Topic models like latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) provide a framework for analyzing large datasets where observations are collected into groups. Although topic modeling has been fruitfully applied to problems social science, biology, and computer vision, it has been most widely used to model datasets where documents are modeled as exchangeable…

The need for improved reading levels of students in elementary school is consistently documented in the literature. As a partial solution, some authors posit that students who participate in literacy instruction in a classroom with gifted students may achieve higher advancement in reading ability. Guided by theories of social learning and…

Two recent changes in federal law have made an impact on reading instruction in the United States, particularly for students for whom learning to read is difficult. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), signed into law in 2002, requires that all students meet an achievement standard in reading by the year 2014. NCLB also recognizes that reading…

The purpose of the study is to examine positions of students and a teacher in dialogic discussion. In this study, dialogic discussion was defined with Bakhtin's (1981) dialogism, Nystrand's (1997) explanation of dialogically organized instruction, and Mercer's (1995) explanation of Exploratory Talk. Studies about literature discussion in…

The problem investigated by this study was whether teachers of kindergarten through second grade feel themselves to be effective literacy teachers and if they do not feel effective, to find out whether their agreement or disagreement with the literacy methodologies required by the school was a factor. The mixed methods approach to this study…

This quasi-experimental study examined the impact of living-learning communities on GPA and fall-to-fall retention rates for college freshmen at Regional University (RU). The specific focus of this study was the effect of these communities on students of different ethnic groups and on the potential of these communities to reduce the academic…

Many children exhibit challenging behavior even in preschool. Recent reports have suggested that behavior problems, language skills, and academic delays are interrelated and perhaps mutually causal mechanisms, each adversely influencing the other. Language difficulties lead to behavior problems, behavior problems lead to academic delays, and…

This study included an analysis of the trend of performance indicators for the technical college sector of higher education in South Carolina. In response to demands for accountability and transparency in higher education, the state of South Carolina developed sector specific performance indicators to measure various educational outcomes for each…

Scope and Method of Study: The focus of this project was to evaluate the effectiveness of a brief parent education program, as a teaching and preventative tool for nonexpectant individuals. The study was designed to test whether or not this parent education program would be effective long-term in positively impacting parenting knowledge, approval…

The school accountability movement has led to a marked increase in the use of standardized test scores to measure school and teacher productivity, yet little is known about the correlation between test score gains and improvements in long-term outcomes. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I study the impact of a school choice policy in…

This dissertation investigates the patterning of Macedonian direct object DPs with respect to clitic pronouns. The occurrence of clitics with direct objects in Macedonian varies along two dimensions, the type of DP and the position of DP. Two broad classes are considered, regular and wh DPs, and positions both within IP and at the left periphery.…

Women university presidents are now successfully leading major doctoral-granting universities, both public and private, and their numbers are trending upward, rising from "token" status numbers (13% in 2007) to a "minority" status of presidents (currently at approximately 20%). Assuming that gender (the socially-constructed expectations of being…

With scant research to draw upon with respect to the maintenance of vertical scales over time, decisions around the creation and performance of vertical scales over time necessarily suffers due to the lack of information. Undetected item parameter drift (IPD) presents one of the greatest threats to scale maintenance within an item response theory…

Using three groups of community college students, this study addresses the process students Using three groups of community college students, this study addresses the process students use to construe, reformulate, and synthesize knowledge, and discusses the connection between drawing skills, sketching, and digital design production. In addition…

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 male collegiate student-athletes in a revenue-generating sport in an effort to better inform current academic support practitioners how to best serve this population. The inquiry focused on student-athlete perceptions of two areas: (1) perceptions regarding the expectations academic personnel have…