Digital Commons Network^™

The Relationship Between Teaching Experience And Style And Primary Student Gains In Mathematics Using An Integrated Learning System, Marilyn N. Meub

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to ascertain using multiple tools and methods, the impact of teachers' interaction with primary students on mathematics performance using the Successmaker Integrated Learning System to determine effective teacher practices. The sample of nineteen primary teachers from an elementary school in southwest Florida included five first grade teachers, seven second grade teachers, and seven third grade teachers.

Data analysis included total years of teaching experience, years of experience in Florida schools, and years of experience at each grade. Both the total years of teaching and the years of teaching at the research site …

Microfinance In Neoliberal Times: The Experience Of An Egyptian Ngo, Sarah A. Tobin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Development non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are under immense pressure to adhere to the programs and methods put forth by external donors, particularly if the NGOs rely on the funding to sustain their own organizations. Those external donors that represent neoliberal ideologies and enforce neoliberal practices, particularly in the area of microfinance, maintain a power that most recipient NGOs cannot evade. This becomes a difficult position for the NGOs to navigate as they try to accomplish good work in their communities. This research project is a study into the experience of one NGO, the Egyptian Development Organization (EDO), as it implemented microfinance …

The Weekly Challenger, August 18, 2005, The Weekly Challenger, Et Al

Weekly Challenger Newspaper Collection

The August 18, 2005, issue of The Weekly Challenger.

Commencement Convocation Program, Tampa Campus, August 13, 2005, University Of South Florida

USF Graduation and Convocation Programs

Outstanding Senior - Leslie Ann North; Honorary Doctorate of Science - Dr. Mario Molina; King O'Neal Scholars - Jennifer Lynn Davis, Nadia Richelle Deeb, and Rosalie Lavinia Freedman

Reconstructing Writer Identities, Student Identities, Teacher Identities, And Gender Identities: Chinese Graduate Students In America, Peiling Zhao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The increasing presence of Chinese international graduate students in American higher education has mandated a closer examination of their multifaceted lives against stereotypes that hinder their efforts to find, transform, or assert their identities in the dominant discourses of American academia and culture.

Cross cultural studies of Chinese international students tend to reinforce stereotypes of their writer identities, learner identities, and teacher identities. Examining these various identities discloses dichotomies that read Chinese students’ traits and behaviors as handicaps and thus characterize them as “abnormal” in relation to the “normal” traits and behaviors of Chinese students’ Western counterparts. Whereas Western student …

A Fuzzy Logic Based Controller To Provide End-To-End Congestion Control For Streaming Media Applications, Bay Pavlick

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The stability of the Internet is at risk if the amount of voice and video traffic continues to increase at the current pace. While current transport layer protocols do work well for most applications, they still present some problems. TCP is reliable, tracks the state of some network conditions and reacts drastically to an indication of congestion. TCP serves data-oriented applications very well but it can lead to unacceptably low quality for streaming applications by multiplicatively reducing the congestion window upon a sign of congestion. The other main transport layer protocol, UDP, provides good service for streaming applications but is …

Multi-Agent Workload Control And Flexible Job Shop Scheduling, Zuobao Wu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the make-to-order (MTO) industry, offering competitive due dates and on-time delivery for customer orders is important to the survival of MTO companies. Workload control is a production planning and control approach designed to meet the need of the MTO companies. In this dissertation, a multi-agent workload control methodology that simultaneously deals with due date setting, job release and scheduling is proposed to discourage job early or tardy completions. The earliness and tardiness objectives are consistent with the just-in-time production philosophy which has attracted significant attention in both industry and academic community. This methodology consists of the order entry agent, …

