Digital Commons Network^™

Parent-Fostered Enrichment Activities And Academic Outcomes In Middle Childhood, Princess-Melissa T. Washington-Nortey

Theses and Dissertations

Despite numerous educational reforms, elementary school children in the United States continue to lag behind their peers from other developed countries on reading, math and science outcomes. Many interventions focus on strategies aimed at increasing the amount of classroom work children undertake. However, the key to improving outcomes may lie in out of school enrichment activities that facilitate learning. Drawing from Eccles Expectancy-Value theory(Simpkins, Fredricks, & Eccles, 2012), the current study focuses on assessing the impact of parent-fostered enrichment activities on child academic outcomes in the first three years of elementary school. Using secondary data from Early Childhood Longitudinal Study …

“An Uphill Battle”: Psychosocial Health And Self-Care Among Advocates Who Work Against Gender-Based Violence In South Carolina, Ebru Cayir

Theses and Dissertations

Gender-based violence (GBV) is one of the most pressing public health and human rights issues in the United States overall, and more specifically, in South Carolina (SC). SC consistently ranked among the highest in the nation in terms of female homicide rates. Non-profit organizations (NPOs) that focus their work specifically on GBV constitute an essential component of prevention and mitigation efforts in SC. Advocates who work for GBV-specific NPOs experience a wide range of psychosocial health and well-being benefits and risks due to their work. This study aimed to: 1) Identify the relationships between engaging in paid GBV-specific advocacy and …

“Bajan To Gullah” Cultural Capital: Wood, Stone, Iron, And Clay 1670 To 1770, Ramona Arlen La Roche

Theses and Dissertations

British planters, merchants and other non-landholding persons from Barbados owned and transported enslaved persons to the South Carolina colonial settlement as early as 1670. However, there is minimal specific information about Africans or Barbadian Creoles selected for these voyages. To date, no empirical research has examined any data on African or African descended artisans (enslaved or free) who accompanied their owners or authorized travelers to the New World. Such historical lack provides negligible if any recognition of the skillsets rendered by specific artisans that significantly enhanced the economic development of both Barbados initially, and later during the early development of …

Narrating The (Im)Migrant Experience: 21st Century African Fiction In The Age Of Globalization, Bernard Ayo Oniwe

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the fiction of 21st century African writers as a product of engagement with the forces of globalization and the related notions of cosmopolitanism and the fact of South to North migration. Analyzing migrant experiences in the writings of Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2007), Chika Unigwe’s The Black Street Sisters (2009), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2011) and Teju Cole’s Open City (2013), I argue that third-generation African writers, while building on the works of previous generations, take a global turn, and in the process, push the borders of African literature beyond the continent. 21st century African fiction, I …

Health Aid In Africa: Placement, Service Utilization, And Benefit, Carrie Dolan

Theses and Dissertations

While the health sector has attracted significant foreign aid, evidence on the effectiveness of this support is mixed. This dissertation examines the allocation of health aid within the context of placement, service utilization, and benefit. The first paper examined the sub-national allocation of Chinese development aid projects across Africa. I determined how political preferencing of Chinese aid specifically, allocating aid to the birth region of the current political leader differs across sectors such as health, education, and transportation. I find some evidence that aid, more broadly defined, is subject to political preferencing in recipient countries, which could potentially limit its …

Renewable Carbon From Lignin Biomass And Its Electrode And Catalyst Applications In Batteries, Supercapacitors, And Fuel Cells, Muslum Demir

Theses and Dissertations

Over the last century, almost all of the carbon materials developed for the energy industry are derived from fossil fuels. The growing global concerns about energy needs, fossil fuels consumption, and the related environmental issues have motived scientists to find new, green and sustainable energy resources such as the wind, solar and biomass energy. Essentially, biomass-derived materials can be utilized in energy storage and conversion devices such as Li-ion batteries, fuel cells, and supercapacitors. Among the biomass resources, lignin is a high volume byproduct from the pulp and paper industry and is currently burned to generate electricity and steam. The …

The Tea Party Versus Planning: A Study Of Tea Party Activism And Its Impact On Local Government Planning, Spencer A. Norman

