A number of federal agencies, universities, laboratories, and companies are placing their documents online and making them searchable via metadata fields such as author, title, and publishing organization. To enable this, every document in the collection must be catalogued using the metadata fields. Though time consuming, the task of identifying…

The focus of this thesis is on practical ways of designing optimization algorithms for minimizing large-scale nonlinear functions with applications in machine learning. Chapter 1 introduces the overarching ideas in the thesis. Chapters 2 and 3 are geared towards supervised machine learning applications that involve minimizing a sum of loss…

With the 2015 passage of the "Every Student Succeeds Act" (ESSA), the oversight of language policy in U.S. schools shifted from federal to state governance. Although the education of students officially designated as English learners (ELs) has historically been grounded in federal law, we argue that ELs' educational experiences are also…

This study investigated the erroneous use of the high-frequency verb TAKE by the Chinese college learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), aiming to identify the similarities and differences between Chinese EFL learners, aimed at finding out more effective ways for the teaching and researching of the high-frequency verbs. Corpus-based…

Under federal civil rights law, U.S. school districts have a dual obligation to provide students identified as English learners (ELs) with designated English-language development (ELD) instruction and integrated ELD support during core content instruction. Drawing on an analysis of interviews with 96 educators in two large California districts, we…

These are the appendixes for the report, "English Proficiency and the Pandemic: How Texas English Learner Students Fared during the COVID-19 Pandemic. REL 2023-144." This study examined levels of English proficiency before and during the COVID-19 pandemic among English learner students in grades 3-12 in Texas. In 2020-2021, nearly…

Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) is an international standard to measure learners' language abilities on a six-point scale, A1 for beginners up to C2 for those who have mastered a language. this study attempted to examine the implementation of the CEFR policy in learning Arabic in Indonesia at al levels, beginning form curriculum…

Developing a writer's voice is a challenging task for second-language writers who are new not only to the culture but also to the values associated with the target language. This study aims at exploring the writer's voice of Arabic-speaking learners who study English as a Second Language. The study mainly discusses the following question: Do L2…

This research aimed to explore the upper-secondary school chemistry teachers' and students' conceptual structures of atomic structure by using multidimensional scaling. Atomic structure is considered to be one of the most difficult concepts in upper-secondary school chemistry course so that the conceptual structure regarding atomic structure held…

Published banks of multiple-choice questions are ubiquitous, the questions in those banks often being classified into levels of difficulty. The specific level of difficulty into which a question is classified might or should be a function of the question's substance. Possibly, though, insubstantive aspects of the question, such as the incidence of…

The current study systematically investigated the effects of scoring and categorization methods on the psychometric properties of the Autism-Spectrum Quotient. Four hundred and three college students completed the Autism-Spectrum Quotient at least once. Total scores on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient had acceptable internal consistency and…

Social class mobility from grandparent to grandchild is a relatively neglected topic. Grandparents today are often healthier and more active, and have longer relationships with their grandchildren than in previous generations. We used data from the UK's Millennium Cohort Study (n = 8570) to investigate the influence of maternal and paternal…

Metadiscourse, or metatalk, is a discursive resource used in virtually any text or conversation to organize its content or signal the author's stance toward the content. Despite its prevalence in classroom talk, few have examined the role of metadiscourse and how it assists teachers and students to manage classroom communication of scientific…

The objective of this study is to reveal the perceptions of the students of the sports sciences faculty regarding the concept of "Fair-Play" by means of metaphors. 275 students [male[subscript (n = 173)], female [subscript (n = 102)]] studying at the Sports Sciences Faculty of Seljuk University in the fall semester of the 2016-2017…

In the educational field, anxiety towards mathematics has been a recurrent theme that has been intensified with the results of the PISA test of 2012 and 2015. Since students who are anxious about mathematics tend to avoid any area related to mathematics, it leads to a decrease in the number of professionals in mathematics. However, this construct…