School Experiences Then And Now: Are Parents' Perceptions Of Their Own School Experiences Related To Their Perceptions Of Their Child's Middle School?, Roxana M. Sanchez-Horn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current study explored the relationship between parents perceptions of their childs middle school and parents perceptions of their own school experiences. Additionally, it was important to research how these relationships differed among variables. The variables explored were (1) race, (2) parents own educational backgrounds (level of education), and (3) socio-economic status. Based on scales commonly used in the study of parent involvement, a survey (i.e., Parent Perceptions of Schooling) was developed. The survey consisted of two parts (i.e., Part I, How I Feel About My Childs School and Part II: Parents Own School Experiences Questionnaire) and a demographic section …

Commencement Convocation Program, Usf, Graduate, May 7, 2005, University Of South Florida

USF Graduation and Convocation Programs

President's Fellow Medallion - Dr. Rita Bornstein

In Poland World War I Ended In 1923, Kazimierz Robak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Poland was erased from European political maps in 1795 and fought in vain for freedom for the next century, until World War I provided another chance for independence. On November 11, 1918, the creation of the Polish Republic was proclaimed, but in an atmosphere of uncertainty, particularly relative to frontiers.

The border with Germany was established in 1920-21 after plebiscites. While peaceful in Masuria, Ermland and Pomerania, there were three violent uprisings of the ethnic Poles in Upper Silesia. The status of Gdansk as a Free City was confirmed at Versailles in 1919. The Southern border with Czechoslovakia was settled …

Effect Of Age On 11- To 18-Year-Olds’ Discrimination Of Nuances In Instrumental And Speech Phrase Interpretations, Andrew Sioberg

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation was a continuation of study on a theory of a learning window for the perception of expressive qualities in music and speech. The proposed theory suggested that a practice window must overlap a learning window before it closes around the age of 10. This dissertation sought to determine whether children older than the proposed learning window continued to improve in speech and musical discrimination skill, or leveled off in this ability. It also examined the impact of gender and private lesson experience on discrimination ability.

Instrumental music students (n = 292) attending a public magnet school for visual …

“They Say That This Clinic Is For Migrants”: Cultural Sensitivity In A Rural Health Center, Nadine I. Ohlinger

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The growing number of minority populations living in the United States makes it mandatory that all health care organizations seek to be culturally sensitive. There is no consensus on the definition of the term cultural sensitivity. The goal of this thesis is to define what cultural sensitivity means in a rural health center, from the perspective of the staff as well as the Hispanic patient. Anthropological methods, such as participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and archival data analysis, show that the qualities that Hispanic patients value in a clinic are 1) attention, 2) availability of Spanish language, 3) financial assistance, 4) …

Two Models Of Consensus, Sudarsan Padmanabhan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation titled Two Models of Consensus is based on five arguments. 1. Consensus is asymmetrical. 2. Consensus is partial or limited unanimity. 3. Consensus and democracy do have a concomitant relation. 4. Consensus is not organic to political systems. 5. Consensus depends upon civil society, subsidiarity, and the dominant cultural paradigm of society.

In the first chapter titled "Historical Specificity of the Western Conception of Civil Society" I argue that concept of civil society evolved under certain conditions in a liberal democratic tradition such as shared social imaginaries. As an example of how diversity could lead to hypostatization of …

Teaching Inclusivity: Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions Of Their Knowledge, Skills And Attitudes Toward Working With English Language Learners In Mainstream Classrooms, Philip C. Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the effect of one semester of ESOL education on preservice teachers by examining their perceived knowledge and skill in working with English Language Learner (ELL) students, their attitude toward having ELL students in their mainstream classrooms, and what classroom methods they perceive as effective in their ESOL preservice education courses.

Data for this study were collected from pre- and post-course attitudinal surveys during one semester of course work, from participants at two specific points in their educational experience; participants in the (1) introductory and (2) final TESOL course.

There were 293 participants who took the pre-, and …

The Weekly Challenger, March 3, 2005, The Weekly Challenger, Et Al

Weekly Challenger Newspaper Collection

The March 3, 2005, issue of The Weekly Challenger.

