Digital Commons Network^™

Westward Empire: George Berkeley’S ‘Verses On The Prospect Of Planting Of Arts’ In American Art And Cultural History, Elizabeth Kiszonas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the extraordinary half-life of a single line of poetry: “Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way…”. Beginning with their composition in 1726 by the Irish- Anglican bishop George Berkeley, these words colonized an enormous swath of cultural landscape over nearly two centuries. Immortalized in newsprint, broadsides, statesmen’s speeches, reading primers, geographies, the first scholarly history of the United States, as well as in poetry, paintings, lithographs, and photographs, the words evolved from an old-world vision of prophetic empire into a nationalist slogan of manifest destiny. Following the poem as it threads through literary and visual culture, …

Liable To Change, Jody Travis Thompson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Liable to Change is a body of paintings in which I explore diverse approaches to the representation of visual space. Depictions of space and movement change throughout the pictures by combining various artistic conventions, such as trompe l’oeil realism and non-objective, geometric abstraction. Oil paint, resin, beeswax, and other materials create built-up surfaces which contain the history of their making. Interaction between various finishes and light on these surfaces changes based on the viewers' proximity to the painting. Images of monkey bars, lattice, golden ratio and flower of life patterns provide a structure through which line, form, and space are …

Give Up The Ghost, Hannah T. Mcbroom

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Give Up the Ghost is a series of six paintings created in Fall 2018 and Spring 2019. The paintings are an introspective examination of transgender subjectivity in visual narrative.

In this paper, I separate the personal and research through first and third person, similarly to how I separate imagery and mark making in my paintings. The paper is broken up into a description of the project, the history and theory which informs the work, and why painting is used to describe bodies and spaces.

Give Up the Ghost refers to giving up social expectations as determined by gender. The paintings …

Good Dyke Art, Sam M. Mack

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The work in good dyke art visually expands upon conversations about institutional critique and its contradictions, specifically questioning who dictates the boundaries between institutions and bodies: how divisions are made between them and who enacts or receives force. One’s participation in this critique, however, indicates a participation in the problematics of the institution and by extension, a desire to critique may also be considered a desire to participate in that system.

Ceramic, glaze, and found objects manifest an allegorical formalism that utilizes coded languages of institutional spaces, traditions of queer-coding, and charged word-play. The ceramic vessel forms reference the Ancient …

An Echo From The Living Room, Makayla Nichole Songer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We are unable to interface with reality as it is. Everything that encompasses our understanding of reality and ourselves—from our physical perceptions to our memories—are subject to innate flaws that make a complete grasp of reality impossible. an echo from the living room is invested in the idea that reality itself is malleable, taking influence from altered states of reality such as dreams, nightmares, and memory. Drawing from the personal experiences of recurring nightmares and living in a haunted house, as well film, the uncanny, and the multiple, an echo from the living room strives to create space for these …

“Because I Care I Risk”: How Ceo Free Market Orientation Affects The Extent And Type Of Income Smoothing, Mirzokhidjon S. Abdurakhmonov

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The executive political ideology literature suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity because social and economic issues are conflated. This has created an inconsistency in empirical findings with the theoretical predictions of the political ideology construct. In this dissertation, I identify a distinct economic component, free market orientation, based on support for economic individualism, competition, and property rights to reconcile these inconsistencies. Specifically, I argue that these indicators of free market orientation will have a unique impact on the way executives run their organizations. I develop a novel scale that measures CEO economic values that I term free market orientation …

To Be Thus Is Nothing, But To Be Safely Thus: Applying The Michael Chekhov Technique To The Character And Fight Direction Of "Macbeth", Scott Nicholas Russell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration of the Michael Chekhov technique as it was applied to the role of Macbeth, as well as the Fight Direction of the play. This production of Macbeth ran from February 1, 2019 to February 10, 2019 at the Global Campus Theatre at the University of Arkansas in downtown Fayetteville; this thesis includes documentation of the show. Additionally, this thesis includes documentation on my self-created one-person show, Forte and Foible, my headshot and resume, and link to my website.

