Digital Commons Network^™

Multicultural Perspectives On Building Instructional Capacity For Multilingual Learners: Synergy Of Teachers, Community Members, And Academics, Mihaela M. Gazioglu, Emily W. Howell, Lindsey W. Rowe, Victoria Pennington, Nicole C. Ferguson-Sams, Kavita Mittapalli, Amlan Banerjee

Publications

This design-based research study explored the feedback process, resulting actions, and changing instructional perspectives involving teachers, community members, and researchers leading to enhanced professional development offered to K-12 teachers of multilingual students. Specifically, the feedback from a community advisory council and teachers significantly shaped researchers’ approaches to designing and adapting a literacy course to address the needs of multilingual students’ caregivers. The findings underscore the importance of a holistic approach to professional development and highlight the multicultural perspectives that academics can discover by involving both community stakeholders and teachers in promoting impactful practices for multilingual learners.

Investigating Crystalline Rock Weathering In Distinct Climate And Ecological Settings: Insights From Shallow Seismic Refraction, Rachel Uecker

All Dissertations

Despite decades of research, understanding the subsurface of the critical zone (CZ) remains a challenge, constrained by limited access to information at depth. Traditionally, boreholes, outcrops, soil pits, and near-surface (<1 meter) geochemical measurements provided access to and quantified CZ structure. These methods, though valuable in their detail, are spatially limited, and many landscape-scale weathering hypotheses are based on these observations. In recent years, geophysical techniques have been applied to characterize large-scale CZ structure and test the validity of existing hypotheses. This dissertation harnesses nearly 10 kilometers of seismic refraction data from diverse ecoregions across the United States to challenge prevailing assumptions about weathering patterns and CZ evolution. The objective of this work is to characterize the interpreted range of weathered materials in each ecoregion and connect them to remotely-sensed information like canopy height, elevation, slope, and aspect. To do this, this work first investigates differences in weathering at depth in a north and south-facing slope system in the Laramie Range, Wyoming. The motivation for this work came from nearly a century of soil and geochemical studies from the western United States that show a greater degree and depth of weathering on north-facing slopes when compared to south-facing slopes. Our seismic refraction data were used to show that there is not a significant difference in weathering thickness at depth between north and south-facing aspects at the study site, thus conflicting with the hypothesis that there would be. Next, the hypothesis that the depth of weathering is affected by elevation was tested in the San Jacinto Mountains in southern California. The motivation for this work came from several geochemical studies in the Sierra Nevada Mountains that show ecologically prosperous mid-elevations possess an ideal combination of temperature and precipitation to produce a greater degree and depth of weathering. Again, the seismic results from the San Jacinto Mountains provided observations that conflict with the existing hypothesis that climate conditions dominate the thickness of weathering seen in rocks. Lastly, I used seismic refraction data and topographic curvature to build a groundwater model of a watershed in the Carolina Piedmont. The results of this model reveal that seismic refraction as an application for including more realistic geometry in groundwater models can improve model calibration fits. This model is the first of its kind, and, therefore, is an important step forward in merging geophysical data with the hydrogeologic and modeling field and, with further development, can be used to explore the role of topographic and regional groundwater flow as a driver of CZ evolution.

Multicultural Perspectives On Building Instructional Capacity For Multilingual Learners: Synergy Of Teachers, Community Members, And Academics, Mihaela Gazioglu, Emily Howell, Lindsey W. Rowe, Victoria Pennington, Nicole Ferguson-Sams, Kavita Mittapalli, Amian Banerjee

Publications

This design-based research study explored the feedback process, resulting actions, and changing instructional perspectives involving teachers, community members, and researchers leading to enhanced professional development offered to K-12 teachers of multilingual students. Specifically, the feedback from a community advisory council and teachers significantly shaped researchers’ approaches to designing and adapting a literacy course to address the needs of multilingual students’ caregivers. The findings underscore the importance of a holistic approach to professional development and highlight the multicultural perspectives that academics can discover by involving both community stakeholders and teachers in promoting impactful practices for multilingual learners.

