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The Effects Of School Autonomy On Students' Reading Achievement In Early Grades: A Dose-Response Treatment Approach, Esther Ferreira Dos Santos Carvalhaes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

School autonomy is at the core of influential educational policies aimed at improving school effectiveness and students' academic performance both in the United States and abroad. Initiatives that promote a transfer of authority from higher levels of the school system to local schools, such as the charter school movement and School-Based Management (SBM), have become increasingly popular in the last two decades. These initiatives operate under the premise that local stakeholders (principals, teachers, and parents) understand their students' needs better than higher-level administrators, which enables them to make better educational decisions regarding students' academic success. However, despite the prominence of …

The Influence Of An Appetitive Conditioned Stimulus On Interval Timing Behavior, Joseph Daniel Jacobs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pavlovian incentive motivation provides a theoretical framework on the basis of which experiments can be designed to examine the effects of motivational variables on timing behavior. The Pavlovian-Instrumental transfer (PIT) paradigm is a prototype for studying Pavlovian incentive motivation. The current study examined the effect of a Pavlovian appetitive conditioned stimulus (CS) on timing performance, based on the PIT paradigm. Nine pigeons were exposed to pairings of a 120-s conditioned stimulus (flashing or steady houselight) and unconditioned stimulus (food). The pigeons were then trained on the peak procedure (FI 30 s). In a subsequent testing phase, the effect of the …

Underprivileged Children In Port-Au-Prince, Haiti: Hearing And Academic Performance Of Children In Public Schools In Port Au Prince, Talia Meisel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hearing loss is estimated to affect more than 360 million people worldwide, 32% of whom are children. Children with hearing loss tend to develop compromised communicative abilities and also have been found to perform more poorly academically than their normal hearing peers. Because of the lack of medical care, children in third world countries are expected to have more difficulty hearing and learning in a classroom setting than children in first world countries due to higher incidences of conductive pathology. The purpose of this study is to assess the hearing ability of underprivileged children in kindergarten and primary schools in …

A Derivation Of The Tonal Hierarchy From Basic Perceptual Processes, David Smey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades music psychologists have explained the functioning of tonal music in terms of the tonal hierarchy, a stable schema of relative structural importance that helps us interpret the events in a passage of tonal music. This idea has been most influentially disseminated by Carol Krumhansl in her 1990 monograph Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. Krumhansl hypothesized that this sense of the importance or centrality of certain tones of a key is learned through exposure to tonal music, in particular by learning the relative frequency of appearance of the various pitch classes in tonal passages. The correlation of pitch-class …

Is Burglary A Violent Crime? An Empirical Investigation Of Classifying Burglary As A Violent Felony And Its Statutory Implications, Phillip Kopp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Under the common law, burglary is defined as a crime committed against the property of another, and is listed as a property offense for purposes of statistical description by the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). However, burglary is prosecuted and sentenced as a violent crime under habitual offender laws at the federal level, and can be regarded as violent in state law, depending on varied circumstances. Using a mixed methods approach, the current study compared state and federal burglary and habitual offender statutes to an empirical description of the offense. First, a comprehensive content …

Assessing Young Males' Perspectives On The Cultural Competency Of Juvenile Justice Staff And Predicting Psychosocial Functioning, Crystal Catherine Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The theory of symbolic interactionism explains how social interactions influence behavior. In this study, it is reasoned that culturally sensitive interactions may be associated with adjudicated youth behavior. The purpose of this project is to (1) examine the differences in adjudicated male youths' perceptions of the level of cultural competency in juvenile justice staff members and (2) to identify whether staff members' cultural competency is related to self-restraint, distress, and delinquent behavior in adjudicated male youth. Utilizing a cross-sectional design, adjudicated youths enrolled in a variety of re-entry and transitional programs were surveyed. Youths retrospectively assessed the cultural competency of …

Planetary Improvement: Discourses And Practices Of Green Capitalism In The Cleantech Space, Jesse Adam Goldstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is money to be made in saving the planet. A whole host of actors, such as investors, entrepreneurs, engineers, and policy makers have mobilized around our ecological problems, seeking to innovate new `green' and `clean' technologies that can serve a rapidly changing environment. The presumption that such technologies are both necessary and necessarily profitable anchors visions of a `green' capitalism that can and must be brought into existence.

