Digital Commons Network^™

Involvement In Community Service And Spiritual Activities As Correlates Of Socially Responsible Leadership Among Undergraduate Students At Asia-Pacific International University, Thailand, Naltan Lampadan

Dissertations

Problem

Institutions of Higher Education invest considerable resources to provide students with leadership experiences through extracurricular activities, especially in community service and spiritual programming. The inter-relationship among these variables (socially responsible leadership, spiritual and community involvement) have not been investigated in faith-based institutions of higher education in Southeast Asia.

Purpose of the Study

This study had four purposes: (a) to examine the extent of student involvement in community service and spiritual activities; (b) to investigate the level of socially responsible leadership among undergraduate students; (c) to examine whether socially responsible leadership might be related to gender, nationality, class status, and …

An Exploratory Study Of Mathematics Anxiety In Caribbean Preservice Teachers, Franka Atwell-Chin Hong

Dissertations

The Problem

Correlational studies suggest that gender, attitudes to mathematics, mathematics performance, the number of college mathematics courses taken, and mathematics teacher efficacy beliefs may be related to mathematics anxiety among preservice teachers (Boyd et al., 2014; Gresham, 2018; Jaggernauth & Jameson-Charles, 2015). Exploratory studies of mathematics anxiety and teacher self-efficacy among elementary teachers exist in Trinidad and Tobago (Jaggernauth 2012; Jaggernauth & Jameson-Charles, 2015). However, the differences in samples, and weakness in methodology, may make it challenging to generalize the results to the preservice teacher population. In addition, no studies have found which variable or combination of variables is …

Coping Skills, Emotional Intelligence, Attachment, And Resilience On Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder In Private Sector Emergency Medical Technicians, Brenda-Joyce Gonzales Orozco Markert-Green

Dissertations

Problem

Private sector Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) are first responders who respond to traumatic incident scenes along with firefighters and police officers. However, news agencies and the public do not acknowledge private sector EMTs with the same vigor or accolade as public sector EMTs, nor are the risks to life, health, and mental well-being recognized among this population. Thus, the research literature has been sparse regarding how private sector EMTs experience PTSD, and what unique risk factors and needs may be present.

Purpose Statement

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between PTSD symptoms and coping skills, …

Perceived Effectiveness Of A Mentoring Program For Training Adventist Chinese Evangelists, Terry Man-Yuen Tsui

Dissertations

Problem

The fact that evangelism in the Unorganized Territories of the Chinese Union Mission was done mainly as personal evangelism and that public evangelism was limited to a one-day seed sowing meeting had led to a serious need for equipping pastors in effective public evangelism methods. It required a model of public evangelism, which is adaptable to the local Chinese culture, and a mentoring program that accompanies evangelists, who were still developing their skills in public evangelism.

Method

This study used a parallel mixed methods design to measure the perceived effectiveness of selected methods in the mentoring program. This design …

Administrator Stress And Well-Being: Lessons Learned From Retired Administrators, Carrie Bosco

Dissertations

School and district leaders work in stressful jobs and a better understanding is needed about how these conditions affect their personal and professional lives. This study presents the stories of experienced K–12 public school and district administrators contending with and managing administrative stress and its effects on administrators. Through qualitative inquiry and narrative analysis, the learning that comes from experience is explored as a way of understanding administrative practice. Storied examples of stressful situations range from the most serious and traumatic events a school administrator might face to the daily grind of always being “on.” Powerful themes that emerged from …

Equity In Secondary Schools: Building A Strong Sense Of Belonging For Students Of Color As A Foundation For Academic Success, Joaquin Stephenson

Dissertations

The problem of practice I am investigating are students who identify as Black and Latinx who are experiencing a statistically significant low sense of belonging at Riverview High School in comparison to their White and Asian counterparts, based on survey data for the past two years. Research has shown that students’ sense of belonging stem from four major factors (1) friendship nominations, (2) time on extracurricular activities, (3) bonding with teacher, and (4) perceived discrimination. By focusing on targeted programming, this study aims to determine the two solutions that can target low sense of belonging for Black and Latinx students. …

Dismantling Tools Of The Incompetent: Exploring Cultural Competence Training In Undergraduate Education Policy And Education Studies Programs, Ashley P. Allen

Dissertations

Cultural competence is described as a set of skills, values, and principles that acknowledge, respect, and work toward optimal interactions between the individual and the various cultural and ethnic groups with which an individual might come into contact. Scholars have been critical of cultural competence training because the three-dimensional approach which is its foundation fails to address institutional and systemic racism. I posit that undergraduate programs should provide training, so graduates are culturally competent entering their respective fields. I examined cultural competence training within education policy and studies undergraduate programs because these graduates will work within education at all levels …

