Digital Commons Network^™

Leadership Development And Service Learning: A Case Study Of The Human Ecology Social Impact Assessment, Joseph Aaron Tonjuk

All Theses

Civic engagement, personal growth, and cognitive development are just a few beneficial outcomes that students gain when they participate in service-learning courses. Assessing these outcomes is often challenging; determining an ideal outcome, like leadership development, can be especially so. Leadership development as an outcome for students who participate in a service-learning is an understudied area, especially for how students develop leadership in a service-learning course throughout the semester, which critical incidents are identified as impacting student’s leadership development, and how a service-learning course that utilizes Social Impact Assessment (SIA) influences these outcomes. Designed as a case study, this research describes …

A Crash Course In Liberal Education: An Analysis Of Civically Engaged Edutainment Videos, Caitlin Marie Lancaster Anderson

All Theses

Crash Course is an entertainment education YouTube channel that was founded on principles that align closely with that of liberal education. Liberal education is a model of education dedicated to broad knowledge, specific intellectual and practical skills, and personal and social responsibility, most notably civic engagement. Despite the value derived from liberal education, it is facing a crisis where it is replaced at the university level by neoliberalism, an ideology dominated by workforce performativity and individualism. Using Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge concept, this thesis examines the neoliberal shift in education as a crisis of power and explores how liberal education is …

X-Panding Halogen Bonding Interactions: Hybrid Cocrystals Composed Of Ionic Halides, Iodine And Organoiodines, Khadijatul Kobra

All Dissertations

Halogen bonding referred to as an attractive, noncovalent interaction between an electrophilic region of a halogen atom X (acts as Lewis acid) and a nucleophilic region of a molecule Y (acts as Lewis base). Such interactions and the resulting polymeric networks play an important role in many fields related to crystal engineering, including for example, the fabrication of liquid crystals and novel drug design. The application of halogen bonding has particular promise in biological systems by increasing the lipophilicity of drugs to improve penetration through lipid membranes and tissues, enabling better intracellular delivery.

Based on this concept, my research at …

Let There Be Dragons! Towards Designing An Engaging Quest That Enhances Curiosity And Learning About Genetics, Karen Rebecca Clark

All Dissertations

This study implemented a convergent parallel mixed methods approach to investigate game-based learning within an educational game compared to a modified entertainment game. Participants (N=31) were recruited from public middle and high schools as well as home school groups. Comparative data of participants’ perceptions, preferences and learning outcomes were investigated to inform better educational game design. This study also considers player personality to determine how dispositional curiosity influences an individual’s approach, acceptance, and interaction with novel learning environments, specifically games. Findings show a statistically significant gain in genetics academic knowledge after the game-based learning intervention. The difference in knowledge gained …

Student Journalists And Mass Communication Ethics – Attitudes And Pedagogy, Karyn S. Campbell

All Dissertations

Today’s student journalists are creating work in an era of rapidly changing technology. Many of them have readership or viewership numbering in the thousands, and what they write and broadcast has an effect on people. While most professional journalists have studied ethics in school or discussed the subject in the workplace, many student journalists have not even had one ethics class. Many of them are seeking guidance as they grapple with ethical issues. This research studied 214 student journalists from every region in the United States through a survey of their attitudes towards ethical situations. The study discovered how they …

Dissolution Of Neptunium Dioxide And Transport Of Aqueous And Colloidal Neptunium In The Vadose Zone, Kathryn Margaret Peruski

All Dissertations

Management of legacy nuclear waste, along with proposed geologic disposal of commercial spent nuclear fuel, necessitates prediction of environmental fate and transport of actinide solid phases, which comprise a majority of long-lived waste products. Actinide dioxides are key for performance assessment due to their ubiquity throughout the nuclear fuel cycle. Neptunium-237, produced in burn-up of commercial nuclear fuel and various other nuclear processes, is often found as an oxide (NpO2(s)) and has the potential to become highly mobile in near-surface geochemical conditions due to oxidation processes. In this dissertation, the oxidation and dissolution of NpO2(s) was studied through both field …

Exploiting Latent Features Of Text And Graphs, Justin George Sybrandt

All Dissertations

As the size and scope of online data continues to grow, new machine learning techniques become necessary to best capitalize on the wealth of available information. However, the models that help convert data into knowledge require nontrivial processes to make sense of large collections of text and massive online graphs. In both scenarios, modern machine learning pipelines produce embeddings --- semantically rich vectors of latent features --- to convert human constructs for machine understanding. In this dissertation we focus on information available within biomedical science, including human-written abstracts of scientific papers, as well as machine-generated graphs of biomedical entity relationships. …

School-Based Instructional Leadership And Problem Solving: Principals’ Descriptions Of Shared Issue Resolution, Donald C. Lawrimore, Jr.

