Digital Commons Network^™

Using A Progressive Time Delay To Increase Mands In A Child With Autism, Brielle Babcock

Honors Theses

Mands are a building block for all communication and are therefore important to teach to individuals who do not consistently use mands. Skinner defined a mand as a “verbal operant in which the response is reinforced by a characteristic consequence and is under the control of relevant conditions of deprivation or aversive stimulation” (Hall & Sundberg 1987). By providing individuals with a way to express their desires and needs, individuals display less problem behaviors. A functional form of communication is imperative to typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders alike. The goal of the current study was to …

Establishing Auditory Discrimination And Echoic Stimulus Control With An Auditory Matching Procedure, Matthew Von Holst

Honors Theses

An echoic is a verbal operant which is controlled by a verbal discriminative stimulus and is characterized by the repetition of the verbal behavior of another speaker with point-to-point correspondence between the sound of the stimulus and the response (Skinner, 1957). These echoic responses are very important for children with developmental disorders because their language development is very unpredictable and may not appear at all, potentially causing difficulties in school and problems with social development (Reed, 2005). Teaching language acquisition skills can help offset these problems because it reinforces future echoic responses and helps develop advanced verbal operants such as …

April 2020 Newsletter, Haworth College Of Business

Haworth College of Business News

• WMU researchers study food consumption behavior during COVID-19 pandemic
• From college to career
• Food marketing students clinch first place at national university case competition
• Students take first place at finance competition
• Sales students claim top spot at regional competition
• Startup that takes the tangle out of power strips wins Bronco Pitch Competition

Covid-19 And The Haworth College Of Business, Haworth College Of Business

Haworth College of Business News

• Supply chain alum helps drive GM's efforts to produce ventilators
• Leading through crisis
• Introducing the Jungle podcast
• Why are store shelves out of products like toilet paper?
• Distance education: You do you
• Getting career-ready during a pandemic
• Six steps to survive a financial crisis
• Serving the community through Meals on Wheels

Assessing Student Employees' Career Readiness, Ewa Urban, Wayne Bond

Assessment Grants

The purpose of this project was to measure, using direct assessment data, student employees’ career readiness competencies gained through campus student employment. Career and Student Employment Services developed and delivered a career readiness certification program to 148 student employees in 14 WMU campus departments. The program was designed to teach students to articulate, through resumes and answers to interview questions, the career readiness competencies required by employers in all industries. These competencies include: critical thinking, communication, teamwork, technology application, leadership, professionalism, career management, and intercultural fluency.

To address the program learning outcomes, students participated in a face-to-face workshop, completed a …

Health Mentors Program, Yvonne Jackson, Debra Lindstrom

Assessment Grants

Three disciplines (Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, and Physician Assistant) in the College of Health and Human Services at WMU have collaborated to provide interprofessional education experiences for entry level prelicensure students. First year students from the three disciplines were assigned to one of 16 small interprofessional teams for the academic year 2019-20. During this year, the students were expected to meet with their Health Mentors in their groups three times. The fall meeting was a luncheon with all the mentors and their small IPE teams. The spring meeting occurred at a place of the mentors’ choice. Preliminary assessment data from …

Plan It 4-Ward: Assessment Of Student Awareness And Engagement, Andrea E. Bau, Steve Booher, Fanny Hernandez De Alvarez

Assessment Grants

Plan It 4-Ward is a tool that students can use to strategically plan their path to graduation while considering specific areas impacting the overall college experience: Academic, Career, Engagement, Financial, and Well-being. The idea is to plan in multiple areas while continuing to move 4-ward. Plan It 4-Ward is introduced to students in the First-Year Experience course, and students are encouraged to continue use of the tool beyond the first semester. The purpose of this assessment project was to: 1) Identify whether students found the tool useful in their first semester; 2) Understand if students continued to utilize the tool …

The Western Insider, Western Michigan University

The Western Insider

• Faculty stepping up to support transition to distance education
• Grad student uses creativity, collaboration to keep her students learning
• Units across WMU donate personal protection equipment to medical professionals
• WMU researchers study food consumption behavior during COVID-19 pandemic
• Safeguarding our future in a period of uncertainty
• An opportunity for empathy
• On distance education, resiliency and coming out stronger: Q and A with Dr. Jim Eckert

