This study investigated the effects of test length (10, 20 and 30 items), scoring schema (proportion of dichotomous ad polytomous scoring) and item analysis model (IRT and Rasch) on the ability estimates, test information levels and optimization criteria of mixed item format tests. Polytomous item responses to 30 items for 1000 examinees were simulated using the generalized partial-credit model and SAS software. Portions of the data were re-coded dichotomously over 11 structured proportions to create 33 sets of test responses including mixed item format tests. MULTILOG software was used to calculate the examinee ability estimates, standard errors, item and test information, reliability and fit indices. A comparison of IRT and Rasch item analysis procedures was made using SPSS software across ability estimates and standard errors of ability estimates using a 3 x 11 x 2 fixed factorial ANOVA. Effect sizes and power were reported for each procedure. Scheffe post hoc procedures were conducted on significant factos. Test information was analyzed and compared across the range of ability levels for all 66-design combinations. The results indicated that both test length and the proportion of items scored polytomously had a significant impact on the amount of test information produced by mixed item format tests. Generally, tests with 100% of the items scored polytomously produced the highest overall information. This seemed to be especially true for examinees with lower ability estimates. Optimality comparisons were made between IRT and Rasch procedures based on standard error rates for the ability estimates, marginal reliabilities and fit indices (-2LL). The only significant differences reported involved the standard error rates for both the IRT and Rasch procedures. This result must be viewed in light of the fact that the effect size reported was negligible. Optimality was found to be highest when longer tests and higher proportions of polytomous scoring were applied. Some indications were given that IRT procedures may produce slightly improved results in gathering available test information. Overall, significant differences were not found between the IRT and Rasch procedures when analyzing the mixed item format tests. Further research should be conducted in the areas of test difficulty, examinee test scores, and automated partial-credit scoring along with a comparison to other traditional psychometric measures and how they address challenges related to the mixed item format tests.

Barriers like financial constraints and travel logistics prevent Indigenous people from accessing their cultural heritage objects held by national, state, and local institutions. This can be overcome using photogrammetry to create 3D models of cultural heritage objects and housing them in virtual museums accessible via Internet-capable devices. This pilot project, working with the White Earth Band of Ojibwe on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, followed appropriate museology and communities of practice approaches to meet the concerns, desires, and budget of the tribal members to provide them unfettered access to cultural heritage objects. Because this approach presents cultural objects as 3D models, which can be 'manipulated' as if physically held, it offers visitors more meaningful engagement than they would have with single-dimension, restricted access museum displays. This project focusing on ten cultural heritage objects serves as a foundation on which similar digital museum projects initiated by Indigenous communities can build. / May 2017

The high school research paper is a task which consumes instructional time, requires considerable student effort, and places a high demand on school library resources. Little research has been conducted on how students accomplish this task. Academic task research indicates that in classrooms, tasks are defined by students in terms of (a) the nature of the products the teacher will accept and (b) the operations allowed and the resources available. Here the product is the research paper; the resources available include those found in the school library. The purpose of this study was to determine what strategies students use to perform the library-related task.

This dissertation creates an information agent that correctly identifies Web pages containing scholarly research approximately 96% of the time. It does this by analyzing the Web page with a set of criteria, and then uses a classification tree to arrive at a decision. The criteria were gathered from the literature on selecting print and electronic materials for academic libraries. A Delphi study was done with an international panel of librarians to expand and refine the criteria until a list of 41 operationalizable criteria was agreed upon. A Perl program was then designed to analyze a Web page and determine a numerical value for each criterion. A large collection of Web pages was gathered comprising 5,000 pages that contain the full work of scholarly research and 5,000 random pages, representative of user searches, which do not contain scholarly research. Datasets were built by running the Perl program on these Web pages. The datasets were split into model building and testing sets. Data mining was then used to create different classification models. Four techniques were used: logistic regression, nonparametric discriminant analysis, classification trees, and neural networks. The models were created with the model datasets and then tested against the test dataset. Precision and recall were used to judge the effectiveness of each model. In addition, a set of pages that were difficult to classify because of their similarity to scholarly research was gathered and classified with the models. The classification tree created the most effective classification model, with a precision ratio of 96% and a recall ratio of 95.6%. However, logistic regression created a model that was able to correctly classify more of the problematic pages. This agent can be used to create a database of scholarly research published on the Web. In addition, the technique can be used to create a database of any type of structured electronic information.

