Electronic health records (EHRs) are essential databases that digitally collect, store, and exchange patient health information. Over 95% of hospitals have EHRs, yet healthcare professionals often struggle with EHR navigation, jeopardizing patient safety and care--consider a physician struggling to order blood for a hypovolemic patient. This…

Colleges and universities across the United States face novel perils that include a decline in enrollment trends, questions about the value of a college degree, and increased scrutiny of institutional practices and policies. Due to the spotlight shined on all aspects of the higher education industry, presidents of colleges and universities have…

Neisseria meningitides serogroup B, commonly referred to as Meningococcal B or Meningitis B, is a highly contagious bacterial infection primarily afflicting the college-aged population with disease contraction resulting in death or severe debilitation if not expediently diagnosed and treated. Currently, there are two vaccines, Bexsero and…

Online literacy learning is still a relatively new field, however, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, online learning became the primary mode of instruction for millions of students in public, charter, and private schools. This descriptive content analysis seeks to identify trends within the field of online literacy instruction from…

Variability is intrinsic to human speech production. One approach to understand variability in speech is to decompose it into task-irrelevant ("good") and task-relevant ("bad") parts with respect to speech tasks. Based on the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) approach, this dissertation investigates how vowel token-to-token…

Abstract databases are essential for literature reviews, and in turn for the scientific process. Research into user interface designs and their impact on scientific article discovery is limited. The following study details the process of building a new abstract database and explores several user interface design elements that should be tested in…

Introduction: For the past decade, many educational institutions have launched initiatives to provide services and funding for professors to adopt, adapt, and create OER for enhancing student success. The initiatives could initially encourage faculty to use OER in their courses, but the continued effort to sustain proved difficult. Goal: The…

Bag-of-words is a commonly used text representation method for many text classification applications. However, bag-of-words representation fails to consider the context of the text because it only examines text documents based on the presence of individual words and explores relationships between texts with similar word choices (Bengfort, 2018).…

Graph representations underlie many modern computer applications, capturing the structure of such diverse networks as the Internet, personal associations, roads, sensors, and metabolic pathways. While the static structure of graphs is a well-explored field, a new emphasis is being placed on understanding and representing the way these networks…

Teaching and learning in introductory programming courses is an overwhelming task for many course instructors and learners. Given the rise of digital and technological advancements, it is only wise to use these affordances for education. Microlearning is a successful technology-enhanced learning format with many features that might help…

The majority of tenured faculty members, full professors, and senior level administrators, such as presidents, provosts, and deans, are likely to be men (Hammond, 2015). Given that there are an equal or even higher number of women in academic employment, the concern becomes why men still dominate higher ranking positions within American colleges…

Typically developing (TD) children, as young as four years of age, have demonstrated enhanced noun learning when orthographic representations are presented during learning tasks. This dissertation investigated the impact of orthographic support on word learning in diverse populations, focusing on children from a variety of clinical categories…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…

Schools face increasing pressure to ensure teachers are using data to support and inform their instruction, and the practice of data-based decision making has many positive effects on teacher satisfaction, instruction, and student achievement. Teachers face difficulties in gathering, organizing, and effectively utilizing student data to drive…

This dissertation investigates the inequitable distribution and causal impacts of mathematics teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT) on instructional quality and student learning outcomes. Using the rich information in the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project longitudinal database, the study addresses three core research questions:…