Digital Commons Network^™

Culturally Responsive School Leadership: How Principals Use Culturally Responsive Leadership Strategies To Develop Engaging And Inclusive School Environments For All Students, Cherilynne Hollowell

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this ethnographic investigation was to identify and describe culturally responsive leadership practices and strategies principals of Title I high schools, in suburban contexts, of the Inland Empire in Southern California use to develop schools that engage and include all students.

Methodology: This qualitative study identified and described the practices and strategies of 15 Inland Empire principals of Title I comprehensive high schools in Southern California, used to develop schools that engage and include all students, particularly students that have been historically and traditionally marginalized. Participants were purposively chosen based on specific criteria. The researcher collected data …

Masters In Nursing Students' Experiences As A Member Of A Virtual Classroom On The Internet, Carla L. Mueller

Dissertations

There is a growing demand for masters prepared nurses to meet the health care needs of the population. However, adult students find that multiple role responsibilities make it difficult to participate in the leisurely pace of the youth-centered model of traditional higher education. Courses in virtual classrooms on the Internet have been established to provide more convenient access to graduate nursing education. However, few attempts at systematically investigating and rigorously assessing the experiences of graduate students involved in courses in virtual classrooms on the Internet have been published. Disciplined investigation of students' experiences is warranted in order to fully explore …

When Worlds Collide: The Meanings Of Work And Fathering Among Fathers Of Premature Infants, Shawn Pohlman

Dissertations

This interpretive phenomenological study examined the meanings, concerns, and practices of eight fathers of pre-term infants. Fathers were interviewed six to eight times over a 6 month period, beginning within a month after birth and continuing at home after infant discharge from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

A Comparison Of Cooperative Learning And Collaboration In High School Geometry Classes Including Geometry In Construction, Shelley Gates

Dissertations

Currently offered at over 450 high schools in the United States, Geometry in Construction is an interdisciplinary course that provides students with the opportunity to learn Geometry content through the process of constructing a single-family home. Highly functioning cooperative groups are a critical element of the Geometry in Construction program. Cooperative learning is an effective instructional strategy that increases student achievement (Slavin, 2011) and also provides opportunities for students to develop collaboration and teamwork skills. Collaboration and teamwork are critical 21st century skills that are highly valued by employers and therefore worthy of consideration as foundational skills to be taught …

The Connection Between Learning And Achievement Of Gifted And Talented (Gate) High School Students Using A Personalized Learning Framework From The Perspective Of High School Teachers, Roseellen Shea

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative study was to describe how expert teachers at the high school level perceive the impact of rigor, relevance, and personalized learning on the learning experience and achievement of gifted and talented (GATE) students.

Methodology: Data collected for this study included classroom observations, interviews, and documents. The target population consisted of public high school teachers of gifted learners in grades 9-12. Moreover, teacher participants were chosen using both purposeful and emergent sampling procedures.

Findings: For this phenomenological study, there were 15 teacher participants from both Los Angeles and Orange County. The …

The Resiliency Of Veteran Preschool Special Education Teachers, Monisola Komolafe

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the perceived factors that led to the resiliency and retention of veteran preschool special education teachers in public schools in California.

Methodology: This study utilized a phenomenological design to gain insight into the perceived factors influencing veteran preschool special education teachers’ resiliency and career decision to continue teaching in the field of special education for at least 10 years. Using snowball sampling, 12 preschool teachers employed in public schools in Solano County with at least 10 years of experience were selected to participate in the study. Qualitative data …

An Investigation Of Three Subjective Rating Scales Of Mental Workload In Third Level Education, Nha Vu Thanh Nguyen

Dissertations

Mental Workload assessment in educational settings is still recognized as an open research problem. Although its application is useful for instructional design, it is still unclear how it can be formally shaped and which factors compose it. This paper is aimed at investigating a set of features believed to shape the construct of mental workload and aggregating them together in models trained with supervised machine learning techniques. In detail, multiple linear regression and decision trees have been chosen for training models with features extracted respectively from the NASA Task Load Index and the Workload Profile, well-known self-reporting instruments for assessing …

An Evaluation Of Learning Employing Natural Language Processing And Cognitive Load Assessment, Mrunal Tipari

Dissertations

One of the key goals of Pedagogy is to assess learning. Various paradigms exist and one of this is Cognitivism. It essentially sees a human learner as an information processor and the mind as a black box with limited capacity that should be understood and studied. With respect to this, an approach is to employ the construct of cognitive load to assess a learner's experience and in turn design instructions better aligned to the human mind. However, cognitive load assessment is not an easy activity, especially in a traditional classroom setting. This research proposes a novel method for evaluating learning …

