Digital Commons Network^™

Effects Of Direct Instruction Flashcards And Reading Racetracks On Sight Word Acquisition And Maintenance For A Student With Autism, Chelsea Burton

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A student’s abilities in literacy can be indicative of his/her ability to live successfully in our society (Rinaldi, Sells, & McLaughlin, 1997). The ability to read is an area of difficulty, particularly for many students with autism spectrum disorders. Two fundamental cognitive processes required for skilled reading are word recognition and reading comprehension (Spector, 2010). Struggles with word recognition hamper the ability of students with ASD to work towards the goal of literacy (Spector, 2010). Browder and Xin (1998) argued that sight word instruction is important because that knowledge provides a foundation for other functional academic skills. The purpose of …

The Domain-General And Domain-Specific Profiles Of Computation And Problem-Solving Difficulties, Xin Lin

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of the study was to explore the domain-general and domain-specific profile of two important mathematics difficulties. Three domain-general measures (working memory, processing speed, reasoning), and three domain-specific measures (language comprehension, mathematics vocabulary, math fluency) were completed among 125 Chinese 4^th grade students. Of these 125 students, 28 were classified as students with only calculation difficulties (CD), 34 were classified as having problem-solving difficulties (PD), 20 were classified as students with calculation and problem-solving difficulties (CPD), and 43 were typically developing (TD) peers. Multivariate analysis showed that, compared to TD, CD was associated with weakness in working memory …

A Multifactorial Model Of Threat Assessment Activity Applied To Educational Settings, Maria Rosa Viñas-Racionero

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The current study proposed a multifactorial model of threat assessment activity(MFTA) in order to assess the effectiveness of threat management interventions for preventing problematic physical approach and violence in institutes of higher education (Scalora & Bulling, 2007; Scalora, Zimmerman, & Wells, 2008; Scalora, Plank, & Scheoneman, 2009). In order to answer this overarching goal, the current study analyzed a sample of 332 cases reported to a Police Department of a Midwestern University between 2006 and 2016. The MFTA model was statistically tested via a structural equation model. Overall, the results of this study suggested that the MFTA model provided …

Evaluating 21st Century Climate Change For Bolivia: A Comprehensive Dynamical Downscaling Strategy Using The Wrf Regional Climate Model, Azar Mohammad Abadi

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Bolivia is a low-latitude, developing country at grave risk for the effects of human-induced climate changes. This means evaluating the consequences of projected future climate changes is of significant importance. Unfortunately, the complex topography and high elevation of much of the country pose particular challenges, as these effects cannot be suitably resolved at the approximately 100 km spatial resolution of current global climate models (GCM). Therefore, a comprehensive suite of high-resolution climate change simulations was made focused on Bolivia are run using three different GCMs with three different emission scenarios for each to drive the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) …

Creating A New Normal: Language Education For All, Aleidine Kramer Moeller, Martha G. Abbott

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

How close are we to the reality of all students having the opportunity to learn another language and gaining support for these efforts from the general public? The answer has a long history, which we point out by referencing articles that span the 50‐year history of Foreign Language Annals. From the 1979 President’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies report under President Jimmy Carter to the recent article by Kroll and Dussias (2017) on the benefits of multilingualism, this article tracks ACTFL’s advocacy efforts over the years. Most recently, the 2017 launch of the Lead with Languages public awareness …

Digital Legal Deposit In Selected Jurisdictions: Australia, Canada, China, Estonia, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom, Peter Roudik, Kelly Buchanan, Tariq Tariq Ahmad, Laney Zhang, Nerses Isajanyan, Nicolas Boring, Jenny Gesley, Ruth Levush, Dante Figueroa, Sayuri Umeda, Elin Hofverberg, Graciela Rodriguez-Ferrand, Clare Feikert-Ahalt

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Comparative Summary by Peter Roudik, Assistant Law Librarian of Congress for Legal Research (United States)

This report, prepared by the staff of the Global Legal Research Directorate of the Law Library of Congress, surveys laws regulating the mandatory legal deposit of electronic materials. Fifteen countries representing different approaches to collecting, describing, preserving, and storing digital and non-print documents and providing access to them are included in the study. (See map, below.) These countries were selected because of their long-term experience with collecting online and offline electronic publications. Each country survey provides information on the history of edeposit programs in the …

Letters From Olive Fremstad To Willa Cather: A View Beyond The Song Of The Lark, Jessica Tebo

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In 1913, Willa Cather met opera-diva Olive Fremstad and the two formed a friendship that would span at least a decade. Fremstad has long been recognized as an inspiration for the character Thea Kronborg of Cather’s Song of the Lark (1915) but has not been portrayed as influential in any other aspects to Cather’s career. Letters sent by Fremstad to Cather have recently been located, and they reveal an ongoing and interdisciplinary dialogue between the two women that negotiates issues surrounding art and professionalism. I locate these letters within the broader context of Cather’s public and fictional statements about art …

Cracking The Pubmed Linkout System, Paul Royster, Sue Ann Gardner

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

The University of Nebraska's institutional repository has managed to participate in The NLM’s PubMed LinkOut program to place links to our Green Open Access content in the nation’s premier scientific citations database. This brief presentation describes how and why we worked to be included and what extended effects the integration of those systems (our IR + NLM’s PubMed) can provide.

