The purpose of this study was to examine if the implementation of a technology-based music class in public high schools in the northeastern United States had any significant impact on the overall music department enrollment and on enrollment in traditional performance ensemble courses, such as band and chorus, as they are the courses most offered in high schools in the United States. The two phases of the study included identifying eligible schools and collecting data from schools. A six-year history of music department and school enrollment data was collected from participating schools (n = 12). Individual music classes in each school were categorized as Band, Chorus, Orchestra, Technology-based, or Other Music Classes. Results found a statistically significant increase in overall Music Department enrollment and no statistically significant change in enrollment in Band or Chorus after the implementation of a technology-based music class. Reductions in enrollment did occur in Other Music classes. No significant change to the number of teachers in music departments was found. This study suggests that implementing a technology-based music classes may help increase overall music department enrollment without negatively impacting enrollment in traditional performance ensembles and may not necessitate funding for additional faculty.

This study investigates the effectiveness of an inquiry-based learning curriculum for middle school students with learning and/or attentional disabilities (LD and/or ADHD). The main questions asked were: To what extent can an inquiry-based learning curriculum focused on digital responsibility impact: (1) well-being; (2) smartphone usage; and (3) smartphone awareness among adolescents with LD and/or ADHD? Fifty middle school participants with LD and/or ADHD were divided into two groups, an experimental group and a control group. Findings showed a significant increase both in positive affect and in awareness of personal smartphone usage for experimental, but not control, participants, suggesting that inquiry-based learning may be an effective approach for teaching digital responsibility to students with LD and/or ADHD. Other findings indicated that social connectivity is a high priority for today's adolescents. Additional insights and implications are discussed.

This study offers insight into students' use and desire to use mobile devices for educational purposes. I examined college students' mobile device usage on the basis of demographic factors including sex, age, ethnicity, class standing, mode of delivery, and socioeconomic status. This study also investigated factors that affect students' likelihood to use mobile devices for academic pursuits. I utilized data from the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research's (ECAR) 2015 Student Technology Survey. Of the 10,000 undergraduate respondents, 56% were female, 70% were between the ages of 18-24, 73% attended college full time and the breakdown of ethnicity included 59% Caucasian, 16% Hispanic, 13% African American, 8% Asian and 1% Native American. The results indicated that traditional aged students reportedly used smartphones more frequently, whereas non-traditional aged students reportedly used tablets more. Students most frequently reported using their devices in class to connect to the learning material. Institutional technology infrastructure and support were strong factors impacting students' use of smartphones. Results of this research can assist higher education faculty and administrators in devising comprehensive training and technology plans to support and encourage students' use of mobile devices for educational purposes.

The purpose of this two-phase, explanatory mixed methods study was to understand the benefits of teaching grammar from three different learning methods: face-to-face, online personalized learning lab and a blended learning method. The study obtained quantitative results from a pre and post-tests, a general survey and writing assignment rubrics from three English 1301 classes and then follow-up interviews with focus groups from each class to explore those results in more depth. In the first phase, quantitative research questions addressed the relationship of grammar teaching methods and grammar acquisition with students at a two-year technical and academic college. In the second phase, used focus groups to perform qualitative interviews to better explore the quantitative results.

Wearable technology has made a positive impact in the consumer industry with its focus on adult fitness. Devices and applications are pervasive, inexpensive and are in high demand. Our nation struggles with obesity and health concerns related to poor fitness. However, the research on such technology has been more focused on adults. Therefore, the need to investigate wearable technology for fitness improvement with children is essential. Children lead increasingly sedentary lifestyles through TV watching, technology-use and a reduction in physical activities. Further, our society is exposed to quick food loaded with calories. These factors contribute to the growing epidemic of childhood obesity. The need to educate students early, on their ability to monitor their fitness, is the focus of this research. This dissertation investigated the impact of an integrated technology-enhanced physical education model with 127 fifth grade students over an 11-week period. A detailed analysis, looking at theoretical perspectives across multiple data collections was conducted. This study answered the questions, 1. To what extent can students improve their performance with technology-enhanced physical education? 2. To what extent can students learn to self-monitor their performance levels? How do affective components impact teaching and learning with a technology-enhanced physical education model? Results showed that technology-enhanced physical education does improve performance measures, does improve students' ability to self-regulate and positively impacts student and teachers' affective states. However long term results were inconclusive, stimulating multiple, potential opportunities for continued research.

