This study extends previous work of Cain Polidano and Kostas Mavromaras (2010) which showed that vocational education and training (VET) qualifications had a positive effect on the chances of finding work for people with a disability. It teases out this earlier result by looking at whether, for those who already have a disability, completing a VET…

This thesis consists of three essays in the economics of education with an empirical focus on Mexico. The first two chapters study a college in Mexico whose admission decisions are made through a lottery. Some applicants are randomly assigned into a group that can immediately enroll and the rest into a group that can only do so after waiting…

This mixed, causal-comparative study was an investigation of culture infusion methods and AYP of two different public schools in Chicago, a school that infuses African culture and a school that does not. The purpose of the study was to identify if there was a significant causative relationship between culture infusion methods and Adequate Yearly…

Purpose: Easy access to fast-food restaurants in the immediate environment of a high school is such that a high proportion of students do not remain in school for lunch. Hence, the probability that they will eat a healthy meal is reduced. The aim of this study is to identify the behavioral determinants of "staying in school to eat lunch" among…

Brain-electric correlates of reading have traditionally been studied with word-by-word presentation, a condition that eliminates important aspects of the normal reading process and precludes direct comparisons between neural activity and oculomotor behavior. In the present study, we investigated effects of word predictability on eye movements (EM)…

There is growing evidence that efficacious interventions for autism are rarely adopted or successfully implemented in public mental health and education systems. We propose applying diffusion of innovation theory to further our understanding of why this is the case. We pose a practical set of questions that administrators face as they decide about…

The purpose of this study was to examine the educational experiences and outcomes of low-skill adults in West Virginia's community and technical colleges, providing a more detailed profile of these students. Data for the variables were obtained from archival databases through a cooperative agreement between state agencies. Descriptive statistics…

This study identified (a) patterns of fearful stimuli for children and young adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), (b) the severity of the fear, and (c) whether excessive fear or the absence of fear negatively affected the participant's quality of life. A web-based survey was used to distribute a modified and extended version of the Fear…

Background: Injury is the leading cause of death for persons aged 1-44 years in the United States. Injuries have a substantial economic cost. For that reason, regional systems of trauma care in which the more acutely injured patients are transported to Level-I (L-I) trauma centers (TCs) has been widely advocated. However, the cost of TC care is…

Introduction: Knowledge translation (KT) initiatives have the potential to improve prescribing quality and produce savings that exceed the cost of the KT program itself, including the cost of evaluation using pragmatic study methods. Our objective was to measure the impact and estimated savings resulting from the distribution of individualized…

This study investigated the prevalence and stability of latent classes at risk for reading disabilities (RD) in elementary-aged children whose first language is Spanish. To this end, children (N = 489) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 at Wave 1 were administered a battery of reading, vocabulary, and cognitive measures (short-term memory [STM], working memory…

The field of ultra-cold atoms, since the achievement of Bose-Einstein Condensation (Anderson et al., 1995; Davis et al., 1995; Bradley et al., 1995), have seen an immensely growing interest over the past decade. With the creation of optical lattices, new possibilities of studying some of the widely used models in condensed matter have opened up.…

This study capitalizes on a natural experiment that occurred in California between 2000 and 2002. In those years, the state offered a competitively allocated $20,000 incentive called the Governor's Teaching Fellowship (GTF) aimed at attracting academically talented, novice teachers to low-performing schools and retaining them in those schools for…

This dissertation proposes a model of phonological relationships, the Probabilistic Phonological Relationship Model (PPRM), that quantifies how predictably distributed two sounds in a relationship are. It builds on a core premise of traditional phonological analysis, that the ability to define phonological relationships such as contrast and…

This research investigated whether people are more likely to attribute events to external agents when events are negative rather than neutral or positive. Participants more often believed that ultimatum game partners were humans rather than computers when the partners offered unusually unfavorable divisions than unusually favorable divisions…