Study and teaching (Higher)

The purpose of this study is to understand culture as a factor in the motivation of heritage speakers of Spanish to study Spanish at the college level in South Florida. 59 participants divided into three groups of heritage speakers of Spanish at Florida Atlantic University at Boca Raton participated in a questionnaire survey, for a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Subjects were grouped according to the degree of involvement in Spanish-related activities at the college-level. The instrument was a combination of Likert-scale questions as well as open-ended questions aimed at clarifying or expanding on topics presented during the Likert-scale part of the questionnaire. The findings of this study indicate that most heritage speakers understood culture as a part of their identity. Students who were enrolled in Spanish classes were not just looking to expand their Spanish knowledge, but to re-connect and re-establish links with their cultural heritage. Finally, those who chose not to study Spanish cite as their most important reason a dislike for the Spanish language. The results revealed the following implications for the heritage speaker curriculum: the need to address the unique demographic make-up of Spanish heritage speakers in South Florida; the necessity for a consistent and reliable methodology for the identification of heritage speakers, and; the importance of instructors' sensitivity to regional and social dialect variation.

Hundreds of universities, colleges and institutions graduate students yearly with some form of culinary education. To date, limited research has been conducted to examine the perceived value of formal culinary education on industry career success from the perspective of those who conduct the majority of the hiring of culinary positions. This dissertation examined the perceived value of formal education in culinary arts and its relationship with industry success from the perspective of Canadian professional chefs.... Though the population for this study was Canadian professional chefs who were members of the Canadian Culinary Federation, the results of this study may be useful to both current and future culinarians who are pursuing or contemplating pursuing formal culinary education in other countries, especially the United States....Institutions that provide formal culinary education will find this important as they come under increased scrutiny from stakeholders to demonstrate the value of the investment students make in terms of tuition and associated costs.

Communication scholars are in disagreement over the presence of online public speaking courses in higher education. Despite limited research on the Online Public Speaking model, it is quickly replacing the traditional public speaking model in American colleges and universities. This study used Burkean Cluster-Agon Analysis to uncover core concepts from four contemporary public speaking textbooks used in various classroom models (traditional, online and hybrid). Concepts were then compared with traditional core concepts of early speech communication to determine if technology has influenced contemporary core concepts. Results determined that contemporary core concepts from three of the four public speaking textbooks reflected traditional core concepts of early speech communication. The fourth textbook revealed similar contemporary core concepts with expanded definitions to technologically mediated speech situations.

The purpose of this study was to examine the persistence of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students at a large multi-campus community college/baccalaureate degree-granting institution in South Florida. The study aimed to determine whether there was a relationship among a specific set of independent variables, background and defining variables (age, enrollment status, prior college education, gender, race, ethnicity, and marital status), academic integration variables (academic goal and first semester GPA), social integration variables (faculty interaction, college facilities and grounds, sense of community, college services, and student life), and environmental variables (family responsibilities, employment status, outside encouragement, and financial aid) and the dependent variable, EAP student persistence. The variables were extrapolated both from student academic transcripts and from an adapted version of the State University of New York (SUNY) Student Opinion Survey-Form A (ACT, 2006). T test and chi square analyses were performed. No relationship was found between any of the independent variables and the dependent variable. The thirteen respondents had high first semester GPA, favorable environmental support, and were socially integrated into the institution.

Famous mathematician Paul Erdèos conjectured the existence of infinite sequences of symbols where no two adjacent subsequences are permutations of one another. It can easily be checked that no such sequence can be constructed using only three symbols, but as few as four symbols are sufficient. Here, we expand this concept to include sequences that may contain 'do not know'' characters, called holes. These holes make the undesired subsequences more common. We explore both finite and infinite sequences. For infinite sequences, we use iterating morphisms to construct the non-repetitive sequences with either a finite number of holes or infinitely many holes. We also discuss the problem of using the minimum number of different symbols.