No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This research examines the effects of consumer motivation during an interpersonal sales encounter. The research proposes that a consumer's motivational mind-set affects the consumer's cognitive appraisal of the salesperson and the consumer's subsequent emotional response. Of primary interest is the interaction between a consumer's motivation and a salesperson's behavior. A main thesis of this research is that a congruency mechanism operates between the consumer and the salesperson during a sales encounter. Depending on the consumer's mind-set and the behavioral orientation of the salesperson either a congruent or an incongruent situation will be perceived by the consumer. Based on the congruency mechanism it is proposed that cognitive appraisals concerning goal facilitation will arise that will subsequently trigger specific emotional responses and behavioral outcomes. / Ph. D.

Within the current national atmosphere of accountability and high-stakes testing, many teachers are changing their instruction to return to more traditional strategies that emphasize rote memorization. As a result, classroom curriculum and student learning are narrowing. This study sought to explore the potential of graphic organizers as an instructional strategy to expand student content knowledge beyond rote memorization to include more organized, complex, meaningful learning. For the purpose of this study, graphic organizers are described as visual displays of concepts, their component parts, and the relationships among their parts. This study was conducted over a six week period in a third grade classroom in a rural elementary school in Virginia. Ten focus students were identified for in-depth data collection on their learning process as recorded during science instruction. Although existing research strongly supports graphic organizer effectiveness as an instructional strategy toward general student achievement, little is known about the type of learning they support or the process by which students' knowledge develops. Thus, this research utilized qualitative methodological strategies in order to investigate this process. Data collection methods included field notes, student artifacts, and participant interviews. Constant comparative methodology was employed to analyze data. The theoretical framework of constructivism, espousing that newly acquired information is connected to prior knowledge forming complex, organized networks of conceptual understanding, guided this qualitative study. Findings resulted in emergent themes including student motivation, simplicity, efficiency, visual hierarchical organization, reconstructing knowledge, and cooperative socialization. Documentation of the learning process as opposed to a comparison of pre/post measurements clearly indicated that student thinking gradually became more complex and organized in nature. As students worked with graphic organizers, and participated in study activities, their knowledge moved from a form of listing facts to resemble more complex, interconnected networks. Implications of this study for practice include appropriate instruction and practice for students with graphic organizers as a strategy and a tool, value as an assessment tool, and potential for use with complex classroom populations. Suggestions for future research are given for teacher training on how to use graphic organizers effectively, interdisciplinary use of graphic organizers within one context, potential benefit for struggling and diverse learners, a continuing focus on process as opposed to product, and an examination of the connection between graphic organizer activities and sorting. / Ph. D.

Background: Engineering students who achieve academic success during their first year may later disengage from challenging course material in their upper-level courses, due to perceived differences between their expectations and values and those of their degree programs. In the extreme, academic disengagement can lead to attrition. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to better understand the learning approaches and strategies used by first-year engineering students. Research questions were as follows:  How do first-year engineering students describe their learning approaches and strategies?  How do first-year engineering students customize their learning strategies among their courses?  How do first-year engineering students employ reflection as part of their learning strategies? Design/Method: I employed both qualitative and quantitative methods to collect and analyze data, using an explanatory design approach consisting of two surveys and a set of semi-structured interviews between survey administrations. The interview data from a purposive sample of survey participants were coded using a priori, pattern and comparative coding. The survey data were analyzed for medians and interquartile ranges in order to identify trends in reflective learning strategies among courses. Results: One notable finding was the fact that many interviewees stated that their overall purpose for studying was to achieve high grades by preparing for tests (a surface-level approach), and yet the learning strategies that they used reflected a deeper engagement with their course material than one would expect from students whose singular focus was on grades. Certain strategies were similar for both technical and non-technical courses, while others were dissimilar. There are also ways to combine the surface and deep learning strategies sequentially. They need not be mutually exclusive. Conclusions: The results of this study will provide educators with a starting point for the development of guided practice in meaningful learning strategies to encourage a greater engagement with learning. Both educators and administrators should be amenable to measures that would improve their students' chances for success, by providing guidance in how to learn as well as what to learn. Several recommendations are given for future studies, such as the relationships among reflection, metacognition, and critical thinking, and the integration of meaningful learning strategies into technically overloaded engineering degree curricula. / Doctor of Philosophy / I chose to study the learning approaches and strategies of first-year engineering students. The term "learning strategies" refers to study habits, but learning strategies also involve choices about how to study based on goals, motivation, and available resources. My results will provide professors and instructors with insights that they can use to help their students learn more effectively and find deeper meaning in their course material, by guiding them in how to learn as well as what to learn. Knowing how to learn is a lifelong skill. First-year engineering students have a special need to know how to learn in order to be better prepared for a more challenging workload in their upper level engineering courses. Prior studies have shown that students most often leave an engineering program during their first or second year due to inadequate academic preparation in prior years. If we are to help engineering these students to improve their learning approaches and strategies, we first need to know what approaches and strategies they currently use. My data came from two surveys that were given at the end of each of two introductory engineering courses to a group of approximately 1,200 students, and from interviews with fifteen students who had also completed the surveys. I was trying to learn more about how these students customized their learning strategies among their courses, and how they used reflection to discover the meaning behind what they are learning. One of the most interesting findings was the fact that many interviewees stated that their overall purpose for studying was to achieve high grades by preparing for tests (a surface-level approach), and yet the learning strategies that they used reflected a deeper engagement with their course material than one would expect from students whose only focus was on grades. This combination of different learning approaches was more common in engineering, science and mathematics courses than in humanities or social science courses. This dissertation also contains a three-part class assignment, given at the beginning, middle, and end of a first-year engineering course, in which students reflect on their progress in learning one or more skills that they had identified at the beginning of the course. Implications arising from my study are directed at researchers, administrators, faculty, and students, respectively, as well as opportunities for further work in this aspect of higher education. Opportunities for further studies include the relationship between reflection and critical thinking, and methods for incorporating guided practice in learning strategies into engineering degree programs that currently contain too much technical content.

