Digital Commons Network^™

Utilization Of Triply Periodic Minimal Surface (Tpms) Based Architectures Impregnated With Phase Change Material For Heat Transfer Applications, Zahid Ahmed Qureshi

Dissertations

This dissertation is concerned with the utilization of mathematically architected Triply Periodic Minimal Surface (TPMS) based lattices for Latent Heat Thermal Energy Storage (LHTES) systems. With the advent of Additive Manufacturing (AM), TPMS structures can be readily manufactured. The objective of this dissertation was to investigate the heat transfer performance of TPMS structures vis-à-vis conventional metal foams represented by Kelvin cells while both were impregnated with a Phase Change Material (PCM). Numerical simulations were performed under various boundary conditions to assess the performance. It was found that TPMS structures outperformed conventional metal foam. Moreover, the effects of boundary conditions (isothermal …

Mental Construal And Alterations In Emotional Memory, Olivia D. Beers

Dissertations

Psychological distancing refers to a shift from a psychologically immersed perspective that involves thinking about the details of an event (concretely) or stepping back from it and watching the event from an outside point of view (abstractly)––this can help individuals change how they feel about the experience. Investigating how construal levels affect emotional memories may provide more insight into how individuals may potentially alter the recall of their memories. The current study reflects a new examination of the effect of primed high and low construal levels on the recall of positive and negative arousing stimuli. This study included a pilot …

Figuring It Out: The Self-Efficacy And Self-Empowerment Of Secondary Ela (English Language Arts) Teachers Of Writing, Alma M. Vera

Dissertations

Knowing how to write well has been linked to college and career success and learning to write well is reliant on the effectiveness of highly prepared teachers of writing. However, secondary ELA (English Language Arts) teachers of writing report that they were not prepared to teach writing in their pre-service teacher preparation programs or in-service professional development. Based on personal experience, such educators engage in their own professional learning in the teaching of writing to meet their students’ needs (grades 9-12). This explanatory sequential mixed methods study sought to identify the professional learning choices made by in-service secondary ELA teachers …

The Pontem Path: A Case Study Of A Catholic Bridge Program Focusing On College Readiness, Sean Green

Dissertations

The Department of Education’s 2018 report on the “Condition of Education” indicated nearly 60% of all children under the age of 18 had parents without a bachelor’s degree. When the statistics were broken down by race, the numbers were far higher. For Black children, that number was 74%; for Hispanic children, that number was 79%; for Pacific islander, it was 78%; and for American Indian/Alaska native, it was 80%. This gap in education has had a tremendous economic impact on families, reverberating through generations. According to Georgetown’s 2015 study on the economics of college majors, a college graduate makes $1 …

The Relationship Between Utilization Of The Elsevier Online Remediation Tool And The Hesi Exit Exam For Student Nurses Preparing For The Nclex-Rn, Judith A. Egan

Dissertations

Nursing schools are operating at full capacity in order to address an impending shortage of registered nurses that may exceed 500,000 by the year 2025. This pressure on scarce resources elevates the importance of NCLEX-RN preparedness for nursing faculty, nursing students, and the public at large. Additionally, the ability to successfully prepare students to sit for the NCLEX-RN exam can affect the reputation of nursing programs throughout the United States. Nursing schools frequently utilize commercially prepared standardized exams to assess student readiness and identify students in need of remediation. The HESI E2 Exit Exam distributed by Elsevier is one such …

Parental Involvement And The Academic Achievement Of Third And Fourth Grade Students During The 2014-2015 And 2015-2016 School Years, Rise’ D. Black

Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to find out if parental involvement in the study school helped to increase student academic achievement. Previous studies have shown that when parents are involved in the educational process of children, parents can expect a gain in academic achievement. This mixed method study examined the relationship between parental involvement and academic gains in reading at one suburban public school. The researcher examined how often parents met with teachers at their child’s school, conversations parents had with teachers about what they were learning in school, how often parents were involved with a parent group, how …

