Digital Commons Network^™

How Student Perceptions Of The Online Learning Environment And Student Motivation Predict Persistence, Completion, And Retention In Developmental Mathematics Courses, Samuel K. Gedeborg

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Online developmental mathematics courses have high dropout rates. The focus of this study is to improve understanding of how students’ perceptions of the online learning environment and student motivation from course design predict student drop out. This understanding will benefit faculty and institutions on student support for online developmental mathematics students.

The study included 330 undergraduate students enrolled in online developmental mathematics courses during the Fall 2018 semester at eight public universities and colleges in the Utah State Higher Education (USHE) system. Participants completed a survey with questions measuring their perceptions of the learning environment. They also completed a survey …

'Lmshapemaker': Utilizing The 'Rmapshaper' R Package To Modify Shapefiles For Use In Linked Micromap Plots, Braden D. Probst

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In order to effectively create map-based visualizations, some map modifications need to be conducted to ensure the map is readable and interpretable. There are several issues that need to be addressed to achieve this. The boundaries of a country may be overly complex which is particularly true with coastal areas of countries. Regions may be small and not seen in the final plot, as is the case with many capital cities in the world’s countries such as Washington D.C. and the Federal District of Mexico City. In other countries, regions may geographically lie far away from the rest of the …

System-Level Analysis Of Autonomous Uav Landing Sensitivities In Gps-Denied Environments, Terran R. Gerratt

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This paper presents an analysis of the navigation accuracy of an fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) landing on a aircraft carrier. The UAV is equipped with typical sensors used in landing scenarios. Data from the Office of Naval Research is used to accurately capture the behavior of the aircraft carrier. Through simulation, the position and orientation of both the UAV and carrier are estimated. The quality of the UAV’s sensors are varied to determine the sensitivity of these estimates to sensor accuracy. The system’s sensitivity to GPS signals and visual markers on the carrier is also analyzed. These results allow …

Materials Design For High-Performance Organic Redox Flow Batteries And Electrocatalytic Carbon Dioxide And Nitrogen Reduction, Bo Hu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Nowadays, the utilization of renewable energy resources such as solar and wind energy has been realized to be a sustainable and environmentally benign strategy to alleviate the world’s severe dependency on traditional fossil fuels, and thus enables the environmental recovery and sustainable development of the economy. The massive commercialization of solar and wind energy raises the demands for advanced energy storage technologies, among which the redox flow battery has been recognized as a promising solution due to it is low cost, safe, environmentally benign, and easy to be scaled up. All vanadium redox flow battery stands for the most important …

The Marshmallow Lab: A Project-Based Approach To Understanding Functional Responses, Melissa Pulley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This paper presents a three-part lesson plan to improve student’s understanding of Holling’s type II functional response model. This model describes the interaction between a predator and how much it is able to consume given a constant number of prey. According to the model, while increased availability of prey allows predators to consume portionately more prey for low values, after some number of prey, predators will only be able to capture a limited number of prey even as the prey continues to increase. This phenomenon is known as saturation. Holling first develop this important ecological theory through his “disc experiment” …

Using Imagery To Improve Program Quality In Computer Programming, Joseph S. Ditton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A common practice in sports is to review film footage of a game. This is done in the hope that individuals on the team or the a team as a whole might learning something about technique, form, process, or strategy that they either did well on or need to improve on. We believe that the benefits of doing this could extend to computer science, and more specifically, the process of writing a computer program. This has never been done in the past, as such this research is exploratory in nature. A new tool called Phanon can record someone writing a …

Model-Based Properties Of Earth's Protective Shield: Relating Ut-Based Dependencies Of The Open/Closed Boundary, Cutoff Latitude, And L-Shell Parameter With Polar Cap Absorption Events, David A. Smith

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

High frequency radio continues to be an important communications medium. For example, commercial airlines use high frequency radios as their primary communications mode during transpolar crossings. It has been estimated that over 7000 transpolar flights occur each year. Unfortunately, during geomagnetic storms high frequency communications can become unreliable, especially near Earth's Polar Regions.

Space weather forecasters are burdened with the responsibility of predicting how radio signals might be affected during geomagnetic storms and passing that important information on to commercial airlines, allowing them to adjust flight plans accordingly. Such adjustments can be costly, but are necessary to ensure safety of …

Family Development And The Marital Relationship As A Developmental Process, J. Scott Crapo

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Despite the commonly held idea that families develop, there is not a theory in common use within the family science field that is developed specifically for the study of the development of the family. Family development theory, developed in the post-World War II era, was used previously, but an inability to be adapted to contemporary families and a lack of scientific utility have kept it from use. Additionally, research on how families develop has not considered how relationships may develop over time.

