Digital Commons Network^™

Working Memory Cross-Modal Binding And Decoding Ability In Children In The First And Second Grades, Eduardo Sanchez

Doctoral Dissertations

unavailable

An Analysis Of 2005 Naep 8th Grade Mathematics Achievement Items By Content Strand, Problem Type And Language Complexity, Yvette Marie Fagan

Doctoral Dissertations

unavailable

The Effect Of Optimistic Explanatory Style Instruction On The Explanatory Style, Reading Self Efficacy, Reading Resilience And Reading Performance Of Third-Fifth Grade Students With Learning Disabilities, Melba Rhodes-Stanford

Doctoral Dissertations

unavailable

Teaching Critical Thinking In A Community-College Art-History Learning Environment : A Comparison Of Implicit Instruction Versus A Combination Of Implicit And Explicit Instruction, Michael Leonard

Doctoral Dissertations

unavailable

The Development Of Hybrid Intelligent Systems For Technical Analysis Based Equivolume Charting, Thira Chavarnakul

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation proposes the development of a hybrid intelligent system applied to technical analysis based equivolume charting for stock trading. A Neuro-Fuzzy based Genetic Algorithms (NF-GA) system of the Volume Adjusted Moving Average (VAMA) membership functions is introduced to evaluate the effectiveness of using a hybrid intelligent system that integrates neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms techniques for increasing the efficiency of technical analysis based equivolume charting for trading stocks"--Introduction, page 1.

Membrane Systems With Limited Parallelism, Bianca Daniela Popa

Doctoral Dissertations

Membrane computing is an emerging research field that belongs to the more general area of molecular computing, which deals with computational models inspired from bio-molecular processes. Membrane computing aims at defining models, called membrane systems or P systems, which abstract the functioning and structure of the cell. A membrane system consists of a hierarchical arrangement of membranes delimiting regions, which represent various compartments of a cell, and with each region containing bio-chemical elements of various types and having associated evolution rules, which represent bio-chemical processes taking place inside the cell.

This work is a continuation of the investigations aiming to …

Rumor, Gender, And Authority In English Renaissance Drama, Keith M. Botelho

Doctoral Dissertations

The dramatic works of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson register a certain type of male character who is capable of discerning listening, an action that becomes an agent of specific masculine authority and identity. However, rumor's inherent ambiguity and indeterminacy poses the greatest threat to discerning listening. The paradox that emerges is that while the drama posits men as superior authors of information, it is men---and not women---who are responsible for the circulation of unauthorized information and rumor on the stage. Early modern literary and cultural discourses repeatedly pointed to the dangers of loose tongues and transgressive speech, …

An Investigation Of Pre-Service Teachers' And Professional Mathematicians' Perceptions Of Mathematical Proof At The Secondary School Level, David M. Gray

Doctoral Dissertations

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM] states that by the time students graduate high school, they should learn to present "arguments consisting of logically rigorous deductions of conclusions from hypotheses" (NCTM, 2000, p. 56) in "written forms that would be acceptable to professional mathematicians" (NCTM, 2000, p. 58). Research studies indicate, however, that students and teachers have difficulty with many aspects of mathematical proof, including its nature and meaning. In addition, there appears to be a disconnect between school teachers' and university mathematicians' expectations for their respective students regarding mathematical proof. This study examined the perceptions of thirteen …

Evaluation Of The Effect Of Vehicle Performance On Consumer Satisfaction, Elizabeth A. Cudney

Doctoral Dissertations

"Value is the relationship of functionality or benefit to the cost of a product or service. Consumers appear to seek value, but not all consumers are alike in their needs and wants. Common characteristics that consumers desire in automobiles include a high level of value relative to the product's cost. Consumers measure vehicle performance in terms of twenty-three attributes such as roominess, ride, reliability, handling, brake pedal feel, visibility, interior noise, acceleration, etc. Problems arise when automakers try to translate these characteristics into vehicle performance specifications and capabilities.

Quality is an essential element for both the consumer and producer since …

Visualizing The Invisible: The Role Of Race And White Racial Identity In The Teaching And Pedagogy Of New Esol Teachers, Tonda Liggett

Doctoral Dissertations

The nature of my dissertation inquiry and my overall argument explore the role that white racial identity has in the teaching and pedagogy of new ESOL teachers. Throughout this dissertation I argue for better understandings of race to raise awareness of how knowledge systems are socially constructed to support a level of inequality that disadvantages ESOL students of color. As ESOL teachers begin their work, I question how their white racial identity and cultural positionality influence their perceptions of diverse groups of English language learners and how these perceptions influence their teaching.

