Digital Commons Network^™

Pesticides And Poverty: How Socioeconomic Factors Relate To Pesticide Application In The Continental Us, Reed Smetter

Theses and Dissertations

Pesticides are often used to help reduce the populations of weeds, insects, and pathogens in agricultural and urban settings, reducing the risk of outbreaks and losses of agricultural yield. The communities that surround agricultural areas often bear the brunt of the negative community and environmental health effects of these chemicals, and are frequently rural, poor, and lack critical infrastructure resources. Pesticide application volumes are often linked closely with specific health effects. In this study, I apply social vulnerability theory to compare the potential connections between the application rates of pesticides and socioeconomic variables across the United States using a nationwide …

Los Juegos De Rol Como Una Herramienta Psicoeducativa, Víctor E. Quintana Villarreal

Journal of Roleplaying Studies and STEAM

Los juegos de rol han funcionado durante mucho tiempo como un medio para compartir y crear historias en conjunto con colegas y amigos. De ellos, se desprenden también habilidades y herramientas fundamentales para la vida, por lo que un método para sistematizar estos juegos de tablero y dados a funciones educativas es necesario para potenciarlos como herramientas psicoeducativas.

La siguiente, es una propuesta planteada desde el marco constructivista para generar espacios con los juegos de rol como eje central del aprendizaje, y se relatan a través de un marco teórico, seguido de una proposición metodológica, una serie de pasos para …

Journal Of Roleplaying Studies And Steam (Jrpssteam) Vol. 5 [2026], Número 1 (Issue 1), Romano Ponce-Díaz Phd, Cristo Leon, Ivan Avila, Sarah Lynne Bowman, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, Alexandra Schreiber Ma, Jaime Eduardo García Maya, Víctor Emmanuel Quintana Villarreal Vic Emma, Francisco Gonzalez Ing., Daniel Romero Benguigui, Antonio Roda-Martínez

Journal of Roleplaying Studies and STEAM

El presente número del Journal of Roleplaying Studies and STEAM examina la convergencia entre las prácticas lúdicas, el diseño narrativo y los procesos de mediación sociocultural en la investigación contemporánea. Las contribuciones reunidas en este número abordan el juego de rol como un dispositivo de producción de conocimiento, intervención psicoeducativa y reelaboración de representaciones culturales. Nos podemos atrever a señalar que la educación es la convergencia entre la ludología, las ciencias sociales, los estudios visuales y el análisis cultural; entendiendo a la educación como la actividad consciente e intencionada de transmitir información y conocimientos a las siguientes generaciones.

Martin Heidegger …

Social And Institutional Factors Influencing Restoration Decisions In Sagebrush Plant Communities In The Great Basin, Carmen Calzado-Martínez

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Sagebrush landscapes of the Great Basin in the western United States have changed dramatically over the past century. Invasive grasses, repeated wildfires, and past land-use practices have made it increasingly difficult for native plant communities to recover once they are damaged. Most restoration efforts occur after disturbances such as wildfire, when ecosystems may already be severely degraded. An alternative approach is proactive restoration, which aims to strengthen ecosystems before major damage occurs. 

This dissertation examines whether proactive restoration strategies could realistically be used in sagebrush rangelands and what factors influence their adoption. The research combines three complementary approaches. First, interviews …

A Survey On Digital Reading Materials And Personal Study Of Christian Religious Texts, Teancum Price

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Religion, including reading from religious texts such as scriptures, are a part of the daily lives of many people. Modern technology has influenced the way that this religious reading takes place, but its effects have not yet been studied. Existing research of the effects of technology on reading focus on topics such as reading comprehension, but the study of religious texts is often focused on achieving a religious experience, so the existing research does not capture the whole scope of these changes. In our study, we surveyed two universities (Utah State University and Abilene Christian University) to ask individuals how …

A Novel Approach To Creativity Assessment: Forced Pairwise Ranking With Large Language Models, Phillip R. Gregory Jr

