Digital Commons Network^™

Strategic Planning Leadership In Illinois Community Colleges: Who Is Leading The Process?, Tasha S. Williams

Dissertations

Planning is believed to bring stability, growth and reassurance to our lives. Since the recent economic downturn in the U.S. economy, individuals, families, small businesses, and major corporations are all looking to planners to assess every aspect of their financial futures. So, when it comes to our community colleges, the fabric of higher education in America, who is leading the planning process?

The 21st century will continue to unveil new challenges for community colleges. Beset with many challenges such as an austere funding environment, growing diverse student populations, community issues and needs, impending leadership and faculty retirements, globalization, and mounting …

A Study Of Exceptional Mentoring Insights For Adult Education And Emerging Mentors, Laura Lee Larson

Dissertations

The purpose of this critical engagement project was to focus on how mentoring relationships positively impact personal and professional lives -- what I call exceptional mentoring. This was a qualitative study using a narrative inquiry methodology and the theoretical framework of transformational leadership. There were five participants in the study who are known in the industry to be exceptional mentors because of their dedication and passion for caring about others. The research method included one-on-one interviews lasting between two and five hours. The study explored the life stories of these individuals with the intent to learn how people become mentors, …

An Examination Of Alcohol Use In The Gastric Bypass Patient, Kathleen Winston Phd, Msn, Rn

Dissertations

Introduction: Obesity and morbid obesity, along with their co-morbidities, are impacting the national and international healthcare delivery systems and policy agendas. Bariatric surgery is a dynamic and fast-changing medical and surgical practice designed to mitigate the consequences of 60 million obese adults in the United States alone. Alcohol consumption after gastric bypass surgery presents potential physiological and psychological problems. Purpose: Examine the prevalence and incidence of increased alcohol consumption among a group of post-gastric bypass patients; identify the relationship of the alcohol use with time since surgery, psychosocial issues (depressive symptomatology, anxiety, coping) and demographic variables. Theoretical Framework: Coping serves …

Novanet Online Curricula And The Course Completion Of Alternative High School Students, Margaret Elizabeth Munger

Dissertations

Studies on alternative schools have previously been qualitative in nature and provided information on the characteristics of a quality alternative school. Quantitative research in the area of alternative education has been limited. Previous research involving NovaNET Online Curriculum has centered on credit recovery, remediation and a small amount has been conducted on student use of the system. Currently, many alternative schools are using NovaNET or other online curricula to assist students move towards graduation without the possibility of losing credit due to poor attendance. The system is being marketed as a means for students to earn additional credits and progress …

Systemic And Personal Change: A Retrospective Case Study Of Balanced Literacy Implementation As Perceived By Those Involved, Donna J. Anderson

Dissertations

This retrospective critical case study was conducted to learn more about teacher perceptions of deep, systemic change experiences. This study examined the successful implementation of a balanced literacy program at one Title I elementary school several years after completion of the implementation period. Participants were teachers who reflected on their experiences with the balanced literacy initiative implementation and discussed personal change associated with their experiences. Analysis isolated elements of teachers' recollected experience and compared those elements with factors that previous research has associated with successful change. Additionally, this study explored the lasting effects the experience of being a part of …

Key Challenges Facing Student Athletes And Connections To Their Choice Of Major, Kimberlee J. Henrion

Dissertations

This study examines the reasons student athletes choose their major and the challenges they face creating a successful student identity, and ultimately graduating with degrees of value to them. A survey was created utilizing themes from previous studies, and distributed at one Midwestern Division I university. Questions regarding time management, academic conflicts, health issues, service usage, selection of major, career aspirations, and perceptions of identity, following Arthur Chickering's theory of College Student Development were asked.

Results show the majority of the 171 student athlete respondents indicated few conflicts with time management (e.g., they generally have time to complete class work), …

Climate In Catholic Schools: A Comparative Study Of Three Types Of Organizational Structures, Andra Zommers

Dissertations

This study inquired into American Catholic schools' organizational structures and their relationship with school climate through use of the national data from Schools and Staffing Survey 2003-04 by the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education. The study focused on the statistical assessment of Catholic school teachers' perceptions of climate within three organizational structures. Another aspect of the research was the principals' perception of climate within each of the organizational structures. Last, the study investigated whether teachers' and principals' perceptions of climate differed.