Facebook studio groups/pages are commonly used by applied music faculty to communicate with current students, recruit new students, share students' activities, and promote faculty members' professional performances and academic endeavors. However, the blurred lines between academic, professional performance, and social activities in the field have led to a wide variety of approaches to Facebook use by music faculty. This dissertation documents the first generation of music faculty social media users and investigates the beliefs, intent, and lived experiences of music faculty who use Facebook studio groups/pages to communicate with their students. Four music faculty were interviewed and a semester's Facebook studio group/page data collected for each faculty member. Interviews and Facebook data were analyzed using Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to identify emergent, and ultimately super-ordinate, themes from the data. The three super-ordinate themes that emerged were: Impact of Social Media on Studio Teaching and Learning, Learning through Enculturation, and Faculty Lived Experiences with Facebook Studio Groups/Pages. Findings of the study included: faculty concerns about personal and professional risk; the observation that teaching and learning are occurring through these Facebook studio groups/pages by way of the process of enculturation, but without evidence of a Virtual Community of Practice; and, a multitude of group/page management practices developed in isolation that suggest a need for discussion/debate and training in the field to determine best practices for using Facebook studio groups/pages as an extension of the physical studio. Recommendations include training for music faculty that situates Facebook studio groups/pages within the enculturation process of students pursuing careers in music, music department development of guidelines for Facebook group/page creation and management based upon their institutions' rules and oversight procedures, and the sharing of exemplar Facebook studio groups/pages by professional music education organizations to encourage discussion of best practices for teaching and learning in informal environments.

Using a case study approach this study investigated how college students in Vlore, Albania seek and use information resources for academic and personal needs and whether they follow a pattern similar to Brenda Dervin's sense-making, or Marcia Bates' berry-picking information seeking models. Influencing factors studied were economic factors, information communication technologies and information culture/policy. A literature review showed that no previous published research has studied information seeking behavior of college age students and faculty in Albania. Thirty-four college students and two full time faculty completed a survey and a smaller group were interviewed. The results of the study indicate that Google is the main source for seeking information for both academic and personal purposes. College students are not introduced or taught on how to evaluate information sources. The information communication technology needs improvement to support information needs. The library as a major information resource was not apparent to most students. College students utilize berry-picking as the information seeking model and faculty use sense-making, as a model of information seeking. This study adds to the knowledge of the information seeking behavior of college students in a developing country, the need for information literacy courses at the university level, and the identification of additional areas of research regarding information communication technologies, information policy, and literacy for developing countries.

Twitter has quickly become one of the most popular social media sites. It has 313 million monthly active users, and 500 million tweets are published daily. With the massive number of tweets, Twitter users share information about a location along with the temporal awareness. In this work, I focus on tweets where author of the tweets exclusively mentions a location in the tweet. Natural language processing systems can leverage wide range of information from the tweets to build applications like recommender systems that predict the location of the author. This kind of system can be used to increase the visibility of the targeted audience and can also provide recommendations interesting places to visit, hotels to stay, restaurants to eat, targeted on-line advertising, and co-traveler matching based on the temporal information extracted from a tweet. In this work I determine if the author of the tweet is present in the mentioned location of the tweet. I also determine if the author is present in the location before tweeting, while tweeting, or after tweeting. I introduce 5 temporal tags (before the tweet but > 24 hours; before the tweet but < 24 hours; during the tweet is posted; after the tweet is posted but < 24 hours; and after the tweet is posted but > 24 hours). The major contributions of this paper are: (1) creation of a corpus of 1062 tweets containing 1200 location named entities, containing annotations whether author of a tweet is or is not located in the location he tweets about with respect to 5 temporal tags; (2) detailed corpus analysis including real annotation examples and label distributions per temporal tag; (3) detailed inter-annotator agreements, including Cohen's kappa, Krippendorff's alpha and confusion matrices per temporal tag; (4) label distributions and analysis; and (5) supervised learning experiments, along with the results.

There is a growing expectation that school librarians function within their job descriptions beyond the role of reading promoter and resource manager. With college and career readiness standards, technology use and digital learning standards and information literacy standards now in place for student learning expectations, it is vital that students have opportunities to acquire, develop and practice such skills for future success in the global market economy. For students to receive such opportunities, there should be designed instruction delivered to students that allows for them to learn and practice information gathering techniques to access, use and apply information effectively, efficiently and ethically while developing technology skills within context of their content learning and real-world connections authentically. This study examined how school librarians conveyed information gathering techniques to students through a qualitative, constant comparative approach. Five middle school librarians in an urban school district participated in an observation and interview. Findings suggest that school librarians do claim an instructional role regarding information gathering and technology usage, although it manifests in diverse ways. Implications for future studies and practice suggest that the position become more defined such that the expectation to function in these roles is widely accepted by all stakeholders, and for the effectiveness of the instruction on the development of these skills. As school librarians embrace and adopt new and emerging technologies within their instructional delivery, examining the effectiveness of that instruction would be of interest.

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