This dissertation examines the manner in which young school-age children construct quantitative mental imagery and act upon these constructions for arithmetic ends. After conducting dyadic teaching experiments with three first grade students who were participating in mathematics intervention, I found the connection between the participants'…

The large pronunciation variability of words in conversational speech is one of the major causes of low accuracy in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Many pronunciation modeling approaches have been developed to address this problem. Some explicitly manipulate the pronunciation dictionary as well as the set of the units used to define the…

Speech utterances are more than the linear concatenation of individual phonemes or words. They are organized by prosodic structures comprising phonological units of different sizes (e.g., syllable, foot, word, and phrase) and the prominence relations among them. As the linguistic structure of spoken languages, prosody serves an important function…

The means of producing information and the infrastructure for disseminating it are constantly changing. The web mobilizes information in electronic formats, making it easier to copy, modify, remix, and redistribute. This has changed how information is produced, distributed, and used. People are not just consuming information; they are actively…

The purpose of this study was to investigate any relationship between observed and reported use of a cappella singing in the elementary general music classroom. A secondary purpose of this study was to examine teachers' practical perspectives influencing the use of a cappella singing in the elementary general music classroom. From a total of 50…

The transitional period between elementary and middle school remains an area of concern for educators. Many middle schools are plagued with retention issues, core class failures, increased discipline problems, and decreased attendance rates among students during their transitional period. The issues increase for students labeled as at-risk…

The purpose of this study was to describe the characteristics of parental involvement and mental health in a sample of traditionally aged college students and investigate the variance parental involvement predicts in mental health. Five hundred and eighty-eight freshmen at a large research university responded to a 97 question survey. Parental…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between Georgia alternative school administrators' perceptions of student success factors and the three domains of essential elements of effective alternative schools. The success factors included: dropout rate, average grade point average (GPA), average absences per student,…

Lesson study, a form of school-based professional development widely practiced in Japan, has gained popularity in the United States over the last two decades. However, research on its effectiveness has been limited in scope, typically conducted shortly after the conclusion of the professional learning and focused primarily on the practices of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the transfer impact of online course participation on constructivist practices in preservice teacher performance. Measuring constructivist practices in student teacher performance was completed by analyzing lesson plans, by analyzing preservice teacher reflections on the lesson planning process and…

Current federal legislation, such as No Child Left Behind and The Race to the Top, have elicited high levels of accountability for increasing student reading achievement. Professional organizations and researchers encourage educators to organize schools into professional learning communities (PLCs) to improve student learning. Despite the…

There is greater emphasis being placed on developing employees' competencies to help organizations achieve their operational and business goals. One of the essential functions of a training department is to support the organization's business goals and initiatives. The urgent and insistent demand for capable and proficient trainers has led to the…

This quantitative study examined the relationship between the perceived leadership styles of school principals and teacher job satisfaction at selected elementary schools. The Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire (LBDQ) provided data that identified the perceived leadership styles of the school principals; the Minnesota Satisfaction…

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act required states to report graduation rates as a condition of high school accountability for receipt and use of federal Title I funds, and to set growth targets that would ensure all students graduate from high school. It also reaffirmed the long-standing national policy that graduation rates be used as the…

With the increasing wealth of information on the Web, information integration is ubiquitous as the same real-world entity may appear in a variety of forms extracted from different sources. This dissertation proposes supervised and unsupervised algorithms that are naturally integrated in a scalable framework to solve the entity resolution problem,…