The purpose of this descriptive study was to investigate course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) outcomes of community college students by looking at students' sense of project ownership, science self-efficacy, and science identity using an end of course survey. A total of 54 students, 41 females and 13 males, completed the survey.…

The rapid advancement of powerful Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Llama, has revolutionized the world by bringing new creative possibilities and enhancing productivity. However, these advancements also pose significant challenges and risks, including the potential for misuse in the form of fake news, academic dishonesty,…

While many institutions had been licensing technologies for decades, the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 precipitated an explosion in technology commercialization activity at American universities. By 2000, about a decade after the Association of University Technology Managers began to collect commercialization metrics, researchers had begun…

This dissertation used a historical research method to examine the rise of the centuries-long complex construct of intellectual property ownership through the lenses of American institutions of higher learning and the American legal system, the latter of which attributing its involvement in intellectual property rights once the principle of…

Access to the Internet has increased connectivity between people across large distances. It has also amplified the desire of college students to engage in the illegal sharing and distribution of data. The purpose of this quantitative research study was to analyze the behaviors that motivate Michigan college students to engage in digital piracy.…

This dissertation provides an historical analysis of libraries and discusses the broader system of scholarly communication and publishing using mixed methods from critical media studies, library studies, organizational communication, systems sociology, and rhetorical studies. It argues that practices of scholarly publishing in the US university…

This dissertation is comprised of three studies that investigate the implications and determinants of public funding for universities. The first chapter lays down the foundation for the other two studies. I discuss how state-level policies, as determined by legislators, represent a pivotal component of firms' non-market strategies that have direct…

Throughout history, there has been a great emphasis placed on the ability to predict future events. The value of such prognostication varies between situations and domains, but the objective remains the same. Is it possible to use current or past observations to forecast future events? One specific area in which such insight is sought after is the…

This study investigates two areas to increase the understanding of university patenting activity using raw data recently made available through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office PatentsView application. First, the study assesses the relationship of institutional characteristics to the number of patents granted, and the subject fields of those…

Firms are often embedded in a technology ecosystem comprised of complementary technologies that span multiple product markets. In this dissertation, I examine how complementarity between the firm's technologies influences its strategies to create and appropriate value in the ecosystem. I investigate this overarching question in two contexts:…

The dissertation comprises of two chapters that use applied econometric techniques to analyze policy related questions that have implications for educational outcomes and one chapter that assesses factors that influence foreign direct investment inflows. In the first chapter I study the impact of equity premiums on the completion numbers of…

Intellectual property affects an increasingly large range of social life. Despite the breadth of goods and activities affected by intellectual property schemas, policy-makers, legislators, jurists and even many social theorists have a narrow understanding of the basis for instituting intellectual property rights and understanding their limits:…

Growing out of research in Technical Communication, Composition Studies, and Writing Program Administration, the articles in this dissertation explicitly seek to address changes in the practices and products of writing and writing studies wrought by the so-called "digital revolution" in communication technology, which has been ongoing in…

This dissertation consists of three separate essays shaping around decision making and risk management in the presence of intangibles. More specifically I study the risk management aspect of information acquisition and the role of information signaling in communicating the value of intangible assets. Intangible asset has proved to be a…

This dissertation contains three essays on the economics of education and innovation. In the first essay, I study the effects of increased access to higher education by examining a dramatic 1961 Italian reform that increased university enrollment in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields by more than 200 percent in a few years.…