Digital Commons Network^™

Using A Decision-Making Process To Determine Where To Relocate A Newer Dual Language Program, Laura C. Weiss

Doctor of Education (EdD)

This qualitative research study used culturally responsive protocols to provide stakeholders in a small rural community access to a district’s decision-making process. Community stakeholders were tasked with making a recommendation for relocating its dual language program (DLP). The committee identified three themes to guide their decision making: (a) keep the school in one location, (b) maintain the culture, and (c) provide access to resources. Despite intentional protocols used, barriers remained that impacted committee members’ level of engagement and participation. Key factors contributing to a lack of engagement included insufficient time and lack of trust. Additionally, native Spanish speakers (NSS) and …

Context-Driven Behavior: Improved Contextual Reasoning For Context-Aware Agents, Christian L. Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Over the last three decades, a considerable amount of research has been dedicated to improving an artificial agent's ability to recognize and deal effectively with context. In this paper, I discuss a framework for a novel form of contextual reasoning. Unlike existing contextual reasoning frameworks, which allow an agent to apply its contextual knowledge after it is operating in an instance of a known context, the model I discuss allows an agent to reason about context proactively. With a proactive model, an agent forecasts the future contexts it will encounter, then takes steps to ensure its behaviors are appropriate for …

Human-Centered Technologies For Inclusive Collection And Analysis Of Public-Generated Data, Mahmood Jasim

Doctoral Dissertations

The meteoric rise in the popularity of public engagement platforms such as social media, customer review websites, and public input solicitation efforts strives for establishing an inclusive environment for the public to share their thoughts, ideas, opinions, and experiences. Many decisions made at a personal, local, or national scale are often fueled by data generated by the public. As such, inclusive collection, analysis, sensemaking, and utilization of pubic-generated data are crucial to support the exercise of successful decision-making processes. However, people often struggle to engage, participate, and share their opinions due to inaccessibility, the rigidity of traditional public engagement methods, …

Understanding And Modeling Drivers’ En-Route Diversion Behavior During Congestion, Mohammad Shapouri

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the field of transportation, traffic assignment models primarily have been used to forecast driver route preferences, translating their choices into traffic flow patterns across networks. These models are grounded in distinct behavioral theories and strive to explain how drivers navigate routes based on network features and personal tendencies. Using an aggregation approach, conventional traffic assignment models distribute demand among paths, considering utility and attractiveness. Despite their prevalent use in transportation planning and operations, the fundamental behavioral assumptions of these models have rarely been thoroughly explored. This gap is further compounded by their limited consideration of real-time adjustments and choices …

Student Perceptions Of The Nonmedical Use Of Prescription Stimulants And Preferences For Health Education, Ana Gutierrez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nonmedical use of prescription stimulants (NMUPS) for the purpose of improving academic performance is a growing concern among the college population. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in 2020, rates of NMUPS were highest among 18–25-year-olds attending college. There are several adverse health outcomes associated with NMUPS, including cardiovascular damage, seizures, psychosis, and dependence. Given the rising rates of NMUPS in this group, and the negative health outcomes associated with NMUPS, it is vital to employ health education that allows students to make informed decisions about behaviors that impact their health. The purpose of this study …

Understanding And Modeling Drivers’ En-Route Diversion Behavior During Congestion, Mohammad Shapouri

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the field of transportation, traffic assignment models primarily have been used to forecast driver route preferences, translating their choices into traffic flow patterns across networks. These models are grounded in distinct behavioral theories and strive to explain how drivers navigate routes based on network features and personal tendencies. Using an aggregation approach, conventional traffic assignment models distribute demand among paths, considering utility and attractiveness. Despite their prevalent use in transportation planning and operations, the fundamental behavioral assumptions of these models have rarely been thoroughly explored. This gap is further compounded by their limited consideration of real-time adjustments and choices …

The Relative Impact Of Anecdotal And Statistical Evidence On Covid-19 Vaccine Intentions., Kiran Misra

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study investigated the relative impact of anecdotal and statistical safety evidence on the perceived likelihood of unvaccinated friends or relatives experiencing severe adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccination. This study also investigated the relative impact of anecdotal and statistical evidence on an individualâ??s intention to encourage unvaccinated friends and relatives to talk with healthcare providers about COVID-19 vaccination. Three hundred and fifty-nine participants were randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions. In each condition, I manipulated the presence of base rate evidence (present, absent) that supported the safety of COVID-19 vaccination; I also manipulated the presence of anecdotal evidence …

