Digital Commons Network^™

Integration Of Faith And Learning In Christian Higher Education : Professional Development Of Teachers And Classroom Implementation, Constance Chibuzo Nwosu

Dissertations

Problem. Few studies have focused on effective professional development programs that enhance faith-learning implementation in the Christian higher education classroom, and little has been documented about what integration of faith and learning actually looks or sounds like in Christian higher education classrooms.

Purpose. This study had four purposes:

1. To describe the training processes used for preparing teachers in Christian higher education for implementing EFL in the classroom.
2. To compare these methodologies with Jesus’ training methodologies and research-based professional development programs.
3. To understand how teachers in Christian higher education classrooms defined IFL.
4. To identify and document some exemplary practices of faith …

Web-Based Courses In Higher Education: Creating Active Learning Environments, Marilyn Ruth Eggers

Dissertations

Problem. As more and more adults seek to continue their education, alternate methods of course delivery Will be required to meet their needs. Web-based courses allow students to learn at times and places that are convenient for them. There is concern, however, about whether or not such courses can create effective, active learning experiences, and whether or not knowledge can be socially constructed in online interactions. In order for higher education to provide exemplary online courses, it is important to identify necessary elements and instructional strategies to create virtual learning environments. The goals of this study were to determine …

The Relationship Between Religious Beliefs, Moral Development, Self-Control, Peer Pressure, Self-Esteem, And Premarital Sex, Jacynth A. Fennell

Dissertations

Problem. The purpose of this study was to ascertain if there is any relationship between religious beliefs, moral development, self-control, peer pressure, self-esteem, and premarital sex, providing for a comprehensive framework for understanding this phenomenon.

Method. Subjects were 148 undergraduates attending three schools in different geographic regions within the United States. Subjects were primarily between 18 and 25 years old. A survey was completed by 148 students. Data-were analyzed using Analysis of Variance and Independent-Samples t test.

Results. Of the 148 students who participated in the study, 38% were Black, Hispanic, 38% were White, non-Hispanic, 10% were …

The Relationship Between Afrocentric Worldview And Marital Satisfaction In African-American Couples, Ganz E. Ferrance

Dissertations

Problem. It has been argued that many of the theories attempting to explain African-American culture derive from a Eurocentric framework, and thus paint a negative and pathological picture of the African-American family and community. What is needed is research examining African-American family life which holds Afrocentric culture and beliefs as its foundation. Consequently, this study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between Afrocentric cultural consciousness (Afrocentric worldview) and marital satisfaction of spouses of African descent.

Method. This study used a correlational and ex post facto research design involving surveys to assess the relationship between the dependent variable …

The Relationship Between Parent Status And The Home Learning Environment, Self-Esteem, And Academic Achievement Of Fifth- To Eighth-Grade Students From Ohio Conference Seventh-Day Adventist Schools, Joseph R. Allison

Dissertations

Problem. The social issues at the end of the 20^th century have not left the Seventh-day Adventist church untouched. This present study sought to determine the differences that may exist between one- and two-parent students in the area of home learning environment, self-esteem, and academic achievement.

Method. Eighty-eight male and female students from 14 Ohio Seventh-day Adventist schools in grades 5-8 were studied. Data for the study were collected from three instruments: the Hare Self-Esteem Scale, the modified Henderson Environmental Learning Process Scale, and the Family Survey. Additional data were gathered from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills student …

Test-Retest Reliability Of Individual Student Acquisition And Retention Rates As Measured By Instructional Assessment, Matthew K. Burns

Dissertations

Statement of the problem. Research on Instructional Assessment is in its infancy. To date, no studies regarding its psychometric properties have been published, but the need for using technically sound assessment methods is prominent in education. Therefore, demonstrated technical adequacy is crucial. The lack of psychometric data for Instructional Assessment is especially noteworthy since it is one of the few educational assessment techniques that includes assessment of performance and cognitive learning theory, both of which have been linked to improved student achievement.