Preschool Teachers’ Self-Efficacy In Teaching Mathematics: A Multiple Holistic Case Study Approach, Farhana Afroz

All Dissertations

Teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching mathematics plays a significant role in students’ success in mathematics (Levine et al., 2010; MacDonald, 2020). Introducing high-quality mathematics instruction in preschool is crucial, as this practice impacts children’s future mathematics achievement (Claessens & Engel, 2013; Braak et al., 2021). Despite having this benefit, children at the preschool level get inadequate mathematics lessons due to the preschool teachers’ uneasiness or discomfort with teaching mathematics (Gerde et al., 2018; Bates et al., 2013). However, this discomfort or uneasiness may arise from teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching mathematics (Copley, 2004). This study investigated the perceived self-efficacy of preschool teachers …

Learning To Represent Temporal Dynamics And Generative Factors For Intelligent Visual Navigation, Sahand Khoshdel

All Theses

Visual navigation systems are crucial in various applications, including autonomous driving, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), and industrial automation. For these systems to operate efficiently in dynamic environments, they must not only interpret complex surroundings but also anticipate changes over time. Temporal prediction—forecasting environmental changes like moving obstacles or shifting lighting conditions—enables navigation systems to act proactively, enhancing both safety and performance. This dissertation investigates representation learning methods both as a backbone feature extractor for RL agents as well as a proxy for systems oriented for Explainable AI (XAI). Two main projects are presented as case studies to achieve the aforementioned …

Shifting Perspectives With Procedural Modeling Techniques And Vertex Animated Textures For Real-Time Interactive Morphing, Stephanie Schulze

All Theses

As humans experience reality, they intake external stimuli using sensory receptors to process information, forming a perception. Perceptions are subjective and shape each individual’s reality. Naturally then, by changing one’s perceptions, their experience of reality is altered, for better or worse. To emphasize the idea that perception is malleable and encourage a mindset of questioning alternative ways to look at a situation, an interactive experience in Unreal Engine is developed where a dull cityscape morphs and transforms into a surreal oversized nature scene. Procedural modeling techniques are used to create a variety of morphing assets, while Vertex Animated Textures are …

Striking A Balance: Market Shock & Responses In Automotive Components Manufacturing, Emma Lane Mcgahey

All Theses

This thesis examines the effects of extreme market shocks on supply chain dynamics within the automotive industry. Through an analysis of demand data from an automotive manufacturer to its component suppliers (January 2018 to May 2024), the study investigates the relationship between market shocks and supply chain responses, providing insights into how auto components inventory management handles downstream responses to market shocks. With supporting public data—from FRED, BLS, and the U.S. Census Bureau resources—we explore two primary relationships: the impact of market shocks on the Average Standard Deviation of Demand (SDO) and the effect of demand variability on expedited pricing …

Interpreting Strain Caused By Transient Well Testing, Soheil Roudini

All Dissertations

Understanding reservoir properties and structure is essential to managing subsurface operations, such as geologic storage of CO₂ or production of water, hydrocarbons or heat. Previous work demonstrated the potential of analyzing strain data during transient well tests by estimating hydraulic diffusivity using a type-curve-like approach. The following dissertation aims to pursue this potential by developing and evaluating methods for interpreting strain tensor data to improve subsurface characterization. The research advances the classic, intuitive method of using type-curves to interpret well tests, but it also brings together modern computational methods from machine learning, proxy modeling and Bayesian inversion, and it …

Influence Of Hygrothermal Conditions Of The Bistability Of Asymmetric Carbon Fiber Laminate Composites, Celia Hill

All Theses

Carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) laminates have widespread use in many industries because of their exceptional strength-to-weight ratio. Carbon fiber laminates following an asymmetric layup orientation can exhibit bistability meaning the laminate can exist at two stable geometric configurations. The morphing characteristics of bistable CRFP has a growing level of interest because of its potential in various applications including space aircraft structures for easy repair, automotive structures for energy dissipation and ergonomics, robotics for flexible motion and energy harvesting. Existing research shows that both moisture and temperature affect the material properties and behavior of CFRP laminates, however, the influence of moisture …

Informing Management Of American Shad (Alosa Sapidissima) In The Carolinas: Evaluating Novel Fish Passage Approaches And Acoustic Tracking Methods, Margaret Gaither

All Theses

Acoustic telemetry is a valuable tool for fisheries scientists to study the movements and migratory behaviors of aquatic organisms. A critical assumption of this method is that tagged fish exhibit similar behaviors and survival rates as their untagged counterparts. To investigate this, we conducted a 12-week laboratory study on adult American Shad (Alosa sapidissima) using gastroesophageal insertion of acoustic transmitters. We implanted 80 fish with dummy transmitters and monitored tag retention and survival. Our analysis, employing a mixed effects Cox’s proportional hazards model, revealed no significant differences in survival between tagged and control fish, regardless of sex. Additionally, …