Theses and Dissertations

The Tea Party movement’s effect on local and regional planning in Virginia has received little study. This work identifies how conservative political activism has impacted planning in the Commonwealth and how planners have responded. The study relies on a qualitative approach involving 22 semi-structured interviews with activists, planners, and citizens, as well as textual analyses of planning documents, local and regional news reports, and Tea Party social media. The resultant findings show that Tea Party activism is rooted in deep seated ideals about private property rights and individualism. It also reveals that planning processes that increased the amount of public …

Effect Of Temperature And Genetic Structure On Adaptive Evolution At A Dynamic Range Edge In The North American Gypsy Moth (Lymantria Dispar L.), Trevor M. Faske

Theses and Dissertations

The study of biological invasions is not only essential to regulate their vast potential for ecological and economical harm, they offer a unique opportunity to study adaptive evolution in the context of recent range expansions into novel environments. The North American invasion of the gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar L., since its introduction in 1869 to Massachusetts, has expanded westward to Minnesota, northward to Canada, and southward to North Carolina. Fluctuating range dynamics at the southern invasive edge are heavily influenced by heat exposure over their optimal (supraoptimal) during the larval stage of development. We coupled genomic sequencing with reciprocal …

Relocations Of The 'Outraged Slave': Transatlantic Reform Conversations Through Douglass's Periodical Fiction, Nikki D. Fernandes

Theses and Dissertations

Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how …

What's Haunting Jackson Ward? Race, Space, And Environmental Violence, Rachel Spraker

Theses and Dissertations

This research is about examining the way in which racialized environmental violence contributes to exploitative social relations becoming embedded in the everyday world. I argue that the space of the everyday has been produced through cycles of social relations proceeding from and/or tied to racialized environmental violence. I continue the work of critical scholars in asserting that social and environmental violence is linked in the same ideological impulse which seeks to hide itself behind a variety of alienating processes. The slow way in which environmental violence works is particularly impactful in these processes because of its attritional lethality, contributing to …

A Virtual Learning System’S Impact On Student Achievement In A Secondary Biology College Preparatory Course; An Action Research Study, Jamie Ankney Whitlock

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this action research study was to describe the effectiveness of a virtual learning system (VLS) on college preparatory biology students’ pre- and posttest scores. Data were gathered from observations of students using the VLS for video lectures, practice tests, reviewing, and other online simulations in the spring of 2017. Data were also collected using a pretest and a posttest designed by the participant-researcher before and after the implementation of the VLS. A t test was used to analyze the pre- and posttest quantitative data, and the constant comparative method was used to analyze the qualitative data from …

Adventures Close To Home, Ryan Syrell

Theses and Dissertations

My work articulates experiences of intimacy and porosity with regard to domestic space. I think of these paintings as fields of interrelatedness which work to dismantle the perceived thresholds between things. The following text brings together the research of my studio practice and a survey of artists, writers, and filmmakers who have charted related spaces of the ordinary, domestic, and porous.

Positions Of Place: Converging Viewpoints In Visual Communication, Gregory J. Schmidt

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis includes a body of work that explores our visual relationship to the physical spaces and places we inhabit in our everyday lives. Today we live in a complex world where we are bombarded with fragments of information and inundated with distractions. As designers, we are equipped with tools and methods that allow us to experience and interpret our environment through multi-faceted perspectives and from different viewpoints. My approach to graphic design adopts techniques and practices from a mix of different disciplines. The work focuses on a design process that alternates between the parallel depiction of first-person and third-person …

Misencounters, Francisco J. Besa

Theses and Dissertations

We are immersed in an era of supermodernity, an age defined by excesses: of information—the acceleration of historical time—spatial overabundance—the nullification of distance by electronic media and transportation—and an excess of self-reflexive individuality. In this context, the idea of place is giving way to non-places: designed spaces in which social relations are tangential and the boundary between the individual and the group is increasingly mediated. Media plays an important role in the creation of non-places, by favoring a removed form of communication made pervasive and extensive through mobile devices. The blurring of the line between media and actuality …

Well Enough Alone: Stories, Sarah Jane Huskey

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of short stories aims to capture the difficulties of telling anything at all, let alone the truth, the whole story, or the abstract reality. Though its thematic concerns might seem a bit cheerless at first blush, Well Enough Alone aims to treat them as prominent features of day-to-day life rather than gloomy afflictions or the loci of trauma.