Master's Theses

Assessing creativity at scale remains a persistent challenge in cognitive science, as human raters are costly, slow, and often inconsistent in their judgments. This thesis introduced a novel framework for automated scientific creativity assessment using forced pairwise ranking, in which fine-tuned large language models compared response pairs and determined which was more creative. Five empirical studies were conducted using Llama-2-7B and Llama-2-13B models adapted via LoRA fine-tuning and benchmarked against human scored responses from the Scientific Creative Thinking Test. A regression baseline achieved Pearson �� = .74 on the test set, matching the human inter-rater ceiling reported in the literature. …

Between Chronicle And Legend: A Two-Scene Environment And Visual Effects Examination Of Physical Accuracy And Emotional Exaggeration On The Honey Creek Bridge Collapse, Alison R. Gaddy

All Theses

This thesis explores how truth and dramatization intersect in digital storytelling by comparing realistic and stylized simulations of the Honey Creek bridge collapse within the context of the Kate Shelley animated short. At the core of storytelling lies a tension between factual accuracy and dramatic stylization. We investigate that tension by examining how narrative truth is conveyed, distorted, or enhanced through visual dramatization by focusing on the psychology of audience perception and the motivations behind creative embellishment. The practical contribution of this research is the development of two distinct digital scene setups depicting the same Honey Creek bridge collapse event. …

Intersectionality And Belonging: Higher Education Mathematics, Ashley Natalie

Mathematics and Statistics

Students with intersecting marginalized identities (such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, disability, or first-generation background) often face unique challenges in advanced mathematics that affect confidence, participation, amounting to a sense of belonging. These experiences remain underrepresented in mathematics education research. This qualitative, narrative-based study examines how these students experience classroom dynamics and belonging in upper-level mathematics courses. Semi-structured interviews will be analyzed thematically to identify patterns related to identity, classroom culture, instructor behavior, and peer interactions. Findings aim to highlight barriers and supportive practices, informing more inclusive teaching strategies and equitable learning environments in advanced mathematics.

Intersectionality And Belonging: Higher Education Mathematics, Ashley Williams

Mathematics and Statistics

Students with intersecting marginalized identities (such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, disability, or first-generation background) often face unique challenges in advanced mathematics that affect confidence, participation, amounting to a sense of belonging. These experiences remain underrepresented in mathematics education research. This qualitative, narrative-based study examines how these students experience classroom dynamics and belonging in upper-level mathematics courses. Semi-structured interviews will be analyzed thematically to identify patterns related to identity, classroom culture, instructor behavior, and peer interactions. Findings aim to highlight barriers and supportive practices, informing more inclusive teaching strategies and equitable learning environments in advanced mathematics.

Digital Grief Technology To Support Bereavement: A Systematic Review Of Potential Benefits And Risks, Xun Ci Soh, Adalia Yin Hui Goh, Paye Shin Koh, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Grief is a universal and inevitable experience. However, the way we support the bereaved is changing, especially in the digital era. This systematic review examines the potential benefits and risks associated with various digital grief technologies, including online grief support groups, generative AI chatbots, online memorials, online therapy interventions, virtual reality, and digitally reproduced visuals or audio of the deceased. A systematic search was conducted in seven databases, and 30 articles were included in the final review. Findings indicate that digital grief technologies offer several benefits, such as reductions in grief and depressive symptoms, enhanced social support, greater accessibility, and …

Understanding Critical Thinking In Generative Artificial Intelligence Use: Development, Validation, And Correlates Of The Critical Thinking In Ai Use Scale, Gabriel R. Lau, Wei Yan Low, Louis Tay, Ysabel Thereze Ang Guevarra, Dragon Gašević, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Generative AI tools are increasingly embedded in everyday work and learning, yet their fluency, opacity, and propensity to hallucinate mean that users must critically evaluate AI outputs rather than accept them at face value. The present research conceptualises critical thinking in AI use as a dispositional tendency to verify the source and content of AI-generated information, to understand how models work and where they fail, and to reflect on the broader implications of relying on AI. Across six studies ( N = 1341), we developed and validated the 13-item critical thinking in AI use scale and mapped its nomological network. …

A New Approach To Generate Combinatorial Patterns In Logical Analysis Of Data And Its Application To Predict College Retention, Salihah Ahmed E. Jaafari

