The Covid-19 global pandemic saw many college and university faculty scrambling to quickly transition their on-site courses online owing to various city, state, and national lockdowns and social distancing efforts in order to stem the spread of the disease. Nearly 90 percent of institutions had to resort to some sort of online or remote learning in order to accommodate continued student learning amongst the lockdowns and required social distancing that was implemented. Similar methods were implemented for the following summer and fall semesters of 2020, bleeding into the spring 2021 semester. These restrictions meant that faculty could not teach their courses wholly, or in some circumstances at all, in an on-site delivery method. Instead, many higher education faculty members had to make the shift to teaching their courses completely online, or in a mixed method of delivery, on-site and online. The purpose of this study was to determine if learner-centered teaching was a key component of the quick transition of on-site to remote teaching in the Spring and Fall 2020 semesters and how this information may provide insight for future online course development.

Few studies bridge workplace engagement and employee voice with internal communication. This analysis builds upon both the crucial concept of employee engagement and its implications for communication professionals and leaders. Further, it calls for more strategic integration of upward employee voice in internal communications. By examining factors that support communication (in two directions) and especially upward employee voice, researchers examine a case study of an intranet site at a major academic research institute. Factors that support employee expression are compared with data streams from both user survey and website analytics. The results point to voice-inducing techniques include projecting critical mass, fostering trust, and emphasizing intranet usefulness and rewards. By enriching workplace communications, voice can strengthen the employee’s ability to contribute, connect leaders with a source for direct feedback, and help employers be more responsive and nimbler.

Since 1939, Batman has been a staple character of the comic book industry. He has been used throughout the last 80 years as a conduit through which to portray mental health content. This thesis analyzes how mental health content has changed in Batman comic books from 1939 to today. Based on existing research, I identified that mental health content has been present in Batman comic books for as long as they have existed. According to my research results, content can be traced back to the Golden Age of comic books (1939-1956), with a decrease in content in the Silver Age of comic books (1956-1970) due to the emergence of the Comics Code Authority. In the Bronze Age of comic books (1970-1986), mental health content reached its peak. In the Modern Age of comic books (1986-Present), content once again dropped, but not as low as in the Golden and Silver Ages. Identifying how mental health representation has changed since 1939 can help researchers to better understand how comic books can be used to communicate with readers.

Contemporary cities are physical and virtual. This thesis describes the findings of a mixed-methods study concerning visual images of the city in the urban Northeast of the United States. I ground these approaches in existing literature concerning digital media, visual narrative, genre ecology, urban planning, and virtual places. The first part of the study analyzes the results of a survey in which 150 people responded to questions about social media use and the relationships between image type and the functions of social media in urban contexts. The second part of the study analyzes the results of coding one year of visual images tweeted by @CambMA, the municipal Twitter feed for the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. These approaches required the development of new tools for analyzing visual communication and genre moves in specific media contexts. My research suggests that specific image types are suited for specific media functions in the context of visual communication in virtual urban environments and that some image types are especially effective in capturing and expressing the city. These findings provide potential strategies for municipal social media channels to consider in terms of how they communicate with their audiences.

This project presents a mixed methods analysis of proposal editing in sponsored research administration at U.S.-based universities. As sponsored research funding has become increasingly competitive, universities have sought to support their faculty and research infrastructure by offering proposal editing services as a component of the proposal development process. However, the relative newness of proposal and research development as fields, combined with prior studies that show a general lack of research into proposal editing and faculty perceptions of proposal development resources, mean that these areas can benefit from additional focused research. This study aimed to answer two primary research questions: How do universities approach and offer proposal editing as a component of the proposal development process, and what are faculty reactions to editing services as a resource during that same process? The study consisted of two components: a survey of 32 faculty members' perceptions of editing services as an element of their proposal development, and interviews with ten research administrators and editors to discuss how editing services function within the proposal preparation process. Despite a small sample size and disciplinary homogeneity, the survey results showed that demand for institutionally provided editing services varies by research field and activity level, but that faculty showed noticeable interest in at least having the option of an editor reviewing their proposals prior to submission. Interview participants agreed that faculty who are new or early in their careers, along with faculty who speak English as a second language, are especially interested in receiving editing services. Editors themselves provide various levels of edit, dependent on their own backgrounds, editing timelines, and faculty receptiveness to the edits. When provided, edits focus on compliance and grammar, but deeper edits help academic styles of writing transition into more persuasive grant writing styles to strategically position the proposal. As proposal editing services become more widespread as a way of supporting faculty and increasingly proposal quality and success, universities should implement editing services according to faculty demand and needs. Careful implementation can ensure that editing services fully support faculty while making a meaningful impact on a university's research development strategies and goals.