Assessment And Support For Basic Computer Skills At Community College Hispanic Serving Institutions In California, Jason Wayne Hough

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This cross-sectional survey study was conducted to determine if California community colleges designated as Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) assess incoming students for basic computer skills, provide learning support for these skills, as well as assess the attitude of administrators towards basic computer skills of incoming students. Prior published research documented the false assumption in higher education incoming students are “digital natives”, capable of effectively using technology expected on college campuses; however, there was no research focused on community colleges designated as HSIs. The study adds to the body of literature about the assessment of and support for basic computer skills …

Electrophysiological Correlates Of Visual Object Category Formation In A Prototype-Distortion Task, Stephanie Marie Long

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In perceptual learning studies, participants engage in extensive training in the discrimination of visual stimuli in order to modulate perceptual performance. Much of the literature in perceptual learning has looked at the induction of the reorganization of low-level representations in V1. However, much remains to be understood about the mechanisms behind how the adult brain (an expert in visual object categorization) extracts high-level visual objects from the environment and categorically represents them in the cortical visual hierarchy. Here, I used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural mechanisms involved in object representation formation during a hybrid visual search and prototype …

Evaluating The Efficacy Of Programs For Veteran Students, Jonathan Paul Lopez

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Veteran students are increasingly prominent in U.S. colleges and universities. The transition from military to civilian life is already challenging, and the transition to the academic realm can be even more so, especially when most veteran students are also first-generation college students, transfer students from community colleges to 4-year universities, or both. The specific problem is that the transition from military to student life requires significant adjustment on the part of both veterans and schools, and it was not known how these students’ school leaders could best help these veteran students adjust. The purpose for conducting this quantitative, historical, non-experimental …

A Case Study Of Faculty Experiences In A College Union, Robert Francis Stagni

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

College Unions remain an important presence on many campuses, and often have long legacies of service to students and the campus. Faculty members have largely been left out of the college union literature, despite their tenure on campuses. This study examined the experiences of faculty members with the college union at a case study institution. Interviews with faculty produced themes of participant’s connection to the union, faculty convenience, and student purpose. Many faculty participants shared common traits that may have influenced their involvement in, and experiences with, the union, such as an undergraduate degree from the same institution and their …

Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Enhanced Mentoring For Delinquency Prevention, Allison Smith

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Youth with certain risk factors (e.g., from a minority group, low-income status, previous contact with the juvenile justice system) are particularly at risk for juvenile delinquency and associated problems (e.g., school failure, mental health problems). In addition, these problems are quite costly to youth, their families, and society as a whole. Mentoring programs have shown modest, but consistent, effects in the prevention and reduction of juvenile delinquency and associated problems. Previous research has identified promising enhancements (i.e., advocacy/teaching roles for mentors, rigorous match processes, comprehensive mentor training, ongoing mentor support) that may increase the effectiveness of mentoring in producing positive …

Associate And Baccalaureate Degree Nursing Students’ Knowledge Of And Attitudes Toward Medication Errors And Reporting Medication Errors: Implications For Curriculum Development, Tabatha Diann Teal

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper evaluates senior nursing students’ knowledge and attitudes of medication errors and reporting errors. This study was conducted to evaluate a need for improvements to nursing education on these two concepts. This mixed method study was conducted using a modified version of the Medication Administration Error Reporting Survey by Wakefield, Uden-Holman, and Wakefield (2005) and focus group sessions at four nursing programs in the Southern United States. Medication errors continue to be a threat to patient safety and underreporting exists due to the stigma surrounding admitting a mistake. Evaluating nursing students’ knowledge and attitudes on these concepts is a …

The Finnish Line: Verbal Tactics Of Small States In Immature Anarchy, Christopher Main

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rules-based international system which has steadily emerged over the last century is in decline. Realists fail to realize that the fundamental anarchy of the international system can mature into a rules-based system which constrains geopolitics. Liberals fail to realize that it can regress in the opposite direction, towards the self-help system described by the realists. Small states stand to lose the most in this regression and are least equipped to fight it by material means. Finland is an ideal example of such a small state, and its foreign policy is articulated by President Sauli Niinistö. This paper will analyze …

Diversity And Health: Three Essays Exploring Social Context And Outcomes, Aaron Novotny

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the world becomes more diverse and more integrated, examining how racial, political, and food diversity influences individuals’ consumption, behaviors, and health becomes more paramount than ever before. The United States grows more racially diverse with large racial and ethnic shifts on the horizon regarding the proportion of the population. With the U.S. population expected to become more diverse, individuals’ political affiliation becoming more prevalent to personal identity, and food security becoming more problematic; we examine how racial, political, and food diversity influences individuals’ consumption and preferences with the intent to understand what changes in health and preferences may occur. …

Designing A Human-Centric Rigid Body Armor For Female Police Officers: The Implications Of Fit On Performance And Gender Inclusivity, Sarah West