The Relationship Between Nursing Students' Test-Taking Motivation And The Exit Examination Score, Lorraine Coalmer

Dissertations

A primary objective of nursing students and nursing programs includes first-time success on the NCLEX-RN®. As the nursing shortage continues, it is essential to have qualified nursing graduates pass the NCLEX-RN ®. One approach some nursing programs have chosen to implement regarding augmenting nursing students' probability of success on the NCLEX-RN® includes the administration of an exit examination. This exit examination is tailored to mimic the NCLEX-RN® blueprint; thereby this examination may reveal the nursing students' readiness for the NCLEX-RN®.

The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a relationship between nursing student test-taking motivation and exit …

Nurse Educators' Perceptions About The Culture Of Nursing And How They Bring Students Into That Culture: A Focused Ethnography, Susan M. Strouse

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to discover nurse educators' perceptions about the culture of nursing and how they bring students into that culture.

Exemplary Practices Which Support Achievement Gaps In Reading And Writing For Hispanic Ell Learners In Title I Twenty-First Century Elementary Schools, Melinda Gonzalez

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological study was to identify and describe strategies used by public school 3rd, 4th, and 5th-grade teachers to support English language learners in Title I public schools.

Methodology: This phenomenological study identified and described 14 teachers' 3rd, 4th, and 5th-grade perceptions on effective strategies to support English language learners in reading and writing. Respondents were purposively chosen based on specific criteria and recommendations of an expert panel of experts and data was coded using NVIVO.

Findings: The expert panel members identified multiple strategies to support English language learners. Strategies include (a) Question higher level of …

A Quantitative Comparative Analysis Of Edd Persistence Factors, Jeffrey D. Deckelbaum

Dissertations

Whether studying physical sciences, social sciences, engineering, mathematics, humanities, or education, approximately one in every two doctoral students fail to persist to degree completion (Bowen & Rudenstine, 1992; Lovitts, 2001; Tinto, 2012). A quantitative comparative study focused on two populations; students currently enrolled in the professional doctorate EdD program and former EdD students, including students who started but did not finish the program. Research-based variables, characterized as personal and program factors driving doctoral student attrition, were tested for significance. The participation criteria defined at least 80% of the program’s course content in totality was or is currently delivered online from …

Measuring And Comparing Social Bias In Static And Contextual Word Embeddings, Alan Cueva Mora

Dissertations

Word embeddings have been considered one of the biggest breakthroughs of deep learning for natural language processing. They are learned numerical vector representations of words where similar words have similar representations. Contextual word embeddings are the promising second-generation of word embeddings assigning a representation to a word based on its context. This can result in different representations for the same word depending on the context (e.g. river bank and commercial bank). There is evidence of social bias (human-like implicit biases based on gender, race, and other social constructs) in word embeddings. While detecting bias in static (classical or non-contextual) word …

Hybridization Of Biologically Inspired Algorithms For Discrete Optimisation Problems, Elihu Essian-Thompson

Dissertations

In the field of Optimization Algorithms, despite the popularity of hybrid designs, not enough consideration has been given to hybridization strategies. This paper aims to raise awareness of the benefits that such a study can bring. It does this by conducting a systematic review of popular algorithms used for optimization, within the context of Combinatorial Optimization Problems. Then, a comparative analysis is performed between Hybrid and Base versions of the algorithms to demonstrate an increase in optimization performance when hybridization is employed.