All Dissertations

Over the last half century, researchers added to a body of knowledge regarding principals’ effective behaviors with few insights about how or why they acted. Current models purport that leadership emerges through various collaborative interactions among principals and other school-based leaders (i.e. teacher leaders, instructional coaches, content department heads, etc.) as they tackle academic and social-behavioral issues.

To illuminate these collaborations more clearly, I used the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to investigate how selected South Carolina secondary school principals described their interactions with other school-based leaders as they collaboratively tackled instructional issues. For this study, instructional issues covered concerns regarding …

Perceived Preparation In Prospective Career Ready Students Attending A Rural High School In South Carolina, Tina K. Faulkner

All Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of the resources and opportunities available to rural students that contribute to their career readiness particularly essential soft skills. The study was designed to identify critical factors that shape workplace skills of prospective career ready students in a rural high school to inform programs and practices focused on preparing students for the workplace. I analyzed WIN data (the assessment in South Carolina to determine career readiness) from the spring 2018 administration to describe student-level results by readiness levels and demographics. Using a descriptive qualitative design, I interviewed community stakeholders in …

Improving Swimming Performance And Flow Sensing By Incorporating Passive Mechanisms, Beau Pollard

All Dissertations

As water makes up approximately 70% of the Earth's surface, humans have expanded operations into aquatic environments out of both necessity and a desire to gain potential innate benefits. This expansion into aquatic environments has consequently developed a need for cost-effective and safe underwater monitoring, surveillance, and inspection, which are missions that autonomous underwater vehicles are particularly well suited for. Current autonomous underwater vehicles vastly underperform when compared to biological swimmers, which has prompted researchers to develop robots inspired by natural swimmers. One such robot is designed, built, tested, and numerically simulated in this thesis to gain insight into the …

Girls' Construction Of Mathematical Discourse In Single-Sex And Coeducational Classroom Environments, Mckenzie Hoxit Brittain

All Dissertations

This study seeks to examine and illuminate the ways in which girls in middle grades single-sex and coeducation mathematics classrooms construct mathematical Discourse. I implement a holistic case study design by providing an in-depth description of how girls engage in constructing mathematical Discourse both with other students and their teacher. There are two bounded settings within this study: an all-girls sixth grade mathematics classroom and a coeducational sixth grade mathematics classroom. The four individual cases for this study are Maria and Leah (Single-Gender) and Nautica and Jordan (Coeducation). The findings from this study suggest girls in middle grades

mathematics single-gender …

The Uncertainty Principle In Control Theory For Partial Differential Equations, Andrew Walton Green

All Dissertations

In this thesis, we will study the interaction between problems in control theory for partial differential equations and inequalities of the uncertainty principle type. The main results will concern the boundary observability of the viscoelastic wave equation and energy decay rates of damped wave equations. In the boundary case, we will prove what may be viewed as a higher dimensional version of Ingham's inequality, replacing the complex exponentials with Laplacian eigenfunctions.

For energy decay rates on the real line, we will use a version of the Paneah-Logvinenko-Sereda theorem for functions with Fourier support contained in multiple intervals. We prove the …

Considering Disaster Volunteer Behavior And The Work Environment In Managerial Decision Making, Abdelwahab B. Ali Alwahishie

All Dissertations

Over the last two decades, large-scale disaster events have significantly increased in frequency and intensity, causing tremendous loss of lives and property. A large number of relief organizations rely on their volunteers to respond to many disasters around the globe, serving people and communities in need. While their contributions are priceless, turnover among disaster volunteers has become a significant problem for these relief organizations. Work environment factors, such as volunteers being mismatched with tasks, unsuitable workloads, and conflict within groups of volunteers may give rise to turnover intentions, which may in turn lead to actual turnover. The link between work …

Assessment Of Affective Responses To Classroom, Outdoor, And Virtual Geology Field Experiences, Victoria Beth Sellers

All Dissertations

Geology field experiences can build students’ confidence, aid in identity development, and lead to emerging individual interest. However, instructors contend with cost, logistical, and accessibility challenges when planning field trips for large, introductory geology courses. This study designed a virtual reality geology field experience set in Grand Canyon to combat challenges with traditional geology field experiences, while providing introductory students with an exciting activity. This study used a concurrent triangulation mixed methods multiple-case study design to compare participants’ attitudes toward the virtual reality geology field experience to a classroom field experience and outdoor field experience. This study also assessed students’ …

An Exploration Of Student Reasoning About Undergraduate Computer Science Concepts: An Active Learning Technique To Address Misconceptions, Cazembe Kennedy