A weighted one-way ANOVA was run to investigate whether the type of Catholic school could …

Counselor Trainees' Perceptions Of Their Personal Growth: A Qualitative Inquiry, Ericka L. Souders

Dissertations

Over the past decade there has been increased discussion in the counselor education literature regarding the personal limitations and/or impairments of counselors that may hinder their abilities to provide competent services. Although counseling ethical codes and standards of practice suggest competent counselors are those who demonstrate both professional and personal skills and counselor educators have explored numerous training methods to promote such development, the concern about impaired counselors remains. There is minimal information in the literature that describes how counselors in training develop personal attitudes, skills, and characteristics that may prevent their impairment and facilitate their competency with their clientele. …

Teacher And Administrator Perceptions Of A Balanced School Calendar And Its Effects On Students In Poverty, Christopher S. Smith

Dissertations

The creation of this study came out of a need to increase achievement and support services for students living in poverty in the selected school district in Missouri. Due to the large amount of academic regression over the long summer break and the lack of consistent support services for students who live in poverty, a Balanced School Calendar (BSC) was investigated. The researchers conducted surveys and interviews to assess the level of support from parents, teachers, and administrators for a BSC school choice program as an option for implementation at a K-5 elementary school in the selected school district in …

Exploring The Effects Of School Calendars On Student Achievement, Malinda R. Meier

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a year-round calendar and an extended school year calendar, which had, in addition to extra days, specific teacher selection, extended professional development for teachers, and research based programs on student academic achievement. This special version of an extended school year was referred to as extended plus. To determine the effects of a year-round schedule, Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) test scores of students attending school on a yearround schedule were compared to scores of students attending schools on a traditional schedule. To determine the effects of extended plus, MAP scores …

Teacher And Administrator Perceptions Of A Balanced School Calendar And Its Effects On Students In Poverty, Kevin D. Huffman

Dissertations

The creation of this study came out of a need to increase student achievement and support services for students living in poverty in the selected school district in Missouri. Due to the large amount of academic regression over the long summer break and the lack of consistent support services for students in poverty, a Balanced School Calendar (BSC) was investigated. The researchers conducted surveys and interviews to assess the level of support from parents, teachers, and administrators to see if a BSC school choice program would be a viable option for implementation at a K-5 elementary school in the selected …

An Investigation Of The Relationship Between District Wealth And Student Achievement, Richard L. Henson

Dissertations

Since the state of Missouri has twice been sued by the Committee for Educational Equity, this study was undertaken to determine if district wealth or district expenditures have any statistical impact on student performance. All of the subjects are Missouri public school districts and all of the data reviewed was from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education or from the internet school ranking site, Schooldigger.com. Two data sets were reviewed. First the Assessed Valuation per Pupil, the Expenditure per Pupil and the Annual Performance Report data from the time of the first lawsuit were reviewed for any correlations. …

Opinion Mining With The Sentwordnet Lexical Resource, Bruno Ohana

Dissertations

Sentiment classification concerns the application of automatic methods for predicting the orientation of sentiment present on text documents. It is an important subject in opinion mining research, with applications on a number of areas including recommender and advertising systems, customer intelligence and information retrieval. SentiWordNet is a lexical resource of sentiment information for terms in the English language designed to assist in opinion mining tasks, where each term is associated with numerical scores for positive and negative sentiment information. A resource that makes term level sentiment information readily available could be of use in building more effective sentiment classification methods. …

A Correlational Study Of Successful School Bond Issues And Successful Athletic Teams, Mark Beem

Dissertations

This study was completed to determine if there was a relationship between successful school bond issues and successful athletic teams. Data were obtained from 53 school districts in central and southwest Missouri that had attempted to pass a bond issue within the past five years. Superintendents in those districts were asked to respond to a survey regarding the success of their recent bond issues and the success of their football and basketball teams the year of the bond issue and the year preceding. The perceptions of the superintendent’s in regard to community support and the effect of athletics on successful …

Identifying And Addressing Issues Faced By New Community College Presidents, Anthony Raymond Miksa

Dissertations

The American community college system is in the midst of a leadership crisis. Community college presidents are retiring at an alarming rate. Further exacerbating the leadership crisis is the lack of qualified candidates to replace the retiring presidents. Senior administrators at community colleges who are the natural choice to replace the retirees are also retiring or choosing not to pursue a presidency. The overarching purpose driving this research was to identify the challenges encountered by new community college presidents, seek to comprehend the information gathering method utilized by new presidents to identify challenges, and finally, to present the strategies the …

Higher Education And The New Capitalism: Social Enterprise Partnerships And The Opportunity For Community Colleges, Rosanna S. Diaz

Dissertations

In the current economic climate, driven by their mission of open access, affordability, and a desire to help all of their constituent communities, community colleges are under increasing pressure to service a rapidly expanding and increasingly diverse group of students with fewer and fewer resources. Declining budgets and a burgeoning enrollment spurred by the recent economic downturn have forced community colleges to become more entrepreneurial in the ways that they develop new programs and find alternative revenue streams. (Wiers, 2007; Dingfelder, 2007).

