English language proficiency assessments (ELPA) are used in the United States to measure annually the English language progress and proficiency of English-language learners (ELLs), a subgroup of language minority students who receive language acquisition support mandated and largely funded by Title III (NCLB, 2001). ELPA proficient and…

A study was conducted to examine the differences in narrative essays produced by skilled and unskilled EFL student writers. Twenty-six Japanese university students participated in the study. They were told to write a narrative story based on six-frame pictures. The students were classified into two groups, skilled and unskilled, according to the…

This study examined middle-class mothers' engagement in urban school selection as residents of two gentrifying neighborhoods in Atlanta, Georgia. Gentrifiers levy social capital when activating or exercising agency and create social networks that valorize child-rearing concerns through exchange of information. Thirty mothers with children under…

Complaining is a fundamental human characteristic that has prevailed throughout the ages. We normally complain about something that went wrong. Patient complaints are no exception; they focus on problems that occurred during the episode of care. The Institute of Medicine estimated that each year thousands of patients die due to medical errors. The…

The triad dimensions of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) has been widely used for assessing second language performance and development. Unlike accuracy and fluency, the construct of Chinese syntactic complexity has not been comprehensibly conceptualized or operationalized. Moreover, not tailored to the typological differences such as the…

Using date from 120,612 students at 26 four-year institutions, this report provides a description of STEM majors entering four-year postsecondary institutions and those who persist through four years of study. The results indicate that persisting STEM majors enter college with very high levels of pre-college academic achievement as measured by the…

This study investigates the language learning strategy use of Turkish and Arabic students enrolled in middle schools and having different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Using a strategy inventory for language learning, the study examines the cross-cultural differences in strategy use of the mentioned students while learning English as a…

English and Chinese are satellite-framed languages in which Manner is usually incorporated with Motion in the verb and Path is denoted by the satellite. Based on Talmy's theory of motion event and typology, the research probes into translation of English and Chinese motion events and finds that: (1) Translation of motion events in English and…

This dissertation is concerned with the specific relationship between copular sentences and existential sentences, and what about that relationship is responsible for the well-known restrictions on definiteness and predicates that are observed in the existential cases. Instead of starting with the well-known paradigms which illustrate restrictions…

In my dissertation, I will present my research which contributes to solve the following three open problems from biomedical informatics: (1) Multi-task approaches for microarray classification; (2) Multi-label classification of gene and protein prediction from multi-source biological data; (3) Spatial scan for movement data. In microarray…

Temporal data are increasingly prevalent and important in analytics. Time series (TS) data are chronological sequences of observations and an important class of temporal data. Fields such as medicine, finance, learning science and multimedia naturally generate TS data. Each series provide a high-dimensional data vector that challenges the learning…

The construction industry is a knowledge intensive industry. Thousands of documents are generated by construction projects. Documents, as information carriers, must be managed effectively to ensure successful project management. The fact that a single project can produce thousands of documents and that a lot of the documents are generated in a…

We used a newly developed experimental paradigm to investigate aftereffects of completed intentions on subsequent performance that required the maintenance and execution of new intentions. Participants performed an ongoing number categorization task and an additional prospective memory (PM) task, which required them to respond to PM cues that…

A significant proposed change to the 5th edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" ("DSM-5") that will significantly affect the way counselors diagnose mental disorders is the addition of dimensional assessments to the categorical diagnoses. The author reviews the current "DSM"'s (4th ed., text rev.; American…

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of weight classification on predicting energy expenditure (EE) in women. Twelve overweight (body mass index [BMI] = 25-29.99 kg/m[superscript 2]) and 12 normal-weight (BMI = 18.5-24.99 kg/m[superscript 2]) women walked and jogged 1,609 m at 1.34 m.s[superscript -1] and 2.23 m.s[superscript…