Practical work involving laboratory experiments is agreed upon to be an essential component of secondary science education. Practical work encompasses a broad range of activity types. The different forms of practical work are not equal in terms of cognitive demand and learning benefit. Inquiry-based investigations provide experience of cognitive…

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…

In many evolving systems, inputs can be derived from both human observations and physical sensors. Additionally, many computation and analysis tasks can be performed by either human beings or artificial intelligence (AI) applications. For example, weather prediction, emergency event response, assistive technology for various human sensory and…

The success of data mining relies on the availability of high quality data. To ensure quality data mining, effective information sharing between organizations becomes a vital requirement in today's society. Since data mining often involves sensitive information of individuals, the public has expressed a deep concern about their privacy.…

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…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate how Rhode Island high school principals rate success in implementing 21st century skills in their schools. Secondly, this study investigated how high school principals rate the influence of implementing of 21st century skills in curriculum and instruction in their schools. The high…

We studied the problem of constraint-based pattern mining for three different data formats, item-set, sequence and graph, and focused on mining patterns of large sizes. Colossal patterns in each data formats are studied to discover pruning properties that are useful for direct mining of these patterns. For item-set data, we observed robustness of…

Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001, public school systems have been engaged in a system of educational reform fueled by a level of accountability that includes not only the performance of the students, but also the performance of the teachers and the administrators. Recent studies have found that student achievement…

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…

With the dramatic growth of text information, there is an increasing need for powerful text mining systems that can automatically discover useful knowledge from text. Text is generally associated with all kinds of contextual information. Those contexts can be explicit, such as the time and the location where a blog article is written, and the…

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 primary purpose of this study is to determine how students are impacted by the use of Classroom Response System (CRS) technology. This research explores the nature of the outcomes experienced by students and their perceptions on the leading pedagogy and practices for using CRS technology in the classroom. The research is both quantitative and…

This dissertation studies information extraction (IE), the problem of extracting structured information from unstructured data. Example IE tasks include extracting person names from news articles, product information from e-commerce Web pages, street addresses from emails, and names of emerging music bands from blogs. IE is all increasingly…