Stampede April 1, 2020, Western Michigan University

Stampede: E-newsletter for students

• Students navigate the challenges, and even advantages, of distance education
• WMU still serving students'
• Faculty stepping up to support transition to distance education
• Counseling Services helping students cope with pandemic-related anxiety, stress
• Invisible Need Project changes, broadens some services in response to pandemic
• Sew worth it- Broncos use skills to craft masks for hospital workers
• Jazz student takes composing experience to new level, livestreaming process online
• How to keep your body healthy during COVID-19
• Six ways to fight boredom during isolation
• Sindecuse Health Center is open with some changes

A Qualitative Study Investigating The Common Or Shared Experiences Of Saudi And American Parents Of Students With Autism In The Iep-Process, Alwiah Abdullah Alsaggaf

Dissertations

Nationally, research on special education has emphasized the importance of involving parents in the individual educational plan (IEP) process (Al-Herz, 2008; Angel, Stoner, & Shelden, 2009; Hebel & Persitz, 2014; Hobbs & Silla, 2008; Hui-Chen & Mason, 2008). The IEP is a blueprint for special education and related special education services in the United States and other countries (Alquraini, 2013; Hebel & Persitz, 2014; Martin et al., 2006; Tal, 2009; Yell, Katsiyannis, Ennis, & Losinki, 2013). Development and implementation of effective educational programs for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) involve collaboration with parents (Hebel & Persitz, 2014). However, the …

The Pre-Instructional And Reading Comprehension Strategies Special Education Teachers Use To Engage And Instruct Elementary Student Readers With Asd, Murfet Alnemr

Dissertations

Lyon (1998) called reading “critical to a child’s overall well-being.” Given the ubiquity of text in their lives today, reading skills can help students lead productive, meaningful lives. But what about elementary student readers with ASD? Senokossoff (2016) argued that “in addition to the social and emotional difficulties that children with ASD experience, many also struggle with reading comprehension.” Research indicates that students with ASD can face deficits associated with self-regulation and sensory overload—associated with visual, hearing, and touch —and this can threaten learning and comprehension (Bogdashina, 2003). Thus, it could be argued that pre-instruction strategies focused on visual, hearing, …

A Qualitative Study Investigating Post-Secondary Services For Students With Learning Disabilities At Saudi Universities, Nahed Mohammed Binbakhit

Dissertations

This qualitative study explored the challenges and obstacles confronting students with learning disabilities who receive assistance from support service centers at Saudi Arabia universities. It also addressed the strategies and skills that students used to overcome these challenges and reviewed the recommendations for the further development of support services. The study was conducted in support services centers at two Saudi public universities in Saudi Arabia (Riyadh). The participants were five female students with learning disabilities and five female staff members at the support services centers.

The study used a semi-structured, faceto- face in-depth interview process to gather information.

Participants addressed …

Cross Language Information Transfer Between Modern Standard Arabic And Its Dialects – A Framework For Automatic Speech Recognition System Language Model, Tiba Zaki Abdulhameed

Dissertations

Significant advances have been made with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) applications. Yet, dialectal conversation ASR is still trailing behind due to limited language resources. As is the case in most cultures, the formal Modern Standard Arabic language is not used in daily life. Instead, varieties of regional dialects are spoken, which creates a dire need to address dialect ASR systems. Processing MSA language naturally poses considerable challenges that are passed on to the processing of its derived dialects. In dialects, many words have gradually morphed from MSA pronunciations and at many times have different usages. Also, …

Efficient Hardware/Software Partitioning Techniques For A Cloud-Scale Cpu-Fpga Platform, Samah Ziyad Rahamneh

Dissertations

The diversity of workload characteristics has stimulated the deployment of heterogeneous architectures to accommodate workloads’ requirements disparity in cloud data centers. In heterogeneous computing, co-processors are utilized to support Central Processing Units (CPUs) in fulfilling workload demands. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have advantages over other accelerators because of their power, performance and re-configurability benefits. In order to achieve the most benefit of a heterogeneous platform, efficient partitioning of workload between the CPU and the FPGA is a crucial demand.

This dissertation first presents a design and implementation of cooperative CPU-FPGA execution techniques, which include code and data partitioning, of …

Dominican Nursing Students’ Self-Reported Mastery Of International Nursing Competencies, Wady Ramirez

Dissertations

The Dominican health care system has many challenges to meet the legal and the population’s health care expectations (La Hoz, 2018; United States Agency for International Development, 2013). The purpose of this study was to evaluate how well Dominican nursing students, who have completed their internship but not yet defended their final career project, assessed themselves against a set of international nursing competencies. In addition, the purpose was to explore any differences in their self-assessments based on whether these students completed their internship at public health care centers or not. Finally, the goal was to determine to what extent do …

