The task of developing vocational nursing students' critical thinking abilities is one of the greatest challenges facing nurse educators today. Licensed vocational nurses (LVNs) must be trained to think critically in order to provide safe patient care. Due to the expanded role and functions in the LVN's scope of practice, LVNs are making…

Open source projects do have requirements; they are, however, mostly informal, text descriptions found in requests, forums, and other correspondence. Understanding such requirements provides insight into the nature of open source projects. Unfortunately, manual analysis of natural language requirements is time-consuming, and for large projects,…

The e-Retail industry has grown rapidly over the last few years and is projected to continue its upward trend as consumers shift from traditional channels to online channels. In March 2010, Forrester Research forecasted that online retail sales will grow by 10% a year for the next 5 years and e-Retail sales will amount to $249 billion by 2014.…

Embodied Conversational Agents (i.e., avatars; ECAs) are appearing in increasingly many everyday contexts, such as e-commerce, occupational training, and airport security. Also common to a typical person's daily life is persuasion. Whether being persuaded or persuading, the ability to change another person's attitude or behavior is a…

This dissertation provides interdisciplinary insights into the role of client's internal collaborative experience in managing communication during a complex outsourced project, building a quality client-vendor relationship and ultimately achieving success in the project. Each of the three studies in this dissertation identifies a gap in…

Exposure to organic chemistry concepts in the laboratory can positively affect student performance, learning new chemistry concepts and building motivation towards learning chemistry in the lecture. In this study, quantitative methods were employed to assess differences in student performance, learning, and motivation in an organic chemistry…

There are essential connections between the isoperimetric theory and information theoretic inequalities. In general, the Brunn-Minkowski inequality and the entropy power inequality, as well as the classical isoperimetric inequality and the classical entropy-moment inequality, turn out to be equivalent in some certain sense, respectively. Based on…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have a significant educational impact on student's learning. However, researchers report time intensive interaction is needed between ITS developers and domain-experts to gather and represent domain knowledge. The challenge is augmented when the target domain is ill-defined. The primary problem resides in…

To facilitate everyday activities, context-aware applications use sensors to detect what is happening and use increasingly complex mechanisms ( e.g., by using big rule-sets or machine learning) to infer the user's context and intent. For example, a mobile application can recognize that the user is in a conversation and suppress any incoming…

There is a national shortage of school-based Speech Language Pathologists (SLP). Schools located in rural and geographically remote areas are often impacted by the shortage, and as a result students with an autism spectrum disorder may not receive services that are mandated by their Individual Education Plan. This study examined the use of…

Research in team science suggests strategies for addressing difficulties that groups face when working together. This dissertation examines how student teams work in project based learning (PBL) environments, with the goal of creating strategies and technology to improve collaboration. The challenge of working in such a group is that the members…

Social scientists usually are more interested in consumers' dichotomous choice, such as purchase a product or not, adopt a technology or not, etc. However, up to date, there is nearly no model can help us solve the problem of multi-network effects comparison with a dichotomous dependent variable. Furthermore, the study of multi-network…

This dissertation studies the perception of tones in Thai, and aims to contribute to a formal characterization of speech perception more generally. Earlier work had argued that perception of tones involves retrieval of some abstract "autosegmental" representation provided by the phonology, while another line of work had argued for the…

Test anxiety (TA) has been recognized as a significant and challenging problem in all cultures and at all academic levels. Numerous empirical studies have been conducted to investigate the problem in order to identify the causes, conduct assessments, and develop intervention strategies, but little research has been done to investigate how family…

Different beliefs exist about the ability of individuals with mental retardation to recognize certain social roles or relationships appropriate for the acquisition of critical skills for successful social development. In particular, a major social skill is conversational proficiency. The purpose of this study was to look at the concept of…