Covid-19: A Review Of Random Testing As An Augmentation Of A Close-Contact Testing Regime In Response To The Covid-19 Pandemic, John Mcdonnell

Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the world with a huge challenge to balance the health of the population with the scale of stringent response measures. Policy makers need evidence based recommendations to inform their response to the pandemic and the ever changing landscape it creates. Testing and isolation of infected individuals plays a critical role in containing the spread of the disease, but is aimed primarily at detecting symptomatic individuals. However, asymptomatic individuals are much more difficult to detect. This study presents the augmentation of a close contact testing regime with random testing to examine the elect on the number …

A Metal-Cutting-Inspired Analytical Framework For Predicting Operating Parameters In Friction Stir Welding, Benjamin Robert Lund

Dissertations

Currently, predictive models for establishing Friction Stir Welding (FSW) process parameters that produce repeatable and robust welds are not well developed and do not account for differences between alloys. Parameter development relies primarily upon costly trial and error studies. The predicted hot working conditions of FSW vary widely with strains ranging from 2 to 100 and strain rates from 10^0 to 10^6 s^-1. These conditions lie outside the range covered by traditional testing techniques but are quite similar to conditions predicted in Orthogonal Metal Cutting (OMC), where strains range from 1 to 50 and strain rates from 10^0 to 10^6 …

Does Co-Speech Gesture Support Children’S Analogical Reasoning? An Investigation Into The Differential Effects Of Gesture On Learning, Katharine F. Guarino

Dissertations

Although the general consensus is that gesture supports learning across a wide range of learning contexts, nuances to gesture’s effects are found across the gesture-for-learning literature. The purpose of this body of research was to advance our understanding of gesture’s effect on learning. Specifically, we explored the utility of gesture in a domain that had not been considered in the gesture literature previously: analogical reasoning (Study 1). We aimed to understand whether gesture supports children’s analogical reasoning ability and why gesture might support this type of reasoning. Specifically, we investigated whether gesture could support learning through directing visual attention, thereby …

Changes In Teacher Pedagogy And Student Engagement In Elementary 1:1 Classrooms, Adam Douglas Smeets

Dissertations

Technology advances at a pace that far exceeds the rate of change possible in education. Without adjustments to their pedagogy, teachers continue leveraging pedagogical practices that do not match the effective use of technology in classrooms. This qualitative, retrospective instrumental case study explores two areas of the connected elementary classroom: (1) how teachers adapt their instructional practices as a result of 1:1 device adoption at their school and (2) teacher perceptions of change to classroom communication and student engagement the adoption of 1:1 devices. The data for this study was collected through a questionnaire, three-part semi-structured interviews, and district document …

Discovery Of Counter Iads Swarming Autonomy Behaviors With Machine Learning, Joshua Robbins

Dissertations

Counter air-defense operations in highly contested airspaces pose significant risk to human life and scarce material resources, making it desirable to reduce the exposure of personnel to risk of loss of life and limb. Replacing human-piloted air platforms with a swarm of low-cost, unmanned systems in the contest for air superiority is therefore an area of intense interest. However, no doctrinal or tactical best practices for swarming combat yet exist. This dissertation documents research conducted to develop a systematical framework for discovery of counter-air defense tactics for unmanned aerial vehicles under control of a cognitive agent, using a reinforcement learning …

Evaluation Of Automated Eye Blink Artefact Removal Using Stacked Dense Autoencoder, Matthew Rigney

Dissertations

The presence of artefacts in Electroencephalograph (EEG) signals can have a considerable impact on the information they portray. In this comparative study, the automated removal of eye blink artefacts using the constrained latent representation of a stacked dense autoencoders (SDAE) and comparing its ability to that of the manual independent component analysis (ICA) approach was evaluated. A comparative evaluation of 5 stacked dense autoencoder architectures lead to a chosen architecture for which the ability to automatically detect and remove eye blink artefacts were both statistically and humanistically evaluated. The ability of the stacked dense autoencoder was statistically evaluated with the …

School Leaders’ Assessment Of Teachers’ Preparedness For Culturally Responsive Teaching, Victoria Maria Siliunas

