DePaul University

About: DePaul University is a education organization based out in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 5658 authors who have published 11562 publications receiving 295257 citations.

Teachers in the news: a critical analysis of one US newspaper's discourse on education, 2006–2007

Abstract: Public education discourse in the USA has been characterized by messages of crisis shaping education policies across national contexts. Education policy solutions target a lack of qualified teachers and insufficient oversight of teacher practice as central factors in the crisis, placing teacher identity as knowledgeable, authoritative professionals at the center of educational reform debates. Mainstream news media is a key site for education policy debate. I employ critical discourse analysis of education news published in a major US newspaper, uncovering how grammar patterns in news discourse situate teacher identity in relation to knowledge and authority. I demonstrate how the paper's discourse frames teacher identity in terms of Accountability and Caring and discuss how, in the context of larger economic and social policy debates, Accountability gains authority over caring to shape education policy. I call for teachers to integrate critical participation in public education debates as key element of pr...

Socioeconomic, family, and social stress correlates of adolescent antisocial and delinquent behavior.

Abstract: A total of 84 male and female adolescents were surveyed for SFS, family systemic functioning, and four types of social stress (Induced Transitions, Daily Hassles, Developmental Transitions, and Circumscribed Life Events) in relation to level of antisocial and delinquent behavior to determine the individual and cumulative effect of these psychosocial predictors. Univariate analyses indicated that perceived and Desired Family Cohesion, Daily Hassles, Circumscribed Life Events, and Developmental Transitions correlated significantly with reported antisocial and delinquent behavior, but SES and gender did not. Multivariate analyses affirmed that SES was of little use in understanding such behavior, at least among the general population, and that family functioning and social stress contributed interactively. Desired Cohesion was the most reliable indicator, with other family and stress variables' importance differing for males and females. These findings suggest that a family's ability to support each other and to harness that support to cope with transitions and stress during adolescence relates to a lower level of antisocial behavior.

The influence of invasive earthworms on indigenous fauna in ecosystems previously uninhabited by earthworms

Abstract: Recent studies on earthworm invasion of North American soils report dramatic changes in soil structure, nutrient dynamics and plant communities in ecosystems historically free of earthworms. However, the direct and indirect impacts of earthworm invasions on animals have been largely ignored. This paper summarizes the current knowledge on the impact of earthworm invasion on other soil fauna, vertebrates as well as invertebrates.

The interview in qualitative research.

Abstract: The interview is by far the most common method of qualitative data collection. Interviewing is a paradox. From a distance, it appears deceptively simple. Some studies, such as surveys, do require fairly basic skills. Yet scholarly qualitative nursing research often explores profound human experiences. Performing sensitive, focused, method-specific interviews is a skill requiring considerable knowledge and practice. In this article, the basics of successful research interviewing will be presented.

A maximum entropy web recommendation system: combining collaborative and content features

Abstract: Web users display their preferences implicitly by navigating through a sequence of pages or by providing numeric ratings to some items. Web usage mining techniques are used to extract useful knowledge about user interests from such data. The discovered user models are then used for a variety of applications such as personalized recommendations. Web site content or semantic features of objects provide another source of knowledge for deciphering users' needs or interests. We propose a novel Web recommendation system in which collaborative features such as navigation or rating data as well as the content features accessed by the users are seamlessly integrated under the maximum entropy principle. Both the discovered user patterns and the semantic relationships among Web objects are represented as sets of constraints that are integrated to fit the model. In the case of content features, we use a new approach based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to discover the hidden semantic relationships among items and derive constraints used in the model. Experiments on real Web site usage data sets show that this approach can achieve better recommendation accuracy, when compared to systems using only usage information. The integration of semantic information also allows for better interpretation of the generated recommendations.