A Survey On Online Matching And Ad Allocation, Ryan Lee

Theses

One of the classical problems in graph theory is matching. Given an undirected graph, find a matching which is a set of edges without common vertices. In 1990s, Richard Karp, Umesh Vazirani, and Vijay Vazirani would be the first computer scientists to use matchings for online algorithms [8]. In our domain, an online algorithm operates in the online setting where a bipartite graph is given. On one side of the graph there is a set of advertisers and on the other side we have a set of impressions. During the online phase, multiple impressions will arrive and the objective of …

Implementation Of A Patient Decision Aid To Facilitate The Selection Of A Pre-Test Genetic Counseling Model, Taylor Berry, Valerie Schimmenti, Magan Trottier

Human Genetics Theses

Genetic testing is being increasingly offered to patients that have a personal or family history of cancer. This has led to a higher demand of patients needing to meet with genetic counselors (GCs) for pre-test counseling and education, which has led to increased wait times for appointments. In order to ameliorate the long wait times patients now face, alternatives such as providing patient education through a series of online educational materials are now being offered. Patient decision aids (PtDAs) are tools created by a team of healthcare professionals that assist patients in making important decisions regarding their healthcare. For this …

Increasing High School Students’ Awareness Of The Risks Of Gang Violence, Kyla Castaneda

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The present study experimentally informed the effects of high school students of not being aware of the impact of gangs and gang violence. The study consisted of 23 participants, ages from 13 years of age to 15 years of age. All in which are highs school freshman in a freshman seminar course located in a small community know for gang violence. Participants were lead with a two day curriculum with an introduction to the risks of gang violence and how to coping with gang involvement. Furthermore, adolescents with higher exposure to gang violence were able to share relatable experiences in …

The Closing Of One Black Box, The Opening Of Another: A Self-Study Of How An Instructional Coach Makes Decisions, Andromeda L. Hightower

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Despite the efforts of traditional and alternative teacher education programs (i.e. pre-service teacher education) in the United States, teachers frequently report feeling unprepared by the time they begin teaching full time in the classroom. Teachers with low levels of self-efficacy are correlated with lower job satisfaction, higher levels of stress and anxiety, and lower student achievement gains in the classroom. To assist with ameliorating these gaps, schools, districts, and private distributors provide training opportunities for teachers once they have begun the job (i.e. in-service teacher training) in the form of teacher professional development. Mainstream professional development approaches are traditionally simplistic …

Advance Care Planning: An Evidence-Based Practice Project, Gabrielle Alanna Harvey

Evidence-Based Practice Project Reports

Advance care planning (ACP) is a topic that can be difficult for patients and providers to discuss due to lack of time, knowledge, communication skills, and discomfort surrounding the subject (Barkley et al., 2019; Hafid et al., 2021; Halpert et al., 2022; Marin, 2022). Delayed or absent ACP discussions may lead to nonbeneficial care, increased healthcare costs, end of life suffering and increased post-death family distress (Halpert et al., 2022; O’Hanlon et al., 2018). The purpose of this evidence-based practice (EBP) project was to increase the discussions and documentation regarding ACP in a family practice setting. The PICOT question guiding …

A Study Of The Impact Of Data Intelligence On Software Delivery Performance, Yongdong Dong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With the rise of big data and artificial intelligence, data intelligence has gradually become the focus of academia and industry. Data intelligence has two obvious characteristics: big data drive and application scene drive. More and more enterprises extract valuable patterns contained in data with prediction and decision analysis methods and technologies such as large-scale data mining, machine learning and deep learning and use them to improve the management and decision in complex practice, so as to promote changes of new business modes, organizational structures and even business strategies, and improve the operational efficiency of organizations. However, there are few studies …

Sex, Drugs, And Secondary Confessions, Kylene Street

Theses

Jailhouse informant testimony in the form of secondary confessions is one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions in the United States. Often, informants receive incentives in exchange for their testimony. This is the first study to incorporate incentives other than reduced sentences. In two experiments, employing a multigroup comparison with 4 levels of the independent variable (Incentive: Legal, Illegal, No Incentive, No Informant), this study explored the influence the type of incentive received by the informant had on jury decision making. The results of Experiment 1 indicated neither perceptions of the informant nor verdict decision making were influenced by …

The Impact Of Framing Effects And User Role On Analytics Dashboard User Experience, Carly Gray

Theses

This study considered the design and formatting of data visualizations as framing effect catalysts among leader and subordinate Air Force personnel. Gain and loss framing was applied to dashboard prototypes by incorporating colors with known population stereotypes (i.e., red and green) and emphasizing completed or remaining tasks. Users’ performance, preferences, and risk tendency were measured in response. Risk-aversion, performance and preference were expected to be higher in the loss frame for leaders and higher in the gain frame for subordinates. Study results did not fully support the involvement of role with framing effects, and main effects were observed for some …

