A Study of the use of computational concept mapping situated in an authentic learning context (CCMAL) in enhancing English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ metacognition in reading comprehension classes

This thesis described a convergent mixed method research which aims to investigate the influence of computational concept mapping situated in an authentic learning context (CCMAL) on students’ metacognition in English as a foreign language (EFL) reading comprehension classes. A hundred first year English non-majored students were invited for this study. The students participated a two-hour session on a weekly basis during a seven-week reading course. While the fifty students of the experimental group (EG) were exposed to CCMAL, the fifty students of the control group (CG) were exposed to a traditional teaching environment during the reading course. Data was collected through the pre and post-test on reading comprehension, pre and post-survey on metacognition, students’ computational concept maps collected in week 1, week 4 and week 7 of the reading course, weekly learning journals and classroom observation, and individual interviews after the reading course. The study found that the students of the EG outperformed those of the CG in the post-test on reading comprehension. In terms of reading comprehension skills, data showed that CCMAL had positive influence on the students’ use of literal skills, interpretive and inferential skills. The study also found that CCMAL had a positive influence on the students’ metacognition. Specifically, CCMAL was found to have the greatest influence on students’ scores on monitoring followed by evaluation. However, there were no significant differences on the students’ scores on planning. The utilisation of CCMAL positively influence students’ use of metacognitive strategies, such as planning, monitoring and evaluation. Furthermore, the study discovered that the students’ CCMAL learning experience was influenced by factors as the relevance between the reading text topics and the students’ experiences, the students’ individual differences, and the affordances of Cmap which was the concept mapping software in this study. In conclusion, this study found that the use of CCMAL had positive influence on students’ metacognition and reading comprehension. It is recommended that CCMAL be widely used in reading comprehension classes to enhance students’ reading achievements. Moreover, it recommended further research into concept mapping related topics for improving the quality of English education in Vietnamese context

Intravenous Administration of Iron Oxide Nanoparticles in the Chicken Model

To be used in health care, the safety and effectiveness of nanoparticles needs to be tested in a living organism. The objective of this project was to develop the chicken as a convenient animal model to examine tissue targeting of intravenously (i.v.)-injected iron oxide (IO) nanoparticles. In Experiment 1, different doses of IO-COOH were i.v. injected into chickens; blood was collected at 0, 5, 15, 30, and 60 minutes post-injection; liver, spleen, lung, and kidney were collected after the last blood collection. For Experiment 2, IO-COOH and IO-PEG were i.v. injected into chickens; blood and the organs were collected at 0, 5, 15, 30, and 60 minutes postinjection. For both Experiments, IO concentration in blood was examined by iron test kit and fixed tissue sections were stained with H/E and Prussian blue stain. Portions of organs from Experiment 2 were frozen and used for preparation of homogenates and tissue-sections for immunohistochemical and/or iron-staining. For Experiment 3, the dermis of growing feathers (GF) was injected with mouse-IgG antigen (Ag); 6 hours later, IO-Ab (IO-COOH conjugated with chicken-antibody specific for mouse IgG), IO-COOH, or IO-PEG were i.v. injected into the chickens; one Ag-injected GF and one uninjected GF per chicken was collected at 0, 0.1, 0.5, 1, 2, 24, and 48 hours post-i.v.-injection; organs were collected at three and seven days post-i.v.- injection; and tissue sections of GFs and organs were stained with Prussian blue stain. Together, results of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 revealed that IO-nanoparticles were taken up quickly by macrophages in liver and spleen, whereby IO-PEG was taken up at lower levels and slower pace by phagocytic cells when compared to IO-COOH. Experiment 3 was not successful in demonstrating delivery of intravenously injected IO nanoparticles to antigen-injected GFs. This may be due to the low dose of nanoparticles injected as well as the antigen-antibody system used. This is the first report describing organ-distribution and uptake of i.v. injected IO nanoparticles in the chicken system, setting the stage for using the avian model to test in vivo targeting effectiveness of nanoparticles

On the Governance of Innovation: Institutional Ownership vs. Stock Price

Firms can change their outstanding shares to manage their stock price levels. Those with lower stock prices tend to attract more speculative trading, which causes higher price volatility and may force their managers to excessively focus on short-term earnings at the expense of R&D and other long-term projects. Thus, I hypothesize that keeping high stock price levels allows firms to (i) limit speculative traders’ influences on stock prices and thus mitigate investor short-termism, and (ii) enhance R&D productivity. Indeed, I find that high-priced firms are less likely to cut R&D to reverse an earnings decline, less likely to fire their CEOs, and have more innovation. All these findings are robust after controlling for institutional ownership, a factor that has been shown in the literature to have a correlation with share price and also have a significant impact on R&D policies and innovation. For robustness checks, I examine stock splits, which allow mangers to re-set their stock price levels, and IPOs in which managers set an offering price range before shares are publicly traded. Consistent with my hypothesis, I discover that innovative firms are less likely to split their stocks, and that innovation declines after firms split their stocks. Furthermore, IPO firms that set higher offering prices, not those that attract more institutional ownership, have more future innovation. Thus, the results imply that, rather than being “forced” or “assured” by institutional investors to innovate as the extant literature suggests, managers of innovative firms actively support high stock price levels to foster innovation

Investigating the Language Learning Potential of Data-driven Teaching Materials on Source Use for College Students in a Writing Course

This report documents the results of the investigation into the language learning potential of data-driven teaching materials on source use for undergraduates in a college-level writing course at a large land-grant Midwestern university. The investigation is a part of a large project which comprises three major stages: linguistic analyses on source use of 149 documented essays written by college students, development of data-driven materials on source use, and evaluation of the materials. The data-driven teaching materials consist of a corpus-based web tool and a computer-delivered online lesson on source use. The corpus-based web tool provides examples of citing sentences in the collection of 79 A-graded essays as concordance lines which help illustrate different features of source use, and displays graphs showing frequency distributions of citing sentences across sub-categories of each feature of source use. The computer-delivered online lesson contains two major tasks each of which has questions that guide students to observe the use of a feature of source use in the corpus-based web tool. This report summarizes key findings of the implementation of the materials in a naturalistic instructional setting. These findings focus on the language learning potential of the materials which concerns two major aspects: (1) whether the pedagogical design characteristics of the materials led to the students’ hypothesized learning processes (i.e., noticing and focusing on features of source use), and (2) whether the students gained any knowledge, skills, and awareness about source use after the training