Emancipatory And Controlling: Examining The Negotiation Of Masculinity-Centered Practices By Women's And Gender Equity Center Practitioners, Ashley M. Brown

Dissertations

Initiatives to understand and transform masculinity have increasingly emerged in higher education, calling attention to the consequences of dominant, masculine gender expectations that permeate throughout college campuses. These masculinity-centered practices in higher education encompass formalized, departmental initiatives for students, faculty, and/or staff that examine topics related to masculinity through educational workshops, speaker events, professional development sessions, dialogue spaces, and other efforts. While it is often assumed that these practices support the advancement of gender equity, scholars have theorized the ways in which this work can also lead to depoliticized efforts that may, in fact, reify patriarchal and other systems of …

The Upstart Peril In The Nineteenth-Century English Novel, Lydia Craig

Dissertations

Responding to the French Revolution (1789-1799) with his widely read text Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), conservative Whig politician Edmund Burke influentially accused an ambitious bourgeoisie of inciting the lower classes to revolt against the aristocracy and Bourbon dynasty. He also insinuated that only the class hierarchy and feudal respect prevented a similar upstart peril in England from occasioning revolution. For the English middle classes, this demonization of upstarts, or parvenus posed an ideological challenge to their public consolidation as a political and cultural force. Bourgeois authors from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens utilized an upstart rivalry device …

Impact Of Violence Exposure On Children's Mental Health And Family Functioning: An Ecological-Transactional Approach, Rice Mary Dusing

Dissertations

N/A

Adherence To A Mindfulness App For College Students With Depression: Patterns, Predictors, And Outcomes, Brynn Marie Huguenel

Dissertations

National trends indicate that mental health concerns, particularly rates of depression, continue to rise on college campuses; however, treatment utilization remains low. Technology-based mental health interventions, such as mental health apps (MHapps), are a promising means of overcoming treatment barriers. MHapps are effective in improving psychological outcomes, but low rates of adherence are a noted limitation. The current study explored patterns of adherence to a MHapp, investigated the bidirectional relation between adherence and depression, and identified motivational predictors of adherence rates. Undergraduate students (N= 66) reporting clinically-elevated depressive symptoms completed a three-month trial using Headspace, a mindfulness MHapp. Patterns of …

The Impact Of Affiliative Motivation And Trust On Confrontations Of Racism, Jamie Patrianakos

Dissertations

Anti-Black racism persists in the United States with harmful consequences for Black people. White people are able to disrupt the racial status quo and propel the conversation about racial justice forward by confronting racism. Confronting perpetrators of racism can reduce prejudice, yet people hesitate to confront because they fear social backlash, even from those with whom they share a social bond. Two online studies asked participants to complete a task eliciting stereotypical responding while being observed by a supposed interaction partner with whom they shared either a high or low desire to get along. Participants were confronted by their interaction …

Moving Beyond Recruitment And Hiring: Including And Actualizing The Voices Of Teachers Of Color In A Suburban School District, Jennifer Ann Rowe

Dissertations

Loyola University Chicago MOVING BEYOND RECRUITMENT AND HIRING: INCLUDING AND ACTUALIZING THE VOICES OF TEACHERS OF COLOR IN A SUBURBAN SCHOOL DISTRICT This capstone identifies, as a problem of educational practice in American secondary schools, the failure of our school systems to equally value and validate Black and brown educators as compared with their white counterparts, consequently preventing the cultivation of an environment that would encourage these educators to flourish in the profession rather than presenting barriers to their success. Calling upon the prevailing research, Ms. Rowe evaluates approaches that school districts can take to overcome these roadblocks and foster …

Dying To Fight: The Individual And Social Processes Of The Foreign Fighter Phenomenon, Michael James Schumacher

Dissertations

Why do individuals take the extraordinary risk of traveling abroad to fight, and potentially die, in another country's conflict? This dissertation compares the motivations behind the U.S. citizens who fought on behalf of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Tunisian citizens who fought on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Syrian Civil War (2011 - present). The study relies on personal narratives of individual foreign fighters collected through twelve weeks of archival research at the Tamiment Library in New York City and the Ernest Hemingway Archives in Boston dedicated …

Pediatric Mental Health Hospitalizations And The Return To School: School-Based Provider Perspectives On Commmunication, Collaboration, And Systematic Practices, Lauren Elizabeth Carr