All Dissertations

Computer science (CS) is a popular but often challenging major for undergraduates. As the importance of computing in the US and world economies continues to grow, the demand for successful CS majors grows accordingly. However, retention rates are low, particularly for under-represented groups such as women and racial minorities. Computing education researchers have begun to investigate causes and explore interventions to improve the success of CS students, from K-12 through higher education. In the undergraduate CS context, for example; student difficulties with pointers, functions, loops, and control flow have been observed. We and others have utilized student responses to multiple …

Topological Excitations And Anomalous Transport Phenomena In Condensed Matter Systems, Chuanchang Zeng

All Dissertations

Topological physics is a burgeoning new area of study in condensed matter systems, focusing on the topological excitations as well as the transport phenomena of systems with topologically non-trivial band structures. These systems being either gapped or gapless, are topologically protected and can support new phenomena which are absent in topologically trivial systems. The gapless topological superconductors can host Majorana zero modes, known as the interpretation of the Majorana fermions in condensed matter systems, which have been proposed as the ideal qubit for topological quantum computation due to their non-Abelian topological properties. The gapped topological insulators, on the other hand, …

Exploring The Relationship Between Course Structures And Student Motivation In Introductory College Calculus: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective, Paran Rebekah Norton

All Dissertations

Calculus I occupies a gatekeeper role for STEM majors nationwide. The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) investigated this issue and found that the use of active learning strategies was one important characteristic of successful calculus programs across the country. This sequential explanatory mixed-methods study explores this issue further by examining the relationship between student motivation and course structures for introductory calculus. Calculus I course structures with differing levels of active learning were examined. The theoretical framework of self-determination theory (SDT) guided this study, which defines three basic psychological needs that are essential to fostering students’ motivation: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. …

Modeling Energy Expenditure And Recovery In Cycling, Vijay Sarthy Mysore Sreedhara

All Dissertations

The power-duration relationship, comprised of the parameters Critical power (CP) and work capacity (ϒ), has been used to model energy expenditure in cycling. For modeling recovery, the W'bal model has been used but lacks validation. Additionally, existing literature has not focused on quantifying or estimating the inherent trial-to-trial variability at the subject level, called the intra-individual variability (IIV), of CP and ϒ, posing challenges in modeling and optimization of performance. Thus, the objectives of this research are (i) to establish a method to quantify the IIV of CP and ϒ as determined from the 3-minute all-out test (3MT), (ii) to …

Preference Construction In Difficult Multi-Attribute Health Decisions: Effects Of Affect And Coherence Shifting, Michael Shreeves

All Dissertations

In shared decision-making, doctors provide patients with information about difficult trade-off treatment decisions so the patient can make an informed choice. Many models of decision-making assume that patients make decisions based on long-term, stable preferences, but research suggests that people dynamically construct preferences for each decision. Affect plays at least two roles in preference construction. First, coherence shifting, or altering preferences prior to choice to make one alternative more attractive, may regulate emotion. Difficult decisions, imagining unpleasant outcomes, and threats to closely held goals produce general negative affect, and coherence shifting may reduce this. Second, preferences for alternatives may be …

Illuminating Perceptions Of Social-Ecological Complexity For More Holistic Management Of Parks And Protected Areas, Michael Patrick Blacketer

All Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on illuminating human perceptions in a social-ecological system (SES) through three studies: (1) revealing human perceptions of the influence of social network structure on social dynamics in an SES; (2) understanding human perceptions of biophysical and social change related to a SES, and (3) exploring how key stakeholder groups might perceive social-ecological reciprocities in an SES. To achieve these endeavors, this dissertation advances analytical tools that have yet to be widely used in natural resource management to understand stakeholders’ perceptions of social-ecological complexity: social network models, perceptions of change, and fuzzy logic cognitive mapping. These tools represent …

Power Bounded Computing On Current & Emerging Hpc Systems, Pengfei Zou

All Dissertations

Power has become a critical constraint for the evolution of large scale High Performance Computing (HPC) systems and commercial data centers. This constraint spans almost every level of computing technologies, from IC chips all the way up to data centers due to physical, technical, and economic reasons. To cope with this reality, it is necessary to understand how available or permissible power impacts the design and performance of emergent computer systems. For this reason, we propose power bounded computing and corresponding technologies to optimize performance on HPC systems with limited power budgets.