A Formal Systems Engineering Methodology For Cyber-Physical Systems: The Verifiable Design Process, Nadew S. Kibret

Dissertations

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are systems that exhibit tight integration between their physical and computational components. They are hybrid systems containing continuous states and discrete states emanating from the physical and computational components, respectively. Systems engineering of these systems is challenging due to the tight integration of their computational, physical and communication technologies. As their level of acceptance increases in mission critical applications such as health care, smart grid, autonomous vehicles and smart cities, the need to ensure their safe operation is paramount importance as well. Therefore, design methodologies followed in their development are required to result in system behavior that …

The Nature Of David's Kingship At Hebron: An Exegetical And Theological Study Of 2 Samuel 2:1-5:5, Christian Vogel

Dissertations

The account of David’s reign at Hebron found in 2 Samuel 2:1—5:5 constitutes a somewhat neglected, yet crucial part of the David narrative, chronicling David’s first years as king. This dissertation investigates these chapters by means of a close reading of the Hebrew text in order to gain a better understanding of the nature of David’s kingship as it is presented in this literary unit. The review of scholarly literature on 2 Samuel 2:1—5:5 conducted in Chapter 1 reveals that not much attention has been given to a careful and in-depth exegesis of this literary unit. Instead, most of the …

A Correlational Study To Examine The Relationships Between The Workplace Big Five Personality Profile And The Leading Managers 360 Assessment Of Senior And Mid-Level Managers, Maurice A. Ferrell

Dissertations

Much has been said about personality and leadership. Leadership was initially attributed to leaders only having certain traits and attributes (Nock, 1940). In the early 20th century, leadership traits were studied to determine what made certain people great leaders. The Great Man Theory of Leadership, which was introduced during this time period, suggested that leaders were born and not made. It was these unique physical traits and attributes that were credited with making great leaders. Herbert Spencer, a noted philosopher, sociologist, biologist and political theorist of the Victorian era, countered that the Great Man Theory was childish, primitive and unscientific. …

Analyzing Disaster-Related Twitter Data And Identifying Panic Triggers For Cyber Disruption Prevention And Emergency Response Enhancement, Nasser A. Assery

Dissertations

Twitter has emerged rapidly as an ideal platform for news updates especially during natural disasters. During disasters, people exchange endless amount of information on Twitter. This information may include warnings, evacuation orders, updates etc. Making sense of this information is challenging due to the limitations of available tools to analyze high-volume data. There have been studies done to make use of twitter data as it contains valuable information that has the potential to help improve the efficiency of disaster response. This research presents a framework to extract, automatically label, and classify tweets from two recent disaster events in order to …

Is There A Correlation Between Wikidata Revisions And Trending Hashtags On Twitter?, Paula Dooley

Dissertations

Twitter is a microblogging application used by its members to interact and stay socially connected by sharing instant messages called tweets that are up to 280 characters long. Within these tweets, users can add hashtags to relate the message to a topic that is shared among users. Wikidata is a central knowledge base of information relying on its members and machines bots to keeping its content up to date. The data is stored in a highly structured format with the added SPARQL protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) endpoint to allow users to query its knowledge base.

Perceptions Of High School Principals Of The Role Of Multi-Tiered Systems Of Support-- Formally Rti-- In Bringing About Social Justice And Equity For Black Boys, La Wanna Marie Wells

Dissertations

Historically, Black males are disproportionately represented as the least likely to graduate at every level of education and the demographic most likely placed in Special Education courses, incarcerated, as victims of homicide and who live in poverty. The United States of America implemented a voluntary program, Multi-tiered Systems of Support for educators to "intervene" with proactive measures that target groups that systemically fail: students of color, English learners, students with disabilities and the poor. The purpose of this research is to observe the perceptions of school principals who have implemented Multi-tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) as an education program for …

Detection Of Offensive Youtube Comments, A Performance Comparison Of Deep Learning Approaches, Priyam Bansal

Dissertations

Social media data is open, free and available in massive quantities. However, there is a significant limitation in making sense of this data because of its high volume, variety, uncertain veracity, velocity, value and variability. This work provides a comprehensive framework of text processing and analysis performed on YouTube comments having offensive and non-offensive contents.

YouTube is a platform where every age group of people logs in and finds the type of content that most appeals to them. Apart from this, a massive increase in the use of offensive language has been apparent. As there are massive volume of new …

Angels And Sub-Divine Supernatural Beings: Their Characteristics, Function, And Relationship To God And Humanity In Deuteronomy-Kings, Joni Amanda Mcguire-Moushon

Dissertations

This research analyzes selected passages in Deuteronomy-Kings in order to determine the characteristics and roles of supernatural sub-divine beings within these books. Then this data is compared with the angelology of the Second Temple period in order to identify the similarities and the extent of the differences between them.