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The lack of availability of female plates for police officers is an issue that has not been analyzed. Female anthropometry is uniformly different from male anthropometry. Currently available hard plates are flat. These plates may decrease coverage while increasing feelings of poor fit, discomfort, and poor mobility for both male and female officers. The plates designed for males offer the possibility of female officers experiencing feelings of gender exclusion. This research project explored the current perceptions of male and female police officers in Arkansas across the dimensions of fit, comfort, and mobility in the context of hard plate body armor. …

Crumbling Foundations: The Case For Prioritizing Self-Care Among Educational Leaders, Joshua Brent Ray

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a potentially dangerous disassociation between human behavior, decision-making, and ethics and the notion that these fundamental aspects of what it means to be human originate simply as the functions of an organ. A deeper knowledge of the operation and limitations of the brain suggests biological input could possess the ability to unknowingly alter human behavior and effectiveness. This study utilizes a research-based understanding of the implications of human health and self-care habits on neurological, psychological, and behavioral function to examine the current practices of educational administrators across Arkansas while exploring systemic and job-based factors within the profession that …

Black Female Graduate Students' Experiences Of Racial Microaggressions At A Southern University, Kendra Elizabeth Shoge

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Researchers have found that microaggressions can cause psychological distress, frustration, avoidance, confusion, resentment, hopelessness, and fear. Previous studies from Southern universities have addressed the adjustment experiences of Black women in graduate programs, obstacles faced by Black women in higher education and strategies to overcome those obstacles, and factors associated with Black student motivation and achievement. Discrimination and racism are factors identified in those studies, however, there is little research on the experiences of Black women in graduate programs and the impact of racial microaggressions on them.

The purpose of this study was to examine Black female graduate students’ experiences of …

Validation Of A 5-Minute Vpc Test To Assess And Compare Cognitively Intact Individuals And Individuals With Cognitive Impairments, Spencer Smith

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The prevalence of cognitive impairments in the older adult population is growing. Finding treatment solutions to impede a cognitive decline can possibly lead to fewer cases of mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. A Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) could serve as a tool to predict, monitor, and regulate people who are susceptible to a cognitive decline. The purpose of this study was to 1) to determine the validity of the Neurotrack 5-minute VPC test with the Neurotrack 30-minute VPC test, 2) to determine the test-retest reliability of the Neurotrack 5-minute VPC test, 3) to compare Neurotrack 5-minute VPC scores …

The Image From The Road: Towards Mapping The Phenomenological, Rachel Anna Smith Loerts

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

An area of focus, used in early and contemporary forms of cognitive geography research, is the ‘cognitive map’, a concept that suggests “that people hold a map-like database in their minds to which they can add and use to tackle geographical tasks”. Kevin Lynch, an urban planner in the 1960s, was an early adopter of the cognitive map approach to reveal spatial cognition, what or how people see their environment, specifically cognition of the urban environment. Lynch’s research aimed to develop empirical methods, to identify how people make spatial relationships. Contemporary tools like machine learning are now considered relevant for …

Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia: Crossing Borders And Proposing A New Concept Of Indonesian Domestic Workers, Tri Murniati

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, Indonesian migrant women who seek employment as domestic workers in foreign countries have caught the Indonesian reading public’s attention with their novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction writings. Creative work by migrant domestic workers was established as a genre when Denok Kanthi Rokhmatika, a domestic worker who works in Hong Kong published her collection of short stories Negeri Elok nan Keras dimana Kami Berjuang (Beautiful and Tough Country where We Struggle) in 2002 (Insani and Raihan iii). The publication marks the birth of a new genre, which has become known as “Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia” (Indonesian migrant …

To And Through College: Investigating Attitudes Towards, Enrollment In, And Graduation From College, Elise Swanson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Postsecondary access and degree completion are increasingly important concerns for individuals and policymakers. This dissertation presents evidence on three distinct strategies for increasing students’ level of preparedness for higher education, rates of postsecondary enrollment, and rates of postsecondary degree completion. The first is an intervention aimed at increasing eighth-grade students’ familiarity with college life. Results from an experimental study indicate that students assigned to participate in campus visits demonstrate higher levels of knowledge about college, are more likely to have conversations with school personnel about college, put forth higher levels of effort while completing a college-related survey, and express a …

Social Class And Social Networks: How Sociocultural Upbringing Affects Organizational Social Networks, Jacqueline Tilton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Organizations are a key venue where individuals from different backgrounds have the opportunity to interact and yet we know very little about how social class background shapes interactions within the workplace. There is reason to believe that the differing value systems of social class groups influence their attitudes and behavior towards workplace connections and relationship formation. This article considers how social class background affects organizational social networks as well as the class-distinct values and attitudes that shape networking behavior of employees. To study this phenomena, I analyze a sample of 490 employees from a broad range of roles and organizations …