Exploring Leaders' Sensemaking Of Emergent Global Norms For Open Science: A Mixed Methods Discourse Analysis Of Unesco’S Multistakeholder Initiative, Lisa Cuevas Shaw

Theses and Dissertations

In November 2021, all 193 United Nations Member States adopted the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Recommendation on Open Science (UNESCO, 2021a), which signaled a shared commitment to globally recognized standards for open science. However, as with other normative instruments established by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) such as UNESCO, the ways in which local, national, and regional leaders will implement the recommendation can and will vary (Finnemore, 1993). Top-down and bottom-up coordination across international stakeholders in the research system is critical for the framework to be effective in driving global policy implementation and enabling sustained research culture change. …

Reasonable Accommodation Requests: Fair Evaluation And The Role Of Decision Makers, Mona Hawkins

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine fair evaluations and the role of the decision-makers in the reasonable accommodation process. In many instances, fair evaluations in the reasonable accommodation process which disabled employees experienced, were challenging and looked upon as perceived discrimination in decision-making process. A review of the literature identified further clarification and insight into educating decision-makers about the disability laws, and then altering their behavior in granting reasonable accommodations. The literature progressed with discussions surrounding why every qualified disabled employee should be accommodated as long as the reasonable accommodation is not an undue hardship to the …

Exploring The Intersection Of Self-Talk And Decision-Making, Chris M. Lewis

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study explored the intersection of self-talk and decision-making. Leaders in today’s world face increasing volume and complexity of decisions. Using a phenomenological approach to understanding the experiences of people managers in the United States, this research conducted interviews to understand the role self-talk plays in a people manager’s decision-making processes and to what extent self-talk influences people managers to avoid making a decision. Findings suggest that self-talk is a foundational component of decision-making. A manager’s awareness of how to best leverage and manage self-talk may increase an organization’s capacity for strong decision-making.

Types Of Questions Teachers Ask To Engage Students In Making Sense Of A Student Contribution, Nishat B. Alam

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In the student-centered classroom, a teacher’s interpretation and response to student mathematical contributions plays an important role to shape and direct students’ opportunities for sense-making. This research used a scenario-based survey questionnaire to examine what types of questions middle and high school mathematics teachers indicate they would ask to engage students in making sense of a high-leverage student mathematical contribution and their reasoning about why particular questions are or are not productive. From the results, it could be concluded that teachers asked more productive questions after seeing a set of possible questions. Their beliefs about the productivity of the questions …

Let It Burn: A Case Study On The Risk Management Practices Of Burning Man Project, Ethan S. De La Torre

Experience Industry Management

Risk management can be defined as a decision-making process of planning, identifying, analyzing, developing a response for, and controlling potential risks with the goal of minimizing the negative impacts of those risks. Risk management is an essential practice for all events, especially large-scale, live entertainment events. The purpose of this study was to examine the risk management practices for Burning Man. The instrument utilized in this study was a best practices guide developed by the researcher. Data were collected prior to, during, and following Burning Man 2022: Waking Dreams. Sources of data include printed material and online sources published by …

Neural Correlates Of Familiarity Across Time Scales And Their Involvement In Explicit Memory Decisions, Haopei Yang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Familiarity is a type of memory signal that can support recognition of prior occurrences without retrieval of associated contextual information. It is typically probed with respect to recent laboratory exposure in recognition-memory studies involving human participants. This line of work has revealed several neural correlates including event-related potentials (ERPs) and blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) activity in several regions. However, few studies have examined familiarity accumulated outside of laboratory settings through lifetime experience. Hence, it is currently unclear whether similar neural correlates are involved. The fluency-attribution framework decomposes familiarity judgement into automatic and decision-related processes. Since recent and lifetime familiarity are phenomenologically and …

Essays In Multidimensional Mechanism Design., Kolagani Paramahamsa Dr.

Doctoral Theses

This thesis analyzes three problems where a monopolistic seller is selling to an agent with multidimensional private information. While our understanding of such problems is comprehensive if the agent's private information is one-dimensional, problems with multidimensional private information are known to be ubiquitous but analytically notorious. The three chapters in this thesis make progress in understanding optimal mechanism design in such multidimensional screening problems. In the first problem, the seller is selling an object to an agent who exhibits behavioral preferences, in a departure from the standard rational models. Behavioral preferences arise because the agent is budget constrained and needs …

Developing An Assessment Model For Entrepreneurship Ecosystems Using Hierarchical Decision Model: Case Study Of Riyadh City, Mustafa Kamal Almuzel

Dissertations and Theses

Entrepreneurship is one of the major drivers of economies. Countries that aim to improve their economies by increasing entrepreneurial activities and its effectiveness need to develop an effective entrepreneurship ecosystem. This ecosystem combines a set of domains and factors that create a healthy environment for entrepreneurs. The analysis shows that there is limited research about structured assessment methods to evaluate the entrepreneurship ecosystems.