Deuteronomy contains references to supernatural sub-divine beings, such as “demons” and “holy one(s)”. While Deuteronomy affirms the existence of sub-divine beings, it forbids the Israelites to worship them. In the books of Joshua and Judges, there is awareness of supernatural beings and their roles as warriors, messengers, and tormentors. However, in …

Islam, Christianity, Traditional Religions And Power Politics In Northern Nigeria Since Pre-Islamic Period, Emmanuel M. Abar

Dissertations

Problem

Currently in Northern Nigeria, religious interaction among the three major religious traditions, Islam, Christianity, and African Traditional Religion, is marred by violent religious conflicts. Also, competing concepts of religious legitimacy, which appeal to the historical heritage of Nigeria, are often used to validate and justify the violation of religious freedom. Does the current state of religious interaction among the various religious groups reflect the true heritage of religious interaction in Northern Nigeria? Or is it possible that the history of the interaction between African Traditional Religions, Islam, and Christianity in the past might actually be a heritage that points …

The Interplay Of Racial Identity Attitude And Religious Orientation On The Social Integration Experiences Of Black African College Students And African American College Students Attending Predominantly White Institutions In The United States, Christina Miattamengie Johnson

Dissertations

Problem

Not much attention has been devoted to the academic experiences of Black African college students, the latter being typically categorized with those of African Americans (Kim, 2014). While research has effectively documented the social challenges that African American college students experience at (Predominantly White Institutions (PWI). much less research has been conducted on the social experiences of subcategories within the Black population, specifically, Black Africans. Though researchers have speculated on the potential differences between the social integration experiences of Black Africans and African American college students as these relate to religious orientation and racial identity attitude, no empirical studies …

Teacher Preparation And English Language Learners: The Negotiation Of Teaching Identities In Communities Of Practice, Eleni Giatsou

Dissertations

This dissertation unveils the identity formation and negotiation processes of teacher candidates, through their practice with English Language Learners (ELLs) in a field-based teacher preparation program. Identity, like learning, is socially constructed and continuously negotiated by someone's engagement in a community (Wenger, 1998). Thus, sociocultural theory and specifically the theoretical construct of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), guided the exploration of candidates' teaching identities to reveal the processes of becoming a teacher of ELLs. I conducted a qualitative case study to examine candidates' teaching practices with ELLs at a surface level and the (re)construction of their teaching identities at a …

Analyzing Twitter Feeds To Facilitate Crises Informatics And Disaster Response During Mass Emergencies, Arshdeep Kaur

Dissertations

It is a common practice these days for general public to use various micro-blogging platforms, predominantly Twitter, to share ideas, opinions and information about things and life. Twitter is also being increasingly used as a popular source of information sharing during natural disasters and mass emergencies to update and communicate the extent of the geographic phenomena, report the affected population and casualties, request or provide volunteering services and to share the status of disaster recovery process initiated by humanitarian-aid and disaster-management organizations. Recent research in this area has affirmed the potential use of such social media data for various disaster …

Promotion And Retention Of English Learners (Ells) In An Large Urban School District: A Policy Advocacy Document, Hanan Matari, Ruqia Ali

Dissertations

This policy advocacy document argues for a fair and equitable retention and promotion policy for English language learners (ELLs) in elementary grades of a large urban school district. Increasing access and instructional opportunities within bilingual/ESL services combined with more accurate measures of English proficiency would help mitigate random or unfair promotion and retention practices. A needs analysis was conducted on educational, economic, social, political, and moral-ethical dimensions and arguments made in support of the recommended policy (Browder, 1995). This policy solidifies district accountability for the education of all ELL students by mandating schools provide equal opportunity and access to high-quality …

Developing Social And Emotional Skills In Early Childhood Instruction: A Delphi Study, Tess Breen

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this Delphi study was to explore social and emotional learning in early childhood instruction with an emphasis on identifying the methods expert early childhood teachers use to support and promote the development of empathy and emotion regulation, to have the teachers rate the impact of these methods, and to identify the specific activities used to implement the six most highly rated methods.