I focus on the social construction of knowledge …

Choran Community: The Aesthetics Of Encounter In Literary And Photographic Modernism, Emily M. Hinnov

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines novels, photographs, and phototexts by British and American artists published between the world wars in order to argue that these works re-envision community through a narrative aesthetic, which I term the choran moment, that communicates the possibility of genuinely empathetic understanding between self and other. My study of literary and photographic modernism is based upon these modern artists' awareness of an ever-present, organic community allied in common knowledge of the interconnection among humanity offered through convergence with and respect for difference. These choran moments of correlation are key to the aesthetics and therefore the politics of modernist …

Indians And Immigrants: Survivance Stories Of Literacies, Joyce Rain Anderson

Doctoral Dissertations

This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

This project stems from my mixedblood heritage and from a community of mixedblood scholars. In this text, I relate stories of the early colonization of Southern New England, of the zones of contact between whites (primarily English) and Indians (primarily Massachusett or Wampanoag). I offer perspectives on competing views of literacy and explored texts translated from Massachusett Algonquin to see how Indians used writing to enact rhetorics of survivance which challenged the prevailing assumptions of the dominant culture. Within these texts we see how Indians continued to define themselves in …

Transition Voices: Perspectives, Concerns, And Discontinuities Expressed By Children, Parents, And Teachers As Children Transition From A University -Affiliated Kindergarten To A Public School First Grade, Laurie J. Harper

Doctoral Dissertations

Transition encompasses the events and experiences that occur as a child moves from kindergarten to first grade. Transition marks the time when children are separated from a familiar routine and environment and placed into an environment of uncertainty, changing roles, and expectations. Children who experience continuity with earlier educational experiences show increased motivation, improved relationships with peers and adults, and higher achievement.

Using a constructivist grounded theory approach this study documented the perspectives, concerns, and experiences of ten children and their parents as children transitioned from a University-affiliated kindergarten program to a public school first grade. Data were gathered using …

The Process Of Integration And The Concept Of Integral: How Does Success With Applications And Comprehension Of Underlying Notions Such As Accumulation Relate To Students' Mathematical Fluency, Mariana Montiel

Doctoral Dissertations

At the end of the standard first calculus course, the student is expected to learn the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, and to be able to use the integral to produce new functions, or numbers which, they are told, represent the "area under the curve". At the beginning of the standard second calculus course, students are expected to generalize their knowledge, and use the integration process to generate solids of revolution, surface areas, arc length and work, among other applications. Looking at students' success or failure in these endeavors, it was detected that there are marked differences in an aspect that, …

The Moderating Roles Of National Culture And The Country Institutional Profiles On The Effect Of Market Orientation And Entrepreneurial Orientation On The Performance Of Banks In Jordan: An Empirical Investigation, Musa A. Dwairi

Doctoral Dissertations

The primary purpose of the study was to extend Jaworski and Kohli's (1993) market orientation (MO) model in the banking industry of Jordan. Specifically, the study (1) added entrepreneurial orientation (EO) as a second mediating variable with market orientation, (2) incorporated national culture and country institutional profile as moderators on the performance effects of MO and EO, and (3) replicated other relationships in the market orientation model of Jaworski and Kohli in the banking industry of Jordan. These moderating variables explained some of the discrepancies in the direct performance effects of MO and EO observed in international contexts.

To accomplish …

The Advantage For Name -Designated Characters During Reading, Kelly A. Peracchi

Doctoral Dissertations

When two characters are mentioned in a text, one referred to by a title (e.g., professor) and one referred to by a proper name (e.g., Christopher), the character referred to by the name is more accessible in memory. Although there has been a lot of research documenting the advantages that name-designated characters have over title-designated characters, most of it has done so using very short texts. The experiments reported in this dissertation utilized longer passages of text to examine whether certain variables that are known to affect accessibility, such as order of mention, number of mentions, elaboration, and distance, will …

Asian American Perspectives On College Student Experience: An Interpretive Narrative, Linda Chen Einsiedler

Doctoral Dissertations

This is a socio-cultural study examining contemporary Asian American college student experiences at a private liberal arts residential college in the rural Northeast United States. This project utilizes a grounded theory approach designed to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. The findings include a narrative interpretation that considers emotional experiences and social behaviors as sub-consciously held internalized identity beliefs.

