Digital Commons Network^™

Mobile Cloud Computing And Network Function Virtualization For 5g Systems, Ali Al-Shuwaili

Dissertations

The recent growth of the number of smart mobile devices and the emergence of complex multimedia mobile applications have brought new challenges to the design of wireless mobile networks. The envisioned Fifth-Generation (5G) systems are equipped with different technical solutions that can accommodate the increasing demands for high date rate, latency-limited, energy-efficient and reliable mobile communication networks.

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is a key technology in 5G systems that enables the offloading of computationally heavy applications, such as for augmented or virtual reality, object recognition, or gaming from mobile devices to cloudlet or cloud servers, which are connected to wireless …

Performance Optimization And Energy Efficiency Of Big-Data Computing Workflows, Tong Shu

Dissertations

Next-generation e-science is producing colossal amounts of data, now frequently termed as Big Data, on the order of terabyte at present and petabyte or even exabyte in the predictable future. These scientific applications typically feature data-intensive workflows comprised of moldable parallel computing jobs, such as MapReduce, with intricate inter-job dependencies. The granularity of task partitioning in each moldable job of such big data workflows has a significant impact on workflow completion time, energy consumption, and financial cost if executed in clouds, which remains largely unexplored. This dissertation conducts an in-depth investigation into the properties of moldable jobs and provides an …

Long-Term Management And Condition Assessment Of Concrete Culvert, Zhenting Zou

Dissertations

Infrastructure is the backbone of national security, economic growth, public safety and other aspects of the society. Nationwide, the condition of America’s infrastructure was graded as “D+” by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2013.

Owners and responsible agencies have employed various cost-effective maintenance and repair methods as well as analytical tools to repair and extend the service life of the infrastructure. However, without a long-term plan, maintenance work can be delayed by lack of funds. Maintenance delay may cause significant reduction in condition state leading to premature failure of the infrastructure. Consequently, a long-term rehabilitation plan is …

Professional Learning Community (Plc): Technology Integration At A Title I Elementary School, Pamela Lan Cheng

Dissertations

Calls for educational technology integration over more than thirty years have taken on

new urgency in an era of computerized assessments for accountability. As Internet Communication Technology (ICT) becomes more widely available, the digital divide is evolving into a digital use divide, characterized by differences between students’ productive uses of technology to create and communicate compared with passive uses for entertainment or skills practice. A growing body of research points to the important interplay among teachers’ frames of reference, school-level context, and alignment of supports in creating conditions for technology innovation. Meanwhile Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) hold potential as leverage …

Standardized To Student-Centered: A Systemic Approach To Navigating The Transition, Finding Balance And Creating Equitable 21st Century Learning Environments, Betsy Fitch

Dissertations

Components of what has been historically referred to as progressive education have been shown to increase both student achievement and motivation. These historically termed ‘progressive’ approaches are now being reintroduced as systemic and innovative practices in the post No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era of education reform. While progressive education has often been criticized for appealing primarily to the white-middle class, and for an apparent lack of rigor, current research is beginning to tell a different story. This dissertation will summarize the evolution of the Progressive Movement from the late 1800s until today, describe the impacts of a more standardized …

Teachers' Perceptions On Preparedness And Supports To Implement The English Language Arts Common Core State Standards, Maria Clara Fernandez

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to: (1) describe elementary teachers’ perceptions on their preparedness to implement the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards (ELA-CCSS); (2) determine how perceptions influenced changes in instructional practices; and (3) to explore ELA-CCSS implementation challenges and/or barriers in supporting teacher development. This study was conducted using a multi-methods research design involving quantitative data from a survey, and qualitative data from interviews. The conceptual framework for this study centered around a history of the Common Core State Standards, education reform implementation research, understandings about the Common Core State Standards, and reconstructing teacher practice. Results …