However, just as free markets have never been all that free, why should we presume that green capitalism would be all that green? Instead of attempting to arbit whether or not …

Committed To The Cause? Violent And Financial Criminal Behaviors Of Domestic Far-Rightists, Ashmini G. Kerodal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study used factor analysis, logistic and multinomial logistic regression analysis to evaluate the effects of an individual's level of commitment to far-right extremism on his / her criminal offending behavior. Agnew's General Strain Theory (2001, 2005), Cloward and Ohlin's Differential Opportunity Theory (1960) and Simi and Futrell's (2010) concept of free / movement spaces were used to address the three research questions: (1) What effect did individual level stressors, significant others, and negative interactions with government officials have on membership in a far-right group, (2) What effect did individual level stressors, significant others, membership in an extremist group, and …

Psychometric Properties Of A Multichannel Battery For The Assessment Of Emotional Perception, William H. Krause

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Perceiving the emotions of others is an important, even critical, skill for success in social interactions. The lack of this skill has been associated with decreased social competence and poor interpersonal relationships (Shimokawa et al., 2001). It frequently co-occurs with psychopathology.

Furthermore, there is a large and rapidly growing literature examining the neural substrates of emotional processing. Studies have examined the processing of particular emotions, as well as how emotions conveyed through different modalities are processed.

The New York Emotion Battery (NYEB; Borod, Welkowitz, & Obler, 1992) includes tests for the perception of eight discrete emotions across three communication channels: …

"Do You Live On Spruce Street Or Are You Straight?" The Boundaries Of Philadelphia's Gayborhood And The Production Of Queer Identities, Lauren Elisabeth Manley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an examination of queer residential and socializing patterns in Philadelphia during the 1930s through 1950s, and discussion of the relationships between geographic space, social location, and queer identity. The production and maintenance of the neighborhood known as the Gayborhood participated in the construction of a "gay" identity that was race, class, and gender specific. This specific identity formulation was maintained and mobilized by various groups for their own sense of identity and community building. Looking at other neighborhoods that also had significant queer residential and socializing populations during this period, I interrogate concepts such as identity, community, …

China's Search For "Peaceful Internationalism" Vis-À-Vis A Liberal World Order: Interests, National Identity And Foreign Policy, Bo Ma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I employ the concept of national identity to explain China's foreign policy behavior during the history of the People's Republic of China. Specifically, I propose the concept of "peaceful internationalism" to characterize the behavioral orientation of China in the post-Mao era. Peaceful internationalism as both an idea and a policy, aims at a cross-national framework for cooperation and co-existence through non-conflictual, non-hegemonic and non-unilateral mechanisms of dispute resolution. This study argues that China pursues peaceful internationalism in a liberal international order, which is consistent with its contemporary national identity, which I term the "phoenix rising" identity. This …

Executive Dysfunction And Reward Dysregulation: Interactions In Drug Addiction, Kristen Paula Morie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cocaine addiction is a serious public health hazard, and contributes to disastrous outcomes for individuals who suffer from it. Addiction is accompanied by an inability to control one's own behavior, and a preoccupation with cocaine at the expense of other rewarding pursuits. Previous research has suggested that difficulties with executive function and reward processing may underlie these problems, but the extent to which each contributes to addiction severity, or how these two factors may interact, remains to be elucidated. By using event related potential (ERP) measures in combination with information about self-reported anhedonia over three experiments, we set out to …

Reexamining Linguistic Relativity: What Adult Bilinguals Can Teach Us About Culture, Language, And Cognition, Natalya Petroff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Extending Whorf's popular notion of linguistic relativity (LR) to bilingual contexts, one would argue that a speaker's first language (L1) influences her thinking and behavior under second language (L2) conditions. According to one interpretation of LR, inter-language relativity, L1 instills in its speakers habitual ways of thinking and thus influences their perception and categorization in L2 contexts. Under intra-speaker relativity, bilinguals follow either L1 or L2 patterns of performance, depending on L2 proficiency. Finally, according to usage-based accounts of language, there is no qualitative difference between mono- and bilingual speakers, and a bilingual's performance under L2 conditions is best viewed …

The Influence Of Advanced Cognitive Ability On The Development Of Psychological Defenses And In Understanding And Managing Affect: A Study Of Latency-Aged Gifted Students, Kahlila Ife Robinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study examines the influence of advanced cognitive ability on the development of psychological defenses and in understanding and managing affect, using the lens of Emotional Intelligence (EI). Theories of psychological defense maturity state that defense mechanisms are influenced both by the cognitive level of the individual and by the cognitive complexity of the defense itself (Cramer, 1999; Cramer, 2009). Individuals with exceptional cognitive ability may therefore show a corresponding "match" with complex defense use. In addition to defense use, how well one is able to identify, understand, manage and use emotion to facilitate thought, abilities often labelled Emotional …

The Legal System And Memory For Analogue Traumatic Experiences, Daisy A. Segovia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trauma and its consequences are ubiquitous in the courtroom. Research on memory for trauma suggests there is reason to suspect that traumatized people may be prone to memory errors. Additionally, jurors' views of witnesses are important as they tend to mistrust evidence given by witnesses they believe to be not credible. If traumatized people are prone to errors, is there a way to safeguard against those errors and make jurors more trusting of their memory reports?