A critical concern for community colleges is that the business paradigm that fuels the increasing pressure to produce …

Righteous Commitment: Renewing, Repairing, And Restoring The World—Wangari Maathai And The Green Belt Movement, Jennifer Lara Simka Kushner

Dissertations

This Africentric historical inquiry introduces Wangari Maathai, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and internationally renowned Kenyan activist, as a visionary adult educator and leader of the liberatory environmental movement -The Green Belt Movement. The Movement addresses decades of mis-education through culturally grounded adult education activities that help communities understand the linkages between environmental degradation and poor governance, and educate people to participate in democracy.

The study describes Maathai’s philosophy and how it informed her leadership of environmental, political, and social change. The African philosophical framework of Maat, and the principle of serudj-ta (repairing, renewing and restoring the world) provide a …

Headed For The Heartland: Decision-Making Factors For International Students To Attend Rural And Suburban Community College In Illinois, Eric John Bohman

Dissertations

Despite record growth in international student enrollment at community colleges, little is known about how the international students learn about community colleges and ultimately decide to attend. The purpose of this research is to identify what factors lead international students to decide to attend Illinois community colleges. Furthermore, this study explores both the knowledge students had about community colleges and the sources of this information prior to their decision to attend.

The research study utilized a multi-theoretical framework encompassing world culture theory, push-pull theory, and cognitive decision making theory. Using a qualitative case study design, thirteen international students from four …

Transformative Learning In The Multiple Sclerosis (Ms) Community An Ethnographic Study Examining How And In What Ways Transformative Learning Is Realized And Lived Out Among Members Of An Ms Community., Mary N. Lewis

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine how transformative learning takes place in the lives of participants who are in the MS community with the hope of identifying coping strategies and motivational factors influencing transformative learning. This research also seeks to discover and examine the lived experiences, meaning and consequent changes made in the lives of the research participants. The focus of this research asks how and in what ways the learning process differs prior to and after a diagnosis of MS and how these individuals reconstruct their lives after experiencing the day-to-day challenges brought about by this disease. …

A Formative Experiment Investigating The Use Of Reflective Video Journals To Increase High School Students' Metacognition, Brian Jeffrey Dixon Edd

Dissertations

This study sought to determine the factors that enhance the effectiveness of reflective video journals to increase the metacognition of adolescent students. To achieve this pedagogical goal, this study followed the six-phase methodology of a formative experiment. Twelve high school students participated in a six- session after-school reflective video journaling program. Diverse data collection methods were used to determine the factors in the educational environment that enhance or inhibit students' metacognition, how the intervention and its implementation were necessarily modified to more effectively achieve the pedagogical goal, the potential impact of feedback and peer response, and any unanticipated positive or …

Wellness Characteristics And Health Risk Behaviors Of Young Adult University Students, Nicole Mareno Phd

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine wellness and health risk behaviors of young adults at a university in the southwest. Nutrition, physical activity, alcohol use, and safe sexual practices are high priority health concerns on college campuses. Health promotion is integral to nursing. Early identification of risky health behaviors allows for the design of campus health interventions. Health behaviors continue to be formed during college and interventions may have a lasting impact on health promotion and disease prevention. This study added to the research on demographic factors impacting wellness. A correlation between BMI and wellness level was also …

The Impact Of Authentic Leadership And Ethical Organizational Culture On Auditor Behavior, Janice Taylor Morris Phd

Dissertations

Recently, unprofessional behavior resulted in several high-profile financial scandals and business failures. Many blamed external auditors of these companies' financial statements for failing to detect and/or report errors and fraud that led to the failures. Leaders within major audit firms have been urged to foster more ethical firm environments as a means of inhibiting dysfunctional auditor behavior (DAB) such as premature sign-off, gathering insufficient audit evidence, and the underreporting of time spent conducting an audit. This advice is based on two assumptions: (1) auditor behavior is one element of audit quality and (2) the behavior of employees is influenced by …

Electro Hydrodynamic Manipulation Of The Process Of Self-Assembly Of Particles At Fluid-Fluid Interfaces, Muhammad Mansoor Janjua

Dissertations

This dissertation is divided into two parts, first deals with the numerical study of motion of dielectric particles subjected to nonuniform electric fields and second deals with the process of self-assembly of particles at fluid-fluid interfaces and subjected to uniform electric field normal to the interface. In the numerical study, the particles are moved using a direct simulation scheme (DNS) in which the fundamental equations of motion of fluid and solid particles are solved without the use of models. The motion of particles is tracked using a distributed Lagrange multiplier method (DLM) and the electric force acting on the particles …

Optimizing Container Retrieval Operation At A Port Container Terminal, Dejan Besenski

Dissertations

In the presence of major challenges, where ports are striving to improve their operation and stay competitive in the global market, the issue of port efficiency, particularly the intelligent management of straddle carriers is investigated in this study. A new approach is presented that optimizes container handling equipment operation and is beneficial for the terminal operator in terms of improving productivity, providing faster service and reducing operating cost, Also, the solution provides acceptable service for truckers, The operational strategies presented are able to assess the operation from the truckers' and terminal operators' perspective.