Exploring The Role Of Mentor Teaching, Through A Co-Teaching Model, In Secondary Teachers’ Beliefs, Practices, And Self-Efficacy Toward English Learners: A Multiple-Case Study, Terry E. Flora

Dissertations

This dissertation presents the findings of an exploratory, multiple-case study in which eight public secondary school teachers engaged in a professional development (PD) program centered on improving teacher instruction for English learners (ELs). The participants worked as co-teachers with teacher credential candidates, serving as both mentors and collaborators in professional development. The PD program focused on improving participants’ instructional practices with ELs as a way to support the high numbers of ELs enrolled in California public schools. The PD included cycles of inquiry, collaborative dialogue within a professional learning community, working with a university consultant, ongoing reflection, and collaborating with …

Academic Supports Preferred By Academically Struggling African American Students At A Predominantly White University, Ellen E. Meadows, Joan H. Ruppert

Dissertations

Academic supports offered by Predominately White Institutions (PWIs) meet the needs of individuals who achieve standards such as high grade point averages and high standardized test scores, and who can negotiate traditional college institutions. Evidence indicates that retention and graduation rates for underrepresented minority students may be lower in comparison to White peers at the same institutions. Observations indicated that academic supports offered by a Midwestern PWI, may not provide the services preferred by African American students who struggle academically in two colleges, the College of Education and the College of Nursing.

A mixed-methods design was used to determine what …

Modelling Student Misconceptions Using Nested Logit Item Response Models, Mustafa Yildiz

Dissertations

Student misconceptions have been studied for decades from a curricular/instructional perspective and from the assessment/test level perspective. Numerous misconception assessment tools have been developed in order to measure students’ misconceptions relative to the correct content. Often, these tools are used to make a variety of educational decisions including students’ achievement level, instructional method effectiveness, and curriculum related achievement progress. These tools have included qualitative and quantitative assessment methods.

The quantitative analysis of misconceptions has mostly relied on classical test theory methods of test construction related to total raw score, percentage of correct responses, and/or percentage of misconception responses. More recently, …

Teacher Job Satisfaction As Related To Student Performance On State-Mandated Testing, James Douglas Crawford

Dissertations

The growing demand placed upon educators has taken a toll on the profession (Walker, 2014). Teacher burnout, stress, and unhappiness may be predestined unless administrators recognize how to prevent these from happening (Elias, 2012). The intent of this quantitative study was to survey teachers in southwest Missouri to determine their level of job satisfaction as it relates to student performance on state-mandated assessments. The survey included items designed to collect data on overall level of teacher job satisfaction in relation to demographic areas of age range, gender, level of education, years of teaching experience, subject areas taught, and salary range. …

The Undergraduate In The “New Urban University”: Recognizing The Role Of Agency And Its Correlates In The Student’S Academic Life Story, Karen Galea

Dissertations

According to the U.S. Department of Education (2016), only 36% of first time college students enrolled at broad-access institutions graduate within six years, compared to 60% at all universities. The vital role of academic agency is universally accepted; however, debate remains over a shared definition. The purpose of this study is to determine which combination of non-academic attributes generate, grow, and support academic agency for undergraduate students at a broad-access, minority-serving “New Urban University.” Three questions are examined:

1. Which attributes define academic agency, and how do they relate to conceptually similar variables?
2. Assuming academic agency exists along a continuum over …

Spatial Analysis Of Time Between Two Consecutive Dental And Two Consecutive Well-Child Visits For Foster Care Youth, Chenyang Shi

Dissertations

Foster care youth is a medically vulnerable population. Poor dental health and irregular well-child visits may cause serious health-related issues, such as mental disorder, nutrition imbalance, tooth damage, etc. Michigan requires all youth in foster care to receive annual dental and well-child visits. Usually, the study of foster care well-child and dental visits include two parts: time between two consecutive visits (gap time) and number of visits. For this study, a longitudinal-spatial model that has the flexibility to analyze the well-child/dental gap times and number of visits was developed. The longitudinal data (2009-2012) on Michigan foster care youth from 10 …