In this dissertation, I seek to address these holes in the family studies field. I do this over …

Retention Of Women In Computer Science: Why Women Persist In Their Computer Science Majors, Katarina Pantic

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Retention of women through graduation in Computer Science (CS) majors is one of the biggest challenges for CS education. Most research in this area focuses on factors influencing attrition rather than why and how women remain committed. The goal of this research study is to understand retention from the perspective of women who persisted in their CS major. Using the theoretical lens of legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice, I designed and conducted a study that involved focus groups, interviews, journey maps, and experience sampling methods. I found that retention of women in this study was influenced by four …

Rural Aging: The Geographic Reach Of Service Access In Utah, Identifying Barriers And Solutions, Alexandra T. Schiwal

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation includes two studies of rural age-related services in the state of Utah. The first study combines geospatial, demographic data (number of people over 55) and age-related services (hospitals, hospice providers, nursing homes, senior centers, and Areas Agencies on Aging) at the county level and census-tract level to determine localized differences in proportional access to age-related services. Higher and lower proportions are then predicted by contextual factors including rural/urban gradient, economic industry, and broadband access. Results demonstrate that broadband access was significantly associated with higher access to age-related services, but being a retirement destination (increase in people over 65 …

The Influences Of Calculus I On Engineering Student Persistence, Amie Baisley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

About half of the students that are declared engineering majors end up leaving engineering within their first two years at the university. This happens following the required math and science courses that these students must take before getting into the technical engineering coursework. There are two systems that students must be a part of at the university to feel comfortable and have the desire to continue on in their degree. These include the academic system and the social system. The experiences engineering students have during their first required math course, Calculus I, is likely not promoting integration into these two …

The Relationship Between Small-Group Discourse And Student-Enacted Levels Of Cognitive Demand When Engaging With Mathematics Tasks At Different Depth Of Knowledge Levels, Kristy Litster

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

High cognitive demand (HCD) tasks can help students develop a deeper understanding of mathematics. Teachers need interventions that encourage students to engage in HCD activities. Small-group discourse provides HCD opportunities for students while solving mathematics problems. Discourse can take place after students solve problems individually (reflective) or in groups as students solve problems (exploratory). This study looks at the relationship between these two types of small-group discourse and student-enacted cognitive demand.

This study looks at how students engage with tasks that were designed at four different cognitive demand levels using Webb’s depth of knowledge (DOK) framework. Ninety-seven grade 5 students …

Preschool Science: An Examination Of Classroom And Teacher Predictors, Donna S. Blaylock

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Science experiences during the preschool years is important because it helps build brain development in children, and improves school readiness. This exploratory study examined several characteristics of teachers and classrooms to see if any factors predicted time spent on science. Over 120 teachers participated, with teachers from Head Starts, university child development laboratories, home-based preschools, and other private preschool programs.

Findings suggest that preschool teachers are quite comfortable with teaching science, but science activities are reported to occur infrequently—one to three times a month. Teachers with higher levels of education and comfort levels with science are reported to be more …

Public Transportation Accessibility: Perceptions Of Riders With Disabilities In Utah, Cherissa R. Alldredge

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Transportation plays an essential role in social inclusion and participation, subjective well-being, and overall quality of life. A lack of private transportation options may make individuals with disabilities more dependent on public transportation systems. Despite increased use, people with disabilities continue to report barriers accessing public transportation services. Interestingly, little is known about these barriers at the regional transportation district level. The purpose of this study was to better understand the barriers and perceived accessibility of the Utah Transit Authority’s (UTA) public transportation system for individuals with disabilities living within the UTA service area.

Using an online survey, data were …

Developing, Adopting, And Executing 100% Net-Renewable Electricity Resolutions At The Local Level, Emily E. Skill

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the absence of national leadership on climate policy, municipalities are adopting resolutions to reduce their carbon footprint and transition to clean energy. However, what leads to successful adoption of these resolutions and how to effectively implement climate goals at the community level needs further exploration. To investigate these questions, this thesis examines the resolutions adopted in Salt Lake City, Park City, and Moab, Utah to transition to 100% renewable electricity by 2032. Data was collected through documents, such as city reports and newspapers, and interviews with government officials, city staff, and community members involved with the resolution process. A …