An Analysis Of The Properties Of Polar Codes, Luke Szramowski

All Theses

Polar Codes have risen to the forefront of practical coding theory, due to their incredible efficiency and ease of construction. Originally introduced by Arikan in his 2009 paper, they are the first code defined with an explicit construction that achieved channel capacity. Moreover, polar codes possess some physically practical properties that make their implementation alluring. In the same paper as mentioned above, Arikan elaborated on his construction and noted that the construction given was one specific instance of a polar code and that there is a family of polar codes that can be produced by the same method. Since this …

Surgical Suturing Skill Assessment Using Estimated Hand Roll Angle From A Deep-Learning Computer Vision Algorithm, Jianxin Gao, Amir Mehdi Shayan, Simar P. Singh, Joe Bible, Ravikiran Singapogu, Richard E. Groff

Publications

This paper proposes a deep-learning computer vision algorithm to estimate hand roll angles for metric-based assessment of surgical suturing skills. The number of rolls metric, previously calculated directly from IMU data, counts the number of hand roll reversals during a single suture. To calculate this metric using computer vision, we apply a deep-learning algorithm that can reliably estimate hand roll angles after training on suturing videos collected on the SutureCoach simulator. Results show that the estimation accuracy of the deep-learning algorithm is robust to different video backgrounds. The number of rolls metrics were used to analyze suturing performance in the …

Basic Safety Message Generation Through A Video-Based Analytics For Potential Safety Application, Abyad Enan

All Theses

With the advancement of modern artificial intelligence techniques, computer vision can play a vital role in enhancing roadway safety by reducing the risk of imminent collisions. To do so, a vision-based safety application is required, where a roadside camera can monitor the roadway traffic and predict potential risks of crashes in real-time. If any risky situation or behavior is observed that may lead to a crash, then a safety application can send warnings to the vehicles at risk. For vision-based safety applications on a roadway section, it is important to accurately monitor each vehicle’s location, speed, acceleration, heading direction, etc. …

Comparative Analysis Of Design-Build And Design-Bid-Build Project Delivery Methods Through Cost, Schedule And Quality Performance For Warehousing And Storage Facilities, Vijaya Ravi Prasanth Reddi

All Theses

Storage facilities are essential for e-commerce operations, providing inventory, distribution, and delivery space. As per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of warehousing and storage businesses in the United States increased from 15,152 in 2010 to 21,287 in 2024, showing continuous growth over the decade. Given the recent surge, there is a need to understand the performance of these facilities better. This study aims to contrast the measure of quantitative performance of design-build (DB) versus traditional design-bid-build (DBB) project delivery methods (PDM) based on cost, schedule, and quality metrics for storage facilities. This research conducted a literature review to …

Unsupervised Moving Object Segmentation With Atmospheric Turbulence, Dehao Qin

All Theses

Moving object segmentation in the presence of atmospheric turbulence is a highly challenging task due to the irregular and time-varying distortions induced by the atmospheric turbulence. This thesis presents an unsupervised approach for segmenting moving objects in videos affected by such atmospheric turbulence. The proposed methodology is grounded in a detect-then-grow scheme: the algorithm begins by identifying a small set of moving object pixels (seed points) with high confidence and progressively expanding a foreground mask from these seed points to segment all moving objects. The proposed approach capitalizes on rigid geometric consistency across video frames to disentangle different types of …

Enhancing Access To Inquiry-Based Art Education In Title I Schools: Addressing Inequities And Promoting Student Driven Learning, Rebecca Stone-Danahy

All Dissertations

This study investigates the enabling conditions that support inquiry-based art education programs in Title I schools, addressing a literature gap regarding effective practices for high school art educators working with economically disadvantaged students. Inquiry-based art education empowers students by fostering creativity and problem-solving skills and encouraging self-expression. These attributes are essential for equipping students with the tools they need for success in college and their future careers. While existing research has underscored the benefits of the arts for marginalized students, the literature lacks guidance on how to support an inquiry-based art education program in a Title I school.

The study …

Magnetic Resonance Imaging Trackable Pathology-Triggered Polymersomes Toward Enzyme Replacement Theranostics For Gm1 Gangliosidosis, Dorian Foster

All Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the development and optimization of pathology-responsive polymersomes for simultaneous enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) in the treatment of GM1 gangliosidosis (GM1). While therapeutic strategies exist for similar, non-neuropathic lysosomal storage disorders, implementation towards GM1 faces significant challenges due to the blood-brain barrier.

