This two-part dissertation centers on a re-examination of the role of book indexes in information retrieval research on full-text digital book collections in digital libraries. Early research focused on information retrieval and book indexes (in addition to other parts of books) in the 2000s when the Google Books corpus was first released to the…

This dissertation presents an innovative approach to examining the keying method, wording method, and construct validity on psychometric instruments. By employing a mixed methods explanatory sequential design, the effects of keying and wording in two psychometric assessments were examined and validated. Those two self-report psychometric…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the representation of black students in contemporary American English. Two questions were addressed, what is the semantic prosody of Black students, and what are the semantic roles for Black students. All the concordance lines containing the phrase Black students were downloaded from the Corpus of…

Many popular global model-data fit indices (GFIs), such as Comparative Fit Index (CFI), Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI), Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA), and Standardized Root Mean Square Residuals (SRMSR) are proposed and widely used in the context of structural equation modeling (SEM) with continuous data. The proposed cutoffs of those…

The COVID pandemic has transformed American higher education in ways that have yet to be fully comprehended. The abrupt shift toward online instruction was the first reaction to the growing threat of COVID. The effects of this shift were far-reaching. Specifically, this realignment to online delivery models created new links between or among…

This is a quantitative research study designed to understand internal and external variables that influence annual fund performance at international schools. The study examined 1365 international school websites for financial data and found a sample of 69 institutions that had annual fund giving data that were publicly available. These 69 annual…

The purpose of this capstone project is to provide an innovative solution to address major public health and social problems known on college campuses in relation to "Ensuring Healthy Development for All Youth," one of the 12 Grand Challenges of Social Work. This project uses conceptual socioecological frameworks of prevention and health…

With few exceptions, digital humanities projects and objects have been described rather than studied. This dissertation attempts to advance that discourse by empirically studying, from a sociotechnical point of view, DH projects and the products they produce, specifically those within the realm of Old and Middle English language and literature.…

The inverted index is the main data structure used by all the major search engines. Search engines build an inverted index on their collection to speed up query processing. As the size of the web grows, the length of the inverted list structures, which can easily grow to hundreds of MBs or even GBs for common terms (roughly linear in the size of…

The importance of school readiness to both the future of an individual child and society as a whole has given rise to several state-specific indexes designed to measure county-level risk for starting school unprepared to learn. One such index is the Oklahoma School Readiness Risk Index (OK SRRI), comprised of indicators known to be associated with…

Background. This project was motivated by the impressive growth that scholarly/scientific journals in Latin America have shown in recent decades. That advance is attributed to global, regional, and national pressures and trends, as well as a response to obstacles that scholars/researchers from the region face to be published in prestigious…