Download button accesses PDF version; PowerPoint slides are attached below.

Review Of Chris Ware: Conversations, Carly Diab

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

No abstract provided.

Sharing Identity: Indexing Cultural Perspectives Through Writing Responses To Graphic Novels, Alex Romagnoli

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Indexing identity through writing responses among ELL students in response to a graphic novel helps provide insight into how writing responses represent people and how graphic novels can aid in that process of self-discovery through their inherent multimodalities. This study takes looks at four students in an ELL class at an urban high school in southern Pennsylvania as they responded in writing to a portion of Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City (2006). All of the participants took events from the portion of the graphic novel provided to them and indexed their urban, cultural perspectives through their …

Pre-Service Teachers’ Perspectives On How The Use Of Toon Comic Books During Guided Reading Influenced Learning By Struggling Readers, Ewa Mcgrail, Alicja Rieger, Gina M. Doepker, Samantha Mcgeorge

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The study presented in this article examines the use of comic books, specifically the TOON comic books during guided reading instruction. The instruction was provided to struggling readers by the Literacy Center at a comprehensive university in southeastern United States. What most pre-service teachers in this study agreed upon was that comic books served as an effective tool for getting their students interested in reading. Reading comic books with tutors as partners in conversation with the struggling readers in this study was also a powerful medium for facilitating students’ literacy skills development, particularly in the areas of reading fluency and …

Review: Architectural Involutions: Writing, Staging, And Building Space, C. 1435–1650. Mimi Yiu., Kelly Stage

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Mimi Yiu’s Architectural Involutions is an expansive, impressive, and largely interdisciplinary study. Many recent books have touched on related topics—probably most relevantly Henry Turner’s The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630—but this one reads from architecture and space forward rather than seeks answers about the theater foremost. The book’s main focus is to theorize the “inward journey” made possible by modes of understanding, building, and reading space in early modern Europe, although England is central to much of the work’s concerns. As Yiu explains in her introduction, the book “suggests a method for spatial mapping …

Seventy-Five North Developments: A Holistic Approach To Improving Northeast Omaha, Fabiola Alikpokou

Community and Regional Planning Program: Theses

The concentration of public housing in high-poverty neighborhoods has many negative impacts; it limits educational opportunities for kids, leads to increased crime, causes poor health outcomes, hinders wealth building, and decreases investments (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2013). Northeast Omaha exhibits many of these issues. North Omaha is not only home to many of the city's minority persons, but also home to one of the most impoverished Black communities in the United States (Cordes, Gonzalez, & Grace, 2011). The Omaha-Council Bluffs area was ranked 14 for the highest African-American poverty rate out of 100 most populous metro areas …

Using Art And Story To Explore How Primary School Students In Rural Tanzania Understand Planetary Health: A Qualitative Analysis, Elizabeth Vanwormer, Jesca Mlawa, Elizabeth Komba, Christopher Gustafson, Hilda Mrema, Jenny M. Dauer

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Background The global planetary health community increasingly recognises the need to prepare students to investigate and address connections between environmental change and human health. As we strive to support education on planetary health themes for students of all ages, understanding students’ concepts of linkages between the health of people and animals, and their shared environments might advance educational approaches. Children living in villages bordering Ruaha National Park in Iringa Region, Tanzania, have direct experience of these connections as they share a water-stressed but biodiverse environment with domestic animals and wildlife. Livelihoods in these villages depend predominantly on crop and livestock …

Digitalcommons Users Discuss The Bepress Acquisition, Paul Royster, Roger Weaver, Marilyn Billings, Phillip Fitzsimmons, Terri Fishel

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Since the acquisition of the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) by Elsevier last summer, there has been much discussion online, in listserves, and elsewhere about what that development means for the future of open access and scholarly communications. The people most directly affected are the users of the bepress DigitalCommons repository hosting service. Some have recoiled in horror at the new ownership situation, others are waiting to see what happens next. This is a panel discussion by current users concerning what they see in the road ahead, including what they regard as essential services, possible options, functionality requirements, and necessary safeguards.

