The bacterium Pseudomonas syringae affects different crops worldwide. In the
Willamette Valley of Oregon, P. syringae causes bacterial canker in sweet cherry,
severely limiting its production. High grafting of susceptible sweet cherry cultivars to
resistant rootstocks is practiced in the Willamette Valley to reduce incidence of this
disease. The research...
This thesis undertakes an examination of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, as a layering of genres. A futuristic dystopia that imagines late twentieth-century America as having fallen into neo-Puritanism and totalitarianism following widespread infertility and violence, The Handmaid’s Tale invites contemplation of various forms of fundamentalism, radicalism, and...
The movement to reform mathematics teaching and learning in schools began in the 1980s. After dedicating vast resources to support reform efforts since then, the transition to improve mathematics teaching and learning in schools has not occurred. In the majority of mathematics classrooms teachers still rely on traditional teaching strategies...
The purpose of this study was to investigate Peer Collaborative
Mentoring (PCM) as a professional development model for international
graduate teaching assistants at an American university. Data were gathered
from interviews and observations of three American peer mentors
(Intracultural Peer Mentors/IAPMs), five Chinese Graduate Teaching
Assistants (Intercultural Peer Mentors/IEPMs), and...
There has been little prior research reporting strategy usage in end-user problem solving, and even less using gender as a factor. Without this type of information, enduser programming systems cannot know the “target” at which to aim, if they are to support male and female end-user programmers’ debugging. As a...
End users' programs are fraught with errors, costing companies millions of dollars. One reason may be that researchers and tool designers have not yet focused on end-user debugging strategies. To investigate this possibility, this dissertation presents eight empirical studies and a new strategy-based end-user debugging tool for Excel, called StratCel....
How might capabilities for algorithm animation be seamlessly integrated into a programming language that is both visual and declarative? Until now, visual programming language researchers have not attempted to answer that question, making the fruits of algorithm animation available only to users of textual programming languages. Users of visual programming...
Although the need for gender-inclusivity in software itself is gaining attention among both SE researchers and SE practitioners, and methods have been published to help, little has been reported on how to make such methods work in real-world settings. For example, how do busy software practitioners use such methods in...
Complex information environments are often organized as hierarchies. However, computational models of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) have almost entirely ignored this fact. Models and tools for predicting programmer navigations have ignored people’s foraging behavior across hierarchies —called hierarchical foraging. Without modeling hierarchical foraging, our ability to build tools to support...
Software history and version control systems (VCS) are an important source of information for developers. This entails the need for a principled understanding of developers’ information seeking in VCS, both for improving existing tools as well as understanding requirements for new tools. However, it is only recently that researchers have...