Digital Commons Network^™

Preservice Science Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge For Nature Of Science And Nature Of Scientific Inquiry: A Successful Case Study, Gunkut Mesci

Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation project is to explore preservice science teachers’ development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for targeted aspects of nature of science (NOS) and nature of scientific inquiry (NOSI). Through multiple data sources, it is examined how preservice science teachers’ understanding of NOS and NOSI have changed over the program, and manifests itself in their classroom practice. This is an exploratory multiple case study of participants’ experiences and developments during a teacher development program. Data is collected in the form of open-ended surveys, interviews, observations, lesson plans, video materials, and teaching documents. After all data is collected, …

Resolving Classes And Resolvable Spaces In Rational Homotopy Theory, Timothy L. Clark

Dissertations

A class of topological spaces is called a resolving class if it is closed under weak equivalences and homotopy limits. Letting R(A) denote the smallest resolving class containing a space A, we say X is A-resolvable if X is in R(A), which induces a partial order on spaces. These concepts are dual to the well-studied notions of closed class and cellular space, where the induced partial order is known as the Dror Farjoun Cellular Lattice. Progress has been made toward illuminating the structure of the Cellular Lattice. For example: Chachólski, Parent, and Stanley have shown that it …

A First-Year Implementation Of Mindquest21, A Project-Based Paradigm Shift To Deeper Learning: A Program Evaluation, Deborah R. Esparza

Dissertations

This program evaluation examines MindQuest21, a project-based learning (PBL) model that was implemented in a Chicago, Illinois suburban community. It began with a summer institute experience with a group of approximately seventy teachers in grades kindergarten through fifth grade. These teachers volunteered to attend a four-day MindQuest21 professional development seminar where they actively participated in a facilitated PBL model of instruction and collaborated on the development of PBL units within their district. A pre-post survey was used to compare teacher confidence increases and PBL understanding after the summer institute. This was followed by teacher interviews, follow-up sessions, classroom visits, and …

Agent-Based Modeling Of Abc Methods For Decision-Making In Highway Bridge Projects Including Uncertainty And Several Stakeholders, Abdul Wahed Mohammed

Dissertations

Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) methods that were recently introduced in the U.S. to reduce the on-site construction duration furnish several benefits to the public and highway agencies. Further, the traffic growth in addition to increasing number of functionally obsolete and structurally deficient bridges necessitates the increased implementation of ABC methods. In recent years, several Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the U.S. have developed decision-making models to compare broadly ABC to conventional bridge construction for a particular site. However, with increased implementation and advancements in ABC methods, there is a need for specifying a particular ABC method and a superstructure system …

The Influence Of Racial Socialization On The Academic Achievement Of Black College Students, Vanessa R. Laurent

Dissertations

Black college students continue to have difficulties reaching academic success in various domains; however, understanding the nature of how academic success is cultivated by Black college students is vital for counselors, educators, and university administrators. The objective of the study was to understand how racial socialization influenced academic success. Research suggests that racial socialization contributes to positive long-term outcomes among African Americans and may be connected to academic achievement (Bowman & Howard, 1985; Boykin & Tom, 1985; Davis & Stevenson, 2006; Neblett, Terzian, & Harriott, 2010; Stevenson, 1994, 1995). Participants were 349 Black college students from a predominately White institution …

Guided Educational Tourism As Informal Science Education: An Empirical Study, Joseph Martin Lane

Dissertations

The scientific research and education communities have long had the goal of advancing the publics’ understanding of science. Informal science education is a powerful mechanism for shaping human conduct, enhancing quality of life, and advancing the publics’ understandings and values regarding science. Guided educational tours (that present science content) provide visitors with unique opportunities to observe and discuss scientific phenomena in the field. Available empirical research related to learning science from guided educational tours is, at best, limited. Research leading to the development of effective guided educational tours that present and interpret scientific information is of interest to both non-profit …

Females In Automotive Careers: Career Decision-Making Influences And Experiences During University Preparation And Beyond, Russell A. Leonard Jr.