Dissertations

Societal and school inequities continue to be highlighted via widening achievement gaps that adversely impact historically marginalized groups of students and their communities. An acknowledgement of the importance of developing teachers who are prepared to work with students of culturally differing identities from their own in the day-to-day work of teaching has inspired a shift in language and practice from a more general multicultural approach to a culturally responsive teaching methodology in which a purposeful inclusion of the ethnic and cultural backgrounds of students is prioritized. Addressing challenges schools face related to cultural difference between teachers and the students they …

An Analysis On Network Flow-Based Iot Botnet Detection Using Weka, Cian Porteous

Dissertations

Botnets pose a significant and growing risk to modern networks. Detection of botnets remains an important area of open research in order to prevent the proliferation of botnets and to mitigate the damage that can be caused by botnets that have already been established. Botnet detection can be broadly categorised into two main categories: signature-based detection and anomaly-based detection. This paper sets out to measure the accuracy, false-positive rate, and false-negative rate of four algorithms that are available in Weka for anomaly-based detection of a dataset of HTTP and IRC botnet data. The algorithms that were selected to detect botnets …

Evaluating The Performance Of Vision Transformer Architecture For Deepfake Image Classification, Devesan Govindasamy

Dissertations

Deepfake classification has seen some impressive results lately, with the experimentation of various deep learning methodologies, researchers were able to design some state-of-the art techniques. This study attempts to use an existing technology “Transformers” in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which has been a de-facto standard in text processing for the purposes of Computer Vision. Transformers use a mechanism called “self-attention”, which is different from CNN and LSTM. This study uses a novel technique that considers images as 16x16 words (Dosovitskiy et al., 2021) to train a deep neural network with “self-attention” blocks to detect deepfakes. It creates …

Investigating The Effect Of An Immersive Extracurricular Stem Program On Underrepresented And Disadvantaged High School Students' Self-Efficacy, Science Anxiety, And Career Aspirations, Nikki Mertz

Dissertations

This mixed methods study was designed to assess how an immersive extracurricular STEM program affected a student’s self-efficacy, science anxiety, and career aspirations. This study utilized the SIC-STEM survey to quantify student self-efficacy in science and the STEM Semantics survey to quantify student interest in STEM. Both surveys also assessed student interest in pursuing careers in STEM. The Science Anxiety survey was used to evaluate how student anxiety in science changed throughout the study. A subject matter survey was utilized to quantify student understanding and comprehension of an advanced science topic. Focus groups were used as the qualitative piece to …

Adaptive Sliding Mode Control Of Small Satellites In Formation For Distributed Beamforming Applications, Mason Earl Nixon

Dissertations

The rising popularity of small satellites over the past few decades has created a new boom in space, and, in particular, in low-Earth orbit. Exciting novel applications are being proposed that enable these small satellites to offer many advantages over their monolithic counterparts which can allow for augmentation, or possibly even replacement of more expensive and large alternatives. One particular enabling method is flying small satellites in formation for antenna array applications, which, through coupled dynamical modeling, can be facilitated through robust, nonlinear techniques of control. Thus, control of a perturbed satellite formation antenna array, with dual quaternion dynamics, is …

Accuracy Improvement Of Dynamic Sensors Measured Input Reconstruction Using Sliding Mode Observers, Rajesh Rayala Jayasheelareddy

Dissertations

Sensor dynamics adversely affect the accuracy of the obtained measurement by dynamically distorting the true value. The accuracy of the measurement may be further degraded by noise/exogenous perturbations. A sensor’s accuracy and performance are improved by reconstructing the true input signal of the sensor from the distorted measurement polluted by a corruption signal or exogenous inputs using Sliding mode and Higher-order sliding mode observer (SMO/HOSMO). The proposed technique is used to reconstruct/estimate a sensor’s true signal, thereby improving the transient response and driving the estimation steady state error to zero in finite time. The proposed SMO algorithm is based on …

The Universality Of Solubility Divergence Effects In Multicomponent Liquid Mixtures, Pauline R. Norris