Plug-And-Play Web Services, Arihant Jain

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The goal of this research is to make it easier to design and create web services for relational databases. A web service is a software service for providing data over computer networks. Web services provide data endpoints for many web applications. We adopt a plug-and-play approach for web service creation whereby a designer constructs a “plug,” which is a simple specification of the output produced by the service. If the plug can be “played” on the database then the web service is generated. Our plug-and-play approach has three advantages. First, a plug is portable. You can take the plug …

Career Prospects And Resources Of Domestic Engineering Doctoral Students, Laura A. Gelles

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Career prospects are a motivating factor for entry and retention of doctoral students, especially in the discipline of engineering. While doctoral student training provides them with highly specialized skills to be an independent researcher, they may not have the requisite skills or guidance to secure the job position of their choice. Therefore, it is important to provide doctoral students with opportunities, training, and information (i.e., resources) about different types of careers to not only ensure they are productive contributors of teaching and research, but also equip them for future career prospects. Research techniques based upon in-depth narrative interviews and combining …

Power V. Threshold: Near-Channel Morphology Controls Sediment Rating Curve Shape In Coastal Redwood Watersheds, Adam Caspian Nebraska Fisher

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

River sediment is one of the most pervasive pollutants in the world. Excess amounts of fine sediment can reduce water quality, damage stream ecosystems, and harm aquatic life. Both natural and human-caused processes can add sediment to a river, such as tectonic uplift, landslides, and timber harvesting. Therefore, it is important to understand how fine sediment enters and moves through a rive system to inform policymakers and land-managers on effective ecosystem management.

In this study, we determined how the relationship between river flow and suspended sediment changed among watersheds along the North Coast of California. We found a rise in …

Energy Management Of Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer Systems For Electric Vehicle Applications, Ahmed N. Azad

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Wireless power transfer is a method of transferring electric power from a transmitter to a receiver without requiring any physical connection between the two. Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer (DWPT) entails having the transmitters buried under the roadway and the receiver unit being installed on the Electric Vehicle (EV). In this method, EVs are charged while driving over the transmitters as they receive bursts of electric energy at the time of significant alignment between transmitters and receivers. Compared to the stationary charging method which involves parking the EV for long hours for a full charge, the dynamic charging method (i.e., DWPT) …

The Role Of A Peer-Led Academic Intervention In College Students' Development Of Self-Regulated Learning: A Person-Centered Approach, Soojeong Jeong

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Due to its unsupervised nature, undergraduate education requires students to manage their own learning. They need to use self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies in order to achieve academic success. However, college students often have insufficient regulatory skills and strategies, suggesting the need for substantive and practical support. Supplemental Instruction (SI) is a well-recognized academic intervention that utilizes peer-led study groups for difficult college courses, through which students can develop their SRL abilities.

This study focuses on the role of the SI program in college students’ development of SRL from a person-centered perspective. First, this study examines the heterogeneous effects of the …

Using A Discrete Choice Experiment To Estimate Willingness To Pay For Location Based Housing Attributes, Kristopher C. Toll

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In 1993, a travel study was conducted along the Wasatch front in Utah (Research Systems Group INC, 2013). The main purpose of this study was to assess travel behavior to understand the needs for future growth in Utah. Since then, the Research Service Group (RSG), conducted a new study in 2012 to understand current travel preferences in Utah. This survey, called the Residential Choice Stated Preference survey, asked respondents to make ten choice comparisons between two hypothetical homes. Each home in the choice comparison was described by different attributes, those attributes that were used are, type of neighborhood, distance from …

Temporal Json, Aayush Goyal

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a format for representing data. In this thesis we show how to capture the history of changes to a JSON document. Capturing the history is important in many applications, where not only the current version of a document is required, but all the previous versions. Conceptually the history can be thought of as a sequence of non-temporal JSON documents, one for each instant of time. Each document in the sequence is called a snapshot. Since changes to a document are few and infrequent, the sequence of snapshots largely duplicates a document across many time instants, …

Measuring The Self-Efficacy Of Students Participating In Vex Robotics Competitions, Joseph S. Furse

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Robotic competitions have become an increasingly popular educational tool to increase students’ interest and achievement in STEM. The largest and fastest growing of these is VEX Robotics Competitions (VRCs). Although millions of dollars of funding are allocated, and countless hours of effort are expended annually to provide students with the opportunity to compete in VRCs, little research has been done to investigate the educational impacts of participation in these competitions. One promising research framework in this area is to investigate the self-efficacy of students who participate in VRCs. Self-efficacy, or the beliefs one holds about one’s own abilities in a …

