Unboxing the Casket: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Limoges Enameled Jewel Box in the Saint Louis Art Museum

From the Washington University Senior Honors Thesis Abstracts (WUSHTA), 2017. Published by the Office of Undergraduate Research. Joy Zalis Kiefer, Director of Undergraduate Research and Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences; Lindsey Paunovich, Editor; Helen Human, Programs Manager and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences Mentor: William Wallac

GPT as a Baseline for Recommendation Explanation Texts

In this work, we establish a baseline potential for how modern model-generated text explanations of movie recommendations may help users, and explore what different components of these text explanations that users like or dislike, especially in contrast to existing human movie reviews. We found that participants gave no significantly different rankings between movies, nor did they give significantly different individual quality scores to reviews of movies that they had never seen before. However, participants did mark reviews as significantly better when they were movies they had seen before. We also explore specific aspects of movie review texts that participants marked as important for each quality. Overall, we establish that modern LLMs are a promising source of recommendation explanations, and we intend on further exploring personalizable text explanations in the future.Comment: 8 pages, 4 tables/figures. Accepted in current form to IntRS@RecSys2023 workshop. Intending on making noticeable in-place revisions on ArXiv for future submission, including potential title chang

Effect of Teaching Method on Students’ Perceptions of Instructor Attributes

A long-standing and substantial body of research indicates that an active and/or cooperative teaching method may be more effective in terms of instructional outcomes than a traditional lecture approach. A separate body of research demonstrates that effective instructors have similar personality traits and professional attributes, at least insofar as students perceive those traits and attributes. This article describes a study that merges these two areas of inquiry to explore whether the use of different teaching methods by one instructor affects student perceptions of that instructor’s traits and attributes

Financial Literacy of College Students: Focus on First-Generation Students

The aim of the present study is to understand the financial literacy of first-generation college students and their level of interest in financial education. College students, especially the first-generation ones, need sufficient exposure to finance education since they will need to have sophisticated financial skills after they start their professional careers and embark on a new stage in their lives. These skills will help them manage their income from a new job, investment and retirement options, and student loans. We use a convergent mixed-methods design in this research. A survey was conducted to help explore the interest of first-generation students in finance education and their current knowledge about financial issues. We also conducted interviews with personal finance industry experts to obtain further information on the need for financial education for college students. The results have important implications on improving financial literacy for first-generation college students

Impact of Community Engagement on Students’ College Experience

Past research has shown student engagement with the college community provides a valuable experience during the student’s college career. Community engagement not only helps make college life a more pleasant one, but could potentially help develop a more well-rounded individual. This study aims to explore the issue of engaging college students with the local community, with a focus on simple approaches to helping make stronger connections between the two sides. We adopt a real-life case study approach to explore students’ experiences after they are introduced to some unique aspects of the community. Two programs, one on local business history and the other on current local businesses, were designed to familiarize students, especially new college students, with the community. The results of the study have implications for student engagement programs, acculturation of international students, students’ learning experiences, and students’ professional growth

An Interactive UI to Support Sensemaking over Collections of Parallel Texts

Scientists and science journalists, among others, often need to make sense of a large number of papers and how they compare with each other in scope, focus, findings, or any other important factors. However, with a large corpus of papers, it's cognitively demanding to pairwise compare and contrast them all with each other. Fully automating this review process would be infeasible, because it often requires domain-specific knowledge, as well as understanding what the context and motivations for the review are. While there are existing tools to help with the process of organizing and annotating papers for literature reviews, at the core they still rely on people to serially read through papers and manually make sense of relevant information. We present AVTALER, which combines peoples' unique skills, contextual awareness, and knowledge, together with the strength of automation. Given a set of comparable text excerpts from a paper corpus, it supports users in sensemaking and contrasting paper attributes by interactively aligning text excerpts in a table so that comparable details are presented in a shared column. AVTALER is based on a core alignment algorithm that makes use of modern NLP tools. Furthermore, AVTALER is a mixed-initiative system: users can interactively give the system constraints which are integrated into the alignment construction process.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figure

The Effect of Fancy Brand Names on Brand Perception and Brand Attitude of Young Consumers

Brand naming, as part of brand management effort, is one of the most crucial marketing decisions. Young consumers’ brand perception and attitude may be especially influenced by brand names. The purpose of this research is to explore whether fancy brand names have an impact on young consumers’ attitude toward brands and the associated purchase intentions. Experiments were conducted to explore whether fancy names lead to more positive feelings about the products compared with generic names, and if such feelings are associated with purchase intentions. The research results have implications about marketing practice involving young consumers in the case of brand naming

Promoting Business Schools: A Content Analysis of Business Schools Magazines

Among the efforts made to attract students and supporters, many business schools use brochures or magazines to build and maintain relationships with alumni and other stakeholders, to attract new students, and to improve their overall visibility. These promotional materials have various contents, such as message from the dean, academic programs, student achievements, or faculty and staff news, among others. We perform a content analysis on the extent to which the content is utilized by AACSB-accredited business schools in the United States. The study provides an initial picture of self-promotion of business schools using school magazines. The result will increase our knowledge in the area of higher education marketing and help inform marketing professionals in business schools and colleges or universities in general