The Effect of a Metalinguistic Approach to Sentence Combining on Written Expression in Eighth Grade Science for Students who Struggle with Literacy

Recent data indicate that less than 50% of American secondary students are able to demonstrate grade-level proficiency in reading, writing, and science (National Center for Educational Statistics [NCES], 2007, 2011, 2012a, 2012b). Secondary students* are expected to develop advanced literacy skills, especially in writing, in order to be ready for college and careers. Students are expected to develop these advanced literacy skills, within all academic subjects. In other words, they are expected to develop disciplinary literacy skills. The statistics are alarming overall, but they are particularly alarming in the area of science. Students need strong literacy skills, including written expression, to be prepared for employment opportunities in science fields, which currently are being filled by graduates of other industrialized nations, who have a more advanced skill set. This loss of occupational opportunity poses a threat for the U.S. to remain globally competitive in science innovation and advancement, which ultimately secures economic prosperity. Despite these staggering concerns, there is little research conducted to evaluate effective instructional methods to develop complex writing skills in academic disciplines such as science. To address this critical issue, the present study examined the effects of a metalinguistic approach to the writing intervention of sentence combining with eighth-grade students who struggle with literacy. The researcher conducted the study in a typical science classroom in an urban American school setting. The focus of the intervention was to increase students* metalinguistic awareness of science text, to improve written sentence complexity in science, as well as the written expression and determination of comparison and contrast of science content. The study employed a quasi-experimental design. The participants consisted of an experimental group (two classes) who received the treatment during typical science instruction and a comparison group (three classes) who did not receive treatment, but participated in their typical science instruction. There were four participating teachers and 84 participating students. The researcher conducted the study over a period of seven weeks within regularly scheduled science classes. Twenty intervention sessions were conducted for a length of 20 minutes each, totaling 400 minutes or 6.6 hours. Hierarchical repeated measures ANOVA and hierarchical repeated measures MANOVA analyses revealed that the experimental group performed significantly better than the comparison group on their ability to determine similarities and differences (compare and contrast) related to science content, with a medium effect. The experimental group achieved a slightly higher marginal mean over the comparison group on their ability to combine sentences, with a small effect. Multiple statistical analyses revealed a trend of higher marginal means in favor of the experimental group over the comparison group on several measures of written sentence complexity on both the science compare and contrast writing prompt (small-medium effect) and the science expository essay (medium to large effect). One experimental class also demonstrated higher scores in their overall sentence correctness on science expository essay as compared to all the other classes. These findings suggest that sentence combining, utilizing a metalinguistic approach, may hold promise as an effective writing intervention in a content area classroom, for secondary students who struggle with literacy. Furthermore, the findings suggest that a metalinguistic approach to sentence combining can be successfully embedded within a content area class, which may result in increased concept knowledge and writing skills in that academic discipline. Implications for practice and future research directions are discussed

Model Transformation Languages with Modular Information Hiding

Model transformations, together with models, form the principal artifacts in model-driven software development. Industrial practitioners report that transformations on larger models quickly get sufficiently large and complex themselves. To alleviate entailed maintenance efforts, this thesis presents a modularity concept with explicit interfaces, complemented by software visualization and clustering techniques. All three approaches are tailored to the specific needs of the transformation domain

Model Transformation Languages with Modular Information Hiding

Model transformations, together with models, form the principal artifacts in model-driven software development. Industrial practitioners report that transformations on larger models quickly get sufficiently large and complex themselves. To alleviate entailed maintenance efforts, this thesis presents a modularity concept with explicit interfaces, complemented by software visualization and clustering techniques. All three approaches are tailored to the specific needs of the transformation domain

