Digital Commons Network^™

Reading Between The Lines: Examining The Literacy Preparation And Classroom Realities Of Teachers Of Color, Dr. Cathy D. Kea, Fanica Young, Joy Banks, Annette Teasdell

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

This study examines the importance of literacy preparation in educator preparation programs (EPPs). Specifically, the authors examine the need to merge literacy practices with culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies to increase reading outcomes for diverse students with disabilities. This article reports on a survey that was distributed to 18 dually prepared teachers of color to explore their collective literacy preparation experiences. The participants were graduates of a Historically Black College and University (HBCU). The findings indicate that regardless of the institution’s location, EPPs, including those at HBCUs, should be intentional about addressing topics related to diversity. For early career educators …

Alvar Aalto: Past. Present.Future, Matthew Collins

Interior Design Capstones

Alvar Aalto serves as a timeless guide for architectural and design principles. These principles are not of universal rigidness but are flexible based on the givenconditions of site, culture, and people. His traditionalmethods of sketching and drawing create a hand to mind connection to the design process. This process, much like his work, develops a mindful and thoughtful outcome of decisions. With computer technology become more increasingly apart of our lives, it is important that we not forget the human point of view rather than purely a rational mode of thinking. This capstone project address how it is possible to …

Architecture Of Union: Exploring Community-Supported Wedding Venues, Erica Keillor

Interior Design Capstones

Weddings, as deeply symbolic rituals, often rely heavily on the venue to set the tone and enhance the emotional resonance of the event Yet, the rising cost of wedding venues often excludes couples from lower-to-middle income backgrounds, creating a barrier to access for many. This design project explores the potential of a community-supported greenhouse wedding venue—a model that not only offers affordability through shared community investment but also enhances the symbolic resonance of weddings through its nature-integrated architecture. The design investigates how intentional spatial planning within a greenhouse structure can serve both the practical needs of wedding ceremonies and the …

Food, Design & Desire, Emily Harnden

Interior Design Capstones

The research presented in Food, Design, and Desire examines the impactful role of interior design in shaping the connection between humans and food, with a focus on fine dining environments. Grounded by the thesis, the ideal dining experience creates a profound connection to oneself and the environment around you. This project investigates how built environments influence diners’ emotional and physical experiences, enhancing their intimacy with food. The research addresses the interplay between space, desire, and the human relationship with culinary experiences, aiming to develop design strategies that increase customer retention and deepen the human connection to food.

This project utilizes …

Emeriti News Spring 2025, Emeriti Council

Emeriti News

No abstract provided.

Data-Driven Decision Making For Quality Control In Foundry Applications, Ronit Shetty

Dissertations

In the transformative landscape of Industry 4.0, advanced quality control in manufacturing demands innovative methods for processing and analyzing datasets. This dissertation presents a comprehensive study on leveraging high volume data and machine learning to enhance decision making in the foundry industry. The research explores three crucial challenges in the foundry industry: predicting surface roughness, monitoring refractory coating thicknesses, and comparing feature extraction techniques for surface quality classification. The findings underscore the transformative potential of integrating advanced feature engineering techniques and machine learning into manufacturing quality control.

The first of the three challenges introduces a framework that integrates digital images …

Resilient Learning For Anomaly Detection In Smart Living Systems, Sahar Abedzadeh

Dissertations

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) rely on anomaly-based detection methods to ensure the integrity and security of critical infrastructures such as smart grids, smart water metering systems, and advanced metering infrastructures (AMI). Anomaly detection methods are commonly used to identify deviations from normal system behavior by establishing learned profiles and thresholdbased distinctions between benign and anomalous events. However, conventional frameworks often fail to account for adversarial data poisoning attacks, unlabeled unsafe events, and environmental noise—factors that distort training data, degrade detection accuracy, and increase false alarms. This dissertation proposes a resilient learning framework that mitigates these biases by integrating quantile regression, M-estimation …

Techniques For Enabling Advanced Adas Features: Operation In Inclement Weather And Use Of Infrastructure Information, Parth Kadav

Dissertations

Modern vehicles have undergone a transformation with the widespread integration of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) technology becoming the new standard and are set to be mandated by the by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for all passenger vehicles and light trucks. ADAS features have proven to prevent or mitigate crashes by either alerting or assisting the driver. ADAS typically utilizes a forward-facing camera, which comes standard in modern vehicles to provide limited automation features such as Lane Keeping Assist (LKA), and Lane Centering Assist (LCA) to improve driver safety. These systems rely on the assumption that vehicle …

Deadtime In The Vale Of Soul-Making: Hermeneutics, Humanization, And Higher Education In Prison, Dale Michael Brown