There is a gap between today's scientific advances and their application--between what is known and what is actually being done. This gap occurs because of the process of knowledge translation required to digest research findings for policymakers and practitioners. Studies have repeatedly shown that because of this "know-do" gap, approximately one-half of patients in the United States and Europe are not receiving care according to the most recent scientific evidence. Children are a medically unique and underserved population that stands to be most affected by this gap. Therefore, in this study, the research-practice gap in the pediatric field was calculated and discussed in the context of knowledge brokers, who facilitate opportunities for knowledge translation. Article mentions from the journal Pediatrics were identified in policy documents and analyzed for the years 2010, 2013, and 2016 with the use of the Altmetric platform as a quantitative means of identifying patterns and drawing conclusions about the knowledge translation gap in pediatrics. Altmetric is a bibliometric tool that offers viable insights into the types of impact not covered with traditional methods of citation analysis. The expert policymaking bodies that cited the Pediatrics articles in their policy documents were coded, categorized, and subcategorized to clarify how and where Pediatrics research is ultimately being used to create health policy and to discover whether the gap is similar or different between the various types of policymaking organizations. This allowed the quantitative findings to be nested within a qualitative context. It took a mean of 7.1 years for research to reach the point of policy uptake for practitioners, with a range of 0-32.8 years. There were more international policy mentions than U.S. mentions, but information made its way through the knowledge translation process more quickly in the United States than it did elsewhere. In fact, nearly 40% of articles were cited in policy fewer than five years after original publication. The gap in pediatrics is thus significantly shorter than the 17-year average reported in the literature. However, knowledge brokerage activities performed by technical communicators are continually needed to build links between research, policy applications, and practice.

My study examined Automated Writing Evaluation tools (AWE) and their role within writing instruction. This examination was framed as a comparison of 4 AWE tools and the different outcomes in the Writing Program Administrators “Outcomes Statement for First Year Composition” (the OS). I also reviewed studies that identify feedback as an effective tool within composition instruction as well as literature related to the growth of AWE and the 2 different ways that these programs are being utilized: to provide scoring and to generate feedback. My research focused on the feedback generating component of AWE and their relationship with helping students to meet the outcomes outlined in the OS. To complete this analysis, I coded the OS, using its outcomes as a reliable indicator of the perspectives of the academic community regarding First Year Composition (FYC). This coding was applied to text associated with two different kinds of feedback related AWEs. Two of the AWE used in this study facilitated human feedback using analytical properties: Writerkey and Eli Review. While the other 2 generated automated feedback: WriteLab and PEG Writing Scholar. I also reviewed instructional documents associated with each AWE and used the coding to compare the features described in each text with the different outcomes in the OS. The most frequently occurring coding from the feedback was related to Rhetorical Knowledge and other outcomes associated with revision, while the most common codes from the instructional documents were associated with feedback and collaboration. My research also revealed none of these AWE were capable of addressing certain outcomes, these were mostly related to activities outside of the actual process of composing, like the act of reading and the various writing mediums.

As an outlet of communication between internet users, digital social media has created opinionated engagement between people that have similar and often contrasting views, just like those in face-to-face communication (Mckenna & Bargh, 2014). The problem is that these digital conversations occur in a synthetic environment, causing users to develop alternative psychological patterns of engagement (Lauren & Hsieh, 2014), that could potentially push them to inadvertently or unknowingly create and participate in negative social interaction with others. The purpose of this study was to determine and assess the needs of a writing heuristic for social media participants to use in engagement with others to increase coherency, civility, and engagement response in content. Research explored existing literature on engagement behavior in digital social media and computer-mediated communication (CMC) and was then used in qualitative sentiment analysis of business-to-consumer social media environments, aiming to recognize the needs in developing a social media writing heuristic. This research found that such heuristic should prompt and advise users to remove ambiguity within engagement practices, encouraging the implementation of salient social markers and nonverbal cues in text. Social media users should also be prompted to create familiarity with others through the posing of messages in an emotional frame that is aligned with their audience’s emotional attitudes, increasing persuasive argumentation and discussion. As well, users should be prompted to thoroughly understand the issues in discussion and follow dynamics to create productive engagement, while avoiding engagement with negative commentary.