Student Attitudes, Collaborative Group Work And Technology Use In Elementary Mathematics Classrooms: Examining Connections, Katie Kukulka

Honors Theses

Understanding how the structure of a group of students impacts how they work together has always been an interesting concept for me, as sometimes my teachers strategically placed certain students with other students, and sometimes we got to choose our seats in class. Recently, I began to focus on how my college peers worked together in groups in my mathematics classes. For example, I noticed how some students would start to lead and take ownership for a group, others would facilitate these group conversations, commenting on the lead students’ suggestions or perhaps recording answers to group work but not necessarily …

Mission Architecture Analysis: Exploring Long-Period Comets From Multiple Staging Orbits, Gabriel Prescinotti Vivan

Masters Theses

Objects that have retained pieces of information about the early Solar System are key to our understanding of its formation and evolutionary history. However, the high delta-V required to reach these objects, such as long-period comets or interstellar objects, makes designing an intercept mission at the time of detection impractical. In this thesis, multiple heliocentric staging orbits are explored to serve as departure positions for future missions, prior to objects’ detections. By utilizing more than one staging orbit concurrently, the set of objects that are reachable is expanded, therefore increasing mission feasibility. Delta-V maps are generated and superimposed; two-impulse burn …

Art For All: An Inclusive Curriculum For A Secondary Art Room, Michelle Ann Fuller

Masters Theses

Art classrooms in a secondary public school tend to be a place where students feel inspired to be creative, improve social skills and self-esteem. But what about those who have a learning disability? If the art educator establishes a positive and safe learning environment, all students, including those requiring adaptations can create meaningful work. Do art teachers feel prepared to guide students who require extra attention? How can pre-service teachers enter the profession feeling more qualified instructing these students? This thesis explores the support of inclusion in the high school art room by defining what an ideal collaboration might look …

Incorporating Fine Arts Into Online Education, Tosha Tessen Mcdonald

Masters Theses

Art Education has seen many changes. One of the most recent changes in art education has been the step into online learning. The question I sought to answer was whether or not art education could be delivered in the same rigorous manner online as it can be in a traditional school setting. During the 2019 - 2020 school year, I started a position teaching for the Rural Virtual Academy, in which all instruction was delivered online. During my own practice, I researched methods to instruct students virtually. My results indicate that it is quite possible to deliver a rigorous curriculum …

The Common Core State Standards In Mathematics For Place Value: Developmentally Appropriate Or Not?, Sarah N. Hughey

Masters Theses

This exploratory case study examines the developmental appropriateness of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM) for place value for second through fourth-grade students. A correlation analysis was performed on end of year scores from the 2018-19 school year on a standardized norm-referenced test and a conceptually-based interview assessment from the Math Recovery program (AVMR) on 137 students from one school in the Midwest. An item analysis was also performed on AVMR assessments for 70 students from the 2019-20 school year. The results showed that second and third-grade students did not display the expected amount of growth in conceptual …

Developing Student Leadership: The Use Of Programs And Methods To Build Adolescent Leadership Capacity, Jonathan D. Waldron

Masters Theses

High school students have a wealth of opportunities to practice leadership skills. Focusing on the importance of leadership training to help teens develop and strengthen their ability to influence, in this project I evaluate the current research about best practices in adolescent leadership training. Although best practices suggest that students grow as leaders with intentional training and guidance from mentors and coaches, few students who hold leadership positions in school or community organizations receive any training at all. This paper describes the necessity for, and creation of a program designed to inspire, motivate and strengthen leadership skills in high school …

Effect Of Implementing A Guaranteed And Viable Ela Curriculum, Christian Manley

Masters Theses

A guaranteed and viable curriculum (GVC) outlines what standards are taught and when; ultimately providing all students with the opportunity to learn identified content over the course of a school year. This paper reviews the impact of implementing a guaranteed and viable English Language Arts curriculum and specific adult practices on ELA proficiency in Battle Creek Public Schools.

This project largely seeks to identify how Battle Creek Public Schools is implementing their English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum in 3rd through 5th grade classes, the adult practice data that contributed to the implementation, and to what degree it is having an …

High Performance And Machine Learning Algorithms For Brain Fmri Data, Taban Eslami

Dissertations

Brain disorders are very difficult to diagnose for reasons such as overlapping nature of symptoms, individual differences in brain structure, lack of medical tests and unknown causes of some disorders. The current psychiatric diagnostic process is based on behavioral observation and may be prone to misdiagnosis.