Dissertations

Critical point effects have been observed in pure fluids, ferromagnets, substitutional alloys, and in binary liquid mixtures having a miscibility gap. That these systems are disparate, while the phenomena observed are similar, serves as the basis for the statement of the Principle of Critical Point Universality, which governs all critical behavior. The effect of the critical point on solute solubility is readily observed; the solubility diverges towards infinity in the critical region. One finds in the critical region that the slope (∂ln solubility/ ∂ (1/Temperature)) of a plot of ln solubility vs 1/Temperature diverges toward infinity if only one composition …

Development Of Aerospace Sliding Mode Control Toolbox : Relative Degree Approach With Resource Prospector Lander And Launch Vehicle Case Studies, Sai Susheel Praneeth Kode

Dissertations

Sliding mode control and observation techniques are widely used in aerospace applications, including aircraft, UAVs, launch vehicles, missile interceptors, and hypersonic missiles. This work is dedicated to developing a MATLAB based sliding mode controller design and simulation software toolbox that aims to support aerospace vehicle applications. An architecture of the proposed aerospace sliding mode control toolbox (SMC Aero) using the relative degree approach is developed. The created SMC Aero libraries include the design of first order sliding mode control (1-SMC), second order sliding mode control (2-SMC), higher order sliding mode (HOSM) control (either fixed gain or adaptive), as well as …

Adaptive Element Spacing Synthesis Technique In Phased Array Antennas, Tanzeela Mitha

Dissertations

Phased array antennas are widely used in a variety of military and civilian applications. For a given application, their radiation characteristics, such as the sidelobes, position of the nulls, and the main beam direction, need to be altered to enhance the array performance. To control these properties for a given requirement, the elements of phased array antennas need to be either properly excited or physically rearranged in different periodic and aperiodic configurations. However, once the position of the elements is fixed to control a single aspect of the generated pattern, it cannot simultaneously fulfill any other specification. To further alter …

The Case For Alternate Media Requirement Expressions In Systems Engineering, Jason Kolligs

Dissertations

“Requirements” are often presented as a necessary, if not mandated, component or tool of the systems engineering process. Despite their place in engineering, low quality requirements are the first potential mistakes of an engineering project and their effects are potentially felt downstream in the form of increased costs and schedule overruns. Innovations to improve requirements engineering have historically omitted the requirement media. This research provides the rationale and process heuristics to include alternate media requirement expressions within systems engineering which shifts accountability to higher context requirement expressions that may require less cognitive load while decreasing effort and schedule thereby potentially …

An Investigation Of Mathematics Self-Efficacy, The Sources Of Mathematics Self-Efficacy, And Mathematics Achievement Among Primary School Students In Trinidad And Tobago, Ronald Sinanan

Dissertations

Purpose of the Study

This dissertation addressed two problems in the literature. Firstly, while many study findings have highlighted the critical role of self-efficacy in students' achievement, additional research was needed about the four hypothesized sources that influence the improvement of students' mathematics self-efficacy. Many studies on self-efficacy sources were conducted with measures not closely tied to social cognitive theory and have not demonstrated sufficient reliability. Using the Sources of Mathematics SelfEfficacy Scale, Usher and Pajares (2009) addressed this problem. They suggested several recommendations for future research (Usher & Pajares, 2008b, 2009), including exploring the validity of their scale in …

Isaac Newton As A Prophetic Interpreter, Kenneth Jørgensen

Dissertations

Throughout his life, Sir Isaac Newton was deeply dedicated to the science of decoding biblical apocalyptic writings. To understand and appreciate Newton's prophetic scheme, it will be advantagous to have a certain grasp of what sources and ideas might have influenced him. No comprehensive study before this one has helped us see Newton from that perspective. A survey of the development of canonical apocalyptic hermeneutic and interpretation, beginning before the time of Christ and ending with Newton, shows that four distinct systems of hermeneutics had developed by that time. Historicism was the earliest and the preferred system among Protestants until …