Dissertations

The provision of pediatric mental health services has changed greatly over the last several decades with more children and adolescents requiring intensive mental health treatment. Despite this increase, systemic barriers continue to prevent youth from receiving appropriate treatment following psychiatric hospitalization. An important aspect of this treatment process includes a child’s return to school, one of the most common environments for a child or adolescent outside of their home. For many children, the hospital-to-school transition team may include regular and special education teachers, school psychologists, social workers or therapists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, case managers, and nurses. Because of this, it …

Promoting Early-Adolescent Dual Language Learners' Language Use & Reading Skills, Holly Griskell

Dissertations

Most studies of Dual Language Learners’ (DLLs’) literacy development focus on the early childhood years. As such, this three-study dissertation sought to advance our knowledge of DLLs’ English language and reading comprehension skills during early adolescence, a developmental stage when many students struggle with reading. Study 1, “Classroom Discussion and Early-Adolescent Dual Language Learners’ Motivation and Reading Comprehension”, considered how features of the classroom language environment promote DLLs’ reading comprehension skills. We examined relations between students’ (N = 413; M age = 11.66-years-old) engagement in high-quality classroom discussions and reading comprehension as a function of their motivation to participate in …

Secularism, The Oxford Movement, And Religious Aesthetics In John Keble, Christina Rossetti, Adelaide Anne Procter, And Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mary Harmon

Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between secularism and the development of Oxford Movement poetry. The members of the movement sought to restore pre-Reformation religious practices in the Anglican Church while maintaining its distinctiveness from the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, which led to the development of unique liturgy, architecture, hymns, and poetry, among other art forms. I argue that secularism simultaneously made the movement more possible while also making it more unstable. Secularism gave the theologians and poets of the movement enough freedom to borrow from older Christian traditions, yet the movement failed to revive the Anglican Church (several members …

God And Rescuer, Clinton Neptune

Dissertations

I argue that the best concept of God, for the purposes of inquiring into God's existence and nature, is one derived from considering the human predicament and how to satisfy the existential yearning of human inquirers. Other popular methods of conceiving of God, such as some perfect being theologies and scriptural theologies, miss this vital motivational component in their God-concept construction. The concept of God on offer in this project, God as Rescuer, characterizes a being who is willing and able to rescue humanity from the predicament of the possibility of personal death, moral failure, and apparent gratuitous evil. It …

Ethical Health Care In An African Context: Linking Conventional Medicine And Traditional Healing Practices In Igboland, Nigeria., Michael Osondu Okoro

Dissertations

This dissertation argues that in Nigeria’s Igboland, a health care ethic reflective of the Roman Catholic Christian faith must build links between the rightful practices of both conventional Western medicine and traditional Igbo healers. It calls such a health care ethic an “integral health care ethic” in the Nigerian Igbo context.The inspiration for this dissertation comes from the growing respect given to indigenous people and their knowledge by the Roman Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council and, more specifically, the attention Pope Francis has given to indigenous people in his writings and speeches. For example, in his remarks on …

Hemingway, Sartre, And Secularization: Finding Religion Without God, Marcos Antonio Norris

Dissertations

This dissertation intervenes in the critical debate over Ernest Hemingway’s religious orientation. One camp of Hemingway scholars argues that he was a practicing Catholic, while the other camp argues that Hemingway was an existential atheist. Rather than side with either camp in this binary debate, my research offers a third option that bridges the gap between these opposing positions. Examining Hemingway’s life and works through the eyes of contemporary political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, I argue that Hemingway is, properly speaking, neither a secularist nor a theist, but a secularized theist, whose “religion” takes the form of masculine volition, or sovereign, …

Promoting Information Exchange: Open-Minded Group Cognition And A Function Of Motivation And Task Type, Jeremy Ryan Winget

Dissertations

Open-minded cognition is a cognitive processing style that influences the manner inwhich individuals select and process information. An open-minded cognitive style is marked by a willingness to consider a variety of intellectual perspectives, values, attitudes, opinions, or beliefs, even those that contradict the individual’s prior opinion. However, people also process information and make decisions within groups, and their individual cognitive styles can influence how the overall group processes and shares information. Therefore, the present paper integrates the open-minded cognition and group decision making literatures, proposes and agent- based model of open-minded group cognition, and empirically tests the antecedents and consequences …

An Exploratory Analysis Of Conflict In African Immigrant And African American Marriages, Cornelius Ayodeji Osuntade

Dissertations

Problem

There has been a high level of marital conflict in immigrant families from patriarchal cultures. There are negative attitudes toward women that contribute to couple conflict. Coupled with this are issues relating to immigration challenges that confront marriage stability among immigrant couples in North America. In the same vein, African American couples experience conflicts that militate against the stability of their marriages. Most of these marital upheavals stem from historical antecedents relating to this ethnic group, as well as the societal dialectics confronting them. By and large, regarding couple conflict, a better understanding of the challenges facing African immigrant …