Therefore, this research objective is to introduce a universal assessment model that can be adopted in different cities for implementing an effective entrepreneurial ecosystem. This will be achieved by addressing three main research questions. 1) What are …

Critical Thinking Or Critical Creativity: Applying De Bono's Six Thinking Hats To Speech-Language Pathology Education And Practice., Samantha Hahn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Decision-making is a fundamental skill that health care professionals use daily which involves the interaction of many cognitive systems. Critical and lateral thinking are two approaches to decision-making often cited in literature. Critical thinking emphasizes reasoning and systematic analyzation, while lateral thinking encompasses imagination and creativity. Speech-language pathology (SLP) is a prime example of a profession that amalgamates creative processes with organized methodologies. Edward de Bono described six styles of lateral thinking – each style is equated to a colored “hat”. This study sought to determine if an association exists between a given SLP student’s level of clinical experience and …

Innovative Data-Driven Demand Estimation Strategies In Revenue Management, Sanghoon Cho

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding customers’ choice behavior and decision-making process is crucial in many industries, including hotels, airlines, and retail, as it allows firms to offer the right product to the right customer. This has resulted in a growing focus on accurately estimating customer demand for a product or service in the revenue management space, which can serve as a valuable input to optimal pricing, inventory, and assortment decisions. However, much of the existing work in the literature has not been able to comprehensively address some common challenges that are observed in practice: unobservable no-purchases, heterogeneous customer preferences, and the impact of factors …

Many-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms: Objective Reduction, Decomposition And Multi-Modality., Monalisa Pal Dr.

Doctoral Theses

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) for Many-Objective Optimization (MaOO) problems are challenging in nature due to the requirement of large population size, difficulty in maintaining the selection pressure towards global optima and inability of accurate visualization of high-dimensional Pareto-optimal Set (in decision space) and Pareto-Front (in objective space). The quality of the estimated set of Pareto-optimal solutions, resulting from the EAs for MaOO problems, is assessed in terms of proximity to the true surface (convergence) and uniformity and coverage of the estimated set over the true surface (diversity). With more number of objectives, the challenges become more profound. Thus, better strategies have …

Evidence-Based Decision Making In Elementary Schools: A Case Study Of How Districts Make Decisions When Implementing Foreign Language Programs, Danielle Elizabeth Moran

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Learning another language is considered a key 21st century subject, something that all students should begin in elementary school. However, most school districts in Illinois do not offer students the opportunity to learn another language in elementary school. There are effective and high quality programs available to learn another language that are also mutually beneficial to English learners (ELs). District leaders in charge of planning curricular programs have choices about which programs are offered and are tasked with considering the many needs of the districts they serve. The purpose of this study was to learn about the decision making of …

The Perceptions And Practices Of Child Welfare Caseworkers And Decision-Making Related To Reunification, Sonja D. Ulrich

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The child welfare system exists to support safe and healthy families. When children cannot remain safely with family, they are removed and often placed with nonrelatives. Only half of all of the children removed from their homes achieve reunification. In the current study, research questions examined the perceptions of caseworkers in determining whether or when a child could reunify with their family of removal, and how the perceptions of the caseworker affected their practice regarding reunification. Using social learning theory as a framework, a caseworker’s decisions were viewed as a balance between their work environment and their personal perceptions. Following …

The Lived Experiences Of Muslim Women With Infertility, Samia Abdelnabi

Wayne State University Dissertations

Background: Infertility, ranked as the 5th highest global disability, is estimated to impact 180 million couples worldwide. Muslim couples associate parenthood or the ability to have children as an accomplishment in their marriage, adulthood, social status, and security in later life. A failure to conceive in Muslim societies may lead to stigma, social isolation, grief, and despair. There is a gap in the literature on how Muslim women perceive, understand, and cope with infertility in the U.S. This knowledge gap limits the ability in to understand how social, religious, and cultural practices impact a diagnosis of infertility on Muslim American …

Experiences Of African American Parents Of Special Needs Students And School Decisions, Jennifer Selena Mccray

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractMany individuals prefer the ability to choose options as opposed to being directed toward a certain path. School choice programs in the United States allow parents to exercise their democratic right to choose what is best for their children with respect to choosing a school for them to receive their education. The problem is that many African American parents have lost faith and trust in public education due to low school safety, lack of quality education, and social/emotional issues with public schools. The purpose of this descriptive phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions of African American parents concerning students’ …