Research is vital in Psychology, as well as the social sciences, as it is a tool for creating knowledge through the interpretation and manipulation of empirical data, and thus furthering understanding in a field (Barak, 1998; Bridges, Gillmore, Pershing, & Bates, 1998; VanderStoep & Shaughnessy, 1997). Self-efficacy, metacognitive awareness, and working memory are essential to explore in relation to academic performance in research methods courses such as RDA IIA, as these skills are needed in the different components of these types of courses and are likely to play a role in predicting academic performance (Alloway, 2006; Bandura, 1993; Payne & Israel, 2010; Zulkiply, Kabit, & Ghani, 2008). Self-efficacy, metacognitive awareness, and working memory are also all potentially susceptible to intervention, and therefore exploring and establishing relationships between these variables could improve ways to teach and help students achieve academically. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the relationships between academic self-efficacy, metacognitive awareness, working memory, and academic performance on the RDA IIA module overall and for different components. The sample consisted of 95 students who had completed RDA IIA at the University of the Witwatersrand. The instrumentation used consisted of a brief demographic questionnaire, an adapted Academic Self-Efficacy Scale, the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory, and three working memory tasks assessing verbal, spatial, and numerical working memory. Academic self-efficacy related to and predicted performance in the research component of the course, and also predicted final RDA IIA mark. Metacognitive awareness did not relate to or predict any aspect of RDA IIA performance, except for a significant positive correlation between declarative knowledge and research mark. The working memory total and mental counters task related to and predicted all aspects of RDA IIA performance; the verbal task related to research mark but had no predictive role in RDA IIA performance; and lastly, the spatial task did not relate to or predict any aspects of RDA IIA performance. The results of the study contribute to a better understanding of the factors relating to and predicting RDA IIA performance; and these findings may lead to the development of more effective intervention programmes to assist students in improving their research methodology marks.

