This multi-sited ethnography analyzes challenges and opportunities in the design and development of digital media systems in the Office of Research and Development (ORD) at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Drawing heavily from interviews conducted over the course of three years, primarily with scientists at the ORD's…

The National Science Foundation's (NSF) broader impacts merit review criterion for research grant proposals has encountered persistent resistance from the scientific community. This study examined the factors that shape response to the broader impacts merit review criterion by investigating the effect of characteristics of NSF-funded researchers…

Physicians, nurses, and other clinical staff rely on alarms from various bedside monitors and sensors to alert when there is a change in the patient's clinical status, typically when urgent intervention is necessary. These alarms are usually embedded directly within the sensor or monitor and lacks the context of the patient's medical history and…

With tightening university budgets, never before has the activity level of research grant proposal writing been more intense. With increased proposal numbers, including for the National Science Foundation's (NSF) prestigious CAREER award, has also come increased competition and decreased funding rates. This dissertation has searched for successful…

A key challenge of the learning sciences is moving research results into practice. Educators on the front lines perceive little value in the outputs of education research and demand more "usable knowledge". This work explores the potential instead of usable artifacts to translate knowledge into practice, adding scientists as stakeholders…

The Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education (CASPiE) is a National Science Foundation funded initiative that seeks to introduce first- and second-year undergraduate students to research in their mainstream laboratory courses. To investigate the effects of this research-based curriculum, a longitudinal study was initiated at Purdue…

This study describes and tests a model of scientific inquiry as an evolving, organizational phenomenon. Arguments are derived from organizational ecology and evolutionary theory. The empirical subject of study is an "epistemic community" of scientists publishing on a research topic in physics: the string theoretic concept of…

For pediatric nurses, their competence in EBP is critical for providing high-quality care and maximizing patient outcomes. The purpose of this pilot study was to assess and refine a Web-based EBP educational intervention focused on improving EBP beliefs and competence in BSN-prepared pediatric bedside nurses, and to examine the feasibility,…

This dissertation contains several projects, each addressing different questions with different techniques. In chapter 1, I argue that they are unified thematically by their goal of "scaling up psycholinguistics"; they are all aimed at analyzing large data-sets using tools that reveal patterns to propose and test mechanism-neutral hypotheses about…

Translational research has proven to be a powerful process that bridges the gap between basic science and medical practice. The complexity of translational research is two-fold: integration of vast amount of information in disparate silos, and dissemination of discoveries to stakeholders with different interests. We designed and implemented a…

Fluctuation electron microscopy (FEM) has been used to study the nanoscale order in various amorphous materials. The method is explicitly sensitive to 3- and 4-body atomic correlation functions in amorphous materials; this is sufficient to establish the existence of structural order on the nanoscale, even when the radial distribution function…

This dissertation starts from the premise that World War II changed Soviet ideas about manhood. The Soviet Union lost twenty-seven million combatants and civilians in World War II--twenty million of whom were men. Delineating, performing, negotiating, and resisting a variety of cultural ideas about manliness shaped Soviet militarism and ideology…

Attempts to bring authentic science into the K-16 classroom have led to the use of sociocultural theories of learning, particularly apprenticeship, to frame science education research. Science educators have brought apprenticeship to science classrooms and have brought students to research laboratories in order to gauge its benefits. The…

Virtual Research Environments (VRE) are electronic meeting places for interaction among scientists created by combining software tools and computer networking. Virtual teams are enjoying increased importance in the conduct of scientific research because of the rising cost of traditional scientific scholarly communication, the growing importance of…

The scientific foundation in firearm and tool mark identification is that each firearm/tool produces a signature of identification (striation/impression) that is unique to that firearm/tool, and through examining the individual striations/impressions; the signature can be positively identified to the firearm/tool that produced it. There is no set…