This study investigated the use of explicit revision instruction and digital writing during writing workshop with 21 students in a mainstream second-grade classroom. The pedagogical goal guiding this study was to improve revisions in informational writing and overall writing quality. Students’ informational writing quality scores significantly improved from pre-to post-assessment. Throughout the intervention, collected data included tallies of the types and amount of revision in student writing samples, the overall quality of student informational writing prior to and after revision, and teacher journal entries. Students were able to revise their informational writing independently. Students’ informational writing scores were higher post-revision, with the addition of words correlating with higher scores. The sample size was insufficient to determine the relationship between the number or type of revisions and increased writing scores. The intervention implemented in this study provided students with instruction that enabled them to utilize revision independently to improve the overall quality of their informational writing. The digital application lent itself to easier manipulation of the text, encouraging students to revise. Findings from this study revealed that students’ informational writing moved from below grade-level competency to at or above grade-level competency in three iterations across 6 weeks.

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Denna kvalitativa studie undersöker hur och varför användare av sociala medier sprider sin aktivitet över flera av dessa samtidigt. Fokus låg på de tre sociala medierna Facebook, Instagram och Snapchat. Studien genomfördes genom att hålla parintervjuer med användare av dessa medier för att sedan applicera det erhållna resultatet på ramverket kontextuell integritet. Resultatet av studien är intressant för de företag som utvecklar och använder sig av sociala medier och även för framtida forskning inom ämnet. Vår studie visade en skillnad i delandet av information över de tre sociala medierna. Den främsta orsaken till skillnaden identifierades som storleken på kontaktnäten hos medierna, och dess inverkan på vad som upplevdes vara ett intrång i den personliga integriteten när information delades. Förutom den ökade visibiliteten som kommer med ett större kontaktnät hade det även inverkan på den underliggande aktiviteten på mediet vilket kan ses som en orsak till ett minskande av aktivt användande. De slutsatser som drogs kring framtiden var att sociala medier, både dagens och framtida, måste ge användarna ett alternativ att dela in sitt kontaktnät  i grupper. Alternativt att de sociala medierna själva måste bli nischade för en specifik del av användarnas kontaktnät. Detta kommer tillåta användarna att dela accepterbar information i lämpliga kanaler. / This qualitative study examines how and why users of social media distribute their activity over several of these at the sametime. Focus was on the three social media sites of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. The study was carried through bykeeping paired interviews with users of these sites and then applying the results on the framework of contextual integrity .The result of the study is interesting both for companies developing and using social media sites, as well as for futureresearch in the field. The results showed a difference in the sharing of information across the three different sites. The foremost cause to thedifference was identified to be the size of the social networks on the sites, and the influence this had on what was perceivedas an intrusion in the privacy of the user when the information was shared. Aside from the increased visibility that comeswith a larger social network, it also affected the underlying activity of the social medium. Which can be seen as a reason fora decreasing active use. The conclusions about the future were that social media, today and in the future, have to give theusers an alternative to separate their social network on the sites into separate groups. Alternatively that the social media sitesthemselves has to become niched for a specific part of a user's social network. This will allow the users to share acceptableinformation in suitable channels.

As an emerging group that wields its increasing influence through social media, social media influencers (SMIs) have continued to grow as a key component of firms’ digital marketing strategies. However, several aspects of SMIs merit attention: their personal characteristics, content features, and how they influence consumers’ decision-making as well as online engagement. By using the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) model together with theories of social connection and social influence, this dissertation reveals the influence of SMIs on consumer behaviors in tourism and hospitality contexts by investigating travel SMIs’ influencing stimuli, mechanisms, and audience responses. Study 1 extracts topics from comments on posts created by two travel SMIs from different cultures; identifies these SMIs’ personal characteristics and content features; and uncovers how travel SMIs wield social connection, value-expressive influence, and informational influence from a cross-cultural perspective. Study 2 includes a pair of sub-studies that quantitatively examine travel SMIs’ marketing effectiveness and unveil associated mechanisms by focusing on social influence theory (i.e., value-expressive and informational influences). Topic modeling, netnographic analysis with social media data, and experimental designs are adopted to achieve all research objectives. Findings extend the understanding of travel SMIs’ influencing processes in consumers’ decision making/online engagement and provide practical implications for applying SMI marketing in tourism and hospitality. / Tourism and Sport

Models of the need-driven information search and the information appraisal process were formed from a comprehensive literature review of factors affecting perceived credibility and trust in online information. The social component of online credibility has not, to date, been thoroughly researched. This component's impact on the development of the perceived credibility of online information was examined in two experiments. In the first experiment, the impact of positive, mixed, and negative social feedback on the development of the perceived credibility of a web page was evaluated. In the second experiment, the effect of social feedback on credibility was examined under two levels of motivation for information use to investigate whether social feedback becomes less important as motivation to obtain quality information increases. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that type of feedback can influence perceived web page credibility. Pages with negative audience feedback received the lowest credibility ratings, while pages with positive audience feedback received the highest credibility ratings. Pages with mixed or no audience feedback received higher credibility ratings than pages with negative feedback, but lower credibility ratings than pages with positive feedback. In Experiment 2, high motivation did not impact the number of web page elements participants reported that they used to determine credibility. High motivation for information use also did not reduce the impact of audience feedback on perceived credibility.