Mental Health On Trial: An In-Depth Look At The Criminalization Of Mental Illness In The United States Criminal Justice System, Addison Elise Shemin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The criminal justice system was created to identify, incarcerate, and rehabilitate men and women that have broken the law. However, over two million people with mental illnesses are placed into jails every year. The lack of proper psychological evaluation and diagnosis coupled with misunderstood evidence and economic hardship has produced a system that treats these men and women as criminals rather than someone suffering from an illness. When an individual with mental health issues comes into contact with the criminal justice system they are often improperly evaluated by first responders, wrongfully convicted, and inappropriately sentenced. The lack of proper psychological …

Music, Language, And Rhythmic Timing, Rhimmon Simchy-Gross

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Neural, perceptual, and cognitive oscillations synchronize with rhythmic events in both speech (Luo & Poeppel, 2007) and music (Snyder & Large, 2005). This synchronization decreases perceptual thresholds to temporally predictable events (Lawrance et al., 2014), improves task performance (Ellis & Jones, 2010), and enables speech intelligibility (Peelle & Davis, 2012). Despite implications of music-language transfer effects for improving language outcomes (Gordon et al., 2015), proposals that shared neural and cognitive resources underlie music and speech rhythm perception (e.g., Tierney & Kraus, 2014) are not yet substantiated. The present research aimed to explore this potential overlap by testing whether music-induced oscillations …

Effects Of Critical Reflection On University Students’ Cognitive Achievement In Agricultural Mechanization, Patterson P. Hilaire

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Experiential learning continues to play a vital role in agricultural education and mechanization laboratories (Shoulders & Myers, 2013). An essential component of experiential learning is critical reflection. Critical reflection helps students process and construct meaning from laboratory experiences. A study conducted by Shoulders and Myers (2013) revealed that only 15.4% of the agricultural educators the researchers interviewed incorporated reflective practices laboratory experiences. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of critical reflection on students’ achievement following five agricultural mechanization laboratory activities. The results from this study revealed that critical reflection had a consistently positive effect on immediate …

Socially Constructing Marijuana Policy And Target Populations In The News Media, Jonathan Taylor Langner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on different aspects of the co-construction African Americans and marijuana in the news. First, the historical background of modern drug laws, including marijuana prohibition, and how this was dependent on racialized fears in the wake of the abolition of slavery. Next, the prevalence and variety of marijuana constructions in a national newspaper, with careful attention paid to associations with racial identifiers. Finally, how African American athletes and marijuana are co-constructed in an exemplary article.

Chapter 2 describes how racial fears relate to the social construction of disadvantaged population in the media. We first describe the current situation …

Familiarization Through Ambient Images Alone, Nia Imani Gipson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The term “ambient images” has begun to show up in much of the current literature on facial recognition. Ambient images refer to naturally occurring views of a face that captures the idiosyncratic ways in which a target face may vary (Ritchie & Burton, 2017). Much of the literature on ambient images have concluded that exposing people to ambient images of a target face can lead to improved facial recognition for that target face. Some studies have even suggested that familiarity is the result of increased exposure to ambient images of a target face (Burton, Kramer, Ritchie, & Jenkins, 2016). The …

Advanced Statistics In Arkansas Sports Reporting, Andrew Lee Epperson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study seeks to analyze how Arkansas’ sports journalists are adapting to the recent surge in available advanced statistics that are being used by certain national news organizations. Using in-depth qualitative research that includes in-depth interviews with a number of individuals in the print, broadcast, and athletics side of sports coverage, we discover how journalists and coaches use these next-generation analytics, what they fundamentally mean for the evolution of each respective path, and why so few Arkansas reporters and writers use them at the time of this paper’s defense. We see how budgets and deadlines restrict the use of these …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Motor Planning With Core Vocabulary: A Behavior Analytic Account, Alison Judith Karnes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) increases, it is important for practitioners to continue to improve evidence-based practices (EBP) for the treatment of ASD symptoms (i.e., impairments in social communication and repetitive behaviors and restricted interests; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013). It is estimated that 30-50% of individuals with autism do not acquire functional speech (Wodka, Mathy, & Kalb, 2013). These individuals would make appropriate candidates for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC; Mirenda, 2003). One form of AAC is the speech-generating device (SGD). Over the last ten years, tablet-based technologies including iPad minisⓇ have been emphasized in the …