Method. Ninety-six students from Grades 1, 3, and 5 were individually taught a series ofwords from …

Characteristics Of Hispanic Seventh-Day Adventist Adolescents Who Attempted Suicide, Juanita E. Trivino

Dissertations

Problem. Hispanic adolescent suicide attempts appear to have been understudied, while suicidal behavior continues to be a concern as a youthful phenomenon. The present study sought to contribute to the understanding of Hispanic youth suicide and its association with acculturation, family, religion, and gender in a sample of Hispanic Seventh-day Adventist adolescents.

Method. The data used for this study came from the Avance survey, the largest denominational survey conducted among Hispanic Seventh-day Adventists in the U.S. (1993-1994). The sample consisted of 869 adolescents, comprised of 380 males and 489 females. Chi-square, t test for means of two independent samples, …

The Reflective Process In Nursing Clinicals Using Journaling And Dialogue, Rita Van Horn

Dissertations

Method. Two case studies describe the experiences of (1) 17 students who worked individually in the hospital clinical setting and who answered specific questions about problem solving in a written journal and (2) 20 students who were paired in the clinical setting and who answered the same questions together in a journal shared by the pair. In both case studies the experience was 9 weeks. The written journal questions were designed around a problem-solving process and thoughts and feelings about the clinical experience. A rubric adapted from Boud, Koegh, and Walker’s (1985) reflective model was used to analyze the journal …

Technology Partnership Curriculum Initiative: A Descriptive Case Study Of Its History, Development, And Implementation, Ingrid Wright-Jones

Dissertations

Problem

Curricular reform has a pathetic history. Curriculum documents, some of the major tools of reformers, have had a minor effect on transforming education because the power of pedagogy has been ignored (Cuban, 1993). Teachers in the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) system voiced similar concerns about curriculum documents. Additionally, they felt that their 2-4-day in-service training did not adequately prepare them to implement curricular changes. This initiative, aimed at restructuring both the content and process of teaching, was to be implemented in a distance-learning pilot project in eight one-teacher schools.

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to: (1) define the …

Self-Esteem, Personal Control, Optimism, Extraversion, And The Subjective Well-Being Of Midwestern University Faculty, Shawn Lee Zimmerman

Dissertations

Problem and Purpose

Although recent summaries of subjective well-being have illuminated four primary covariants, little research has been done that addresses the interaction and combined effects of these variables, limiting the development of theory and practice, especially in the population of university faculty. This research sought to address the interaction of self esteem, personal control, optimism, and extraversion when measured together, and how they combine in relation to subjective well-being in a sample of Midwestern university faculty.

Methodology

A total of 233 surveys was collected from two Midwestern university faculty populations. These surveys measured self-esteem, personal control, optimism, extraversion, subjective …

Demon Possession And Exorcism In The Context Of Divine Providence In Luke-Acts, Charles Badu Yeboah

Dissertations

The dissertation examines the nature and function of demon possession and exorcism within the context of divine providence in Luke-Acts. Chap. 1, after defining the subject and purpose of the study, lays out the dissertation's methodology, constraints and relevance. Chap. 2 provides a survey of the state of scholarship on demonology in the New Testament. Chap. 3 discusses the backgrounds against which Luke's account of demonic possession and exorcism have been understood by prior scholarship. Chap.4 and 5 are devoted to the exegetical analysis of the demonic stories in Luke-Acts. Chap 4 examines stories of Jesus' encounter with the demoniacs …

Sexual Politics And Subversion: Feminist Utopia As Praxis, Jennifer Sue Boyers

Dissertations

Literary studies meets up with sociology as feminist utopian fiction Is examined for what sociologist Dorothy Smith (1990) labels normal narrative and counter-narrative articulations of gendered structures of power. The method of analytical Induction Is used both In the choosing of the four novels for study and the resulting textual analysis. Ursula Le Guln's The dispossessed (1974), Marge Plercy's Woman on the edge of time (1976), Suzy McKee Chamas's Motherllnes (1978), and Sally Miller Gearhart's The wandereround (1979) are examined for their constructions of dystopian normal narratives, as well as for their reconstructions of subversive utopian counter-narratives, both articulating gendered …