Race, Slavery, And Evasion: Whitman And Melville’S Changing Perspectives And Their Glancing Poetic Treatment Of The Core Civil War Issue, Said Hail Fallaha

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Whitman and Melville’s poetry about the Civil War is almost completely silent when it comes to slavery. Both writers depict a newly emancipated person in their poems about the Civil War, but they seem to do so almost as an afterthought. Both Whitman's “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” and Melville's “Formerly a Slave” represent an elderly African American woman. These poems stand alone in their representation of an African American. Peter J. Bellis argues that both writers were concerned with how to negotiate national emotions and policies by the end of the war and these “emotions” and “policies” were vital to …

A Friend Beyond The Screen, Raymart Pontemayor

Laurus: Undergraduate Literature Journal of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln

This essay highlights the importance of friendship through online communication which is not often seen in today's society. Most friendships occur on a real life basis, however there is a layer of intimacy when distance is involved. As a result, long distance relationships build a stronger foundation between friends that is underappreciated.

Interferon-Gamma Impairs Maintenance And Alters Hematopoietic Support Of Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stromal Cells, Marieke Goedhart, Anne S. Cornelissen, Carlijn Kuijk, Sulima Geerman, Marion Kleijer, Jaap D. Van Buul, Stephan Huveneers, Marc H.G.P. Raaijmakers, Howard A. Young, Monika C. Wolkers, Carlijn Voermans, Martijn A. Nolte

United States Public Health Resources

Bone marrow (BM) mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) provide microenvironmental support to hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs). Culture-expanded MSCs are interesting candidates for cellular therapies due to their immunosuppressive and regenerative potential which can be further enhanced by pretreatment with interferon-gamma (IFN-γ). However, it remains unknown whether IFN-γ can also influence hematopoietic support by BM-MSCs. In this study, we elucidate the impact of IFN-γ on the hematopoietic support of BM-MSCs. We found that IFN-γ increases expression of interleukin (IL)-6 and stem cell factor by human BM-MSCs. IFN-γ-treated BM-MSCs drive HSPCs toward myeloid commitment in vitro, but impair subsequent differentiation of …

Supporting English Language Learners Inside The Mathematics Classroom: One Teacher’S Unique Perspective Working With Students During Their First Years In America, Amy Marie Fendrick

Research and Evaluation in Education, Technology, Art, and Design

Reflecting upon my personal experiences teaching mathematics to English Language Learners (ELL) in a public high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, this essay largely focuses on the time I spent as the only Accelerated Math teacher in my school building. From 2012 – 2017, I taught three different subjects at this high school: Advanced Algebra, Algebra, and Accelerated Math. This essay highlights why I chose to become a math and ELL teacher, as well as the challenges, issues, struggles, and successes I experienced during my time teaching. I focus on the challenges I faced teaching students who did not share my …

Nebline, May 2018

NEBLINE Newsletter Archive from Nebraska Extension in Lancaster County

Feature: Farmers: Use climate for planning, weather for doing

Farm & Acreage

Pests & Wildlife

Horticulture

Early Childhood

4-H & Youth

and other extension news and events

Representations Of Mainstream And Marginalized Subjects In The Work Of Diane Arbus, Grace Short

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis considers the photographs of the twentieth-century photographer, Diane Arbus. In America during the 1950s and 60s, Arbus photographed both marginalized and mainstream subjects including dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, debutants, socialites, and celebrities. At one point in her career, she expressed an interest in family portraiture and, indeed, a number of her images depict families.

Scholars who have written about Arbus, such as Susan Sontag, Carol Armstrong, Anthony W. Lee, and John Pultz, have formulated theories about Arbus’s motivations, although their findings focus on individual features of her work. Sontag argued that Arbus exploited her unorthodox sitters whereas Armstrong …

The Impact Of Mentoring On Life Science Undergraduate Mentors, Kari Nelson

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

Universities are increasingly encouraging their undergraduates to become mentors to others, yet relatively little research has been done to empirically understand the impact of this work on the mentors themselves. Therefore, the overall goals of this work were: (1) To evaluate the types of studies that have been conducted on the impacts of serving as an undergraduate mentor; (2) To examine the methodological rigor of recent studies and make recommendations for improvement; and (3) To asses if serving as an undergraduate mentor impacted the critical thinking of the mentors, using a valid and reliable instrument, the California Critical Thinking Skills …

Road Weather Impact Based Decision Support Applications: Developing A Department Of Transportation Winter Severity Index, Curtis Louis Walker