Dissertations

This body of work examines higher education with and for justice-involved people from a descriptive, theoretical, and empirical perspective—pulling together multiple disciplines and employing different methodologies from the humanities and social sciences. The investigation is written from a philosophical perspective via educational foundations and a social science perspective via qualitative research, including an examination of carceral higher education’s connections to teaching and experiential learning. This approach reflects the interdisciplinary nature of both the author’s degree program and the topic itself, which (as a field of academic inquiry) is part theoretical and part empirical (both qualitative and quantitative). The papers in …

The Ebony Edge: A Qualitative Exploration Of Math Success Among Black College Women, April Ruiz

Dissertations

Historically, women have been underrepresented as leaders in STEM. However, according to the National Science Foundation (2022), women accounted for a little more than half of the college-educated workforce and underrepresented minority women increased in broad science and engineering occupational categories. This promising upturn underscores the importance—if progress is to continue—of better understanding why some African American women succeed in and persist with their study of college mathematics.

This study aimed to explore the experiences of Black college women attending a predominantly White institution in the Midwest, to better understand what reasons Black college women ascribe to their success in …

A Multiple Case Study Of Four-Year Public, Non-Flagship Universities: Meeting Common Institutional Goals Of Increased Enrollment And Academic Profile, Alicia Kornowa

Dissertations

For several reasons, the number of students seeking and enrolling in a postsecondary education has started to decline in the United States (U.S.) and the decrease is expected to intensify for the foreseeable future. This trend is cause for concern among higher education enrollment leaders, especially those who serve at institutions not among the most elite universities or without a national brand—the campuses researchers project will have the greatest difficulty maintaining enrollment levels. Using strategic enrollment management (SEM) as an example of general systems theory and systems thinking, this multiple case study explored how four public, four-year, non-flagship institutions increased …

Divided Motherhood: Narrative Within The Domestic Vessel, Jacqueline Denaway

Masters Theses

This research explores the story of motherhood through that of art, craft, and the domestic vessel. It analyzes how the installation, Motherhood Divided, can be viewed as an exemplification of the conflicted divide inherent within contemporary motherhood. I posit this divide to be a result of the tension created between the impossibility of the current normative maternal ideal of intensive motherhood, and its contradiction to that of the private hidden realities of mothering.

The historical origin of intensive mothering is explored, along with its impact on current societal maternal standards. These concepts are juxtaposed with the art of Camille Henrot …

Exploring Ballast Water As A Vector For The Spread Of Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, Kathleen Beadling

Masters Theses

Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD) has led to high mortality rates of reef-building coral species throughout the greater Caribbean region since it was first documented off the coast of Miami in 2014. The pathogen is currently unknown, but it is suspected that ballast water discharge is a vector of disease transmission. As a step towards better understanding SCTLD transmission, this study aimed to identify locations of ballast water exchange that coincide with outbreaks of the disease. Spatial and temporal patterns of SCTLD outbreaks and ballast water exchanges conducted within 50 nautical miles of coastlines were explored using Density-Based Spatial …

Analyzing The Resilience Of Infrastructure-Based Vs. Camera-Based Lane Detection In Autonomous Vehicles, Pritesh Yashaswi Patil

Masters Theses

Traditional autonomous vehicle perception subsystems that use on-board sensors have the drawbacks of high computational load and data duplication. Infrastructure-based sensors, which can provide high-quality information without the computational burden and data duplication, are an alternative to traditional autonomous vehicle perception subsystems. However, these technologies are still in the early stages of development and have not been extensively evaluated for lane detection system performance. Therefore, there is a lack of quantitative data on their performance relative to traditional perception methods, especially during hazardous scenarios, such as lane line occlusion, sensor failure, and environmental obstructions. This need is addressed by evaluating …

Ready, Set, No: Why Not All Successful Dual Credit High School Graduates Matriculate To Postsecondary Education, Jessica Deckard Mann

Dissertations

Dual-credit programs that allow students to earn college credentials in high school have become commonplace in the United States. Early College High Schools (ECHSs) were specifically developed to support equitable access to these programs, targeting groups that are historically underpopulated in postsecondary education (PSE). ECHSs aim to close the achievement gap, increase the number of college credentials earned by high school students, better train the workforce, and improve the life-time earnings potential of a diverse population.