Theses and Dissertations

Student retention and degree completion remain central challenges for higher-education institutions, with significant implications for student success, institutional effectiveness, and public accountability. While advances in predictive analytics have enabled earlier identification of students at risk of withdrawal, many commonly used machine learning approaches suffer from limited interpretability, constraining their practical usefulness for advising, intervention, and policy decision making. This dissertation addresses the problem of predicting student persistence by developing and evaluating optimization based, interpretable classification models within the Logical Analysis of Data (LAD) framework. Building on existing LAD formulations, this research introduces two novel pattern generation models, the Best Term …

An Ordinal Categorical Data Analysis Using The Stereotype Model Within A Bayesian Framework With A Logistic-Normal Prior, Nathaniel A. Sakyi

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Ordinal categorical data are pervasive in applied research, yet their analysis is often compromised by modeling strategies that implicitly assume equidistant category spacing or impose restrictive structural constraints. Metric regression models and latent-variable threshold approaches routinely misrepresent ordinal information, leading to biased inference, distorted uncertainty quantification, and loss of structural insight. This paper develops a Bayesian framework for ordinal regression that explicitly accommodates \textbf{unequal spacing among ordered response categories} while preserving ordinal structure and interpretability.

The proposed approach builds on the stereotype regression model, which embeds ordinal categories into a latent one-dimensional continuum through estimable score parameters. While the stereotype …

Understanding Machine Learning Model Behavior Under Fairness And Privacy Constraints, David Anthony Sanchez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Machine learning systems deployed in high-stakes domains are increasingly expected to satisfy demands beyond predictive accuracy-including fairness across demographic groups, protection of sensitive information, and explanations that human stakeholders can inspect and trust. This thesis investigates how those demands can be met through learning frameworks that explicitly govern the relationship between data and models, arguing that trustworthiness is a design problem rather than a post hoc correction. The thesis is organized around three studies, each targeting a distinct point of data-facing control. The first develops CondFairGen, a fairness-aware conditional generator for tabular data that improves subgroup equity by dynamically reweighting …

Exploring The Evolution Of Preservice Elementary Teachers' Mathematics Identity And Possible Selves: A Multi-Case Study Approach, Christa R. Mawn

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study explores the nature of preservice elementary teachers’ mathematics identity and possible selves and identifies shifts in their mathematics identity or possible selves over the course of a place value unit during the semester during a course on mathematics content for elementary teachers. Drawing on narrative identity and possible selves theory, this qualitative multi-case study examined the mathematics identity and possible selves of preservice elementary teachers enrolled in a mathematics content course. Course assignments were used as data sources and included written narratives, future-oriented reflections, drawings, and course artifacts. Individual cases were analyzed, and were followed by a cross-cases …

Advancing Apparel Education Through 3d Simulation In Vstitcher: Confidence, Competence, And Career Readiness In Higher Education, Jonah Diniakos Graham

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rapid adoption of 3D garment simulation in the apparel industry has created new demands of higher education to better prepare students with both technical proficiency and confidence within digital design platforms to better enable them for many career avenues. This study examines the integration of Browzwear’s VStitcher in an undergraduate apparel production course, addressing the need to assess both competence and self-confidence in digital garment construction while also fostering broader career readiness competencies. Guided by a combination of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Situated Expectancy-Value Theory (SEVT), the study emphasizes the role of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the shaping …

Beyond The Interface: Human Perceptions Of Generative-Ai Chatbots As Conversational Partners, Browning W.E. Blair

All Theses

Generative AI (gen-AI) chatbots are becoming embedded in everyday communicative life, yet it remains unclear whether users perceive these systems as socially reciprocative conversational partners. Therefore, this study examines how young adults understand and interact with gen-AI chatbots, focusing on perceptions of conversational partnership, anthropomorphism, politeness, discomfort, and technical understanding. Guided by the CASA framework, Media Equation Theory, and the uncanny valley hypothesis, this study employed four semi-structured, online focus groups with 15 undergraduate students and recent college graduates in the United States. Findings indicate that participants did not broadly perceive gen-AI chatbots as conversational partners in the interpersonal sense. …

Moodify: A Mood-Based Music Recommendation System, Meghana Kagitha

Theses and Dissertations

Music has long been recognised as a powerful tool for emotional regulation, yet existing music streaming platforms often fail to align song recommendations with a user's current emotional state. Moodify is a mood-based music recommendation system designed to bridge this gap by delivering personalised playlists that reflect how a user feels in real time.