Evolution Of The Book Cliffs Dryland Escarpment In Central Utah - Establishing Rates And Testing Models Of Escarpment Retreat, Nicholas R. Mccarroll

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Since the earliest explorations of the Colorado Plateau, geologists have suspected that cliffs are retreating back laterally. Clarence Dutton envisioned “the beds thus dissolving edge wise until after the lapse of millions of centuries their terminal cliffs stand a hundred miles or more back from their original position” when he wrote about the landscape in 1882. While many geologic studies have determined how fast rivers cut down through the Plateau, only a few studies have calculated how quickly cliffs retreat laterally, and geologists have been arguing since the 1940’s what exactly drives cliffs to retreat in the first place. We …

Foreground Removal In A Multi-Camera System, Daniel T. Mortensen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Traditionally, whiteboards have been used to brainstorm, teach, and convey ideas with others. However distributing whiteboard content remotely can be challenging. To solve this problem, A multi-camera system was developed which can be scaled to broadcast an arbitrarily large writing surface while removing objects not related to the whiteboard content. Related research has been performed previously to combine multiple images together, identify and remove unrelated objects, also referred to as foreground, in a single image and correct for warping differences in camera frames. However, this is the first time anyone has attempted to solve this problem using a multi-camera system. …

Assessing Amendment Treatments For Sodic Soil Reclamation In Arid Land Environments, Sandra Udy

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Plugged and abandoned well pads throughout the Uintah Basin face reclamation challenges due to factors including a harsh climate, invasive species, and high salt loads. Finding ways to alleviate soil sodicity could improve soil reclamation success. Gypsum, sulfur, activated carbon, and Biochar are being applied to improve soil parameters negatively impacted by sodicity, but the direct impact of these amendments on Uintah Basin soils is still largely unknown. The aim of this study was two-fold. (1) Evaluate the effectiveness of gypsum, sulfuric acid, Biochar, activated carbon, and combinations of these amendments in reducing the impact of soil sodicity of the …

Wildfire In The West: An Initial Analysis Of Wildfire Impacts On Hydrology And Riverbed Grain Size In Relation To Salmonid Habitat, Natalie J. Gillard

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Historically wildfires have been beneficial to forests, however, human developments have encroached on forests when wildfire was artificially suppressed by federal and state agencies. The area burned by wildfire each year has increased twenty-fold in the past three decades. Large, high severity fires pose increased threats to human and aquatic communities within and downstream of the burned area due to post-wildfire effects on flooding and sedimentation. We need to understand the impacts of wildfires to be able to mitigate their damages and to recognize their potential benefits. This research addresses the questions: 1) Do wildfires impact rural and urban economies …

Implementation And Effects Of University College Algebra Growth Mindset Structured Assessments In Large Lectures, Hannah Mae Lewis

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Recent scientific evidence shows the incredible potential of the brain to grow and change. Students with a growth mindset view errors and obstacles as opportunities for growth. These students welcome challenges and the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Although some university instructors are incorporating growth mindset into their lectures, attitudes, and exams in small classes, the traditional exam method used in large lecture undergraduate mathematics classrooms follows a fixed mindset model. The growth mindset structured assessments developed for this study incorporate a testing center portion (matching, short answer, fill in the blank and free response) with structured rework opportunities, …

The Farm As Place In A Changing Climate: Capturing Women Farmers' Experiences In Idaho, United States And Victoria, Australia, Tagen Towsley Baker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In Australia and the US, women play a vital role in the agricultural sector. However, historically farmwomen’s contributions to agriculture as well as their individual knowledge and social resilience to stressors like climate and climate change have been unrecognized and rendered invisible. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from geography and the humanities, this dissertation explores the farm as place in a changing climate, drawing on women farmers’ experiences, under three distinct themes: identity, place, and photography. The dissertation research includes three distinct parts. First, incorporating non-fiction writing and photography, I explore my agricultural and religious heritage, as well as familial connections …

Revolution In Autonomous Orbital Navigation (Raon), Rachit Bhatia

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Spacecraft navigation is a critical component of any space mission. Space navigation uses on-board sensors and other techniques to determine the spacecraft’s current position and velocity, with permissible accuracy. It also provides requisite information to navigate to a desired position, while following the desired trajectory. Developments in technology have resulted in new techniques of space navigation. However, inertial navigation systems have consistently been the bedrock for space navigation.

Recently, the successful space mission GOCE used on-board gravity gradiometer for mapping Earth’s gravitational field. This has motivated the development of new techniques like cold atom accelerometers, to create ultra-sensitive gravity gradiometers, …