Herein, we developed and characterized a range of low molecular weight hyaluronic acid-b-polylactic acid (HA-PLA) polymersomes (PSs) capable of encapsulating therapeutic enzymes in their hydrophilic core. These polymersomes exhibit pathophysiology-triggered responsiveness, degrading in the presence of acidic conditions, which is characteristic of lysosomes, and enzymes such as hexosaminidase A, which …

Composites Developed By The Reaction Of Elemental Sulfur With Biologically Derived Fats And Oils, Katelyn Tisdale

All Dissertations

Human civilization’s modern infrastructure relies mainly on cement and petrochemical products. However, the production of these building materials have harmful ecological effects such as green gas emissions, therefore intensifying the need to develop alternative, sustainable structural materials from renewably sourced or waste material precursors. The work presented herein investigates various biomass derived resources that serve as the olefin source for reaction with elemental sulfur, another abundant waste source, via inverse vulcanization to form high strength composites competitive with that of traditional building materials.

Chapter one reviews various techniques that have been developed and executed in an effort towards lignin valorization …

Modeling Instrument Design Risks In Medical Device Reprocessing, Manuel Andres Gutierrez

All Dissertations

Medical device reprocessing is an essential practice in healthcare delivery. While FDA regulations require device manufacturers to develop and validate reprocessing procedures, the increasing complexity of medical device designs and their use environments can increase the risks of inadequate reprocessing and associated device malfunctions and potential patient injury. While some design features present known difficulties for reprocessing, critical information needed to define relative risks or feature-specific parameters that increase or decrease risks of inadequate reprocessing is lacking. There is an urgent need for tools to quantify and predict reprocessing risks associated with design features used in surgical instruments.

The broad …

Charge Transport In Two Dimensional Systems With Arbitrary Rashba And Dresselhaus Interactions, Abhishek Khanal

All Dissertations

In this thesis we discuss two different transport phenomena that occur in a two-dimensional electron system endowed with linear Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interactions of arbitrary values. First, in a semiclassical formalism we calculate the non-linear charge currents that appear in response to the simultaneous application of in-plane electric and magnetic fields. Working in a rotated system of coordinates that introduces $\alpha \pm \beta$ as effective couplings on perpendicular directions, we formulate a transport theory that relies on a second order distribution function derived in a local energy approximation and on chiral dependent relaxation times to show that the currents …

Hardware Applications Of High-Speed Fault Detection Algorithms, Daniel Zintsmaster

All Theses

The growing need for a sustainable electric energy infrastructure has driven research into control, protection, and optimization of power systems. A key challenge is that the changing grid must operate at increasingly higher speeds, but many current hardware devices cannot meet these demands. This thesis focuses on power system protection, aiming to design a hardware solution that can detect and isolate faults in microseconds, ensuring faster, more reliable grid operations. The first hardware developed was for a low-voltage direct current (LVdc) microgrid, which faces challenges due to a lack of protection schemes and novel speed requirements. This thesis presents protection …

Exploiting Randomness In Secret Sharing, Cailyn Bass

All Theses

Shamir's (k,n)-threshold scheme is a method for sharing a secret among n participants such that any group of k or more participants can recover the secret. Additionally, any group of participants with size less than k should learn nothing about the secret. The scheme works by distributing a share to each participant, where each share is a linear combination of the secret and k-1 random symbols. This allows any group of k or more participants to solve a linear system to compute the secret. Any group of less than k participants does not have enough to determine anything about the …

Application Of Lossy And Lossless Compression To Dicom Files, Yizhe Yang

All Theses

The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard is widely utilized for the management, storage, and transfer of medical images. However, the substantial file sizes associated with DICOM data present challenges in terms of storage and data transmission. Data reduction techniques help address these challenges by minimizing the size of the data while preserving its integrity. This thesis examines various compression methods aimed at reducing the size of DICOM files. We evaluate five lossless compressors and four lossy compressors on DICOM data to compare and assess their performance. Through an analysis of each compressor’s compression efficiency and resulting image …

Multiple Cut Systems Of Cannabis Sativa L. For Micropropagation Without The Use Of Cytokinins, Molly Mckay