This project presents the design, development, and evaluation of Moodify, a mobile application that leverages the Circumplex Model of Emotion to capture user mood through an intuitive two-dimensional valence-arousal interface. Rather than relying on text input or manual search, users plot their emotional state directly onto …

Manned Exploration Of Satellites Of The Outer Planets: An Analysis Of Current Technologies And A Discussion Of Advancements Required, Joshua Carson Meador

Theses and Dissertations

The Solar System’s outer planets have many satellites, some of which are known to be the most likely places to find extraterrestrial life in our celestial backyard. Multiple scientific missions have been sent to glean information from these satellites, yet the possibility of a manned expedition has long been exclusive to science fiction stories. This paper intends to collect and analyze the current state of space travel technology to explore the feasibility of such a mission with modern technology and to discuss which future advancements should be the focal point for making such missions a reality. To begin, data on …

Detecting Doubt In Reflective Learning: A Learning Analytics Study With Large And Small Language Models, Eng Lieh Ouh, Kar Way Tan, Siaw Ling Lo, Yuhao Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reflective learning enhances understanding, especially when instructors promptly address difficulties raised in student reflections. Automated doubt detection can reduce time for instructors, yet existing classification approaches take substantial time for manual annotation and model training. This paper investigates whether large and small language models (LLMs, SLMs) can automate doubt detection without time-consuming training. Using a dataset of anonymized student reflections, we evaluate zeroshot, few-shot prompting, and multi-step reasoning against prior supervised classification baselines. We show that LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude-4, Gemini-2.5) surpass earlier F1 scores without prompting, while prompting further improves their performance. However, using proprietary LLMs can raise cost and …

At The Intersection Of Science And Sustainability: A Qualitative Study Of Food Scientists' Personal And Professional Perspectives, Srushti Parikh

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Sustainable food systems require not only technological innovation but a more profound understanding of the professionals involved in the field. Even though the topic of sustainability is currently gaining importance throughout the food industry, the real expertise of food scientists is under-researched. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to explore food scientists' perspectives on sustainability, how these perceptions influence the way they pursue their careers, and how they view their impact in the larger sustainability agenda of the food industry. METHODS AND MATERIALS: This study captured detailed insights of 22 food scientists’ perspectives through qualitative methods. Food scientists in …

Analysis Of Collective Behavior In Living And Nonliving Systems, Kaitlyn Cohan

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis aims at understanding the phenomenon of of self-organization in complex dissipative systems, living and nonliving. Dissipative systems are characterized by their search for energy, interactions with their surroundings and the production of entropy, all of which result in the creation of stable structures or patterns, which persist as long as the initial environmental conditions are maintained. The two specific models that we chose to study here are (a) Futbol (or Soccer) and (b) a chemical system involving free-floating menthol crystals floating on a fluid surface to represent nonliving systems. Using experiments and mathematical models, we will try to …

Probing Representational Emergence In Large Language Models, Shawn Ismail

Master's Theses

This thesis investigates whether abrupt behavioral gains in large language models under scaling are accompanied by systematic changes in internal representations. It combines a behavioral screen of 65 tasks per family with targeted layerwise probing across eight decoder-only, open-weight model families. Behavioral emergence is defined for each family-task trajectory using an empirical jump detector, with segmented regression retained only as a diagnostic. The representational follow-up analyzes 27 selected MMLU subtasks shared across all families, spanning 37 checkpoints and 216 family-task units.

