It has often been suggested that bilingual children might have enhanced metalinguistic awareness, as compared to monolingual children. In this paper, the evidence for such a stance was reviewed. In contrast to most previous thinking, it is suggested here that if metalinguistic awareness were enhanced at all by exposure to a second language, it might be the process of learning a second language that draws children's attention to their knowledge about language. Accordingly, a group of preliterate second-language learners was compared with monolinguals and bilinguals on word and phonological awareness tasks. It was found that, for the most part, there were no significant differences among linguistic groups on the performance of these tasks. However, a trend of low performance by the bilingual children was observed. This suggests that if the learning of a second language enhancer metalinguistic awareness, these tasks might not be the most appropriate measures.

The versatility and dimension of smart phone applications is   increasing at magnificent rate and getting more and more advanced in a level that could solve complicated real time tasks. One of the important factors for such advancement has been the powerful sensors embedded on a Smartphone devices and sensory networks. Moreover, Context and Context-awareness would have remained a myth without the advent of sensors. The objective of this thesis has been to contribute to the research work carried out under the MediaSense project. Accordingly, the ultimate purpose of the thesis has been to evaluate and study the feasibility of the adaptive context view proposed in MediaSense Platform. In precise words, the thesis has done three core tasks. Firstly, the theoretical presentation of related works and the significance of the research question have been discussed through various social applications. Secondly, a proof-of-concept application has been developed to simulate what has been proposed in the research work. Finally, Android application has been designed and implemented in order to evaluate and study the techniques presented in a practical scenario. Moreover, in the android application known as SundsvallBIGBuddies, we have used the extensions designed for the existing MediaSense platform. The impact of using Android app relaying on a continuous stream of context data has been presented using graphs and tables.  In order to study the impact we used smart phone and tablets from Samsung.

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This study was designed to determine the effects of various teacher characteristics on their level of cultural competency as measured by the Cultural Competency Survey. Teacher characteristics of interest were sex, age, years of teaching, grade level currently teaching, and degree level earned.The sample consisted of 2800 teachers, teaching in 82 schools. They ranged in educational experience from student teachers to those with doctoral level degrees and in length of experience in urban schools from just a few months to over 29 years. Of the 2800 teachers requested to complete the survey, 594 were minority teachers. This makes up 20% of the teaching population.The Cultural Competency Survey was adapted with the help of the Indianapolis Public Schools from a paper-and-pencil survey to one that was administered to each and every IPS teacher through the IPS intranet survey capabilities delivered through the IPS Online portal.The data were analyzed using statistical programs from the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS,13.0.1). Significant differences in the dependent variable on the Cultural Competency Survey were explored among the groups of teachers categorized by race/ethnicity, length of service, education, and grade level taught (the independent variable) with a standard split-plot factorial Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) design.Results showed main effects for sex and race with females generally scoring higher than males and African Americans scoring higher than Caucasians. Possible reasons for these findings were discussed and a call for future research was offered. / Department of Educational Leadership

Awareness techniques have been proposed and studied to aid developer understanding, efficiency, and quality of software produced. Some of these techniques have focused on either direct or indirect conflicts in order to prevent, detect, or resolve these conflicts as they arise from a result of source code changes. While the techniques and tools for direct conflicts have had large success, tools either proposed or studied for indirect conflicts have had common issues of information overload, false positives, scalability, information distribution and many others. To better understand these issues, this dissertation will focus on exploring the world of indirect conflicts through 4 studies. The first two studies presented will focus on motivational circumstances which occur during the software development life cycle and cause indirect conflicts. Developers interactions are studied in order to create a tool which can aid in the workflows around indirect conflicts. The second two studies present a deeper investigation into why most indirect conflict tools fail to attract developer interest through exploring the root causes of indirect conflicts and how tools should be properly built to support developer workflows. / Graduate / 0984

Awareness techniques have been proposed and studied to aid developer understanding, efficiency, and quality of software produced. Some of these techniques have focused on either direct or indirect conflicts in order to prevent, detect, or resolve these conflicts as they arise from a result of source code changes. While the techniques and tools for direct conflicts have had large success, tools either proposed or studied for indirect conflicts have had common issues of information overload, false positives, scalability, information distribution and many others. To better understand these issues, this dissertation will focus on exploring the world of indirect conflicts through 4 studies. The first two studies presented will focus on motivational circumstances which occur during the software development life cycle and cause indirect conflicts. Developers interactions are studied in order to create a tool which can aid in the workflows around indirect conflicts. The second two studies present a deeper investigation into why most indirect conflict tools fail to attract developer interest through exploring the root causes of indirect conflicts and how tools should be properly built to support developer workflows. / Graduate / 0984

A rapid serial visual presentation task (RSVP) was combined with the 'inattention' paradigm (Mack & Rock, 1998) to investigate the effect of cognitive load on the detection of an unexpected stimulus. In addition, the detection of an unexpected stimulus presented in conjunction with a distractor item, rather than target, was also investigated. Seventy four students of the University of Canterbury participated in one of five experiments. Participants either performed a high cognitive load version of the RSVP task, selecting items on the basis of colour and semantic category, or a low cognitive load version selecting items on the basis of colour only. On the final frame of the fourth and critical trial, an unexpected stimulus appeared in conjunction with either a target or distractor item. The level of inattentional blindness to the unexpected stimulus was the result of interest. No effect of cognitive load or presentation partner was found. The implications of the results for the load theory of attention and cognitive control are discussed, along with the potential future uses of the developed method.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Texas State University-San Marcos, 2007. / Vita. Appendices: leaves 175-182. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-191).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Bibliography: l. [265]-285.