Dissertations

Today, women fill nearly 50% of the jobs in the U.S. economy (U.S. Dept. of Labor, 2014). While women are making progress in many careers once considered male only, they are still underrepresented in the male-dominated Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers, filling only 25% of available STEM jobs (Beede et al., 2011). The problem is not a lack of interest in STEM subjects, but a “leaky pipeline” that develops early in adolescence. By the eighth grade, half as many girls are interested in STEM careers as boys (National Science Foundation [NSF], 2007). Even after graduation from college, women …

N-Terminal Domains Of Copper Atpases In Plasmodium Falciparum, Dictyostelium Dicsoideum, Human Atp7b And A Chimera Of Atox1 With Metal Binding Domain Four Of Atp7b, Javan Kilango Kisaka

Dissertations

Copper transporting ATPases (Cu-ATPases) are essential for mediating copper uptake, maintaining cellular copper levels and prevention of accumulation of toxic copper. The most studied copper ATPases are the Menkes and Wilson proteins in eukaryotes, CopA and CopB found in bacteria. The precise interaction of the metal binding domains with their copper donor, the association of each metal binding domain within the N-terminal portion of the protein, how they communicate with each other, and the eventual metal ion translocation across the membrane, is little known. The variation in number of the cytosolic metal binding domains may also offer clues on the …

Four Year Old Kindergarten Should Not Be Optional, But A Necessary Program For Low Performing School Districts, Edward Todd Beadle

Dissertations

The Wisconsin Engaging Early Education (WEEE) Policy outlines a school readiness funding intitative that can help to close the achievement gap in underperforming school districts. Research has shown that students from lower social economic status do not have the same access to high quality early education compared to more affluent communities. The WEEE Policy will help to provide resources and structure to Wisconsin school districts in need of improvement and support Wisconsin's goal of closing the achievement gap.

Chromatic Connectivity Of Graphs, Elliot Laforge

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Reframing Lesson Plans: The Foundation For Improving Instruction, Carletta M. Noland

Dissertations

This dissertation is a policy advocacy document that boldly states that it is our moral imperative to change the current educational landscape for the students attending Milwaukee Public Schools. In advocating for such a change, it is strongly suggested that the way to accomplish this challenging task is to mandate a stronger instructional foundation by leveraging the power of thoughtful lesson planning and design. Through its own merit, public and professional opinions and research findings, a viable argument is crafted to eliminate the current policy that marginalizes the planning process by suggesting through its current language, that the planning process …

Exploring The Strategic Implementation Of Common Core State Standards In Small School Districts Of Northern California, Michael A. Gulbransen Dr.

Dissertations

This Delphi study involved examining the implementation of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in small school districts of Northern California. This dissertation presents an overview of CCSS implementation, a review of the literature, statement of the problem, purpose of the study, research questions, significance, and the anticipated methodology for the intended qualitative research design. The review of literature explores the historical context of education in the United States and increasingly focuses on the new national Common Core State Standards and their implementation in small school districts.

The Delphi study uses the participants’ opinions to identify CCSS implementation strategies and related …

Termination, Correctness And Relative Correctness, Nafi Diallo

Dissertations

Over the last decade, research in verification and formal methods has been the subject of increased interest with the need of more secure and dependable software. At the heart of software dependability is the concept of software fault, defined in the literature as the adjudged or hypothesized cause of an error. This definition, which lacks precision, presents at least two challenges with regard to using formal methods: (1) Adjudging and hypothesizing are highly subjective human endeavors; (2) The concept of error is itself insufficiently defined, since it depends on a detailed characterization of correct system states at each stage of …

Subspace Methods For Portfolio Design, Onur Yilmaz

Dissertations

Financial signal processing (FSP) is one of the emerging areas in the field of signal processing. It is comprised of mathematical finance and signal processing. Signal processing engineers consider speech, image, video, and price of a stock as signals of interest for the given application. The information that they will infer from raw data is different for each application. Financial engineers develop new solutions for financial problems using their knowledge base in signal processing. The goal of financial engineers is to process the harvested financial signal to get meaningful information for the purpose.

Designing investment portfolios have always been at …

Experimental And Modeling Studies In Membrane Distillation, Lin Li

Dissertations

A variety of microporous hydrophobic flat sheet membranes of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) and expanded-polytetrafluoroethylene (e-PTFE) are studied to evaluate the influence of membrane properties on their performance in desalination by direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) and vacuum membrane distillation (VMD) processes. The membrane thickness is varied between 23 μm to 125 μm; the pore size is varied from 0.05 μm to 0.45 μm. The porosity is generally high in the range of 0.7 - 0.8. DCMD experiments are performed over a hot brine temperature range of 65 °C to 85 °C and distillate temperature at 25 °C for various brine …

Studies On Purification And Functionalization Of Carbon Nanotubes And Their Aqueous Phase Behavior, Zheqiong Wu

Dissertations

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are known to have unique mechanical, thermal and electrical properties which make them attractive for a wide range of applications ranging from batteries to sensors. CNTs are rolled up graphene sheets where the single-walled CNTs (SWCNTs) and multi-walled CNTs (MWCNTs) are classified according to the number of concentric rings. In this dissertation, the focus is on several different aspects of MWCNTs. These include purification, functionalization and colloidal behavior.