For each follow-up checkpoint, frozen linear probes are trained on every layer's hidden states to measure how much task-relevant …

Developmental Mathematics As A Potential Barrier To Degree Completion In Community Colleges, Cynthia Bernice Fletcher

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Developmental mathematics is often seen as a barrier to student progression in community colleges, especially for students pursuing Associate of Science degrees requiring math coursework. This quantitative, ex post facto, non-experimental study examined how developmental mathematics factors predicted Associate of Science degree completion at a two-year community college in the West South-Central United States. Specifically, it assessed how academic performance in developmental mathematics, placement method, math pathway, and number of developmental math courses related to Associate of Science degree completion, as well as differences across student subgroups. Archival institutional data were used for first-time-in-college students across four cohorts: 2018, 2019, …

Spike-Sorting Algorithm For Neuropixel Probes, Luis David Davila

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Modern extracellular neural probes like Neuropixels, allow for high-density extracellular neural probes to record terabytes of electrophysiological brain data. Spike sorting is the process of isolating individual neurons on this data through various clustering and filtering techniques. Modern spike sorting algorithms are held back by their need for human intervention to separate high-quality from low quality clusters, due to the volume of data that can be collected a completely automated approach is required. To address this requirement, we have developed a framework to preprocess, cluster, grade, and separate high/low quality clustering results using custom models trained on the grades. To …

Collaborative Practices And Tool Utilization In Software Development Projects: A Student Perspective, Yi Meng Lau, Muhammad Syahmi Bin Abbas, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development is a collaborative activity that depends on effective teamwork, shared understanding, and coordinated use of development practices and tools. While these aspects are well studied in professional environments, they are less frequently examined within software engineering education. This study investigates how students collaborate in group projects, focusing on collaborative practices, tool usage, and their perceptions of software quality. We conducted a quantitative post-project survey with 143 second-year undergraduate students enrolled in a software development course. The results show that students actively share information and often establish team norms to support coordination and collaboration. However, students face challenges in …

Robots And Ageing Population – Rehabilitation And Social Robots, Yuzhou Qian, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Population ageing is placing increasing pressure on healthcare and caregiving worldwide. Governments in different countries are looking into the use of advanced information technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics to help in caring for ageing population. Older adults often need both physical assistance and psychological support, and robots have emerged as a promising technological approach to supplement eldercare. This paper provides an overview of the current state of robots in eldercare. It reviews the major definitions, categories, and features of robots used in healthcare and eldercare. The paper also examines the potential benefits of robotic technologies, such as reducing …

Three Essays On Workplace Ethics And Ai: Conceptualizing, Scale Development, And Validation Of Self-Value Actualization, And Ai-Enabled High-Performance Work Systems, Mansura Nusrat

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation advances understanding of workplace ethics and responsible AI integration across three interconnected essays unified by social cognitive theory. My first essay introduces self-value actualization (SVA), a novel construct defined as the dynamic, integrated psychological process through which individuals continually strive to align and fulfill their core moral values through observable professional behavior. Drawing on social cognitive theory and emotional intelligence theory, I conceptualize SVA as a higher-order self-regulatory orientation comprising three mutually reinforcing processes: value congruence, moral reflection, and adaptive morality. I developed and validated a 9-item SVA scale across four studies using expert panels, exploratory factor analysis, …

From Vibration To Visualization: Building An Real-Time Audio Visualization System For Learning And Exploration Using Pyqt5, Aidan Roach

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This paper presents the design, development, and analysis of my real-time audio visualization system created entirely in Python using PyQt5, called WaveCatcher. The system captures live audio input from a microphone and provides simultaneous visual feedback through multiple signal representations: including a time-domain waveform, a frequency-domain FFT spectrum, a scrolling spectrogram, harmonic peak visualization, dynamic range, amplitude envelope, spectral centroid, and spectral bandwidth. These features offer insight not just into the raw structure of sound, but into how humans perceive its qualities–like timbre! This terminology may seem intimidating—it certainly was when I first began learning it—but I’ll explain all of …

Research Remix: Teams, Tech, And Texts, Jaime Carbajal

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

The pedagogical innovation that enhanced student learning in the Research Methodologies in Health Sciences course is described as Integrated Digital Collaborative Inquiry-Based Learning (IDCIBL). The IDCIBL approach leveraged digital tools (lecture videos, podcasts, recorded poster presentations, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms), integrated journal article analysis, utilized research-informed active learning, and included team-based learning activities. The combination of multiple innovative strategies into the IDCIBL model intentionally transforms the educational environment and optimizes the student learning experience, relating to the TLC priority area of teaching and assessments in the age of Gen AI.