Chemotypic Variation Of Biogenic Volatile Organic Compounds In Midwest Forest And Atmospheric Role Of Peroxyacyl Nitrates In Southeastern U.S., Shino Toma

Dissertations

Biogenic volatile organic compounds (VOC), including isoprene and terpenes, impact atmospheric processes such as production of tropospheric ozone, formation and growth of secondary organic aerosol (SOA), global climate change, and human health. Although estimated emission rates of total biogenic VOC exceed anthropogenic emissions, there are many challenges to direct measurements because they are very reactive with atmospheric oxidants and some are still difficult to detect by current analytical techniques. Therefore, high uncertainties lead to discrepancies between individual and total biogenic VOC budget with atmospheric oxidants and an underestimation of SOA formation.

White pine (Pinus strobus) was once a dominant species …

An Investigation Of Turkish Middle School Science Teachers’ Pedagogical Orientations Towards Direct And Inquiry Instructional Approaches, Selcuk Sahingoz

Dissertations

One of the most important goals of science education is preparing effective science teachers which includes the development of a science pedagogical orientation. Helping in-service science teachers improve their orientations toward science teaching begins with identifying their current orientations. While there are many aspects of an effective science teaching orientation, this study specifically focuses on effective pedagogy. The interest of this study is to clarify pedagogical orientations of middle school science teachers in Turkey toward the teaching of science conceptual knowledge. It focuses on what instructional preferences Turkish middle school science teachers have in theory and practice.

The purpose of …

Structures Of Metallacarboranes And Coordination Complexes: Coordination Sensors Based On Rhodamine B And Quinolines, Agozie Nnaemeka Oyeamalu

Dissertations

Rhodamine-based ligands that can complex different metals has been designed and synthesized. Using Rhodamine B as starting material, we synthesized and characterized quinoline precursors as well as successfully carried out the oxidation of methyl and aldehyde groups on the quinoline ring, and on the hydroxyl moiety of the quinoline spirolactone ring. These turn-on/off rhodamine fluorescence probes sense Cr³⁺ and Ni²⁺ with high selectivity and sensitivity. These probes can be applied to detect other metal ions that are present in chemical, biological and environmental settings. They were designed to fluoresce when bonded to ions such as cyanide in detecting …

Using Concept Maps To Monitor Knowledge Structure Changes In A Science Classroom, Leah J. Cook

Dissertations

The aim of this research is to determine what differences may exist in students’ structural knowledge while using a variety of concept mapping assessments. A concept map can be used as an assessment which connects concepts in a knowledge domain. A single assessment may not be powerful enough to establish how students’ new knowledge relates to prior knowledge. More research is needed to establish how various aspects of the concept mapping task influence the output of map creation by students. Using multiple concept maps and pre-instruction and postinstruction VNOS instruments during a 16-week semester, this study was designed to investigate …

Highly Hamiltonian Graphs And Digraphs, Zhenming Bi

Dissertations

A cycle that contains every vertex of a graph or digraph is a Hamiltonian cycle. A graph or digraph containing such a cycle is itself called Hamiltonian. This concept is named for the famous Irish physicist and mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton. These graphs and digraphs have been the subject of study for over six decades. In this dissertation, we study graphs and digraphs with even stronger Hamiltonian properties, namely highly Hamiltonian graphs and digraphs.

