Speech-language pathology literature is limited in describing the clinical practicum process from the student perspective. Much of the supervision literature in this field focuses on quantitative research and/or the point of view of the supervisor. Understanding the student experience serves to enhance the quality of clinical supervision. Of…

The study addresses the automated translation of architectural drawings from 2D Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) data into a Building Information Model (BIM), with emphasis on the nature, possible role, and limitations of a drafting language Knowledge Representation (KR) on the problem and process. The central idea is that CAD to BIM translation is a…

The purpose of this study was to investigate demographic, family, and school variables, including the variable of the number of years at a residential school for the deaf and examine the relationship of these variables to English reading comprehension. This focused study involved a sample of 60 deaf students attending a southwestern U.S. school…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to analyze the self initiated conversations held by school principals on web2.o platforms, such as blogs, through the lens of current leadership standards. The online writings of thirteen school principals were analyzed using grounded theory techniques (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) to elucidate emerging…

Using the Practice Theory Approach to Language, this dissertation examines how social actors use communicative practices within activities to constitute a communicative context that I call the American English Stuttering Speech Community (AESSC). Building on previous linguistic research on stuttering and sociological research on collectives of…

Musical sight-reading, or sight-playing, is defined as "the ability to play music from a printed score or part for the first time without benefit of practice." While this is the most strict definition of the term, also known as "prima vista" (at first sight), some use the term "sight-reading" even if some rehearsal…

This applied dissertation was developed to determine (a) the impact that Achieve3000, a web-based reading program, had on the reading-comprehension skills of English language learners (ELLs) and (b) the perceptions of students and their teacher on the technology program used at the study school as it relates to the remediation of the reading…

This descriptive correlational study examined the impact of the levels of asynchronous interactive participation (AlP) on the learning outcomes in an online Chinese course. Three research questions are included in this paper: 1. What is the relationship between the levels of asynchronous interactive participation and the learning outcomes in…

This quantitative, causal-comparative study examined differences in success (GPA) and retention (enrollment in Spring 2007) between students who took and passed recommended developmental English or reading in the first semester of attendance and students who did not take or did not pass recommended developmental English or reading in the first…

Surveillance video recording is becoming ubiquitous in daily life for public areas such as supermarkets, banks, and airports. The rate at which surveillance video is being generated has accelerated demand for machine understanding to enable better content-based search capabilities. Analyzing human activity is one of the key tasks to understand and…

Mixed-initiative clustering is a task where a user and a machine work collaboratively to analyze a large set of documents. We hypothesize that a user and a machine can both learn better clustering models through enriched communication and interactive learning from each other. The first contribution or this thesis is providing a framework of…

This dissertation describes the teaching methods and educational philosophies of natural philosophy instructors at several of the colleges in colonial and early national North America. It finds two distinct approaches: the demonstrative, in which the instructor centers the course on visually engaging lecture-demonstrations, and the catechetical,…

This qualitative study examined the collaboration of general and special education teachers as well as the principals' perceptions of their responsibilities in sustaining effective collaboration in ensuring the services for the students with disabilities. The qualitative data were collected through one-on-one interviews from a team of general…

This design research demonstrates a prototype content management system capable of training graphic communication students in the creation of basic HTML web pages. The prototype serve as a method of helping students learn basic HTML structure and commands earlier in their academic careers. Exposure to the concepts of web page creation early in…

Culturally proficient school leadership and its impact on narrowing the learning gap is both timely, and needed and the focus of discussion for this study. This phenomenological qualitative research study examined culturally proficient school leadership actions that help promote a measurable narrowing of the achievement gap in five southeastern…