Digital Commons Network^™

Development And Initial Validation Of The Parent And Family Engagement In Higher Education Measure, Michelle R. Mcnulty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the history of higher education in the United States, parents and family members of college students have often found themselves as obsolete to the postsecondary experience. Minimal research has been dedicated to understanding the experience of parents and family members of college students until the millennial generation began their collegiate years (Harper et al., 2012; Wartman & Savage, 2008). In consideration of a new generation of college students (i.e., Gen Z) and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it is crucial to illuminate the complexities of parent and family engagement in higher education and the needs of …

Relationships Among The Community Of Inquiry, Achievement Emotions, And Academic Achievement In Asynchronous Online Learning In Higher Education, David H. Tai

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research aimed to investigate how achievement emotions predict, mediate, and affect academic achievement in online learning. Online learning has been proliferating, but little is known about how emotion mediates cognition in the Community of Inquiry framework. Recent progress in cognitive neuroscience provided the theoretical foundation for researchers to investigate emotion's role in online learning, especially academic achievement. The researcher of this study adopted a quantitative non-experimental research design to investigate how achievement emotions mediated, predicted, and affected academic achievement in the Community of Inquiry framework. The Partial Least Square Structure Equation Modeling (PLS- SEM) method was adopted for statistical …

The Boy Scouts Of America Merit Badge Program And Career Development, Todd R. Van Auken

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to determine whether a youth’s career development, as defined by the Career Maturity Inventory (CMI Form C), is associated with motivation, student grade level, and number of merit badges earned as a result of participation as Boy Scouts. For close to three decades there has been a call to improve career counseling for middle and high school youth. However, due to a shortage of school counselors in middle and high schools, counselors are inundated with heavy workloads of various responsibilities and do not always have the ability to focus on youth career development. Thus, …

The Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy And Career Action Steps Of Humanities Students: A Quantitative Survey Analysis, Catherine Gorman Cordova

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In an era of governmentally controlled education systems sustained through performance-based funding metrics, the value of higher education is often considered justified by socioeconomic impact and degree employability. Although modern academia traces its roots to the humanities and liberal arts for its foundation, degrees without direct job relation, and the students seeking these degrees, are often considered less employable than majors directly linked to vocations. However, the humanities and labor market are not mutually exclusive. Influenced by Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) (Lent, et al., 1994), Self-Efficacy Theory (Bandura, 1977), and Career Maturity Theory (Crites, 1973), this cross-sectional quantitative survey …

Collaboratively Building A Teaching Model (Tttc) In A Doctoral Science Education Program: An Autoethnography, Alton George Declaire

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This autoethnography illustrates benefits of doctoral education consistent with the holistic paradigm underlying today’s society and development of a practice-research-practice cycle useful to science teacher educators. Emergent hypotheses indicate ways to increase a doctoral student’s well-being, intellectual risk taking, production of creative products, and expedite in-depth learning. The hypotheses were derived from the processes and pathways I used to make sense of the learning opportunities afforded me and features of my experience that led to my well-being and maintaining my enthusiasm despite the significant life challenges I encountered and the tedious parts of the doctoral process.The original research question was, …

Finding Signal In The Noise: High-Fidelity, Quantitative, Optical Blood Perfusion Imaging With Interference, Abdul Mohaimen Safi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For label-free, non-invasive, wide field-of-view (FOV) imaging/monitoring of blood flow, speckle-based approaches are gaining popularity. However, to obtain quantitative flow information, speckle techniques rely on the multi-exposure scheme which requires complex, bulky, and expensive instrumentation, limiting its application to preclinical studies. This dissertation directly addresses these issues. In the first part of this dissertation, we report a novel single shot synthetic multi-exposure speckle imaging (syMESI) method to synthetically produce multi-exposure images from one short single exposure speckle image using spatial binning/averaging. We demonstrate that syMESI can reimagine conventional hardware based MESI, with low-cost single exposure laser speckle imaging (LSCI) instrumentation. …

Meditation And Mindfulness Practice: Mitigating Burnout And Promoting Wellbeing Among Faculty, Billy E. Thomas Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this autoethnography was to explore meditation and mindfulness to mitigate burnout and promote wellbeing among faculty. I explored how meditation and mindfulness shaped me personally and professionally as an educator. I explored the methods I used to promote my own wellbeing and to deal with my experiences of burnout, anxiety, and depression. Self Determination Theory and Flow helped to inform this autoethnography, as well as mindfulness and meditation as tools for promoting faculty wellbeing. By telling my personal and professional story and how I have benefited from meditation and mindfulness practices, I hope to provide a road …

Passion To Purpose: An Autobiographical Narrative Inquiry Into The Development Of The Summer Ace Program, Owen Hooper