Provision of complete and responsive solution to healthcare services requires a multi-tired health delivery system. One of the aspects of healthcare hierarchy is the need for nursing care of the patient. Nursing care and observation provide basis for nurses to communicate with other aspects of healthcare system. The ability of capturing and managing nursing practice is essential to the quality of human care. The thesis proposes knowledge based decision making and analyzing system for the nurses to capture and manage the nursing practice. Moreover it allows them to monitor nursing care quality, as well as to test an aspect of an electronic healthcare record for recording and reporting nursing practice. The framework used for this system is based on nursing theory and is coupled with the quantitative analysis of qualitative data. It allows us to quantify the qualitative raw natural nursing language data. The results are summarized in the graph that shows the relative importance of those attributes with respect to each other at different instances of nurse-patient encounter. Research has been conducted by the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for the College of Nursing. / by Shubhang Tripathi. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Given the demands of the era of accountability and standardization, the purpose of this study was to explore how educational leaders construct their identity and agency. The study utilized overlapping post-structural and critical theoretical frameworks on identity and agency to analyze how high school principals interpret and enact comprehensive school reform rhetoric and their state’s educational leadership standards. In addition to several cycles of coding, a critical discourse analysis was performed with the input of the participants’ high schools in order to further analyze the form and function of discourses, socially situated meanings, and ideologies that constitute being an educational leader and doing the work of an educational leader. The findings from the study revealed that the high school principals discursively construct their professional identity and agency by engaging in discourses and social practices related to managing the personnel, numerical data, and external expectations of the organization. As a result, the participants use the comprehensive school reform rhetoric as a way to legitimize and rationalize their duty as educators. The socially situated meaning attributed to the state’s educational leadership standards is not as clear, with the participants dismissing their value for a lack of context. In interpreting and enacting the school reform policy mandates set forth by the district and the state, principals conserve a corporatized model of school leadership that borrows much of its neoliberal language from the business sphere. The principals are positioned as mid-level managers, confirming Foster’s (2004) description of the contemporary school leader who is preoccupied with controlling the numeracy, information systems, and language of the organization. Future research should focus on performing critical discourse analysis studies with the upper levels of management, including, but not limited to, the central office and the office of the superintendent, as a way of exploring a more transcendent meaning of schooling and school leadership that focuses on human development. This study has the potential to provide leadership preparation programs and policymakers significant insight into the problems, paradoxes, and possibilities of school reform rhetoric and its impact on local school leaders. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Microarray expression data which contains the expression levels of a large number of simultaneously observed genes have been used in many scientific research and clinical studies. Due to its high dimensionalities, selecting a small number of genes has shown to be beneficial for many tasks such as building prediction models from the microarray expression data or gene regulatory network discovery. Traditional gene selection methods, however, fail to take the class distribution into the selection process. In biomedical science, it is very common to have microarray expression data which is severely biased with one class of examples (e.g., diseased samples) significantly less than other classes (e.g., normal samples). These sample sets with biased distributions require special attention from researchers for identification of genes responsible for a particular disease. In this thesis, we propose three filtering techniques, Higher Weight ReliefF, ReliefF with Differential Minority Repeat and ReliefF with Balanced Minority Repeat to identify genes responsible for fatal diseases from biased microarray expression data. Our solutions are evaluated on five well-known microarray datasets, Colon, Central Nervous System, DLBCL Tumor, Lymphoma and ECML Pancreas. Experimental comparisons with the traditional ReliefF filtering method demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in selecting informative genes from microarray expression data with biased sample distributions. / by Abu Hena Mustafa Kamal. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Tumor cells interact with basement membrane collagen at the site of extravasation through distinct cellular receptors, including the α2β1 and α3β1integrins. These receptors are known to be differentially expressed in metastatic tumors, relative to the normal cells, depending on tumor type and stage of progression. The binding sites within type IV collagen for the α2β1 andα3β1 integrins have been identified. Since both of the integinspecific sequences possess at least one glycosylated Hyl residue, we questioned whether glycosylation could modulate integrin binding. Triple-helical peptides with and without Lys substituted by glycosylated Hyl for Lys543 and Lys540 from the human a1(IV)531-543 gene sequence (α3β integrin-specific) and Lys393 from the human a1(IV)382-393 gene sequence (α2β1 integrin-specific) were synthesized and utilized in the present study. / Cellular response to these triple helical ligands was tested with a primary melanoma cell line, WM-115, and three highly metastatic melanoma cell lines , WM-266-4, M14#5, and SK-MEL-2. Cell adhesion and cell spreading assays yielded differing results depending on whether the ligands contained glycosylated Hyl residues or not. In general, a decrease in cellular affinity toward the ligands was observed when glycosylated Hyl was present. Differences in the levels of adhesion and spreading between cell lines representing different stages of melanoma were also observed. Neutral B-galactosidase activity was detected in all four cell lines. Enzymatic activity levels were comparable for the three metastatic cell lines, whereas distinctively higher activity was detected for cells originating from a primary lesion. This acitivity can signal the potential of tumor cells to enhance and recover their invasive abilities. / The ability of each cell line to remove the galactose from the peptide ligands has been investigated, to test whether tumor cells can reestablish binding relationships between the α2β1 and α3β1 integrins and type IV collagen that are reduced by glycosylation. / by Beatrix Aukszi. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2008. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This study investigated electroencephalographic differences related to cue (central left- or right-directed arrows) in a covert endogenous visual spatial attention task patterned after that of Hopf and Mangun (2000). This was done with the intent of defining the timing of components in relation to cognitive processes within the cue-target interval. Multiple techniques were employed to do this. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were examined using Independent Component Analysis. This revealed a significant N1, between 100:200 ms post-cue, greater contralateral to the cue. Difference wave ERPs, left minus right cue-locked data, divulged significant early directing attention negativity (EDAN) at 200:400 ms post-cue in the right posterior which reversed polarity in the left posterior. Temporal spectral evolution (TSE) analysis of the alpha band revealed three stages, (1) high bilateral alpha precue to 120 ms post-cue, (2) an event related desynchronization (ERD) from approximately 120 ms: 500 ms post-cue, and (3) an event related synchronization (ERS) rebound, 500: 900 ms post-cue, where alpha amplitude, a measure of activity, was highest contralateral to the ignored hemifield and lower contralateral to the attended hemifield. Using a combination of all of these components and scientific literature in this field, it is possible to plot out the time course of the cognitive events and their neural correlates. / by Edward Justin Modestino. / Vita. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.