Web sites

The purpose of this study was to analyze the biology content, instructional strategies, and assessment methods of 100 biological science websites that were appropriate for Grade 12 educational purposes. For the analysis of each website, an instrument, developed from the National Science Education Standards (NSES) for Grade 12 Life Science coupled with criteria derived from the Web-based Inquiry (WBI) for Learning Science instrument (Bodzin, 2005) and other pertinent published educational literature, was utilized. The analysis focused on elucidating the appropriateness of the biology content, instructional strategies, and assessment tools of selected websites for facilitating the biological science education of Grade 12 students. Frequencies of agreement and disagreement of the content of each selected website with criteria included in the data collection instrument were used for alignment determination of the content of each website with the NSES. Chi-square tests were performed by Microsoft Excel to determine the statistical significance of differences of actual and expected 85% frequencies of alignment of the analyzed website parameters with indicators of alignment to NSES. Chi-square tests indicated that at a 0.05 level of significance there was an overall difference between the actual and expected 85% frequencies of alignment of biology content, instructional strategies and assessment methods with website indicators of alignment with the NSES (p < 0.05). Chi-square tests also indicated that there was a significant difference between the actual and expected frequencies of alignment of analyzed categories (biology content, instructional strategies, and assessment methods) of the sampled websites with website indicators of alignment with the NSES (p < 0.05).

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether statistically significant differences existed between high school Honors Physics websites and those of Advanced Placement (AP) Physics in terms of web-design, National Science Education Standards (NSES) Physics content, and NSES Science Process standards. The procedure began with the selection of 152 sites comprising two groups with equal sample sizes of 76 for Honors Physics and for Advanced Placement Physics. The websites used in the study were accumulated using the Google[TM] search engine. To find Honors Physics websites, the search words "honors physics high school" were entered as the query into the search engine. To find sites for Advanced Placement Physics, the query, "advanced placement physics high school," was entered into the search engine. The evaluation of each website was performed using an instrument developed by the researcher based on three attributes: Web-design, NSES Physics content, and NSES Science Process standards. A "1" was scored if the website was found to have each attribute, otherwise a "0" was given. This process continued until all 76 websites were evaluated for each of the two types of physics websites, Honors and Advanced Placement. Subsequently the data were processed using Excel functions and the SPSS statistical software program. The mean and standard deviation were computed individually for the three attributes under consideration. Three, 2-tailed, independent samples t tests were performed to compare the two groups of physics websites separately on the basis of Web Design, Physics Content, and Science Process. The results of the study indicated that there was only one statistically significant difference between high school Honors Physics websites and those of AP Physics.

There is a growing need to better understand what influences user behavior for developing comprehensive IT security systems. This study integrates two prominent bodies of research, the theory of planned behavior used to frame the factors influencing user behavior and individual level climate perceptions used to frame organizational environment influences, to develop a multidimensional IT security user behavior model. The model is then used as the basis for a survey based research to empirically test the hypotheses whether the perceived IT security climate of an organization significantly influences the users beliefs regarding the use of IT security. The intent of the study is to extend the theory of planned behavior and IT security literature by investigating salient IT security beliefs and environmental influences on those beliefs. First, anti-spyware was identified as an appropriate target IT security artifact, and then incorporated into a multi-phased research approach. Second, a semi-structured interview process was used to elicit salient beliefs regarding use of the IT security artifact. Third, IT security psychological climate was conceptualized based on the extant literature on organizational climate, safety climate and IT security in order to examine the organizational environment influences on these beliefs. Finally, a survey was used to collect data to validate the constructs and test the hypothesized relationships.

With the exponential increase of Internet usage and the embedding of multimedia content on the Web, some of the Internet resources remain inaccessible for people with disabilities. Particularly, people who are deaf or Hard of Hearing (HOH) experience inaccessible Web sites due to a lack of Closed Captioning (CC) for multimedia content on the Web, no sign language equivalents for the content on the Web, and an insufficient evaluation framework for determining if a Web page is accessible to the Hearing Impaired community. Several opportunities for accessing content needed to be rectified in order for the Hearing Impaired community to access the full benefits of the information repository on the Internet. The research contributions of this thesis are to resolve some of the Web accessibility problems being faced by the Hearing Impaired community. These objectives are to create an automated CC for the Web for multimedia content, to embed sign language equivalent for content available on the Web, to create a framework to evaluate Web accessibility for the Hearing Impaired community, and to create a social network for the Deaf community. To demonstrate the feasibility of fulfilling the above listed objectives several prototypes were implemented. These prototypes have been used in real life scenarios in order to have an objective evaluation of the proposed framework. Further, the implemented prototypes have had an impact to both the academic community and to the industry.