A Comparison Of Instructional Efficiency Models In Third Level Education, Murali Rajendran

Dissertations

This study investigates the validity and sensitivity of a novel model of instructional efficiency: the parabolic model. The novel model is compared against state-of-the-art models present in instructional design today; Likelihood model, Deviational model and Multidimensional model. This models is based on the assumption that optimal mental workload and high performance leads to high efficiency, while other models assume that low mental workload and high performance leads to high efficiency. The investigation makes use of two instructional design conditions: a direct instructions approach to learning and its extension with a collaborative activity. A control group received the former instructional design …

Human Age And Gender Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Eamon Kelliher

Dissertations

In a world relying ever more on human classification, this papers aims to improve on age and gender image classification through the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Age and gender classification has become a popular area of study in the past number of years however there are still improvements to be made, particularly in the area of age classification. This research paper aims to test the currently accepted fact that CNN models are the superior model type for image classification by comparing CNN performance against Support Vector Machine performance on the same dataset. Using the Adience image classification dataset, …

Supporting User Interaction And Social Relationship Formation In A Collaborative Online Shopping Context, Yu Xu

Dissertations

The combination of online shopping and social media allow people with similar shopping interests and experiences to share, comment, and discuss about shopping from anywhere and at any time, which also leads to the emergence of online shopping communities. Today, more people turn to online platforms to share their opinions about products, solicit various opinions from their friends, family members, and other customers, and have fun through interactions with others with similar interests. This dissertation explores how collaborative online shopping presents itself as a context and platform for users' interpersonal interactions and social relationship formation through a series of studies. …

Blast Shock-Wave Characterization In Experimental Shock Tubes, Sudeepto Kahali

Dissertations

Blast-induced traumatic brain injuries have affected U.S. soldiers deployed for extended periods in the gulf and Afghanistan wars. To identify the biomechanical and biochemical mechanisms of injury, critical in the identification of diagnostic and therapeutic tools, compressed gas-driven shock tubes are used by investigators to study shockwave-animal specimen interactions and its biological consequences. However, shock tubes are designed and operated in a variety of geometry with a range of process parameters, and the quality of shock wave characteristics relevant to field conditions and therefore the study of blast-induced traumatic brain injuries suffered by soldiers is affected by those conditions. Lab-to-lab …

Identifying Successful Strategies Within An Extrinsic Reward System To Improve Behavior In The Alternative School Setting, Christian Burner

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this Delphi study was to identify strategies that are successful within a school-wide extrinsic rewards system to improve alternative school student behavior in the alternative school setting. A second purpose was to rate the effectiveness of the identified strategies for improving alternative school student behavior in the alternative school setting.

Methodology: This study used a Delphi method, consisting of 3 rounds, to collect data from alternative schoolteachers who are experts in implementing strategies within a school-wide extrinsic rewards system. In Round 1, participants were asked to identify strategies to improve student behavior in the alternative school …

Mental Health And The High-Performing Student: A Study Of Stressors And Effective Supports For High-Achieving High School Students, Jodi Boyle

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of high-achieving 11th- and 12th-grade high school students participating in International Baccalaureate (IB), Advanced Placement (AP), or Honors courses. An additional purpose of this study was to identify the academic and social stressors experienced by students and the coping strategies used to overcome them.

Methodology: This study used a phenomenological research design to describe the lived experiences, academic and social stressors, and coping strategies of high-achieving students. For this study, in-depth interviews were conducted to understand the academic and social experiences of students participating in …

A Phenomenological Study On The Impact Of Servant Leadership For Establishing A Culture Of High Performance As Perceived By High School Principals, Darrick Rice

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore and describe the perceived impact of Patterson’s (2003) 7 servant leadership constructs on high school principals in establishing a culture of high performance.

Methodology: The qualitative phenomenological study described the lived experiences of high school principals who lead schools that have implemented Patterson's (2003) 7 servant leadership constructs for establishing a culture of high performance in Los Angeles County, California. The researcher was a part of 8 peer researchers and 2 faculty advisors. The data collection included virtual face-to-face semi structured interviews using a protocol developed by the thematic team. …

Mental Health And Discipline In California Community Schools, Damien Phillips

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this mixed method study was to determine if there is a difference in achievement, absenteeism, graduation rates and suspension for students enrolled in community schools that do and don’t have access to school-based mental health services. In addition, it was the purpose to identify and describe the practices most effective in improving attendance, reduction of suspension, achievement and graduation as perceived by community school employees.

Methodology: This mixed-method dissertation attempted to determine the difference between California county community schools for expelled students who have had access to school-based mental health and those who do not as …