The purpose of this nonexperimental quantitative study was to gather data from graduates in one Midwestern state who earned a college credential in high …

Upper-Level Undergraduate Pre-Healthcare Students’ Journeys To Graduation And Health Professional Graduate Programs, Holly L. Sisson

Dissertations

Despite decades of research on undergraduate student retention and persistence, only a handful of researchers, such as Dumke et al. (2018) and Stull et al. (2021), have looked specifically at pre-health students preparing for graduate health professional programs and the complex challenges these students face while trying to achieve their goals. Very little research focused on upper-level undergraduate students pursuing graduate health professional programs, such as physical therapy, occupational therapy, physician assistant, or similar graduate health professional programs excluding medical school. To help fill this gap, my study focused on the experiences of pre-healthcare students as they navigated their undergraduate …

Nature-Based Activities And Educational Programming To Promote Health And Wellbeing In Community-Dwelling Older Adults, Madison E. Smith

Capstone Projects

This doctoral capstone experience (DCE) and project applied occupational therapy’s (OT) role in positive and healthy aging to the design and implementation of a nature-based activity and education program. Nature-based OT interventions for older adults are supported throughout scientific literature and are of continued importance to address ongoing mental and physical health challenges for the older adult population. This program took place at the Ecumenical Senior Center (ESC), a day center serving primarily underserved older adults in the Kalamazoo, Michigan area. Four interactive group sessions were implemented to explore the physical and mental health benefits of participating in nature activities. …

An Exploration Of Sensory And Fine Motor-Based Interventions To Address Self-Regulation And School Participation In Students Impacted By The Flint Water Crisis, Katie Sicklesteel

Capstone Projects

To be successful academically, students must first be regulated and ready to learn. For this capstone project, the occupational therapy (OT) process was used to develop and implement sensory and fine motor interventions in a first-grade classroom to support their participation. Given that the target population in Flint has been impacted by the water crisis and poverty, a trauma-informed approach was also integrated throughout. While research shows that OT plays an important role in sensory processing, self-regulation and motor skills in schools, there is a lack of accessible and evidence-based tools for educators to support these areas. To address this …

Assistive Technology To Increase Occupational Participation For Individuals With Sci, Emma M. Sauger

Capstone Projects

Individuals with spinal cord injuries (SCI) typically experience a disruption to their involvement in meaningful daily activities, or occupational participation, which can harm their quality of life. Occupational therapists are equipped to confront this obstacle, often through the use of assistive technology (AT). Various AT devices can be utilized to aid in performing daily occupations and have been shown as an effective way to compensate for functional limitations. With the improved ability to participate in activities, AT can help to restore quality of life among the SCI population. Even with this knowledge, significant barriers to accessing AT still exist, particularly …

Implementing Occupational Therapy Services To Enhance Reentry For Justice Involved Individuals In The Kalamazoo Region, Lexis Rich

Capstone Projects

Within the criminal justice system, there are difficulties and concerns regarding the high rates of recidivism involving the transition from incarceration to community. Formerly incarcerated individuals enter the reentry process with possible mental health conditions, increased social isolation, low self efficacy and difficulties navigating a new way of life. Occupational therapy can help address the difficulties and mental health concerns with incorporating meaningful occupations, however, services are not offered in many regions due to limited awareness of its value. The purpose of this project was to implement occupational therapy services for Region 8 of the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) …

Autism Spectrum Disorder And Neurodiversity: Sensory, Behavior, Trauma-Informed And Interdisciplinary Considerations, Sawyer Hodgkins

Capstone Projects

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a diagnosis that commonly receives occupational therapy (OT) services for sensory and behavioral intervention to promote participation and performance in daily activities. Additionally, individuals with ASD typically receive applied behavior therapy (ABA) to work on similar goal areas while benefiting from a trauma-informed approach. Many resources offer education and advocacy for the ASD population, but they lack a comprehensive and engaging format suitable for a wide range of audiences. This capstone project focused on developing an hour-long video providing an overview of ASD and neurodiversity, education regarding interdisciplinary, sensory, behavioral, and trauma-informed approaches, and concluded …

An Exploration Of Self-Identity And General Functioning Among U.S. Female Athletes Post-Paralympic Games, Riley M. Groves

Capstone Projects

Paralympians are a unique group of elite athletes with varying levels of disabilities who compete at the high level of sport. While much of the existing research focuses on their training and athletic accomplishments, little is known about their lives post-Paralympic Games and the role of Occupational therapy (OT) in athletic performance and everyday life. This doctoral capstone experience was conducted as a qualitative research study, with objectives developed to guide the research process. The study utilized an interpretative phenomenological analysis framework, grounded by Social Identity Theory, to explore the self-identity, sense of purpose, and functional abilities of Paralympians post-competition, …

Safe Sensations In Flight: Integrating A Sensory-Based Protocol For The Flight Experience To Support The Knowledge Of Neurodiverse Conditions, Jillian French

Capstone Projects

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by challenges with social interactions, communication, and repetitive behaviors (Autism Speaks, 2024). The level of support required to carry out activities of daily living can vary for neurodiverse individuals. According to the Center for Disease Control (2025), one in 31 children are diagnosed with Autism indicating an increase in prevalence. Occupational therapists (OTs) are uniquely equipped to support individuals with Autism by helping them engage in meaningful occupations involving community mobility, such as air travel. In accordance with the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework – 4 (OTPF-4), OTs can provide support to individuals with neurodiverse …