In Part One, I polled participants on their views toward traumatized people and trauma memory (Study 1). Results of this study suggest people have …

Verbal Behavior In Individuals With Generalized Anxiety Disorder And Depressive Disorders, Tzachi Slonim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and clinical depression are both internalizing disorders characterized by sustained negative affect and have mainly been studied utilizing either self-report or physiological measures. Fewer studies have focused on behavioral indices of these disorders, and little is known about their overlapping and distinct linguistic features. The present research examined the above gap in two separate studies. Study 1 synthesized previous efforts made to study the linguistic features of individuals with depression. Previous investigations found that depressed individuals evidence high proportions of I-words, high proportions of negatively-valenced words, low proportions of positively-valenced words, and high proportions of cognitive …

Water Conservation To Reduce Wet Weather Pollution Loads To The Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, Ny, Suzanne Carol Stempel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Public participation plays an important role in wet weather pollution management. However, the effects of participation programs on local water quality are often difficult to quantify. This project aims to quantify the potential effects of a community based, non-structural, BMP aimed at controlling inputs to combined sewage systems by encouraging residents to reduce their water use during rain events. A household could participate by reducing the amount of water they use for flushing toilets, washing dishes, taking showers, etc. during rain events; thereby reducing stress on the system during the time of highest demand. The Gowanus Canal sewershed in Brooklyn, …

Expanding Political Space In Contemporary China: A Comparative Study Of The Advocacy Strategies Of Three Grass-Root Women's Groups, Weiting Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The absence of contentious performance has led scholars to question the existence of social movements and to agree with the description of state-social group relations in China as state corporatism. However, defining social movement by confrontational performance is inappropriate to examine social organizing under repression regimes. Most western social movement theories assume that political space for organizing exists before the formation of social movement. My research challenges this assumption by extending the concept of political opportunity structure to conduct process-tracing comparisons of two women's and one lesbian groups' respective strategies when facing interferences from the central authorities. By conducting interviews …

Reconstructing The Nation: African American Political Thought And America's Struggle For Racial Justice, Alex Zamalin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how twentieth-century African American intellectuals engaged American political cultural beliefs central to American identity. A prominent argument of American political thinkers has been that the liberal-democratic ideals of freedom, equality, representative government, the rule of law, tolerance and civic obligation are what make Americans a unique people. From the immediate aftermath of the Second World War to the late twentieth-century such an argument provided American politicians, social movements and intellectuals a strong justification for divergent political claims, from Cold War warriors calling for the containment of Soviet Communism, to Civil Rights activists calling for racial integration to …

When Wives Migrate And Leave Husbands Behind: A Jamaican Marriage Pattern, Elaine B. Douglas-Harrison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For over a hundred years Jamaicans have been migrating to make the proverbial `better life' for themselves and their families. In the early 20th century husbands migrated, leaving wives behind. As economies of the United States and Canada have become more service-oriented, wives migrate leaving husbands behind. The experiences of Jamaican immigrant women are documented in Caribbean migration studies, but the marriages of Jamaican legally-married immigrant wives and their husbands left behind in Jamaica are so far unstudied. The main research question of this study is what maintains these transnational marriages over time, sometimes for decades, when spouses see each …

Birthing, Blackness, And The Body: Black Midwives And Experiential Continuities Of Institutional Racism, Keisha La'nesha Goode

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Within the last decade, historical and contemporary accounts of midwives, along with the efficacy of the Midwives Model of Care for pregnancy, childbirth and general women's health, have become increasing popular in mainstream publications and documentaries. Yet, very few of these accounts represent historical or contemporary black midwives (and midwives of color, more generally). Despite a long history of midwifery in the black community, black women currently represent less than 2% of the nation's reported 15,000 midwives. Relatedly, black women and infants experience the worst birth outcomes of any racial-ethnic cohort in the United States.

In the early 20th century, …

Modifying The Criminalization Hypothesis: Predicting Jail Diversion Outcome With Clinical, Criminological, And Personality Factors, Wen Gu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There are a disproportionate number of individuals with serious mental illness in the criminal justice system, compared to the general population. Mental health courts and jail diversion programs were developed to divert individuals with mental illness out of jails into community treatment to ease the overburden of treating psychiatric disorders in the criminal justice system. These programs have become increasing popular, but little is known about the characteristics of the diverted individuals that result in successful outcomes. The purpose of this study is to test different causal models of noncompliance as predicted by clinical, criminological, and personality variables, and examine …