Toward A Social-Cognitive Psychology Of Speech Technology: Affective Responses To Speech-Based E-Service, Melanie Diane Polkosky

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Speech technologies, or technologies that recognize and respond to human speech, have recently emerged as a ubiquitous and cost-effective form of customer self-service (e-service). Although customer satisfaction is regarded as an important outcome of e-service interactions, little is known about users affective responses to conversational interactions with technology. Using a theoretical foundation derived from research in social cognition, interpersonal communication, psycholinguistics, human factors, and services marketing, two studies develop items for a speech interface usability scale, which is then used to examine interrelationships among individual differences (e.g., self-monitoring, need for interaction with a service provider, inherent novelty seeking), usability, comfort, …

Policymaking In Education: Understanding Influences On The Reading Excellence Act, Jacqueline Edmondson

Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA)

Educators and researchers are being called to participate in language and literacy policy making (Roller & Long, 2001). In order to do so, however, there needs to be an understanding of how policy is made. Although policymaking often appears to be an irrational process, there are theories that exist to explain the influences and mechanisms that work to shape policies. In what follows, I adapt Theodoulou and Cahn’s (1995) typology on policymaking in order to discuss how policy is made.

Education Policy Analysis Archives 13/11 , Arizona State University, University Of South Florida

College of Education Publications

Policymaking in education : understanding influences on the Reading Excellence Act / Jacqueline Edmondson.

Developing An Anthropology Curriculum For High School: A Case Study From Durant High School, Hillsborough County, Florida, Kory Mcneil Bennett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

It has become increasingly apparent that anthropology has much to offer when it comes to educating our youth. This is true for all grade levels, kindergarten through senior level studies in high school. Here, this idea will be explored further by focusing on the students of Durant High School (DHS) of Plant City, Florida.

This project was designed to explore the idea of combining widely accepted pedagogical theories (Gardner 1983, 1993, 1999; Geraci 2000; Silver, Strong and Perini 1997) with anthropological theory and methods in order to devise effective curricula for high school archaeology and other anthropology courses. More essentially, …

Inclusive Education And Training Systems: Illusion Or Reality/ The Story Of Nothemba, Lebusa A. Monyooe

Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA)

This article explores the challenges facing the South African National Department of Education in its commitment to provide equal educational opportunities for all. ...

Education Policy Analysis Archives 13/03 , Arizona State University, University Of South Florida

College of Education Publications

Inclusive Education and Training Systems: Illusion or Reality? The Story of Nothemba / Lebusa A. Monyooe.

Choosing Your Baseline Carefully: Integrating Historical And Political Ecology In The Evaluation Of Environmental Intervention Projects, Danny De Vries

Journal of Ecological Anthropology

Environmental intervention projects aim to re-engineer the cultural landscape. Entering at a particular moment in time, such projects commonly produce a "baseline" analysis. This analysis captures elements in the environment that are later compared to measured changes the project claims to produce. Illustrated through a case study of a Tanzanian community conservation non-governmental organization, the argument made in this paper is that uncritical use of such baselines in measuring and evaluating environmental intervention projects is a practice that tends to impose ahistorical understandings of human-environmental relationships that have deep historical roots. The paper illustrates how an attempt to draw a …

The Power Of The Machine: Global Inequalities Of Economy, Technology, And Environment, Eric C. Jones

Journal of Ecological Anthropology

No abstract provided.

Migration And Home Gardens In The Brahmaputra Valley, Assam, India, Rahul J. Shrivastava, Joel T. Heinen

Journal of Ecological Anthropology

The Brahmaputra is the largest river system in northeast India. Its valley, in the State of Assam, is home to the Assamese people, indigenous Mishing and Karbi tribes, and Kaziranga National Park. A spectacular array of wildlife shares the floodplain including the endangered Asian elephant, tiger, one-horned rhinoceros and wild buffalo. The fertile floodplain and tea estates have attracted immigrants from within India and from neighboring countries. Migration has been linked to Assam's high population density and agriculture expansion. Based on household surveys in 37 villages in the park's periphery, we compared home garden productivity and economic return among residents …