Automated Security Analysis of Web Application Technologies

TheWeb today is a complex universe of pages and applications teeming with interactive content that we use for commercial and social purposes. Accordingly, the security of Web applications has become a concern of utmost importance. Devising automated methods to help developers to spot security flaws and thereby make the Web safer is a challenging but vital area of research. In this thesis, we leverage static analysis methods to automatically discover vulnerabilities in programs written in JavaScript or PHP. While JavaScript is the number one language fueling the client-side logic of virtually every Web application, PHP is the most widespread language on the server side. In the first part, we use a series of program transformations and information flow analysis to examine the JavaScript Helios voting client. Helios is a stateof- the-art voting system that has been exhaustively analyzed by the security community on a conceptual level and whose implementation is claimed to be highly secure. We expose two severe and so far undiscovered vulnerabilities. In the second part, we present a framework allowing developers to analyze PHP code for vulnerabilities that can be freely modeled. To do so, we build socalled code property graphs for PHP and import them into a graph database. Vulnerabilities can then be modeled as appropriate database queries. We show how to model common vulnerabilities and evaluate our framework in a large-scale study, spotting hundreds of vulnerabilities.DasWeb hat sich zu einem komplexen Netz aus hochinteraktiven Seiten und Anwendungen entwickelt, welches wir täglich zu kommerziellen und sozialen Zwecken einsetzen. Dementsprechend ist die Sicherheit von Webanwendungen von höchster Relevanz. Das automatisierte Auffinden von Sicherheitslücken ist ein anspruchsvolles, aber wichtiges Forschungsgebiet mit dem Ziel, Entwickler zu unterstützen und das Web sicherer zu machen. In dieser Arbeit nutzen wir statische Analysemethoden, um automatisiert Lücken in JavaScript- und PHP-Programmen zu entdecken. JavaScript ist clientseitig die wichtigste Sprache des Webs, während PHP auf der Serverseite am weitesten verbreitet ist. Im ersten Teil nutzen wir eine Reihe von Programmtransformationen und Informationsflussanalyse, um den JavaScript HeliosWahl-Client zu untersuchen. Helios ist ein modernesWahlsystem, welches auf konzeptueller Ebene eingehend analysiert wurde und dessen Implementierung als sehr sicher gilt. Wir enthüllen zwei schwere und bis dato unentdeckte Sicherheitslücken. Im zweiten Teil präsentieren wir ein Framework, das es Entwicklern ermöglicht, PHP Code auf frei modellierbare Schwachstellen zu untersuchen. Zu diesem Zweck konstruieren wir sogenannte Code-Property-Graphen und importieren diese anschließend in eine Graphdatenbank. Schwachstellen können nun als geeignete Datenbankanfragen formuliert werden. Wir zeigen, wie wir herkömmliche Schwachstellen modellieren können und evaluieren unser Framework in einer groß angelegten Studie, in der wir hunderte Sicherheitslücken identifizieren.CISP

(I) A Declarative Framework for ERP Systems(II) Reactors: A Data-Driven Programming Model for Distributed Applications

To those who can be swayed by argument and those who know they do not have all the answers This dissertation is a collection of six adapted research papers pertaining to two areas of research. (I) A Declarative Framework for ERP Systems: • POETS: Process-Oriented Event-driven Transaction Systems. The paper describes an ontological analysis of a small segment of the enterprise domain, namely the general ledger and accounts receivable. The result is an event-based approach to designing ERP systems and an abstract-level sketch of the architecture. • Compositional Specification of Commercial Contracts. The paper de-scribes the design, multiple semantics, and use of a domain-specific lan-guage (DSL) for modeling commercial contracts. • SMAWL: A SMAll Workflow Language Based on CCS. The paper show

UTPA Catalog 1994-1996

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PAU Catalog 1986-1988

https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/edinburglegacycatalogs/1052/thumbnail.jp

An efficient implementation of lazy functional programming languages based on the generalized intensional transformation

Αυτή η εργασία διερευνά θεωρητικά και πρακτικά ζητήματα της αλληλεπίδρασης μεταξύ (ευρέως γνωστών και νέων) τεχνικών μεταγλώττισης, όπως ο γενικευμένος νοηματικός μετασχηματισμός, ο μετασχηματισμός σε συναρτησιακά αντικείμενα, η ξεχωριστή μεταγλώττιση και η λάμβδα άρση. Ένας πειραματικός μεταγλωττιστής για τη γλώσσα Haskell (GIC), ο οποίος χρησιμοποιεί τις τεχνικές αυτές, δίνει τη δυνατότητα σε νέες ιδέες να υλοποιηθούν και να αξιολογηθούν μέσα σε ένα πρακτικό πλαίσιο. Ως μέρος αυτής της δουλειάς πραγματοποιήθηκαν διάφορες προσθήκες και αλλαγές στο μεταγλωττιστή, είτε προκειμένου να γίνει ο μεταγλωττιστής πληρέστερος είτε προκειμένου να βελτιωθεί ο τελικός κώδικας που παράγεται από το LAR back-end του μεταγλωττιστή.This dissertation investigates theoretical and practical issues of the integration between (well-known and novel) compilation techniques, such as the generalized intensional transformation, defunctionalization, separate compilation, and lambda lifting. An experimental Haskell compiler (GIC), which incorporates these techniques, serves as a workbench allowing ideas to be demonstrated and evaluated in a practical context. Within the scope of this work, several additions and changes were made to the compiler either towards enchancing the tool’s robustness or towards the optimization of the code generated by the compiler’s LAR back-end

PAU Catalog 1988-1990

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PAU Catalogue 1984-1986

https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/edinburglegacycatalogs/1051/thumbnail.jp