Gifted Education Commons^™

Using Game Theory To Model Tripolar Deterrence And Escalation Dynamics, Grace Farson

Honors Theses

The study investigated how game theory can been utilized to model multipolar escalation dynamics between Russia, China, and the United States. In addition, the study focused on analyzing various parameters that affected potential conflict outcomes to further new deterrence thought in a tripolar environment.

A preliminary game theoretic model was created to model and analyze escalation dynamics. The model was built upon framework presented by Zagare and Kilgour in their work ‘Perfect Deterrence’. The model is based on assumptions and rules set prior to game play. The model was then analyzed based upon these assumptions using a form of mathematical …

Cell Volume As A Determinant Of Virus-Mediated Population Growth In Ciliates, Jace Miller, John Paul Delong Phd

Honors Theses

Many protists and other small aquatic organisms consume virus particles, a behavior known as virovory. Some species of protists, such as the ciliate Halteria grandinella, can grow and divide using viruses as their sole food source. Other ciliate species have previously been shown to consume large quantities of viral particles, but it is unclear if they are able to support population growth with viruses alone. Because large ciliates have a higher energy demand, we hypothesize that they will be unable to support population growth on a virus-only diet. We fed nine ciliate species a diet of chloroviruses and found …

An Evidence-Based Design, Translation, And Implementation Of A Hypertension Health Education Pamphlet, Katie Patton

Honors Theses

Health equity is the opportunity for all to attain their highest level of health. This includes creating understandable educational resources that aid in reducing risk and controlling symptoms of disease. A singular piece of written education material will not be effective among all in a broad population due to the many different backgrounds in which people originate. While this may seem obvious, there is a wide gap between knowledge and action. This gap leads to health disparities, or differences in health status between people that are related to social or demographic factors such as race, gender, income, or geographic region …

Architecture And New Urbanism’S Relationship To Biomimicry And Floral Design, Alycia Timmerman

Honors Theses

The craft of floral design is classified as an art and a science. Similarly, architecture is rooted in the two disciplines. After conducting research and exploring biomimicry through the design process, it became evident that the process of design for architecture and floral design are similar. This relationship can also be extended into the field of planning and the New Urbanism movement. This study explores the integration of floral design and biomimicry with architecture and New Urbanism at the scale of the building and city block.

With Liberty And Justice For The Wealthy: The Criminalization Of The American Poor, Ashlyn Dickmeyer

Honors Theses

The last phrase of the Pledge of Allegiance states “with liberty and justice for all”. However, not everyone has access to this liberty and justice. Liberty and justice can be bought in this country for a price, and those who can’t afford to pay it are often left in the hands of those who can. One of the most prominent ways to see this is by analyzing the criminal justice system. Despite clauses in the Fourteenth Amendment and court cases like Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) establishing and upholding that the poor are entitled to equal treatment within the criminal justice …

Social Transmission Of Predator Information Through Referential Alarm Calls Within And Across Species, Carly Trebac

Honors Theses

Animals can encode information about a predator’s size, identity, or threat through alarm calls. This can provide referential information that can be used by individuals within and across species receiving the information. Referential alarm calls can encode information through changes in structure or rate of the call, and these variances in their call can elicit different responses, such as fleeing or mobbing, in conspecifics and heterospecifics. We aimed to investigate whether white-breasted nuthatch alarm calls can encode referential information and elicit different responses from conspecifics. Previous studies showed that a related species of nuthatch varies their call rate in the …

An Analysis Of The Episodic Writing Process, Megan Kanger

Honors Theses

Writing for an episodic series vastly differs from writing for a short film. This essay explores the major differences between writing a short film in contrast to writing an episodic series and how these differences impact the writing process. The essay examines the topic by breaking down my own experience writing an episodic series and the key findings I uncovered throughout that process. I describe my series, Scythe, and the central themes and characters that encompass the series. With a central theme of death, I describe how I worked to establish an emotional tonal balance between drama and humor within …

The Impact Of Parent Math Anxiety On Parent Homework Help Behaviors, Makenzie P. Starlin

Honors Theses

Math anxiety is commonly defined as negative feelings toward mathematics or solving mathematics problems (Dowker et al., 2016). Research indicates that math anxiety can influence parenting behaviors during homework interactions, which can involve behaviors that are autonomy supportive, or allow the child to initiate the homework task, or controlling, which does not allow the child to be actively engaged (Retanal et al., 2021) In particular, autonomy support behaviors allow children to work through homework on their own, whereas control behaviors do not allow children to work through the homework on their own and instead involve parents overseeing the homework help …

Project Avatar: Utilizing The Power Of Social-Media To Share Stories Of Hope, Elizabeth Cremins

Honors Theses

Addiction affects everyone and the stigma around addiction and its’ recovery makes it exponentially harder for individuals to heal. Today, adolescents are exposed to drugs, alcohol, and related substances from younger ages than ever before and the age of first consumption of these substances is continually decreasing. Further, social media makes it easier than ever for these young people to see substance-related content. Most teens and young adults today check their social media daily—if not hourly. Due to the young age of first exposure to substances coupled with the near-constant exposure that social media provides, addiction is an ever-present problem …

All Bark And No Byte: A Case Study On Nuclear Weapons' Role In Cyber Deterrence, Phuc Nguyen

Honors Theses

In what some scholars consider a marked departure from its traditional policy, the U.S.' 2018 Nuclear Deterrence Posture Review declared that the U.S. would consider the use of nuclear weapons in response to "significant, non-nuclear strategic attacks." However, despite real-world examples of the type of significant cyberattacks on U.S., allied, or partner civilian population or infrastructure alluded to in the Review, the factors that might trigger multidomain escalation remain underexplored, which creates a credibility gap in the U.S.' deterrence policy. This paper explores these factors by providing a case study of the North Korean WannaCry and Russian NotPetya cyberattacks and …