Senecan Tragedy And Virgil's Aeneid: Repetition And Reversal, Timothy Hanford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the relationship between Senecan tragedy and Virgil's Aeneid, both on close linguistic as well as larger thematic levels. Senecan tragic characters and choruses often echo the language of Virgil's epic in provocative ways; these constitute a contrastive reworking of the original Virgilian contents and context, one that has not to date been fully considered by scholars. This study is organized according to three main themes that are argued to have strong intertextual aspects: repetition of the past, victor and vanquished, and maius nefas, or greater crime. In each case Seneca tragicus is seen to take a theme …

If You See Something, Say Something: A Look At Experimental Writing On Art, Charlotte Lucy Latham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Signs all over New York City state, "If you see something, say something," but museum studies repeatedly find viewers do not attend to pictures, just as eye witness testimony is invariably skewed. Ways of seeing have been limited to known ways of discussing. Alternative approaches offer new insights. The first section, "Experiments in Art Writing," examines two texts: T.J. Clark's The Sight of Death, a journal of his daily visits looking at two Poussin paintings, for which he maintains the ambiguity of exploration and argues to keep visual images from their dissolution into political symbols; and, Charles Simic's Dime Store …

Secrets Of A Toy-Box: A Study Of Claude Debussy's La Boîte À Joujoux, Mirna Lekic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The influence of Claude Debussy's inventive musical language can be traced through to the most modern classical repertoire. Yet of the composer's three ballets, which provided the counterweight to the Russian dominance of Parisian ballet culture in the early 1900s, only Jeux has received substantial scholarly attention. The following document is a monograph on La Boîte à joujoux (1913), Debussy's innovative ballet for children or marionettes. It offers an exploration of the work's broader significance and contextualizes it both within Debussy's oeuvre and in a broader historical realm. Included is a survey of the ballet's performance history, as well as …

"Fits Of Vulgar Joy": Play Anxiety In The Romantic Poets, Alison Powell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

"Fits of Vulgar Joy": Play Anxiety in the Romantic Poets considers the crucial but neglected role of play as a component of the imaginative faculty and as related to the development of moral sensibility in the Romantic era. It examines the Spieltrieb ("play drive") in the works of Coleridge, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, and John Clare to explore the tension between what is explicitly stated about the relationship between play, intersubjectivity, and aesthetics, and how play is actually depicted in the poetry and essays of the Romantic era. It works to identify how and with what objective the Romantics differentiated so …

Developing A Culture Of Citizenship In Elementary School Classrooms: How Democratic Schools Teach Children About Rules, Rights And Responsibilities, Mindi Reich-Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to explore development of civic participation in children in primary grade (K-2) classrooms. Young children are accorded neither the rights nor responsibilities of adolescents or adults, nor given many opportunities to participate meaningfully in the decisions that directly impact their lives. The public school classroom is, in a sense, the first opportunity for children to develop a sense of how to participate in a diverse community organized to address the needs of many. As such, it is a microcosm of the larger society within which children are learning to engage as active participants. The …

When Less Can Be More: Dual Task Effects In Stuttering And Fluent Adults, Naomi Nechama Eichorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study tested the counterintuitive hypothesis that engaging cognitive resources in a secondary task while speaking could benefit aspects of speech production. Effects of dual task conditions on speech fluency, rate, and error patterns were examined in stuttering and fluent speakers based on specific predictions derived from three related theoretical frameworks. Twenty fluent adults and 19 adults with confirmed diagnoses of stuttering participated in the study. All participants completed two baseline tasks: (1) a continuous speaking task in which spontaneous speech was produced in response to given prompts; and (2) a working memory (WM) task involving manipulations of WM …

Conflict And Playmaking: The Impact Of A Recess Enhancement Program On Elementary School Playgrounds In New York City, Elizabeth Lake

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As time demands for schooling increase and children's freedom to play is under threat, the question of how play during school recess can best be designed to serve children has grown in importance. This research examines whether a peer-training program can influence children's activity choices and social behaviors and reduce conflict on elementary school playgrounds during recess and what aspects of such a peer-training program are important to this goal. Three general recess issues are considered: conflict, activity level and choice, and gender inclusion. The data was collected as part of a Recess Enhancement Program in a select group of …

Standard Deviations: Genre, Gender, And The Cartographical Imagination In Popular British Literature, 1830-1880, Taylor R. Kennamer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While cartography is understood to undergird the spatial interventions integral to Victorian reform in areas such as sewerage and housing, little critical attention has been paid to the influence of cartographical discourse in itself, rather than through its concrete products, as a force that fundamentally altered nineteenth-century conceptions of self, other, and environment. Standard Deviations fills that gap, studying the changing parameters of spatial epistemology by monitoring expanding and contracting definitions of bodily deviance across four generic modes historically associated with the nineteenth century: detective, sensation, and domestic fiction, and the household management guide. Altered perceptions of spatial reality and …