Methodology: This study utilized the Delphi method which is an iterative process used to collect and distill the judgments of experts using a series of questionnaires interspersed with feedback. Fourteen participants recommended strategies to …

Diffusion, Adoption, And Network Constraint: Can Understanding Personal Networks Of Afghan Women Improve The Adoption 0f Agricultural Innovations, Clair Wilcox

Dissertations

A plethora of case studies conducted in myriad locations find that factors influencing the adoption of agricultural innovation are different, emphasizing the need for locality specific understanding (Waddingon 2014). The diffusion of agricultural innovations may be influenced by the structure of the social system in which that diffusion is taking place. This study investigates the social structure of rural Afghan women, in an effort to determine how they interact and exchange information, and how the personal network structure, and the nature of the women’s interaction influences adoption of innovations. With the objective of framing rural development programs targeting women in …

Refugee Resettlement And Perceptions Of Insecurity: A Comparative Study Of The United States And Canada, Erik Amundson

Dissertations

In the United States and Canada, refugee resettlement has been the subject of extensive scrutiny and political debate, particularly since the November 2015 terrorist attacks carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) against targets in Paris. While public opinion polls have shown increasingly negative attitudes toward refugees, existing survey questionnaires only provide a limited understanding of what shapes these views. As such, this study focuses on two important factors that influence attitude formation toward refugees, pre-existing levels of knowledge and contact with minority groups. Using a comparative case study approach, this research examines how refugee resettlement …

A Study Of Acculturative And Linguistic Experiences Of Syrian Refugees In The United States From 2011 – 2018, Amany Habib

Dissertations

Research examining the acculturation and linguistic processes of Syrian refugees resettling in the United States from 2011 – 2018 is limited. In order to learn about the acculturative and linguistic experiences of this unique group of refugees, the current study sought to collect data related to these two experiences within the resettled Syrian refugee population living in the U.S.A. since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.

Acquiring the language of a host country is necessary but language-learning experiences vary depending on a number of factors. This research attempted to elucidate the challenges of Syrian refugees in their …

Factors For Influencing Intervention For Dyslexia, Michele Schraeder

Dissertations

Although instructional leadership and transformational leadership styles of elementary school principals have been found to be effective variables in increasing academic progress for students, the integration of instructional and transformational leadership behaviors has proved to be the most effective form of leadership. However, many students in elementary schools have difficulty learning to read despite good leadership by the principal, with 5-20% of students being diagnosed with dyslexia. While these students need phonetic, multisensory intervention to build necessary reading skills, many principals report lack of knowledge of this specialized instruction. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to explore variables that …

Counseling In Spanish And English: Phenomenological Experiences Of Bilingual Counselors, Bradley James Crookston

Dissertations

The primary purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to understand how bilingual professional counselors experience bilingual counseling in Spanish and English. I was additionally interested in learning how bilingual professional counselors develop their bilingual skills for bilingual counseling. Further, how counselor educators and supervisors can assist bilingual professional counselors in their development of bilingual skills was of note. Twelve professional counselors were interviewed for the study from various regions in the United States of America. Through thematic analysis, five main themes and 13 subthemes were identified. The findings provide specific implications for bilingual professional counselors, counselor educators, and supervisors. …

Parental Engagement In The Education Of Gifted Children In Saudi Arabia: A Phenomenological Study, Aiman Ali Alyahya

Dissertations

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore parents’ perceptions of their experiences engaging in their gifted children’s education in Saudi Arabia. Qualitative research design was utilized, and a phenomenological approach was employed to answer the research questions. Ten Saudi parents were interviewed to explore their engagement in the education of their gifted children. Following thematic analysis, four themes emerged regarding the roles parents played in the engagement of their gifted children’s education. These roles were: Guiding their Gifted Children, Challenging their Gifted Children, Encouraging their Gifted Children, and Advocating for their Gifted Children. Additionally, five themes emerged regarding …

Implication Of Item And Test Differential Functioning In Criterion-Referenced Tests, Xiaojie Hu

Dissertations

In a compensatory criterion referenced test (CRT) it is common that the test developer maximizes the test information at or near the cut score location. This is believed to produce the highest classification accuracy. However, a recent study showed that the optimal location to maximize test information for highest classification accuracy (CA) and consistency (CC) also depends on factors such as test length, cut score location, the examinee ability distribution, and the test model applied for latent trait estimation (Wyse & Babcock, 2016). Moreover, when unintentional secondary dimensions are also measured (nuisance dimension caused by test construction, test standardization, or …

An Ethnographic Study On The Relationship Between Andragogy And Perceived Ability Of Hybrid And Virtual Employees To Live Corporate Values, Laura Van Iseghem

Dissertations

As several businesses and organizations push to be profitable and successful, many lack efforts in enforcing and maintaining an effective vision and mission as part of the business strategy. This qualitative, ethnographic study aimed to identify the relationship, if any, between andragogy, an adult learning theory, and the perceived ability of the study company’s hybrid and virtual employees to live the seven corporate core values (trust, humility, embracing change, passion, positive attitude, teamwork and honesty and integrity) based on Knowles’ (1973, 1995) six assumptions of the characteristics of the adult learner and the eight process elements (theoretical framework) by which …