Noninvasive brain imaging technologies such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) make the process of understanding the structure and function of the brain easier. Quantitative analysis of brain imaging data using machine learning and data mining techniques can be advantageous not only to increase the accuracy of brain disorder …

Medical Cannabis And Recreational Marijuana: Patient Perceptions, Stigma, And Gender During A Time Of Emerging Legalization, Matt Reid

Dissertations

Marijuana’s status as an illegal drug has been redefined over the previous three decades. Despite Michigan and 32 other states having comprehensive medical cannabis programs, both academics and laypeople commonly present the medicalization of marijuana as an intermediary phase or proxy for fully legalized recreational use. While some evidence exists to support this position, this framework marginalizes the struggles and experiences of patients who have found relief through their therapeutic use of cannabis. As such, the goal of this study is to re-center the voices of cannabis patients in academic conversations of cannabis as medicine.

My study is unique in …

Saudi Arabian Science Teachers And Formative Assessment In The Gender Segregated Male School System, Khalid Abdullah Kariri

Dissertations

Formative assessment is a key pedagogical tool that allows teachers to make instructional assessments in real time for the improvement of student learning. It gives students the opportunity to provide evidence of their learning thus giving teachers assurances that their hard work is not in vain. Formative assessment is commonly practiced in Western schools, while most Saudi science classroom teachers rely on end-of-unit summative assessment. A review of the literature reveals that very little research has been done related to Saudi teachers’ use of formative assessment in science classrooms. The goal of this dissertation was to address this absence of …

Racial Identity Among Native American Adults In The Southwestern United States, Deidre P. Begay

Dissertations

There is growing interest in the empirical psychological study of Native Americans. Nonetheless, currently there are few empirical investigations examining Native American identity from a racial perspective. One study, completed in 2011 by Gonzalez and Bennett, modified the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity to adapt to Native American individuals and used an Exploratory Factor Analysis that resulted in a four factor model of Native American identity called the Native Identity Scale (Gonzalez & Bennett, 2011). The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability of the Native Identity Scale when used with a sample from self-identified Native American adults …

Undergraduate Educational Research Experiences In The Study Of Interior Design, Julia Virginia Pimentel Jiménez

Dissertations

Designers create social constructions (experiences and interactions) for human beings among themselves and with and within interior environments to enhance meaning in people´s lives (Poldma, 2011). Those social constructions are created through the design process developed by the interior designer; that process relies heavily on design research. Therefore, it is at the undergraduate level that the passion for research should start for interior design (ID) students. Faculty in ID programs need to encourage that passion by engage students in meaningful learning experiences such as how to ask questions about users, functions, activities, and aesthetics.

This study explored what types of …

How Elementary Teachers Demonstrate Leadership In The Classroom To Increase Science Learning, Dipsy Anais Etanislao Gonzalez

Dissertations

In the DR, the need of producing drastic changes in students’ outcomes fostered the adaptation of a professional development (PD) program to improve the public education system. In 2013, the National Institute for Teacher Preparation chose the School Centered Continuous Teacher’s Preparation (EFCCE, acronym in Spanish) PD program to help teachers with the needed transformation. This program aimed to form knowledgeable and skillful teachers who exhibit instructional leadership in the classroom.

This qualitative, multiple instrumental case study involved 10 Dominican science elementary teachers who had completed the EFCCE program and who had self-identified as a teacher actively implementing engaging science …

The Voices Of Single-Headed Household African American Mothers Concerning The High School Completion Of Their Daughters, Lametria A. Johnson_Eaddy

Dissertations

African American female students in urban schools are not graduating from high school at the same rate as females of other ethnic groups (Bucknor, 2015; Martin & Halperin, 2006; Stillwell & Sable, 2013). This study sought to investigate the voices and lived experiences of single-headed households of African American mothers whose daughters graduated from high school within the traditional four-year schedule. Through the voices and lived-experiences of these African American mothers, this study sought to capture the impact certain internal and external support systems from within both the home and school environments had on their daughters’ persistence in graduating from …

An Exploration Of Preschool Choice With Low-Income Families: The Critical Role Of Positive Attitudes, Behavioral Norms And Control Beliefs, Laurel E. Schmitt

Dissertations

Since the 1960s preschool has been seen as a potential equalizer for children of poverty as they enter kindergarten and long term studies of state and federal preschools have documented positive impacts, especially for low-income students. What has yet to be deeply explored is guardians’ decision-making processes to explain the lack of enrollment even when the stated barriers are eliminated (Obi, 2011; Payne, 1994; Swartz, 1996).

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe and interpret, through a phenomenological lens, how low income parents and guardians made decisions to enroll their child or dependent in a preschool program. I …