UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Postsecondary Stratification and the Democratization of Education: Using stratification theories and national data to examine stratification, the community college, and the transfer mechanism in postsecondary institutions(2020) Patricio, Kalia Raquel; Malen, Betty; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Stratification in postsecondary education has been a persistent issue since education became widely available to women, racial and ethnic minorities, and low-income students. This unequal access to education has significant consequences on where people end up in the labor market because of the strong connection between education and job attainment. Decades of policy have attempted to reduce educational stratification, with expanded community college access being a popular approach. Theoretically, expanded community college access increases the use of the transfer mechanism to reach the restrictive four-year institution and its associated degrees. In the past few decades there have been changes to the demographic make-up of the US and a variety of policy efforts aimed at the k-12 system and higher education funding, yet there is a dearth of recent research to indicate how the transfer mechanism is operating in the current educational environment. This three-paper dissertation uses sociological theory to hypothesize about the potential utility of the transfer mechanism to reduce stratification and uses complex samples logistic regression and recent data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 to analyze the current effectiveness of the community college transfer pathway in reducing stratified patterns of enrollment and outcomes at four-year institutions. Findings from these analyses show that the transfer mechanism is at best an unreliable solution to stratification in higher education. While there is some evidence to suggest that low-income students are utilizing the transfer pathway at greater rates compared to traditional four-year enrollment, the transfer mechanism is doing little to facilitate access to four-year institutions for first-generation and racial and ethnic minority students.Item CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER OF SPELLING SKILLS IN SPANISH-SPEAKING ADULT ESL LEARNERS(2016) Bai, Yu; MacSwan, Jeff; Martin-Beltran, Melinda; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Spelling is an important literacy skill, and learning to spell is an important component of learning to write. Learners with strong spelling skills also exhibit greater reading, vocabulary, and orthographic knowledge than those with poor spelling skills (Ehri & Rosenthal, 2007; Ehri & Wilce, 1987; Rankin, Bruning, Timme, & Katkanant, 1993). English, being a deep orthography, has inconsistent sound-to-letter correspondences (Seymour, 2005; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). This poses a great challenge for learners in gaining spelling fluency and accuracy. The purpose of the present study is to examine cross-linguistic transfer of English vowel spellings in Spanish-speaking adult ESL learners. The research participants were 129 Spanish-speaking adult ESL learners and 104 native English-speaking GED students enrolled in a community college located in the South Atlantic region of the United States. The adult ESL participants were in classes at three different levels of English proficiency: advanced, intermediate, and beginning. An experimental English spelling test was administered to both the native English-speaking and ESL participants. In addition, the adult ESL participants took the standardized spelling tests to rank their spelling skills in both English and Spanish. The data were analyzed using robust regression and Poisson regression procedures, Mann-Whitney test, and descriptive statistics. The study found that both Spanish spelling skills and English proficiency are strong predictors of English spelling skills. Spanish spelling is also a strong predictor of level of L1-influenced transfer. More proficient Spanish spellers made significantly fewer L1-influenced spelling errors than less proficient Spanish spellers. L1-influenced transfer of spelling knowledge from Spanish to English likely occurred in three vowel targets (/ɑɪ/ spelled as ae, ai, or ay, /ɑʊ/ spelled as au, and /eɪ/ spelled as e). The ESL participants and the native English-speaking participants produced highly similar error patterns of English vowel spellings when the errors did not indicate L1-influenced transfer, which implies that the two groups might follow similar trajectories of developing English spelling skills. The findings may help guide future researchers or practitioners to modify and develop instructional spelling intervention to meet the needs of adult ESL learners and help them gain English spelling competence.Item Writing Transfer Across Domains: Academic, Personal, and Extracurricular Writing(2015) Lindenman, Heather; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Over the last decade, scholars in composition studies have devoted significant attention to the issue of student transfer at the collegiate level. That is, they ask whether and how students repurpose their writing knowledge and abilities for new and alternate writing situations. This existing research provides insight into the ways that students do or do not productively repurpose their writing experiences and suggests that successful transfer occurs less often than writing instructors might hope. Drawing on data from a survey, focus groups, writing samples, and interviews, my qualitative study extends this existing research in three primary ways. First, I expand the scope of contexts included in studies of writing transfer. Much of students’ writing, and thus writing education, occurs outside of school. Rather than focus primarily on academic settings, as most scholarship does, my study investigates students’ writing experiences across academic, personal, and extracurricular domains. Second, my study discerns the specific ways that students relate their writing experiences across these domains. Most scholarship in composition examines how students repurpose their writing knowledge by tracing vertical transfer, or the ways students transfer their learning from one writing class to another. My study redirects scholarly attention by focusing instead on how students forge connections between disparate contexts, establishing a “transfer mindset.” Based on students’ writing samples and commentary, this dissertation analyzes five relational reasoning strategies that students use to connect their writing across contexts. Finally, this study examines how students transfer prior experiences and knowledge to create a credible persona, or effective ethos, in many writing situations. My study examines three types of sources that students draw on to project an ethos appropriate to a given writing task. Throughout “Writing Transfer Across Domains,” I emphasize the importance of viewing transfer from students’ own perspectives and valuing students’ idiosyncratic ways of making meaning. Ultimately, this project shows that students can and do draw productive connections between their writing experiences, cultivating a “transfer mindset.” “Writing Transfer Across Domains” offers both theoretical and pragmatic insights into college students’ ability to move their writing knowledge between all the writing situations they encounter and create.Item Some mechanics challenges and solutions in flexible electronics(2009) Tucker, Matthew Brody; Li, Teng; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Flexible electronics is an emerging field with potential applications such as large area flexible displays, thin film solar panels, and smart prosthesis, to name a few. Promising future aside, there are challenges associated with flexible electronics including high deformability requirements, needs for new manufacturing techniques and high performance permeation barriers. This thesis aims to explore possible solutions to address these challenges. First, a thin stiff film patterned with circular holes is proposed as a deformable platform to be used in flexible electronics in either component and circuit level. Second, we explore possible pathways to improve the quality of transfer printing, a nanofabrication technique that can potentially enable roll-to-roll printing of flexible devices. Third, we investigate the failure mechanism of multilayer permeation barriers for flexible electronics and offer an improved design to achieve better mechanical reliability.