Max Horkheimer’S Critical Theory Of Religion:The Meaning Of Religion In The Struggle For Human Emancipation, Michael R. Ott

Dissertations

Over the past thirty years much has been written about the critical theory of society that was produced by a small group of left-wing Hegelians in the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and in the United States. However, except for the pioneering work of Rudolf Siebert, little has been written about the critical theory of religion as a fundamental and dynamic element of the entire critical theory’s struggle for human emancipation. This study seeks to make a contribution in the development of the critical theory of religion as a corrective to the one-sided, positivistic development of …

The Effects Of Social Skills Training And Reciprocal Social Skills Training With Parent/Guardian(S) On Behavior And Recidivism Of First Time Adjuncted Youth, Kathleen A. Bailey

Dissertations

This research investigates the effect of social skills training on 46 first-time adjudicated males, ages 13 through 15 and placed on traditional probation. The independent variable was the type of group. Three types of groups were conducted: Group I (youth who received social skills training with their parents or guardians), Group II (youth who received social skills training without parents’ or guardians’ participation), and Group III (a control group of youth who did not receive social skills training). The dependent variable was the Jesness Inventory scales and subscales scores, and the type of offenses (status, misdemeanor, and felony). The research …

Loss Of The Lifelong Partner: Implications For Social Adaptation, Anora Ackerson Grinwis

Dissertations

The death of a partner has long been recognized for its ability to alter the lifestyle of the survivor. This life event can be even more significant for older adults who may be facing loss in several areas of their lives simultaneously. The focus of this qualitative study is on how older adults socially reconstruct their lives following a partner's death. The social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) guides design and analysis. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 29 individuals following the death of a lifelong partner, described as a relationship of 45 or more years. Participants had been …

An Examination Of Self-Efficacy In Master’S Level Counselor Trainees, Matthew G. Rushlau

Dissertations

This research is an investigation into changes in individuals’ belief of self-efficacy as they advanced through master’s-level counselor training. Differences were examined between reported levels of beliefs of self-efficacy for a group of 30 master’s students involved in counselor practicum training and 31 master’s students involved in basic counseling coursework. Participants completed the Counselor Self-Estimate Inventory (COSE) (Larson et al., 1992) at the beginning and end of an academic semester. Data generated by the COSE included an overall score on beliefs of counselor self-efficacy along with five subscale scores of various aspects of counseling, consisting of Micro-Skills, Process, Difficult Client …

The Relationship Of Reading Recovery Teachers' Efficacy To Length Of Service And School System Support, M. Louise Moon

Dissertations

Existing research results directly relate teachers’ efficacy to student outcomes and to continuing staff development and school context; however, little work has been done to investigate these relationships for Reading Recovery teachers. Reading Recovery (RR) is an early intervention program designed to assist first grade children who are having difficulty learning to read and write. This program requires ongoing staff development and an implementation plan designed to provide appropriate school context; therefore, survey data were collected from Reading Recovery teachers to study relationships between teacher efficacy and (a) their length of service in Reading Recovery and (b) support for RR …

Acts Of Resistance: Nurses' Personal Narratives, Maryanne Garon Dnsc

Dissertations

Acts of resistance can be expressions of creativity, protest or non-cooperation by oppressed groups. Resistance is seen as always present in the face of domination. Acts of resistance can help us to understand how the powerless mediate power relations, and they can actually give hope to the powerless. This study looked at the issues of power and resistance through critical and feminist perspective. A central concept of feminist theory is that women, and thus nurses as a women's profession, are oppressed. This study looked at female nurses' acts of resistance, which were defined as speaking up or taking action about …