The research is structured into four different …

Surface And Bulk Passivation Of Multicrystalline Silicon Solar Cells By Silicon Nitride (H) Layer : Modeling And Experiments, Chuan Li

Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation is to study passivation effects and mechanisms in Si solar cells, specifically, the surface and bulk passivation by hydrogen-rich PECVD silicon nitride (SiN :H) antireflection layer on multicrystalline silicon (me-Si) solar cells.

The passivation of silicon surface can be achieved in two ways: by field-effect passivation and/or by neutralization of interface states. In other words, the deposition should result in a high value of fixed charge, Qf and /or a low value of interface state density, D1. The surface recombination velocity can be described by Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH) statistics.

Current SRH formalisms have failed to explain …

Terahertz Response Of Microfluidic-Jetted Fabricated 3d Flexible Metamaterials, Yew Li Hor

Dissertations

Conventional materials exhibit some restrictions on their electromagnetic properties. Especially in terahertz region, for example, materials that exhibit magnetic response are far less common in nature than materials that exhibit electric response. However, materials can be designed, namely artificial man-made metamaterials that exhibit electromagnetic properties that are not found in natural materials by adjusting, for example, the dielectric, magnetic or structural parameters of the constituent elements.

This dissertation demonstrates the use of new fabrication techniques to construct metamaterials in THz range via a material deposition system. The metamaterials are fabricated by stacking alternative layers with conventional designs such as single …

Precipitation Of Micro/Nanoparticles In Enhanced High Energy Dissipation Mixing Systems, Giuseppe Di Benedetto

Dissertations

Crystallization is the most common unit operation used in the pharmaceutical industry to synthesize active ingredients. Rapid development of a drug candidate is dependent on the ability to produce a desired drug substance with consistent properties, These properties include stability and purity, which are directly affected by the crystallization process and which affect, in turn, bioavailability, drug dissolution rate, drug stability, and shelf life.

The objective of this work is to produce micro/nanoparticle crystals within existent glass-lined pharmaceutical stirred-tank reactors by modifying the current reactor configuration to include features that can increase the local rate of energy dissipation in the …

Experiment And Modeling : Ignition Of Aluminum Particles With A Co2 Laser, Salil Mohan

Dissertations

Aluminum is a promising ingredient for high energy density compositions used in propulsion systems, explosives, and pyrotechnics. Aluminum powder fuel additives enable one to achieve higher combustion enthalpies and reaction temperatures. Therefore, to develop aluminum based novel and customized high density energetic materials, understanding of ignition and combustion kinetics of aluminum powders is required. In most practical systems, metal ignition and combustion occur in environments with rapidly changing temperatures and gas compositions. The kinetics of exothermic reactions in related energetic materials is commonly characterized by thermal analysis, where the heating rates are very low, on the order of 1 -50 …

Phosphate And Thermal Stabilization Of Heavy Metals In Dredged Sediments, Peter Kuria Ndiba

Dissertations

Treatment and reuse of dredged harbor sediments in construction as an alternative to disposal reduces costs and conserves resources. This research focused on leachability of metal contaminants subsequent to phosphate addition and thermal treatment at 700 °C. X- ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) in combination with principal component analysis, target transformation, and linear combination revealed that in the untreated sediments Zn precipitated as the relatively soluble smithsonite (ZnCO₃) (67%) and adsorbed to hydrous iron oxides (15%) and hydrous manganese oxides (18%). Phosphate addition and calcination resulted in sparingly soluble phases, hopeite (Zn₃₍PO₄)₂.4H_{2 …}

Enhanced Fluidization Of Nanoparticle Agglomerates, Daniel Lepek

Dissertations

Gas fluidization of nanoparticle agglomerates has recently received much attention due to the excellent way in which these novel nanornaterials can be dispersed in a gaseous medium. Nanopowders have a very high surface area to volume ratio which allows them have unique chemical and physical properties especially at the surface. Fluidization is a popular technique for the continuous dispersal of solid materials in the fluidlike state.

Recently it has been found that nanoparticles exist in a highly agglomerate state which allow them to become fluidizable. The fluidization behavior of the nanopowders is dependent on the bulk and material properties of …