This project details psychological and social dimensions of shared Asian American experiences with insights into individual interpretive perspective frameworks shaped by community cultures. This study describes a distinctive Asian American identity that conjoins ethnicity with racial self-identity. Variables in ethnic identity, …

Writing American Subjects: Race, Composition, And The Daily Themes Assignment For English 12 At Harvard, 1886--1887, Amy A. Zenger

Doctoral Dissertations

This study works to develop a way of reading the functions of race in classroom contexts---specifically in the predominantly white contexts in which composition was formed as a university subject. The model of race chosen for this study is based on critical race theories that conceive of race as being socially constructed, but also a force that organizes identity and experience in powerful ways, even when (or perhaps especially when) its presence is apparently silent---or is, in the terminology of Charles Mills, "normalized."

Primary data for the study is drawn from materials related to the daily theme assignment designed by …

The Effects Of Instruction Utilizing The Arts On The Academic Achievement Of Fourth-Grade Students, Elizabeth Fallin Manning

Doctoral Dissertations

In this day of accountability, members of state government agencies are looking for ways to increase student achievement, especially in the area of high stakes testing. Louisiana's accountability program has yielded state curriculum standards which identify the content that should be taught by specific grade levels. Teachers are now charged with the responsibility of finding methods to teach these standards. With all of the attention to these academic standards, what is the role of the arts? The Louisiana Institute for Education in the Arts (LAIEA) suggests that the arts are the tools with which to teach these academic standards. This …

Introducing Performance Into The Communication Curriculum For Engineers: Breaking The Mould, Constance Matilda Israel

Doctoral Dissertations

Education in South Africa has, thankfully, not escaped the winds of change. The introduction of Outcomes-based Education (OBE) has generated much debate. How have technikons responded to the educational transformation impelled by sociopolitical change? I refer here specifically to the Communication curricula for engineers at Mangosuthu Technikon.

This research explores the effects in my Communication classroom of introducing performance, through games and a dramatic text. My intention is to subvert the potential dangers of OBE, given its behaviourist and prescriptive thrust, and a possible reversion to the transmission model in its application at Mantec. I argue that gaps in the …

Reading The Personal: Toward A Theory And Practice Of Self -Narrative In Student Writing, Megan Fulwiler

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines students' personal essays as rhetorical projects of self-representation. The debate over the role of personal writing in composition studies has created a binary opposition between a modernist transcendent notion of self and a postmodern discursive subject. As a result, the complex issues of self and representation in student work is often dismissed in favor of what is traditionally called "academic discourse." The concept of "narrative identity" provides a way to identify the strategies that student writers use to establish ethos, assert agency, and negotiate codes of belonging within multiple social communities. Chapter 1, "Situating Personal Writing," considers …

Knowledge, Inquiry, Action: Teacher Collaboration At Prospect Center's Summer Institute, Karen Hendrickson Woolf

Doctoral Dissertations

This two-year study describes the work of approximately thirty educators, kindergarten/post-secondary, who attend the Summer Institute on Descriptive Inquiry and November Conference under the auspices of The Prospect Archive and Center for Education and Research in North Bennington, Vermont. The purpose of this study is to portray the experience of collaborative inquiry using Prospect Center's descriptive processes.

Teacher network groups generally center around specific content areas such as language arts or science. In contrast, Prospect Center is an independent national network of educators committed to guided observation and disciplined description as a grounding for teaching practice and inquiry. Generated by …

The Principal's Role In Promoting Success For Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Students: A Participatory Research Study, Maria Norma Martinez

Doctoral Dissertations

We need to understand more fully what facilitates success in schools with diverse populations. Through participatory research, the voices of school principals who are responsive to the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students were recorded and analyzed to provide insights on the practices that promote the school success of culturally and linguistically diverse students. Using a dialogic retrospective, the participants had the opportunity to engage, individually and collectively, in reflection and dialogue to identify common themes that emerged in their important work as school leaders and as advocates for diverse students.