知源育利用のガイド, Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Learning, Teaching, & Researching Optimization

知源育を応用するための様々な角度からのヒントを学ぶことができるガイドです。実勢んをしながら、時々このガイドを参照することで、より高いレベルでの実践が可能になるでしょう。

Abrunning: Beginner’S Guide To Running-Based Training Programs, Alexander Boerner

Honors Theses

This thesis is used to introduce any level of runner to training program creation and give resources to allow the individual to create their own. This was done through a website that has information on warm up, cool down, strength and conditioning, running programs, nutrition, hydration, and running aids. The website gives readers insight on each of the topics while giving them resources on how to implement the information within their programs. The written portion of this thesis is used to detail the creation of said website and the thought process that went into each of its components from structure …

Introduction To A Universal Performance Improvement Method (Chigen-Iku), Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Learning, Teaching, & Researching Optimization

This brief article introduces a universal performance improvement method called Chigen-iku, which has been developed carefully and extensively over more than 25 years through more than 100 individual and group projects based on the principles that were selected through my doctorial study in the field of Instructional Psychology and Technology.

A Conceptual Exploration Of Anti-Fragility In The Context Of Confucian Heritage Culture Education, Alwyn Lau

Journal of Research Initiatives

It is a common but not unrealistic stereotype of Asian students that educational success is a matter of personal identity and status. As such, achieving distinctions in as many subjects as possible (the popular target of becoming a ‘straight A’ student) is usually a non-negotiable objective nurtured by both parents and educators. Such an obsessive pursuit of academic excellence produces both laudable outcomes (e.g. the tendency of Asian students to outperform their counterparts) as well as dangerous ones (e.g. worrying rates of mental health problems). This theoretical paper hopes to apply the concept of anti-fragility developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, …

Ungifted: Teacher Candidates’ Understanding Of Giftedness Through Literature Circles, Sharryn Larsen Walker, Wendie Lappin Castillo

Literacy Practice and Research

The purpose of this qualitative study was to analyze the reflective comments made by teacher candidates (TCs) after they participated in weekly discussions about the tween novel Ungifted by Korman (2012). The TCs attended at a regional Pacific Northwest university, majoring or minoring in various educational fields. After reading and discussing the topic of giftedness as it related to their engagement with the novel, the TCs wrote a reflective essay about their new understandings of teaching the gifted. Using the constant-comparative method, the essays from three sections of the course over a three-year period were read and reread for identifiable …

Defining Twice Exceptional Learners: A Study Of Self-Concept, Alyssa D. Landau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 2014, the first operational definition of twice exceptional (2e) learners was published in Gifted Child Quarterly to provide a clear and identifiable profile of the population (Reis, Baum, & Burke, 2014). The article defines 2e learners as, “students who demonstrate the potential for high achievement or creative productivity in one or more domains such as math, science, technology, the social arts, the visual, spatial, or performing arts or other areas of human productivity AND who manifest one or more disabilities as defined by federal or state eligibility criteria” (Reis et al., 2014, p. 222-223). Publishing an operational definition of …

Gendered Leadership: Men And Women Governor’S Responses To Covid-19, Kate Gaulke

Honors Theses

To alleviate a large-scale crisis, leaders have to choose mitigation strategies to best address the issue at hand while also avoiding the spread of panic among their constituents. This balancing act can be challenging and was especially demanding during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic was not only a global health crisis, but also caused worldwide social, economic, and political turmoil. For three years, the pandemic riddled the United States with disease, economic hardship, food insecurity, and unemployment. Since its rise, COVID-19 has been the foremost concern on policy agendas nationwide. Governors, in particular, played a significant part in leading …

Economic And Input-Use Efficiency Of Nitrogen Management Techniques In Non-Irrigated Maize Production, Katie J. Bathke

Honors Theses

The efficiency of nitrogen (N) management has become a main concern in agricultural cropping systems for understanding the optimal N rate to help producers improve economically and reduce the exhaustion of natural resources environmentally. Nitrogen rates vary both temporally and spatially by the interactions of the soil environment and rainfall through a growing season. Thus, a site-specific approach can further optimize this variability with the understanding of the role soil variability plays in the N rate applied to a non-irrigated field. The objective of this study was to evaluate the various nitrogen treatments for their nutrient use efficiency and economic …

Investigating Transparency Policy As A Means Of Increasing Sexual Violence Reporting Numbers At Universities, Shaina Isaacsen

Honors Theses

It is well known that sexual violence occurs on college campuses at alarming rates. Despite this, sexual violence remains grossly underreported to universities. In a study investigating why survivors choose to not report sexual violence, only half believed that a university would investigate an assault fairly (Ridolfi-Starr, 2015). This project focuses on investigations of sexual violence conducted by universities, and whether certain adjudication processes can increase overall reporting numbers. Specifically, I focus on different forms of transparency within the sexual violence policy, third-party oversight and outcome publication. By using information collected from Annual Security Reports (ASRs) published by universities, I …

Honors Liberal Arts For The 21st Century, John Carrell, Aliza S. Wong, Chad Cain, Carrie J. Preston, Muhammad H. Zaman

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

We argue that honors colleges can deploy the power of the liberal arts to emphasize diversity, equity, global citizenship, ethical leadership, and empowerment by combining liberal arts and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and medicine) fields in interdisciplinary approaches to global challenges, from climate change to the pandemic to forced displacement. As the honors colleges at Texas Tech and Boston University work to be at the forefront of pedagogical and curricular innovation, the twenty-first century has presented us with a student and faculty community becoming increasingly aware of historical, racial, gendered, and socioeconomic disparities, which were further exacerbated by the COVID …