Continuous integration (CI) is a widely used practice in modern software engineering. Unfortunately, it is also an expensive practice — Google and Mozilla estimate their CI systems in millions of dollars. In this dissertation, I propose a collection of novel build selection approaches that are able to save the cost of CI. I also propose the first exhaustive comparison of techniques to improve CI including build and test granularity approaches. I firstly design a build selection approach (SMARTBUILDSKIP) for CI cost reduction in a balanceable way. The evaluation of SMARTBUILDSKIP shows that it can save a median of 30% of builds by only incurring a median delay of 1 build in a median of 15% of failing builds under its most conservative configuration. To minimize the delayed failure observation, I then propose the second build selection approach (PRECISEBUILDSKIP) that can save cost without delaying failure observation. We find that PRECISEBUILDSKIP can save a median of 5.5% of builds while capturing the majority of failing builds (100% in median) from the evaluation. After that, I evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of 10 techniques that can improve CI including SMARTBUILDSKIP. The findings of the comparison motivate my next work to design a hybrid technique (HYBRIDBUILDSKIP) that combines these techniques to produce more cost-saving while keeping a low proportion of failing builds that are delayed in observation. Finally, I design an experiment to understand how different weights of test duration among the whole build duration can influence the cost-saving of build and test selection techniques. / Doctor of Philosophy / Modern software developing teams commonly use the continuous integration as the practice of automating and testing the integration of code changes from multiple contributors into a single software project. The best practice of continuous integration requires this process happens as frequently as possible because the bugs can be found earlier and easier before the change sets grow too large. However, continuous integration process can be time-consuming and in most cases the code change is bug-free. This means that developers may have to wait for a long time only to get a result with no actionable feedback. Thus, in this dissertation, I present multiple selection approaches to selectively execute the continuous integration process based on the prediction of the outcome - if the outcome is predicted to be passing with no actionable feedback, the approach will decide to skip the current execution. The evaluation result shows that my approaches can save the cost of continuous integration while keeping the value of it (finding bugs earlier).

The purpose of this study was to determine how three female superintendents attained their positions given the notable underrepresentation of women in superintendency positions. The research questions to be investigated were: (1) What are the forces or factors that have assisted those three women who have become superintendent? (2) What are the forces or factors that have served as barriers in the process those three women went through in achieving appointments as superintendents? (3) What strategies did they use in overcoming barriers to their achievement of appointment as superintendent? (4) What situations or events have been beneficial to their achievement of appointment as superintendent? A multiple-case study design and multiple data gathering methods were utilized in this study. The career paths of three women employed as public school superintendents in Virginia were investigated. A questionnaire was developed to collect data for the study. The instrument consisted of twenty-five questions with open-ended responses. Data were collected through interviews and document analysis to determine the barriers these female superintendents perceived, the strategies they employed to overcome barriers, and the factors which had an impact on their obtaining the position of superintendent. Material gathered during the interviews were transcribed and coded using the Ethnograph software program. Common patterns, themes and concepts emerged, and key statements and important stories shared by the participants were summarized. The researcher presented a descriptive narrative case study profile of each superintendent. Recommendations for further research were provided. / Ed. D.

The use of investigative laboratory programs is one of the recommended methods of instruction for improving the outcomes of college science laboratory work. In such programs, students are expected to take more responsibility for their learning and to exercise manipulative skills as well as their thinking. One factor that contributes to students' learning success is their learning strategies. In order to increase our understanding of students' learning strategies in an investigative laboratory program, a qualitative research design was used in this study. The participants for this study were ten students who were enrolled in Principles of Biology Laboratory Hl15 which used an investigative approach. The primary data were gathered through interviews with the students. Additional data to provide a more holistic description of some aspects of the students' use of learning strategies were obtained from assessment of the students' learning style, a review of course syllabus and handouts, non-participant observations, and interviews with the instructors. / Ph. D.