All Theses

Micropropagation is a technique used to propagate clean, high-quality clonal stock plants using plant growth regulators (PGR) in a single harvest batch system. This two-part study uses an in vitro multiple harvest system “hedging” combined with the fed- batch media process, to observe (1) the effects of modified physical state and (2) LED light quality to improve shoot production and quality. In Experiment 1, four genotypes of Cannabis sativa (‘Cherry 1’,‘BaOx’,‘T1’,‘Peach’) were observed in three different physical states: stationary agar (A), stationary Oasis® infused with liquid (OIL_s) and agitated Oasis® infused with liquid (OIL_a). Fifteen …

Ai At The Helm: Transforming Crisis Communication Through Theory And Advancing Technology, Timothy Whims

All Theses

This thesis investigates the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models, into crisis communication, focusing on how AI technologies can enhance response strategies and stakeholder engagement during crises. By leveraging established communication frameworks such as Image Repair Theory, Situational Crisis Communication Theory, and the Discourse of Renewal, this research explores the potential for AI to improve both the speed and precision of crisis responses. The study highlights how AI can assist in monitoring public sentiment, drafting tailored responses, and managing real-time information during crisis events. However, it also addresses the limitations of AI, such as its inability to …

Bounding The Convex Hull Relaxation Of The Unit Commitment Problem With The Shapley-Folkman Theorem, Lauren Henderson

All Theses

The Unit Commitment (UC) problem finds an optimal schedule for a set of generators by minimizing the total operation cost subject to demand and operational constraints. The UC problem is often modeled with a mixed-integer linear program (MILP). We employ the Shapley-Folkman Theorem to provide a bound on the size of fractional solutions of its convex hull relaxation. This result is used to obtain a bound on the optimality gap between the MILP and the convex hull relaxation, which is further tightened using several problem-specific properties of UC. We conduct extensive numerical experiments to study the tightness of this threshold, …

Magnetic Nano And Micro Rods As Tools For Characterizing Materials Mechanical Properties: Fundamentals And Applications, Artis Brasovs

All Dissertations

The focus of this dissertation is insect blood (Hemolymph). Hemolymph is analyzed by taking a materials science approach. Rheological characterization of hemolymph has been performed for the first time. Owing to a minute amount of available material, a new protocol was established where Magnetic Rotational Spectroscopy (MRS) with ferromagnetic nanorods was employed. The challenge was examining the microliter droplets' viscosity in less than a few minutes. This challenge was successfully resolved.

Blood is critical for the insect's survival: after wounding, the insect has to seal the wound quickly, in a few minutes. As the mechanism of fast clotting has never …

Computational Representation, Analysis And Verification Of Requirements In Engineering Design And Systems Engineering, Chandan Kumar Sahu

All Dissertations

Systems are developed to satisfy a set of requirements derived from stakeholders’ needs, defining the problem space for which the system is created as a feasible solution. The system design process begins with eliciting these requirements and concludes with validating whether the created system meets them. Requirements engineering (RE) encompasses elicitation, representation, analysis, documentation, verification, and validation. However, challenges in RE, such as imprecision in natural language (NL), proprietary restrictions, and a lack of standardized quality metrics, hinder the creation of well-formed and comprehensive requirements. These challenges complicate formalization and analysis of requirements.

This dissertation addresses these challenges by proposing …

Nanostructured Silicon Meta-Waveguides And Surfaces For Enhanced Light-Matter Interaction, Saddam Gafsi

All Dissertations

In this study, we tackle the challenge of light-matter interaction engineering and local field enhancement using various silicon photonic platforms based on three different approaches. (i) The first approach is based on boundary condition engineering where we present and show through simulation and experimental results, a silicon nanodisk “diabolo” configuration able to support significant local field enhancement levels in the range ~102 to 104 in the high index medium through proper structural modifications at the nanoscale. We show that the presented optical behavior is consistent with the anapole modes characterized by the observed near-field enhancement and coinciding with far-field suppression. …

"Don't Put Me Here To Meet A Quota": A Qualitative Descriptive Study Of Black Male Teacher Retention, Latresha Drummond

All Dissertations

The national teacher shortage has reached a fever pitch and can be accurately described as a crisis. Teacher vacancies in South Carolina (SC) have reached an all-time high since the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and advancement began tracking the teacher shortage in 2001. Further, the phenomenon surrounding the exodus of Black teachers is understudied. Currently, no agency or organization tracks demographic turnover among the teacher workforce in South Carolina.

I utilized a qualitative descriptive design informed by an improvement science framework to identify motivating factors for teacher mobility among current and past Black male educators in SC public schools. …