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Over the past two decades, the readership of poetry has declined to the point that the art form is seldom engaged with by the public. I argue that reading poetry requires a skillset that must be learned, practiced, and refined. While close reading is traditionally trained in college classrooms, such spaces cannot reach broad audiences. To address this dearth, I have developed a web app that applies interactive learning strategies, through a series of exercises, to cultivate expert reading practices in novice users. Close Reading will guide users through poems by Robert Frost. With each poem, users will progress through exercises grounded in the practices of expert readers. For instance, users will block poems into sections to allow a chunking of the material, slowing down novice reading speeds. Another exercise cognitively models the act of reading by displaying the sequential thoughts of a reader making sense of a work. Furthermore, Socratic questioning will attempt to stimulate an internal dialogue to foster focus and interpretation. These exercises will build on one another and attempt to replicate pedagogical processes observed in the classroom. Performing these pedagogical exercises will provide a resource for developing the skillset necessary for poetry appreciation. This ambitious digital humanities project experiments with a new venue for pedagogy and poetry, promoting an engagement with the public frequently neglected in academic work. / Master of Arts

The massive rise in Computer Science enrollments in both traditional classroom courses and in Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) shows the enormous opportunities in engaging students to learn programming. While the number of students in CS courses continues to increase, there has been no concomitant increase in the number of instructors for such courses. This leads to a completely lopsided learning environment where the already-stretched instructor is pressed to spend more time on ancillary tasks like grading and course bookkeeping. CodeWorkout is an online drill-and-practice system with course management features that aims to address these issues. CodeWorkout hosts an online repository of programming questions that instructors can incorporate into their courses. It also provides instructors with a facility to create their own programming questions so that exercises can be tailored according to the needs of the class. CodeWorkout has an open gradual engagement model that allows students who are not enrolled in a course to use it. CodeWorkout also creates an open environment for instructors to collaborate by sharing exercises that they create. CodeWorkout has been used in four courses at Virginia Tech. It has been shown to significantly improve the student's skills in introductory programming through providing a number of online practice questions. / Master of Science

The effect of major or minor mode in music on the free recall of materials presented in a multimedia setting was investigated. Seventy-seven students from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University voluntarily participated in the experiment. The experiment consisted of three Hypercard stacks, identical except for the introduction where participants heard either a major or a minor melody line or no music. Participants read an identical text passage and recalled as much information as they could about the passage afterwards. The results showed no significant difference between groups. / Master of Arts

Public education has been in a recession many years longer than our economy and unless we make some attempt to break from the past the outlook for public education in the state of Massachusetts looks bleak. This study discusses the status of experienced teachers working in public schools in ten communities in Massachusetts. Using the telephone interview survey the research shows a lack of technological skills among the participants and demonstrates a definite need for retooling the seasoned teacher. Public schools do many things well but very often we find our school systems short on finances and short on long-range planning. This is especially true in the areas of staff development. There are still many educators who are still professing that our traditional teaching methods are adequate to address the needs of today's student. The survey relates the responses of one hundred teachers regarding their knowledge and expertise in the use of computers and the use of computers in education. Retooling the experienced teacher is essential to the success of our public schools. Among the towns surveyed all ten of the communities reported that seventy-five to eighty percent of their teaching staffs are on the maximum salary step. The subjects of this study ranged from twenty years of experience to thirty-four years. The literature review indicated that very little research has been conducted around the topic of teacher training in technology. Most of the literature and research has been dedicated to the promotion of various brands of computers and various software programs and very little on the needs of the classroom teacher in the age of technology. All of the subjects surveyed recognized the prominence of computers in education and also showed a willingness to be trained to make use of the computers available to them. This study discussed the responses of the teachers and their suggestions for staff development.