Conceptual Metaphor In The Health Care Culture, Cheryl D. Glennon Dnsc, Ms, Rn

Dissertations

The conceptual metaphor has meaning only when understood within the cultural framework which gives rise to the conceptualization. The purpose of this study was to investigate the interaction of cognition (conceptual metaphor) and culture as manifest during intercultural communication in teaching-learning sessions between health care providers and patients. An ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1974; Saville-Troike, 1989) was the method employed to investigate the use of metaphor by patients, nurses and other health care professionals. Patients were viewed as a sojourner group in the health care culture; nurses and their health care partners were seen as a host group. Data were …

Influence Of Psychiatric Diagnostic Training On Counseling Students’ Development Of A Model-For-Helping And Professional Identity, Jerry E. Mclaughlin

Dissertations

Over the years, numerous proposals have been made in the counselor education (CE) literature about what counseling philosophy can best lead the profession to a distinctive professional identity (Bauman & Waldo, 1998; Fong & Lease, 1994; Guterman, 1994). An issue in this debate is whether psychiatric diagnostic training forms a part of a counseling philosophy (i.e., model-for-helping) and professional identity that is more focused on client psychopathology than on normal developmental issues. This study explored how training and experience in psychiatric diagnostic categories (PDCs) influenced counselors’ development of their counseling philosophy and professional identity.

Focus-group interviews were held at four …

Mdma And Learning: Effects Of Acute And Neurotoxic Exposure, Thomas P. Byrne

Dissertations

In two experiments, the effects of MDMA were examined on the acquisition of lever-press responding by rats exposed to procedures in which water delivery was delayed by 0, 10, or 20 seconds. In the first experiment, naive, water-deprived rats received an intraperitoneal injection of MDMA (0, 1.0, 3.2, or 5.6 mg/kg) prior to one experimental session. Response acquisition was observed under all conditions at all drug doses. MDMA increased both response rates and reinforcers earned in a dose-dependent fashion, but only when reinforcement was immediate. Under conditions of delay, MDMA had no effect on the number of lever presses emitted …

Making An Early Medieval Ethnie: The Case Of The Early Slavs (Sixth To Seventh Century A.D. ), Florin Curta

Dissertations

This study approaches the problem of the early Slavs from the perspective of current anthropological theories on ethnicity. The relationship between material culture and ethnicity is also examined, with particular emphasis on the notion of style. The historiography of the subject is vast and its survey shows why and how a particular approach to the history of the early Slavs was favored by linguistically minded historians and archaeologists. The historiography of the early Slavs is also the story of how academic discourse was used for the construction of national identity.

The study of the written sources indicates that the history …

The Impact Of Selected Barriers On Students Completing Community College In Michigan, Terri Lynn Burt

Dissertations

Research studies have been conducted to investigate barriers that inhibit the ability of adult students to obtain a postsecondary education (Powell, 1989; Shields, 1990). These studies suggest that there are three distinct categories that could be used to describe this phenomenon: (1) situational, (2) dispositional, and (3) institutional. The overall purpose of this study was to determine what barriers, if any, are experienced by nontraditional African-American students in selected Midwest community colleges in comparison to White adult students according to selected demographic variables (e.g., age, sex, marital status, number of children, employment, status, income, and race). More specifically, this study …

A Computer/Tutorial System Compared With A Workbook/Tutorial System For Presenting Instructional Material To At-Risk Elementary School Students, Vincent O. Hodge

Dissertations

Two different ways of presenting instructional material and reacting to students’ responses were compared. One, taking advantage of several features of multimedia instruction involved a desktop computer and various computer-presented consequences of correct and incorrect responses (largely chosen by the student). The other consisted in presenting the same instructional materials (the SRA primary curriculum) in a workbook form with tutors' comments and praise as the main form of response consequence. The two methods were compared with respect to various measures of student and system performance, including student accuracy (percent correct responses), types of errors, amount of correct response repetition (over-responding), …

The Effects Of Counselor Skills Training On Levels Of Counselor Cognitive Complexity, David K. Duys