Trade And Plunder Networks In The Second Seminole War In Florida, 1835-1842, Toni Carrier

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Second Seminole War in Florida, 1835-1842, was a time of disruption and upheaval for all of those unfortunate enough to occupy the territory of Florida during the seven years of this protracted battle over Seminole removal to the West. Illicit trade was a major factor which enabled the Seminoles to resist removal for such an extended period. Illicit trade requires outside assistance. Documentary evidence suggests that such assistance was rendered by Spanish fishermen, English and American wreckers, slaves, free blacks, Native Americans and white American settlers. This thesis examines the evidence for plunder and illicit trade, and the possible …

Promoting And Preventing Alzheimer’S Disease In A Transgenic Mouse Model: Apolipoprotein E And Environmental Enrichment, David Antonio Costa

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Besides age, inheritance of the apoE-ε4 allele is the main risk factor for late-onset AD. To determine the role of apoE in amyloid deposition, we studied mice expressing both mutant human amyloid ß-protein precursor (APP) and presenilin 1 (PS1) that were either normal or knocked-out for apoE. By 7 months, amorphous Aß deposition developed equally in both lines, indicating that Aß alone is sufficient for deposition to occur. In contrast, filamentous amyloid deposition was catalyzed at least 3000 fold by apoE. Electron micrographs further illustrate the filamentous nature of these plaques. These results and other, behavioral, data indicate that the …

The Power Of The Spoken Word: Literature In The American Mass Media Of The 1990s, Codrina Cozma

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The 1990s saw a climax of literature representations in what Ong called the secondary orality, particularly in film, television, and radio; for instance, the film industry produced a number of adaptations of novels that had been accepted into the American literary canon, while television and radio marketed literature through book clubs and literary shows. All these literary productions mediated through film, radio, and television are referred to in this study as mediatized literature.

The argument of this dissertation is that 1990s U.S. mediatized literature constitutes a post-modern re-enactment of the traditional oral literature that initially emerged on U.S. territory …

Extrapulmonary Tuberculosis In Hiv-Positive And Hiv-Negative Children In Haiti: A Hospital-Based Investigation, Marie F. Denis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Globally, one in four persons infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) who are living with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) will die of tuberculosis (TB). The estimated number of HIV-infected children who die of tuberculosis, especially extrapulmonary TB (EPTB), in Haiti, is only loosely based on facts or investigation. This study proposes to describe demographics of children with EPTB in a pediatric TB hospital in Haiti. The objectives are two-fold. The first objective is to describe the population of children discharged from Grace Children’s Hospital with a confirmed diagnosis of tuberculosis overall, and broken down by whether or …

The Invisible Handshake: Interpreting The Job-Seeking Communication Of Foreign-Born Chinese In The U.S., Hongmei Gao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Building upon Granovetter’s well-known study of the job search behaviors of white males, this research extended the degree to which his findings apply across cultures to Chinese minorities, and across time to the Internet age. Using quantitative and qualitative data collected through systematic observation, questionnaire surveys, and in-depth interviews, this research investigated the impact of culture, Internet usage, gender and age on the communication patterns of foreign-born Chinese jobseekers in the U.S.

It is found that jobseekers adopt either one or a combination of traditional (printed publications and direct application), institutional (the Internet, job fairs, and employment agencies), and personal …

Vowel Identification By Monolingual And Bilingual Listeners: Use Of Spectral Change And Duration Cues, Merete Mã¸Ller Glasbrenner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent studies have shown that even highly-proficient Spanish-English bilinguals, who acquired their second language (L2) in childhood and have little or no foreign accent in English, may require more acoustic information than monolinguals in order to identify English vowels and may have more difficulty than monolinguals in understanding speech in noise or reverberation (Mayo, Florentine, & Buus, 1997). One explanation that may account for this difference is that bilingual listeners use acoustic cues for vowel identification differently from monolinguals (Flege, 1995).

In this study, we investigated this hypothesis by comparing bilingual listeners’ use of acoustic cues to vowel identification to …