challenge encountered is that of enabling adaptivity of the educational experience. This thesis addresses both major challenges in the way of high-quality…

Educators often use reading programs to address younger students' reading abilities and teachers' perceptions of those reading abilities; however, few researchers have examined teachers' perceptions of the effects of sustained silent reading on middle and high school students. The conceptual framework for this study was based on social learning…

This dissertation investigates how distributional information in the speech stream can assist infants in the initial stages of acquisition of their native language phonology. An exploratory statistical analysis derives this information from the adult speech data in the corpus of conversations between adults and young children in Russian. Because…

This study examines the contemporary user patterns that emerged when a new medium--the personal computer and the Internet--was introduced into the user's media ecology. The study focuses on the introductory period and current usage. Data analysis conformed to practices accepted by oral historians (Richie, 2003, and Brundage, 2008), and grounded…