Trailer Park Residents: Are They Worthy Of Society's Respect, Steve Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

Existing research is limited in explaining the existence of and reasons for stereotypes held against trailer park residents. This study uses an experimental design to measure attitudes towards trailer park residents, specifically in terms of being considered worthy of society’s respect. An Internet questionnaire was designed and administered to a sample of 559 introductory sociology students at a Midwestern university using semantic differentials to measure attitudes towards a fictitious couple. Participants were divided into a control and an experimental group. The groups were presented with two different vignettes, which were the same except for the experimental group where the vignette …

Assessment Of Climate Change And Agricultural Land Use Change On Streamflow Input To Devils Lake: A Case Study Of The Mauvais Coulee Sub-Basin, Courtney Jackson

Theses and Dissertations

Since 1993, Devils Lake in North Dakota has experienced a prolonged rise in lake level and flooding of the lake’s neighboring areas within the closed basin system. Understanding the relative contribution of climate change and land use change is needed to explain the historical rise in lake level, and to evaluate the potential impact of anthropogenic climate change upon future lake conditions and management. Four methodologies were considered to examine the relative contribution of climatic and human landscape drivers to streamflow variations: statistical, ecohydrologic, physically-based modeling, and elasticity of streamflow; for this study, ecohydrologic and climate elasticity were selected. Agricultural …

An Evaluation Of Elk Home Range Variation In North Dakota, Jacqueline Marie Amor

Theses and Dissertations

In North Dakota, dispersing elk (Cervus elaphus) were colonizing areas of suitable habitat in Turtle Mountain, Pembina Hills, and Porcupine Hills, ND, USA. Although these 3 elk herds were small (~100–250 individuals each), they had been responsible for crop depredation in these areas. The North Dakota Game and Fish Department (NDGF) had little information on these elk herds. In cooperation with Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and Manitoba Department of Sustainable Development, NDGF contracted with the University of North Dakota (UND) to collect and analyze critical baseline information to better manage these elk herds. The objectives of this study were to …

Mimic-Women: Twentieth-Century American Women On The Edges Of Exploration, Michele R. Willman

Theses and Dissertations

Women have been involved in exploration as adventurers, discoverers, mountaineers, and botanists for centuries. Yet, women have largely been unrecognized as explorers. This project shows that women in exploration have had to practice physical and rhetorical strategies to overcome historical and traditional gender biases in exploration and its related fields. Expanding on Homi Bhabha’s explanation of colonial mimicry, I argue that twentieth-century American women explorers practiced a form of gender-based mimicry to make their presence in exploration possible. At times, they mimicked their male explorer-counterparts such as when they inhabited the imperial gaze. At other times, they employed gendered rhetorical …

The Impacts Of Lake-Effect Snow On Traffic Volume In Ohio And Indiana, 2011-2015, Daniel Allen Burow

Theses and Dissertations

Snowfall presents a hazard to drivers by reducing visibility and increasing safe stopping distances. As a result, some drivers cancel trips if snowfall is occurring or forecasted, and traffic volumes often decrease on snowy days. Lake-effect snow is very localized and is thus hypothesized to have a lesser influence on traffic volume than synoptic-scale snow, which usually covers a broader areal extent. Traffic volume in northeast Ohio and northern Indiana is studied using a matched-pair analysis to determine if volumes differ between lake-effect and synoptic-scale snowfall in these regions. While little statistical evidence is found to support this hypothesis, other …

Evaluating Wetland Expansion In A Tallgrass Prairie-Wetland Restoration, Katie Mae Engelmann

Theses and Dissertations

Remote sensing is an effective tool to inventory and monitor wetlands at large spatial scales. This study examined the effect of wetland restoration practices at Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge (GRNWR) in northwest Minnesota on the distribution, location, size and temporal changes of wetlands. A Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) land cover classification method was applied that integrated spectral data, LiDAR elevation, and LiDAR derived ancillary data of slope, aspect, and TWI. Accuracy of remote wetland mapping was compared with onsite wetland delineation.

