The present study investigates the influence of multidimensionality on linking and equating in a unidimensional IRT. Two hypothetical multidimensional scenarios are explored under a nonequivalent group common-item equating design. The first scenario examines test forms designed to measure multiple constructs, while the second scenario examines a…

Every year, the national high school graduation rate is declining and impacting the number of students applying to colleges. Moreover, the majority of students are applying to more than one college. This makes a lot of colleges to be highly competitive in student recruitment for enrollment and thus, the necessity for institutions to anticipate…

This dissertation aims to analyze the Western Armenian (WA) verbal morphology from a diachronic perspective and perform an internal reconstruction to trace the modern Western dialects back to Classical Armenian (CA) or an older, unattested variant of Armenian. The dissertation's methodology (Chapter 1) is based on comparative dialectology (Chapter…

Children's picture books are introduced to children during their foundational years and is often a child's first exposure to culture. It is imperative that those depictions are authentic portrayals of African American culture. This study is a replication of Ussery's 2006 analysis of the characterization of African American characters in award…

Despite the increasing demand for diagnostic information, observed subscores have been often reported to lack adequate psychometric qualities such as reliability, distinctiveness, and validity. Therefore, several statistical techniques based on CTT and IRT frameworks have been proposed to improve the quality of subscores. More recently, DCM has…

Dialogue act (DA) classification plays an important role in understanding, interpreting and modeling dialogue. Dialogue acts (DAs) represent the intended meaning of an utterance, which is associated with the illocutionary force (or the speaker's intention), such as greetings, questions, requests, statements, and agreements. In natural language…

The purpose of the current research is to determine the effect of changing the English Language Art curriculum on the reading growth of fourth-grade students who attended a public school district located in a suburban community in the Northeastern part of the United States. This ex-post facto study is designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the…

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to investigate the effectiveness of the use of games as part of mathematics instruction on academic achievement in grades Kindergarten to 12 in the United States. There were 17 studies selected for investigation published from 2010 to 2023 that focused on game-based learning and mathematics. This meta-analysis…

The present study explored perceptual and articulatory techniques addressing the pronunciation of Spanish rhotics by means of a week-long computerized training. Through a quasi-experimental design approach, the study tested the utility of the online training and its effects on the phonetic production of taps [voiced alveolar tap or flap] and…

Discourse markers (DMs) are linguistic forms characterized by their use as conversation organizers or pause fillers (Fox Tree, 2010). Although used frequently in both speech and writing, DMs are not often taught in L2 classrooms, despite incorrect usage causing potential misunderstandings (Polat, 2011). Additionally, L2 learners have been observed…

Purpose: The purpose of this quantitative, causal-comparative study was to determine whether English learners who participated in transitional kindergarten perform equally or better than English learners who did not participate in transitional kindergarten in the areas of oral language, written language, and overall language as measured by the…

This research aims at deconstructing and questioning certainties about assessment as an educational institution on its most fundamental levels. To achieve that, I am utilizing theoretical frameworks inspired by concepts on the existence of cultural and social capital, by artifact mediated cognition, and by a recently proposed discipline on…

Multilayer perceptron neural networks, Gaussian naive Bayes, and logistic regression classifiers were compared when used to make early predictions regarding one-year college student persistence. Two iterations of each model were built, utilizing a grid search process within 10-fold cross-validation in order to tune model parameters for optimal…

Text classification typically performs best with large training sets, but short texts are very common on the World Wide Web. Can we use resampling and data augmentation to construct larger texts using similar terms? Several current methods exist for working with short text that rely on using external data and contexts, or workarounds. Our focus is…

Statement of Purpose and Method of Study: Historically, Mississippi has lagged behind the rest of the nation in student achievement and funding for education. This comparative quantitative study investigated whether significant differences in student achievement as measured by mean composite ACT scores of high school juniors in Mississippi public…