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Adverse weather conditions are responsible for millions of vehicular crashes, thousands of vehicular deaths and billions of dollars in economic and congestion costs. Many transportation agencies utilize a performance or mobility metric to assess how well they are maintaining road access. This research focuses on the development of a winter severity index for the State of Nebraska (NEWINS). NEWINS is an event-driven index that was derived for the Nebraska Department of Transportation (NDOT) and its districts across the state. The NEWINS framework includes a categorical storm classification framework and climatological aspect to capture atmospheric conditions more accurately across diverse spatial …

Exploring Adolescent Dating Violence In Rural Communities: A Mixed Methods Study, Sarah A. Taylor

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Adolescent dating violence (ADV) occurs nearly twice as often among rural adolescents than it does among non-rural adolescents. Research has suggested several reasons for this population difference. First, people in the rural context oftentimes have traditional gender role attitudestowards male dominance over women, which can be displayed in the form of relationship violence. People in the rural context also tend to have less access to friends and resources (e.g., social services), whichcan further perpetuate violence by limiting a victim’s opportunity to seek help. In addition, rural individuals tend to have a reduced sense of anonymity, and thus, victims may be …

Parental Involvement Among Low-Income Filipinos: A Phenomenological Inquiry, Aileen S. Garcia

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Parental involvement in children’s education is an integral component of young children’s academic achievement. In the Philippines, a developing country with high rates of poverty and input deficit in basic education, school dropout rates are high especially among the poor. Given that many children from disadvantaged backgrounds do not get enough support (PIDS, 2012) and many parents are not equipped with skills to support their children’s education, it is essential to investigate how Filipino parents can help and contribute to their children’s academic success. In response to the lack of parental involvement literature situated in the Philippine context, the present …

Burnt Lavender & Other Remnants, Danielle Airen Pringle

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following is an essay on the craft of poetry. It talks about influences for poetry writing including other poets, history, music, and the poet’s personal life, as well as the process of writing poetry throughout the poet’s life. The work focuses on how her poetry has developed and what she is trying to accomplish with her poetry in regards to women, power, and desire. The poems are usually persona poems written from the perspectives of medieval women (either real or imagined) and a few of her own personal poems. A sample of some of the poems are included here. …

Conceal And Carry: Communicating About Trauma, Triggers, And Second Assaults In The Classroom, Amy Arellano

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Challenging the predominance of rape culture within academia, this dissertation focuses on the intersection of academic conversations regarding the inclusion of trigger warnings. This project examines the academic trigger warning debate from its inception in January 2014 through its peak in May 2015. I argue that the implementation of trigger warnings serves as a visible adaptation within pedagogy to respond to the role trauma from sexual assaults may influence the classroom. To achieve this, I offer a careful examination of the trigger warning debate informed by an approach that puts Kenneth Burke’s indexing in conversation with Michael McGee’s ideographic analysis. …

Fanfiction As A Form With Merit, Alyssandra Holmes

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Fanfiction is a form of writing with a vast wealth of merits, and it should be respected as a unique and valuable literary genre. I have read a number of scholarly articles written regarding fanfiction, analyzed certain works and my own experiences within the fan community, and considered original media in order to construct my defense of fanfiction's value as a literary form. Fanfiction has an unfortunately poor reputation, given the unique advantages it provides to authors. Fanfiction is an egalitarian learning tool, with a thriving community and a significant impact upon the individuals engaging with fanfiction creation. Fanfiction is …

Disentangling The Roles Of Modernization And Secularization On Fertility: The Case Of Turkey, Dogan Hatun

Department of Sociology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Second Demographic Transition (SDT) theory argues very low fertility results from the simultaneous processes of modernization and secularization. However, this theory has primarily only been examined in the Christian countries of Northern and Western Europe. The assumption that modernization and secularization are co-occurring processes may not apply in other non-European, non-Christian contexts. Notably absent are studies of Muslim-majority nations, where modernization has occurred separate from secularization because the primary interpretation of Islam views the pursuit of secular knowledge is as important as the pursuit of religious knowledge. Therefore, there is a critical need to examine the applicability of the SDT …

The Earliest Surviving Version Of Charles Chesnutt's "Rena Walden," The Short Story That Became "The House Behind The Cedars", Dominic Yarabe

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

My research project presents an edited version, with an introduction, of the earliest surviving version of “Rena Walden,” the short story that ultimately became the novel The House Behind the Cedars. The novel is a passing story in which a light-skinned, mixed race girl enters white society to live life as a white woman. Interestingly, however, the short story on which the novel was based began as a fiction with no white characters whatsoever. As the manuscript of this story is often difficult to read because of hard-to-decipher handwritten revisions, I had to create my own editorial policy to …