The GEOBIA method produced land cover classifications with high overall accuracy (88 – 91 percent). Wetland area …

Online Versus On-Ground: Student Outcomes And The Influence Of Student Engagement In A College Success Course, Theresa Elizabeth Orosz

Theses and Dissertations

Online course enrollments are growing despite concerns about higher withdrawal rates and lower persistence rates, academic performance, and levels of engagement (Bambara, Harbour, Davies, & Athey, 2009; Blackner, 2000; Jaggars & Xu, 2010; Xu & Jaggars, 2011). College success courses, which are meant to bolster new students' academic skills and foster engagement, are being offered online, placing academically inexperienced students in a high risk learning environment. This mixed methods study sought to understand the experience of community college students enrolled in online and on-ground sections of a college success course and how engagement may have influenced their outcomes. Despite similarly …

Fresh Air: The Impact Of Reformulated Gasoline On Infant Health, Mohammed Husain

Theses and Dissertations

This paper considers a 1996 Reformulated Gasoline program, where gasoline emissions were regulated in California, to observe the effects on infant health indicators. I use a cross-county analysis to find significant effects from the policy that suggests an improvement in birth weight, gestational length, and infant mortality.

E-Waste In Relation To Geopolitical Forces: A Case Study Of The United States - Mexico Border Region, Michael A. Hicks

Theses and Dissertations

Analysis deconstructs the electronic waste industry and its interconnectedness to geopolitical forces and economic development in the border region between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico. A symbiotic business relationship exists between informal e-waste collectors, non-profit collection sites, and for-profit recyclers. Fieldwork data is analyzed from a slow/structural violence perspective.

Documenting Internationalism: The Instituto Cubano Del Arte E Industria Cinematográficos As A Cultural Extension Of Cuban Foreign Policy, Vella V. Voynova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the connection between the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos and the Cuban Revolution's internationalism and argues that it made ICAIC documentarians, their methods of production, and their documentary films a valuable asset to Cuban foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s.

Slavery, Migration, And Local Development In The Western Us, Colin Q. Sharpe

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the effects of migration from eastern slave states in the 19th century on the subsequent development of counties in the Western US. I find that increased migration from slave states has a large, statistically significant negative effect on 2010 income, and no significant effect on racial inequality or overall income inequality. These findings are robust to a variety of specifications, including controls for geographic factors, state fixed effects, and various county level social and economic conditions. Data on individual migrants suggest that the cause of the negative income effect is the lower average human capital endowment of …

The Three Year Clock, Sam Roeck

Theses and Dissertations

Roeck: I mean, it’s “a” future. It’s like half what I want to be and half completely not what I want. I didn’t want to create a future that I was entirely excited about because I’m not actually that excited about the future. It looks pretty fucking grim.

Natural Population Dynamics Of Rock Iguanas In The Bahama Archipelago, Giuliano Colosimo

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding whether groups of individuals represent a single panmictic gene pool, or multiple genetically structured populations across a species range should aid in predicting whether specific conservation strategies would be more or less effective for species preservation. Further, contrasting the population structures of multiple coexisting taxa could foster an even deeper understanding of evolutionary divergence among demes and potentially even suggest local adaptation in the form of tight coevolutionary relationships. Finally, the analysis of population dynamics within small and isolated populations could improve our understanding of the relative importance that different evolutionary mechanisms have in predicting population persistence in the …

Utilization Of Outdoor Resources To Enhance Understanding Of Geosciences, Sarah Radencic Lalk

Theses and Dissertations

Societal awareness and general understanding of the diversity of geosciences environments and phenomena across regions is vital. The primary method to obtain information about geosciences is through mass media. However, there is little coverage of geosciences information and the public may not trust it because of low geosciences awareness. Geosciences are rarely included as part of K-12 curricula and are optional at the collegiate level, contributing to the public deficiency regarding awareness and understanding of the geosciences. This research study investigated methods utilizing outdoor resources in an effort to increase region-specific understanding and awareness of geosciences among diverse groups. A …

Hill-Fort Sites And Tumuli In The Shkodra Plain Region Of Northern Albania: A Geospatial Perspective, Dora Jane Lambert

Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this research was to determine the environmental and social factors that led to the shift of settlement patterning from agro-pastoral in the late Neolithic to hillort sites at the turn of the Early Bronze Age and why burial mounds (tumuli) were erected further than anticipated from corresponding hillort sites in the Shkodra Plain region in Northern Albania. Geospatial techniques were used to examine 168 tumuli and seven hillort sites. These were mapped to examine visibility, viewshed, slope, and potential prehistoric networks. Based on the landscape visibility GIS results, it was found that hillort sites and tumuli were …