Promoting Equitable Access To Music Through Implementation Of An Eye Gaze Musical Instrument (Eyeharp) In A Special Education School, Amber Foster

Capstone Projects

Music is a universal language that transcends physical, cognitive, and cultural boundaries. The benefits of playing a musical instrument are well known and researched, however, individuals with severe motor disabilities often face physiological, neurological, and/or societal barriers that limit their access to playing a musical instrument. Additionally, there is limited knowledge about adaptive musical instruments that are available to serve these individuals and their needs. To address these challenges, this capstone project utilized EyeHarp, an adaptive musical instrument that uses eye gaze technology, to allow students at a special education school with limited motor abilities to create music. The objectives …

Sex, Sexuality And Intimacy In Occupational Therapy, Samantha Baril

Capstone Projects

“Sex is the most common behavior among humans after birth, breathing, sleeping, and death” (Brown, 2019, as cited in Ellis & Ungco, 2023). The Occupational Therapy Practice Framework (OTPF) states that sexual activity is an activity of daily living (ADL) and managing intimate partner relationships is considered an instrumental activity of daily living (IADL), however, Occupational Therapy (OT) practitioners are not addressing sex and intimacy in practice. This could be due to reasons such as; uncomfortability, lack of knowledge and training, or fears of being professionally discredited. OT’s are experiencing a gap on the topic of sex and intimacy beginning …

A Review Of Smartsocks® Technology For Dementia Care: Addressing Agitation And Implications For Occupational Therapy Practice, Lucile Webb

Capstone Projects

The population of persons with dementia (PWD) is rising in the United States, expected to reach 82 million by 2050 (Alzheimer’s Association, 2024). Agitation is one of the most common and challenging aspects of the disease characterized by irritability, severe restlessness, physical aggressiveness, and/or verbal aggression (Carrini et al., 2021). This behavior can cause significant stress for carers, pharmaceutical interventions have limited effectiveness and may have adverse side effects. Technological approaches for addressing agitation have included robotic pets, wearable technology, and environmental sensory modifications although with mixed results. The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth product review …

Promoting Self-Regulation In Children: A Weekly Group Intervention Integrating Sensory, Movement, And Art-Based Activities, Emily Zion

Capstone Projects

Self-regulation, or the ability to control one’s mind and body in response to changes in the environment, is a prevalent challenge for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), sensory processing disorder (SPD), among other neurodevelopmental conditions. Research shows that evidenced-based interventions rooted in sensory integration, movement, social-emotional learning, and artistic expression all contribute to improved self-regulation. The aim of this project was to develop a group program to promote self-regulation for clients at the Sensory Connections outpatient pediatric clinic in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Two evidence-based, six-week programs for preschool and elementary aged children were developed. The …

Occupational Therapy-Based Strategies To Support Tier 1 And 2 Of Mtss, Katherine Satterfield

Capstone Projects

This capstone project aimed to create and disseminate a range of occupational therapy (OT) resources and educational guides for teachers and faculty within the general education classroom, specifically addressing tier 1 and 2 supports of the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS). These OT-based strategies which are focused on posture, handwriting, scissor skills, sensory processing, dressing skills, and more, are designed to enhance student engagement and performance within the academic setting. Despite the positive outcome potential of OT utilization within schools, strategies are often underutilized due to inadequate training, limited understanding of OT's role, and restricted access to resources. This project …

Enhancing Support For Refugee Women: Supplemental Resources For Service Providers Through An Occupational Therapy Lens, Nabilah Salwa

Capstone Projects

This doctoral capstone experience (DCE) focused on developing comprehensive, occupational therapy (OT) -informed resources to support refugee women and young adults. The primary goal was to equip community leaders—particularly those working with Treetops Collective in Grand Rapids (GR), Michigan—with practical, culturally sensitive tools to better serve refugees and New American members. Refugee women face many barriers to occupational participation due to intersecting cultural, linguistic, and systemic challenges. While existing literature highlights general needs within refugee communities, there is a lack of tailored, practical resources to guide service providers in daily practice.

In response to this gap, resources were created with …

Enhancing Aging In Place: Client-Centered, Occupational Therapy Programs For Fall Prevention In Community-Dwelling Older Adults, Megan Oliver

Capstone Projects

This Doctoral Capstone Experience (DCE) focused on fall prevention and the promotion of safe aging in place for older adults through occupational therapy (OT)-based interventions. Conducted at WellWise Services Area Agency on Aging in Brooklyn, Michigan, the project identified a gap in fall prevention resources and OT interventions for community-dwelling older adults. The primary objectives were to develop and implement client-centered fall prevention programs to reduce fall risk, support aging in place, and create sustainable educational resources for staff. Project outcomes demonstrated significant improvements in participants’ safety and confidence within their home environments. No new falls were reported, and participants …