Software modeling is an integral practice for software engineers, especially as the complexity of software solutions increases. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the industry standard for software modeling. however, it is often used incorrectly and misunderstood by novice software designers. This study is centered around understanding patterns of…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate college students' beliefs of their parents' role in influencing their character development, and of their own character in influencing their college academic achievement. Two research questions guided the study: (1) What are college students' beliefs about how parental role modeling…

Collaboration among teachers positively affects both teachers' professional development and students' reading achievement. However, teachers face challenges in collaboration with colleagues. Current research focusing on the collaboration experiences between general education classroom teachers and reading interventionists is absent. The purpose of…

California Community Colleges are not producing enough educated graduates to meet future workforce needs; to address the issue, goals and initiatives have been developed in an effort to increase completion (Foundation for California Community Colleges, 2017). In this study, the Clark and Estes (2008) gap analytic framework was used to understand…

In current higher education fundraising models where alumni are aligned with their degree-granting unit, the academic library struggles to match the fundraising outcomes of its campus peers. A survey of seventy-nine fundraisers in academic libraries collected data on fundraising activity. It reveals common practices amongst fundraisers working in…

The main goal of learning analytics and early detection systems is to extract knowledge from student data to understand students' trends of activities towards success and risk and design intervention methods to improve learning performance and experience. However, many factors contribute to the challenge of designing and building effective…

Variability is intrinsic to human speech production. One approach to understand variability in speech is to decompose it into task-irrelevant ("good") and task-relevant ("bad") parts with respect to speech tasks. Based on the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) approach, this dissertation investigates how vowel token-to-token…

In multisite experiments, we can quantify treatment effect variation with the cross-site treatment effect variance. However, there is no standard method for estimating cross-site treatment effect variance in multisite regression discontinuity designs (RDD). This research rectifies this gap in the literature by systematically exploring and…

This dissertation studies a few topics in industrial organization. In the first two chapters, I study the education market from the perspective of industrial organization. Chapter 3 studies second-price auctions with participation costs. Chapters 1 and 2 study the high school market of a large city in China that introduced a policy allowing public…

This dissertation investigates the ways that natural languages evolve and what it means in the overall cultural evolution of society. Computational and modeling advances have made possible to explore large-scale text data and test hypothesis of language evolution. Similar to biological systems, natural languages are evolving systems with words as…

State-wide tests are designed to measure student overall ability on grade-level standards. School leaders want fine-grained information on student performance to inform curriculum and instruction. One currently used target scoring method, which compares student scores to expected values is currently used to give this feedback to schools, but there…

Education researchers frequently have to choose between statistical models for their data, and in many cases the candidate models or parameters can be listed in a sequence, m=1,...,M, from less preferable choices to more. For instance, in choosing a bandwidth for regression discontinuity designs, researchers would favor the largest possible…

At the Peugeot Center for Engineering Service in Developing Communities at Lipscomb University, seventeen years of experience have provided the foundation for a program that creates lasting impact. In comparison to other service learning or humanitarian engineering programs, the Peugeot Center is unique in that it achieves substantial impact on…

Recent calls by transition researchers in postsecondary transition have advocated for new approaches to transition services focused on career design, which uses career-related experiences based on a person's interests to develop goal setting and problem-solving abilities. Youth and young adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who often have…

Reading a word requires several component processes. The dual route cascaded (DRC) model provides a characterization of these component processes and their involvement in different reading routes. We tested how relevant precursor skills associated with these component processes predict the use of the sublexical and lexical route in beginning…