Positive social support, realistic job demand, and appropriate levels of control over their responsibilities can mitigate empathy fatigue and burnout among nurses, increase quality care for patients, and lay the foundation for teams to embrace challenges during crises. The COVID-19 pandemic stretched nurses in all these areas, leading many nurses to contemplate changing fields. Failure to address and embrace the difficulties that nurses face during such crises can result in loss of nurses and impact the entire healthcare industry. The present study used one-to-one interviews to glean insider perspectives of changes in job demand, control, and support nurses experienced as they showed up to work in COVID-19 units. Results showed that the bridge to overcoming daily battles and stresses came primarily through supportive education and skill building, emotional support from peers, and venting after a challenging event. Keywords: social support, emotional support, informational support, moral injury, Demand-Control-Support Model

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The study investigated the effects of noise, one of the major environmental stressors, on speech perception and spoken word comprehension. Three tasks were employed – listening span, listening comprehension, and shadowing – in order to find out to what extent different types of background noise affected speech perception and encoding into working verbal memory, as well as spoken word comprehension. Six types of maskers were used – (1) single babble masker in English, (2) single babble masker in Mandarin, (3) multi babble masker in Greek and (4) construction site noise, (5) narrow-band speech signal emulating phone effect and (6) reverberated speech signal. These could be categorized as energetic (2, 3, and 4), informational (1) and signal degradation (6 and 7) noise maskers. The study found that general speech perception and specific word comprehension are not equally affected by the different noise maskers – if shadowing is considered primarily a task relying on speech perception, with the other two tasks considered to rely on working memory, word comprehension and semantic inference. The results indicate that informational masking is most detrimental to speech perception, while energetic masking and sound degradation are most detrimental to spoken word comprehension. The results imply that masking categories must be used with caution, since not all maskers belonging to one category had the same effect on performance. Finally, introducing a noise component to any memory task, particularly to speech perception and spoken word recognition tasks, adds another cognitively stimulating real-life dimension to them. This could be beneficial to students training to become interpreters helping them to get accustomed to working in a noisy environment, an inevitable part of this profession. A final study explored the effects of noise on automatic speech recognition. The same types of noise as in the human studies were tested on two automatic speech recognition programs: Otter and Ava. This technology was originally developed as an aid for the deaf and hard of hearing. However, their application has since been extended to a broad range of fields, including education, healthcare and finance. The analysis of the transcripts created by the two programs found speech to text technology to be fairly resilient to the degradation of the speech signal, while mechanical background noise still presented a serious challenge to this technology. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The study investigated the effects of noise, one of the major environmental stressors, on speech perception and spoken word comprehension. Throughout three different tasks (listening span task, in which participants were asked to recall a certain number of items from a list; listening comprehension task, in which listeners needed to demonstrate understanding of the incoming speech; and shadowing, in which listeners were required to listen and simultaneously repeat aloud the incoming speech), various types of background noise were presented in order to find out which ones would cause more disruptions to the two cognitive processes. The study found that general speech perception and specific word comprehension are not equally affected by the different noise maskers – provided that shadowing is considered primarily a task relying on speech perception, with the other two tasks considered to rely on working memory, word comprehension and semantic inference, or the way the listener combines and synthesizes information from different parts of a text (or speech) in order to establish its meaning. The results indicate that understandable background speech is most detrimental to speech perception, while any type of noise, if loud enough, as well as degraded target speech signal are most detrimental to spoken word comprehension. Finally, introducing a noise component to these tasks, adds another cognitively stimulating real-life dimension, which could potentially be beneficial to students of interpreting by getting them accustomed to working in a noisy environment, an inevitable part of this profession. Another field of application is the optimization of speech recognition software. In the last study, the same types of noise as used in the first studies were tested on two automatic speech recognition programs. This technology was originally developed as an aid for the deaf and hard of hearing. However, its application has since been extended to a broad range of fields including education, healthcare and finance. The analysis of the transcripts created by the two programs found speech to text technology to be fairly resilient to a degraded speech signal, while mechanical background noise still presented a serious challenge to this technology.