MWCNTs are insoluble in solvents and therefore some degree of functionalization is required prior to their real-world applications. Oxidation debris is generated during carboxylation which is usually the first …

Mediating Chance Encounters Through Opportunistic Social Matching, Julia M. Mayer

Dissertations

Chance encounters, the unintended meeting between people unfamiliar with each other, serve as an important social lubricant helping people to create new social ties, such as making new friends or finding an activity, study or collaboration partner. Unfortunately, social barriers often prevent chance encounters in environments where people do not know each other and people have to rely on serendipity to meet or be introduced to interesting people around them. Little is known about the underlying dynamics of chance encounters and how systems could utilize contextual data to mediate chance encounters. This dissertation addresses this gap in research literature by …

The Hydromagnetic Structure Of The Polar Cap And Its Interaction With The Solar Wind, Kevin D. Urban

Dissertations

At this time it is uncertain as to how and to what extent ultra-low frequency (ULF) structures in the solar wind (periodicities ranging between several seconds to several hours) impact the coupled ionosphere-thermosphere-magnetosphere (ITM) system, especially in the high-latitude open flux region, where these structures can directly drive polar cap phenomena (e.g., via the direct injection of hydromagnetic energy along open field lines). First, a historical overview of open and closed models of the magnetosphere is provided, which develops the motivations and concepts associated with the expanding/contracting polar cap (ECPC) model that prevails today. In the ECPC model, the open …

Collaborative Development Of A Small Business Emergency Planning Model, Arthur Henry Hendela

Dissertations

Small businesses, which are defined by the US Small Business Administration as entities with less than 500 employees, suffer interruptions from diverse risks such as financial events, legal situations, or severe storms exemplified by Hurricane Sandy. Proper preparations can help lessen the length of the interruption and put employees and owners back to work. Large corporations generally have large budgets available for planning, business continuity, and disaster recovery. Small businesses must decide which risks are the most important and how best to mitigate those risks using minimal resources.

This research uses a series of surveys followed by mathematical modeling to …

A Data Science Approach To Pattern Discovery In Complex Structures With Applications In Bioinformatics, Lei Hua

Dissertations

Pattern discovery aims to find interesting, non-trivial, implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful patterns in data. This dissertation presents a data science approach for discovering patterns or motifs from complex structures, particularly complex RNA structures. RNA secondary and tertiary structure motifs are very important in biological molecules, which play multiple vital roles in cells. A lot of work has been done on RNA motif annotation. However, pattern discovery in RNA structure is less studied. In the first part of this dissertation, an ab initio algorithm, named DiscoverR, is introduced for pattern discovery in RNA secondary structures. This algorithm works by …

Magnetic Reconnection In Small And Large Scales On The Sun, Xin Chen

Dissertations

Almost all solar activities observed are related to the solar magnetic field, especially the topological restructuring of magnetic fields, the so-called magnetic reconnection in solar physics. They are occurring at different scales related to various phenomena, during minimum or maximum of the solar cycle, from the photosphere to the solar corona.

For small-scale activities, type II spicules which display high velocity upflows observed at the limb, have the most possible underlying driving mechanism of magnetic reconnection. A set of tools is developed for detecting small-scale solar magnetic cancellations and the disk counterpart of type II spicules (the so-called Rapid Blueshifted …

Schema-Aware Keyword Search On Linked Data, Ananya Dass

Dissertations

Keyword search is a popular technique for querying the ever growing repositories of RDF graph data on the Web. This is due to the fact that the users do not need to master complex query languages (e.g., SQL, SPARQL) and they do not need to know the underlying structure of the data on the Web to compose their queries. Keyword search is simple and flexible. However, it is at the same time ambiguous since a keyword query can be interpreted in different ways. This feature of keyword search poses at least two challenges: (a) identifying relevant results among a multitude …

Thermochemical Properties Of Fluorinated Hydrocarbons, Hydroperoxides, And Fluorinated Hydroperoxides; Thermochemistry And Kinetics On Dissociation And Association Reactions Of Oxiranyl Radical, Heng Wang

Dissertations

Thermochemical properties on fluorinated hydrocarbons, alcohol, hydroperoxides, and alkyl hydroperoxides are determined. Reaction kinetics and modeling on the three member ring cyclic ether radical, oxiranyl radical, are studied under atmospheric and combustion environments.