Dissertations

This study measured the impact of an intensive counseling skills training course on levels of cognitive complexity in novice counselors. Graduate level counseling students were assessed at the beginning of a basic counseling skills training course and again at the end of the course by obtaining written responses to a stimulus questionnaire. A control group was recruited consisting of other graduate counseling students who were taking other courses during the same time interval and who were not exposed to the basic counseling skills course. Participants in the control group were tested using the same instrument and their scores were compared …

Laterality Of The Perception Of Computer Presented Written Sexual Words By Right-Handed Males And Females, Randall W. Stewart

Dissertations

The right hemisphere of males has been shown to possess a greater capacity for accurate perception of emotional non-verbal material (pictures) than the left hemisphere. The same is true for females, but with a smaller difference between the two hemispheres. Some previous research has partially confirmed these relationships using tachistoscopic presentation of emotional words. The present study, using briefly exposed computerpresented sexual words, compared perception accuracy with respect to a sexuality rating of clearly sexual and clearly non-sexual words, in the right versus the left visual field, and with males versus females. As with previous research using verbal stimuli, the …

The Relationship Between Organizational Culture And The Practice Of Program Evaluation In Human Service Organizations, Lorraine Marais

Dissertations

There are many obstacles for human service organizations in evaluating programs. Some of these barriers are the difficulty in defining human behavior and the change that needs to be evaluated, human service programs that take a long time to show results, agency capacity to do evaluation, and cost (Young, Hollister, Hodgkinson, & Associates, 1993). Another subtle yet powerful influence on the practice of evaluation in nonprofit organizations may be organizational culture (Schein, 1990). If an organization is going to employ self-evaluation, an organizational culture may be needed that will support such efforts. This study was designed to assess the relationship …

The Relationship Of Self-Esteem, Learned Resourcefulness And Social Support To Health-Related Quality Of Life In Long-Term Cancer Survivors, Leli W. Pedro Dnsc, Ms, Rnc, Ocn

Dissertations

Increased survival and advances in oncology research demand that health professionals attend to the gap in knowledge regarding health-related quality of life (HRQL) variables associated with the unique sequelae of cancer in the long-term (LT) cancer survivor. Research in this area may direct the development of effective interventions to increase the HRQL of LT cancer survivors. The study's purpose was to describe the relationships between self-esteem, learned resourcefulness, and social support to HRQL as well as their predictive value to HRQL for LT cancer survivors. A quantitative, descriptive, correlational, and noninterventional design was used to describe the relationship of self-esteem, …

Relationships Between Posttraumatic Stress, Acculturation, And Maternal Sensitivity In Vietnamese And Hmong Mothers, Gwendolyn F. Foss Dnsc

Dissertations

The purposes of this study were to determine if posttraumatic stress (PTS), depression, and anxiety occurred in a community sample of Vietnamese and Hmong mothers and to describe relationships between PTS, depression, anxiety, acculturation and maternal sensitivity. Transition theory (Bridges, 1980), and a conceptual model of parenting in immigrant populations building on Belsky's (1984) work, provided the theoretical framework (Foss, 1996). The sample was divided evenly between Vietnamese and Hmong participants. Ages ranged from 17–43 years, time lived in the United States ranged from 3–21 years, and education ranged from no formal education to completion of college. Maternal sensitivity was …

A Kierkegaardian Understanding Of Self And Society: An Existential Sociology, Chris L. Jakway

Dissertations

In examining the history and development of existential sociology, it becomes clear that in its initial phases it was not intended to oppose traditional sociological research, but to complement it. I intend to show that the contemporary chasm between the methodologies can be narrowed with a reconsideration of their common roots in the work of G.H. Mead and the symbolic interactionists. Existential sociologists today offer a practical synthesis that combines that theoretical heritage with philosophic ontology dating back to the writings of Soren Kierkegaard.

My conceptual goal is reveal how the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard, while not irrational or solipsistic, …