Development Of Traditional And Rank-Based Algorithms For Linear Models With Autoregressive Errors And Multivariate Logistic Regression With Spatial Random Effects, Shaofeng Zhang

Dissertations

Linear models are the most commonly used statistical methods in many disciplines. One of the model assumptions is that the error terms (residuals) are independent and identically distributed. This assumption is often violated and autoregressive error terms are often encountered by researchers. The most popular technique to deal with linear models with autoregressive errors is perhaps the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA). Another common approach is generalized least squares, such as Cochrane-Orcutt estimation and Prais-Winsten estimation. However, these usually have poor behaviors when fitting small samples. To address this problem, a double bootstrap method was proposed by McKnight et al. …

Rebranding Mediocrity: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Common Core Textbooks For College-Bound Writers, E. Suzanne Ehst

Dissertations

This project analyzes the quality of high school writing textbooks from major publishers, textbooks purported to align with The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for writing. I measure the textbooks against the promise of CCSS’s tagline, “college and career readiness,” focusing specifically on the former goal to discern how “college-ready writing” is constructed and to analyze the degree to which the textbooks align with relevant research and theory in the fields of English Education and Rhetoric and Writing Studies. I begin the project by situating this study in current U.S. educational policy and rhetoric. Specifically, I describe the politicized rhetoric …

Time-Dependent Photoionization Of Gaseous Nebulae, Ehab Elsayed Elhoussieny Ahmed

Dissertations

We study time-dependent photoionization of gaseous nebulae, i.e. the physical conditions and spectra of astronomical plasmas photoionized by a time-dependent source of ionizing radiation. Our study proceeds in two chief steps: First, we start with a simplified model of plasmas of pure H. Second, we develop a more realistic model of plasmas composed of a mixture of chemical elements. For the first step, we wrote a time-dependent photoionization code (TDP) that solves the coupled system of equations for ionization, energy balance, and radiation transfer in their full time-dependent forms For the second step, we developed a more realistic code (TDXSTAR) …

Airspace Analysis For Greener Operations: Towards More Adoptability And Predictability Of Continuous Descent Approach (Cda), Emad Ali Alharbi

Dissertations

Continuous Descent Approach (CDA), also known as Optimized Profile Descent (OPD), is the advanced flight technique for commercial aircraft to descend continuously from cruise altitude to Final Approach Fix (FAF) or touchdown without level-offs and with- or near-idle thrust setting. Descending using CDA, aircraft stays as high as possible for longer time thereby expanding the vertical distance between aircraft's sources of noise and ground, and thus significantly reducing the noise levels for populated areas around airports. Also, descending with idle engines, fuel burn is reduced resulting in reduction of harmful emissions to the environment and fuel consumption to air carriers. …

Novel Membrane Structures For Air And Water Purification, Smruti Ragunath

Dissertations

Membrane separations have undergone rapid developments in recent years. The key component in the process is the membrane itself which acts as a selective barrier regulating transport of components between the two sections. The main advantage of membrane separation process in comparison to other unit operations is its unique separation principle, ease of operation, lower energy requirement, and can be easily coupled with other downstream processes. Different membrane based applications include filtration, osmosis, dialysis, gas separation, pervaporation, membrane extraction and membrane distillation (MD). The membranes can be fabricated by a variety of processes such as phase inversion, sol-gel, track etching, …

Classroom Organizational Structure In Fifth Grade Math Classrooms And The Effect On Standardized Test Scores, Dallas Marie Lane

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a relationship between the classroom organizational structure and MCT2 test scores of fifth grade math students. The researcher gained insight regarding which structure teachers believe is most beneficial to them and students, and whether or not their belief of classroom organizational structure differs based on the number of years of classroom experience and/or degree held.

The results of this study showed no significant difference in the standardized test scores of students in a self-contained classroom compared to the students in a departmentalized classroom. Though there was no significant difference …

The Influence Of Administrators On Literacy Instruction Through The Promotion And Selection Of Professional Development, Lucy K. Johnston-Josey

Dissertations

Literacy is a key component to success in school and in life. Literacy has been a focus of education since 1965 when President Jimmy Carter announced a “war on poverty.” Since then, history has shown that educators should place an emphasis on literacy within schools. Because literacy is so important, I set out to explore how administrators influence literacy through the promotion and selection of professional development.