Molecular geometries, vibration frequencies, internal rotor potentials, and thermo-chemical properties (ΔfHº298, S°(T) and C°p(T)) for fluorinated-hydrocarbons, thermochemical properties and bond energies, for alkyl and fluoro hydroperoxides and fluoro alcohols are determined with comparison of data from a number of different ab initio, density functional theory (DFT) and composite calculation methods, and basis sets.

Kinetic parameters for unimolecular decomposition and isomerization reactions of the oxiranyl radical are determined …

New Facet Of Solar Activities Revealed By High-Resolution Imaging At He I 10830 Å, Zhicheng Zeng

Dissertations

Major solar activities such as major flares and associated coronal mass ejections (CMEs), have a great impact on space weather, which requires us to develop the ability to predict them. Despite the extensive studies already made, however, many basic processes, such as energy accumulation processes in solar active regions and the triggering mechanism of solar activities, are still not well understood.

One reason why the basic processes are hard to be understood is that the large-scale activities are complicated, involving many small-scale energy releases, making it hard to understand the basic picture of the events. Small-scale solar activities, such as …

A Study Of The Impact Of An Electronic Classroom Response System On Student Participation In Class Discussions And Response On Course Assessments., Robert Kuschke

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact that a classroom response system, often referred to as “clickers”, had on student participation and overall student assessment. This quantitative study was designed to compare and contrast two classes of high school students over a semester time period. One of the classes was equipped with the clicker technology and used the devices frequently during the semester, while the other class had no access to the technology at any point during the semester. The three research questions that were used to guide this study were: How does the use of clickers …

An Exploration Of The Relationship Between The Partisan-Business Cycle And Economic Inequality Within Developed Economies, Richard O'Doherty

Dissertations

Recent contributions to the study of inequality have provided strong evidence towards the presence of an established trend, over several decades, of growing economic inequality (with a particular focus on distribution within their tails; i.e. top 10%, 1%) across countries with developed economies and indications of similar trends across developing economies. While the causality and influencing factors to these trends has widely been discussed, and has range from declining domestic growth rates as economies move towards high mass consumption states to globalisation, political decision making and policy application been referred to as both contributory or an instrument for dampening such …

Sustainability Of A Long Term Professional Development Program, Christine E. Ries

Dissertations

Currently, in most school districts, the main form of teacher education comes from professional development (PD) that claims to improve teaching and student achievement. School districts and teachers spend time and money trying to make sure that they are providing the best quality education for their students. Yet, educators are looking for what the most effective form of PD should look like. Utilizing the methodology of a descriptive case study a long-term PD grant, called Science Alliance was evaluated to add to the research on PD and grant program efficacy. Twelve teachers that participated in the Science Alliance grant were …

Applications Of Nanoporous Gold Monoliths As Substrates For The Capture And Release Of Lectins And Glycoproteins, Allan Jonson Alla

Dissertations

Nanoporous gold (np-Au) monoliths are a free-standing nanostructured material with typical pore dimensions in the tens of nanometers range. The microstructure of np-Au resembles those of macroporous monolithic materials being used in chromatographic separations. The surfaces of np-Au monoliths were modified via flow methods with different ligands to develop affinity substrates for separations. A carbohydrate-modified np-Au monolith was prepared by immobilizing thiolated saccharides and further used to separate lectins. The np-Au monolith surface was also functionalized with self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of α-lipoic acid (LA) followed by activation of carboxyl terminal groups to create amine reactive esters. Concanavalin A (Con A) …

Children Who Are Deaf Deserve Researched Based Education, Cheryl Ann Hermann

Dissertations

Deaf Education includes many complex components, including: 1) Academics, 2) Cognitive, 3) Hearing, 4) Speech, 5) Language: American Sign Language and English, 6) Social Skills & Emotional Well Being, 7) Deaf Culture, and 8) Instructional Methods. Evidence indicates that children who are deaf achieve academically at the same levels as their peers, “Postsecondary enrollment and degree completion by deaf individuals in colleges, universities, and career and technical education schools have increased dramatically over the past several decades,” (Marc Marschark, 2015, p. 5). However, most of the current research shows that despite numerous interventions and philosophies, children who are deaf continue …

Optimizing Inventory For Profitability And Order Fulfillment Improvement, Liu Yang

Dissertations

Despite the extensive research on inventory management, few studies have investigated the optimization of inventory classification and control policies for maximizing the net present value of profit and order fulfillment performance. This dissertation aims to fill the gaps, and consists of two main essays. Essay One (Chapter 1) presents a new multi-period optimization model to explicitly address nonstationary demand, arbitrary review periods, and SKU-specific lead times, with the objective of maximizing the net present value of profit. A real-world application and computational experiments show that the optimal dynamic inventory classification and control decisions obtained from the model significantly reduce both …