Intercultural Communication Between Caucasian Unitedstatesians And Salvadorians: Implications For Team Dynamics, Gabriela Couch Melano

Doctoral Dissertations

With the advent of an increasingly interdependent world, organizations and businesses around the globe either purposefully seek or have no other option than to integrate work teams with members from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds. This is true in government, the corporate world, education, and the social service fields and community development endeavors, among others. However, multicultural teams most frequently experience frustrations and, at times, significant impasses in their performance. This phenomenon is directly related to differences in values and beliefs towards work, as well as to habits and expectations regarding teamwork (Bennett and Stewart, 1991; Cox, 1994; Donnellon, 1996; …

Predictor Variables Of Performance On The Louisiana Educational Assessment Program For The 21st Century, June Adeline Thomas

Doctoral Dissertations

Using the Student Characteristics: Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) composite national percentile scores, repeating fourth grade, spring third grade Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) scores, socioeconomic status, race, gender, and preschool attendance and the School Characteristics: teacher degree level, teacher experience, teacher professional development, and school Title I status, this study employed a stepwise multiple regression analysis to determine the best predictors of fourth grade scores on the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program for the 21st Century (LEAP 21). Students must pass the English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics portions of this test to be promoted to fifth grade. Having previously …

An Empirical Investigation Into The Personal Value Systems Of Accounting Managers Of Cpa Firms, Morsheda T. Hassan

Doctoral Dissertations

The objectives of this dissertation were to empirically examine (i) the primary value orientation of CPA firms' managers; (ii) the value profile of these managers; (iii) the relationship between the personal value systems of CPA firm's managers and their managerial decisions, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and managerial success; (iv) whether the personal value systems of CPA firms' differ by gender or age; (v) differences between the personal value systems of CPA firm's managers affiliated with the departments of auditing, taxation, consulting, information technology, general administration, or others, and (vi) differences between the personal value systems of CPA firms' managers and …

Fuzzy Product -Limit Estimators: Soft Computing In The Presence Of Very Small And Highly Censored Data Sets, Kian Lawrence Pokorny

Doctoral Dissertations

When very few data are available and a high proportion of the data is censored, accurate estimates of reliability are problematic. Standard statistical methods require a more complete data set, and with any fewer data, expert knowledge or heuristic methods are required. In the current research a computational system is developed that obtains a survival curve, point estimate, and confidence interval about the point estimate.

The system uses numerical methods to define fuzzy membership functions about each data point that quantify uncertainty due to censoring. The “fuzzy” data are then used to estimate a survival curve, and the mean survival …

Identifying Gifted African-American Students: A Case Study Of A Louisiana School System, Donna Lynn Sutton

Doctoral Dissertations

In 1995, the Office for Civil Rights conducted a compliance review of the Bayou Parish School System (a pseudonym) in Louisiana. The review revealed a statistically significant underrepresentation of African-American students in the Bayou Parish gifted program. This case study examined how African-American representation in a gifted program may be increased through the use of research-based interventions implemented by the Office for Civil Rights.

The researcher used both quantitative and qualitative methods to collect and analyze data. Documents from the Office for Civil Rights and the Louisiana Department of Education were examined to: (a) show patterns of African-American and nonminority …

Breaking The Norm: Family Characteristics Associated With The Avoidance Of Corporal Punishment, Wendy Ann Walsh

Doctoral Dissertations

Corporal punishment (CP) is an acceptable and frequently used discipline tactic, with 94% of parents of 2- to 4-year-olds using it (Straus, 2001). Much of the parenting literature indicates that there are more positive ways to discipline a child (May, 2000; Sears & Sears, 1995; Spock & Parker, 1998). Yet, only a minority of parents raise children without CP.

Using Belsky's (1984) model of parenting, this study analyzed the 1985 National Family Violence Survey to compare this minority group of parents with those who use CP in order to understand the experiences and context associated with avoiding it. The extent …

A Gender And Development (Gad) Implementation Evaluation: Testimonios Reveal The Successes, Challenges, And Unpredicted Results For Women's Equality And Community Sustainability, Melinda Salazar

Doctoral Dissertations

This is a case study of a Gender and Development implementation evaluation in several rural, Baha'i communities in Andean Bolivian. "Traditional Media as Change Agent," funded by UNIFEM (UN International Fund for Women) and implemented by BIC (Baha'i International Community), was an innovative, non-economic approach to change gender attitudes and behaviors by including men in a consultative process using traditional media. This study responded to criticism that GAD ignored the environment, was lodged squarely in Western economic development thought and Western feminist values, and lacked the voices of the women and men for whom development aims to benefit.

This study …