Mississippi was chosen as a basis for the study because it falls below the nation in terms of literacy rates on the National Assessment for Educational Progress assessment. Nineteen participants from four school …

Is Human Capital Development The Missing Element Of The Aerotropolis Model?, John Roosevelt Hubbard

Dissertations

Until the early 20th century, transportation by land or water served as the primary methods of trade. As competition in the global marketplace increased in the 21st century air transportation emerged as a new and faster method of trade. Convinced of the economic benefits of air transportation, many policymakers of airport communities were quick to make plans for growth such as building infrastructure around the airport. This aerotropolis model often ignored the human capital development required for success.

Central to this study is this question: Is human capital development the missing component of the aerotropolis model economic development strategy? The …

Mississippi’S Teacher Observation Rubric: Administrator Perceptions Of Appropriateness By Grade Level, Danette Irvine Moore

Dissertations

The focus of this study was to measure elementary, middle, and high school administrators’ beliefs regarding the appropriateness of the Mississippi Statewide Teacher Appraisal Rubric domains, as well as their perceptions regarding the Mississippi Statewide Teacher Appraisal Rubric’s overall alignment with the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium standards. This was a quantitative study that investigated whether a statistically significant difference existed between administrators’ beliefs regarding the appropriateness based on their grade level assignment. A 48-statement questionnaire was developed using the current Mississippi Statewide Teacher Appraisal Rubric domains and standards to obtain the quantitative data. A five-point scale ranging from Strongly …

A Mixed-Methods Study Of Students’ Success And Persistence In Biology, Biscah Syombua Munyaka

Dissertations

Undergraduate success and persistence in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields is of critical importance to the United States (U.S.) maintenance of its position as the world leader in scientific innovations. While the total number of undergraduate degrees awarded annually has nearly tripled over the past 40 years, the same cannot be said for the proportion of degrees in Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The U.S. share of the world’s STEM graduates is sharply declining, on average less than 40% of incoming college freshmen elect to pursue a degree in a STEM field each year, with more …

Interpreting The Impact Of The Four-Day School Week: An Examination Of Performance Before And After Switching To The Four-Day School Week, Matthew Lee Gower

Dissertations

As four-day school weeks continue to gain popularity among school districts across the United States, determining the potential impact associated with the unconventional school week has become increasingly important (Johnson, 2013). The four-day school week has been credited with producing a number of potential benefits and consequences, but there is currently a limited amount of research available to determine the overall worth of the practice compared to the five-day school week. Some purported impacts of the four-day school week include shifts in teacher and student attendance, changes in achievement, financial adjustments, decreases in dropout rates, and improvement in morale (Plucker, …

Affective Domain Learning In High-Fidelity Simulation: Students’ Perspectives, Ketty M. Holt

Dissertations

Affective domain learning is an integral element to developing nursing students who can provide holistic, patient-centered nursing care. Often an invisible objective in nursing education, affective learning is rarely described beyond the first two levels of the domain: receiving and responding. In this phenomenological inquiry, the experiences of undergraduate nursing students, while participating in high-fidelity simulation, were examined and described for affective domain learning. In addition, this study compared the descriptions of third- and fourth-year students in an effort to understand the progressive nature of affective learning. Twenty-five third- and fourth-year students from the baccalaureate nursing programs of two universities, …

Design And Synthesis Of Polymer Brush Surfaces With Complex Molecular Architectures And Morphologies, Wei Guo

Dissertations

The combination of surface-initiated polymerization (SIP) and postpolymerization modification (PPM) is a powerful technique for the fabrication of functional soft surfaces. Better understanding the influence of the aforementioned factors on the PPM effectiveness is valuable for fulfilling the potential of the PPM approach for the fabrication of functional soft surfaces. Specifically, by carefully balancing modification reactivity and limitation of mass transport, polymer brush with composition heterogeneity and gradient along the normal direction of the surface otherwise unattainable by methods of direct polymerization can be fabricated via the PPM approach which opens doors to new routes to polymer brush with complex …