We have multiple research objectives in this dissertation. …

Using Novel Approaches For Navigating Complex Energy Landscapes: Ion Channel Conductance Using Hyperdynamics And Human-Guided Global Optimization Of Lennard-Jones Clusters, Wenxing Zhang

All Dissertations

Molecular dynamics (MD) is a widely used tool to study molecular systems on atomic level. However, the timescale of a traditional MD simulation is typically limited to nanoseconds. Thus many interesting processes that occur on microseconds or larger timescale can't be studied. Hyperdynamics provides a way to extend the timescale of MD simulation. In hyperdynamics, MD is performed on a biased potential then corrected to get true dynamics provided certain conditions are met. Here, we tried to study potassium channel conductance using the hyperdynamics method with a bias potential constructed based on the potential of mean force of ion translocation …

Homomorphic Encryption And Cryptanalysis Of Lattice Cryptography, Benjamin M. Case

All Dissertations

The vast amount of personal data being collected and analyzed through internet connected devices is vulnerable to theft and misuse. Modern cryptography presents several powerful techniques that can help to solve the puzzle of how to harness data for use while at the same time protecting it---one such technique is homomorphic encryption that allows computations to be done on data while it is still encrypted. The question of security for homomorphic encryption relates to the broader field of lattice cryptography. Lattice cryptography is one of the main areas of cryptography that promises to be secure even against quantum computing.

In …

A Computational Framework For Axisymmetric Linear Elasticity And Parallel Iterative Solvers For Two-Phase Navier–Stokes, Alistair R. Bentley

All Dissertations

This dissertation explores ways to improve the computational efficiency of linear elasticity and the variable density/viscosity Navier--Stokes equations. While the approaches explored for these two problems are much different in nature, the end goal is the same - to reduce the computational effort required to form reliable numerical approximations.\\

The first topic considered is the axisymmetric linear elasticity problem. While the linear elasticity problem has been studied extensively in the finite-element literature, to the author's knowledge, this is the first study of the elasticity problem in an axisymmetric setting. Indeed, the axisymmetric nature of the problem means that a change …

Student Conceptualization Of Stoichiometry, Khushikumari J. Patel-Desai

All Dissertations

General Chemistry (I and II) is a year-long introductory course frequently taken at the start of the college career for STEM-intending students. It is broadly found to be difficult, and many students struggle. Stoichiometry describes the relationships between compounds and elements in a reaction. It is a fundamental concept that is taught in the first semester of General Chemistry as a building block for the understanding of future concepts in second-semester and upper-level chemistry courses. Students have a difficult time conceptualizing stoichiometry because it involves a combination of algorithms and builds off of other fundamentals. However, studies claiming to focus …

Frictions In The Youth Labor Market: Theory And Evidence, Guanghua Wang

All Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how young workers’ abilities shape their early careers in the presence of information frictions and labor market shocks through two studies. The research in the first chapter focuses on the strength of a worker’s comparative advantage, which measures the distribution of her abilities. Workers are uncertain about what they are good at when they enter the labor market, and then they shop around to find their best-matched occupations. I use the average distance between productivities in the best-matched occupation and the other occupations to measure the strength of a worker’s comparative advantage. Empirically, those productivities are estimated …

Development Of Capillary-Channeled Polymer (C-Cp) Fiber As Stationary Phase For Biological Sample Application, Lei Wang

All Dissertations

Capillary-channeled polymer (C-CP) fibers as an alternative support/stationary phase for biomacromolecule separations on analytical and preparative scales have been developed by Marcus research group. The combination of the fiber micro- and macro-structures and in-column orientation allows operation at comparably high linear velocities (~100 mm s-1) without excessive system backpressure. The ability to move fluid efficiently through the structure is complemented by the fact that the fiber physical structure is effectively nonporous with respect to the size of proteins, therefor there is no significant intrafiber diffusion. Ultimately, these factors combine for protein separations that are devoid of appreciable van Deemter C-term …

Lossy Compression For Transferring, Storing, Analyzing Huge Scientific Datasets (White Paper), Sheng Di, Franck Cappello

Large Scale Networking (LSN) Workshop on Huge Data: A Computing, Networking and Distributed Systems Perspective

No abstract provided.

Huge Data Is Outgrowing The Internet's File Transfer Protocols - Keynote Presentation, Craig Partridge

Large Scale Networking (LSN) Workshop on Huge Data: A Computing, Networking and Distributed Systems Perspective

No abstract provided.

Predictive Models For Pulmonary Artery Size In Fontan Patients, Akash Gupta, Chris Gillett, Patrick Gerard, Michael M.H. Cheung, Jonathan P. Mynard, Ethan Kung

Publications

We developed models of pulmonary artery (PA) size in Fontan patients as a function of age and body surface area (BSA) using linear regression and breakpoint analyses based on data from 43 Fontan patients divided into two groups: the extracardiac conduit (ECC) group (n = 24) and the non-ECC group (n = 19). Model predictions were compared against those of a non-Fontan control group (n = 18) and published literature. We observed strong positive correlations of the mean PA diameter with BSA (r = 0.9, p < 0.05) and age (r = 0.88, p < 0.05) in the ECC group. The absolute percentage differences between our BSA and age model predictions against published literature were less than 16% and 20%, respectively. Predicted PA size for Fontan patients was consistently smaller than the control group. These models may serve as useful references for clinicians and be utilized to construct 3D anatomic models that correspond to patient body size or age.