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Students transitioning from high school to college are met with many challenges beyond academics including social acclimation, campus culture integration, and holistic wellness. Researchers agree that a successful and purposeful transition for incoming college students requires involvement and engagement with peers to help students adapt and increase their likelihood to graduate (Astin, 1999; Kuh, 2009; Tinto, 1998). This autobiographical narrative inquiry reflects on past experiences in assessing the needs of transitioning students at the University of South Florida and developing a purposeful programming model to support students. I aim to help the reader understand my personal commitment to these programs …

Light-Controlled Magnetism And Magnetic Sensing In Two-Dimensional Vanadium Dichalcogenides And Related Semiconductors, Valery Ortiz Jimenez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) semiconductors hold enormous potential for modern optoelectronic devices, magnetic sensing, and quantum computing applications. By inducing long-range ferromagnetism (FM) in these semiconductors by stacking them with other magnetic TMDs or through the introduction of small amounts of a magnetic dopant, it is possible to extend their potential in emerging spintronic applications. In this dissertation, we aim to demonstrate two important applications of these materials: magnetic sensing and light-mediated, room temperature (RT) FM in V-doped WS2 (V-WS2) and V-WSe2 monolayers and in ML VSe2/TS2 (T = Mo and W) heterostructures. In this work, we developed …

Exploring The Relationship Between Student Expected Engagement And Referrals To The Behavioral Intervention Team, Makenzie R. Schiemann

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Higher education administrators are tasked with supporting and retaining students with increasing needs. These needs often include emotional and mental health issues but can worsen to include suicidality and violence toward others. Traditional campus approaches for supporting students and intervening for violence, such as counseling and campus safety, have been reactionary rather than proactive. Behavioral Intervention Teams (BITs) have emerged as a mechanism for heading off violence before it occurs while also supporting students who may never engage in violence but need support. These teams were born out of the concept that violence is preventable and have grown into a …

Informal Communication, Sensemaking, And Relational Precarity: Constituting Resilience In Remote Work During Covid, Tanya R.M. Vomacka

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The COVID-19 global pandemic disrupted every corner of the globe, impacting our personal and professional lives with intensity and scope that have yet to be fully comprehended. One such disruption has been to the workplace and organizational culture as businesses, non-governmental agencies, governments, and other organizations worldwide rapidly moved face-to-face operations to remote work. Two years into the pandemic, with vaccines available and the immediate health threat for most healthy individuals waning, businesses still find themselves confronting a changing paradigm as remote work becomes more of a permanent and competitive fixture.

This study explores the impact of remote work on …

Who's Got Your Six: A Formative Evaluation Of A Military-Connected Student Cultural Competency Workshop, Wayne N. Taylor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The University of South Florida (USF) ranks as one of the top 50 public universities in the nation. As of Spring 2022, 14% of the student population identify as military-connected students (MCS). MCS comprises Active Duty, National Guard, Reserve, veteran or military dependents. Many student veterans choose not to embrace their veteran identity due to feeling unaccepted or viewed from a deficit mindset by faculty, staff, and other students. Veteran studies research identifies the significant influence faculty and staff possess when addressing MCS retention and graduation rates (Lim et al., 2018; Vacchi, 2012; Vacchi, 2018). USF’s Office of Veteran Success …

High-Risk Traffic Crash Pattern Recognition And Identification Using Econometric Models And Machine Learning Models, Runan Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Roadway crashes have become a major cause of human deaths and injuries and caused much economic damage. According to World Health Organization (WHO), about 1.35 million people died in traffic crashes and over 50 million people injured from traffic crashes in the year of 2016 (World Health Organization, 2020). Nationally, in the U.S., the latest decade witnessed an increase of over 10% in traffic fatalities (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 2019). Similarly, in state of Florida, the fatal crashes increased by 4.62% from 2019 to 2020 (Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, 2021). To prevent injuries and …

Origin And Epigenetic Regulation Of Cutaneous T Cell Lymphoma, Carly M. Harro

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The pathogenesis of Cutaneous T cell lymphoma (CTCL) remains unclear. Using conditional knockout mice, we found that ablation of the genomic organizer Special AT-rich sequence-binding protein-1 (Satb1) caused malignant transformation of mature, skin-homing, Notch-activated CD4+ and CD8+ T cells into progressively fatal lymphoma. Mechanistically, Satb1 restrained Stat5 phosphorylation and the expression of skin-homing chemokine receptors in mature T cells. H3K27 and H3K9 trimethylation occluded the SATB1 promoter in Sézary cells, while inhibition of SUV39H1/2 methyltransferases (unlike EZH2 inhibition), restored protective SATB1 expression and selectively abrogated the growth of primary Sézary cells more effectively than romidepsin. Additionally, using single-cell RNA/TCR sequencing …

On The Reliability Of Wearable Sensors For Assessing Movement Disorder-Related Gait Quality And Imbalance: A Case Study Of Multiple Sclerosis, Steven Díaz Hernández

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Approximately 33 million American adults had a movement disorder associated with medication use, ear infections, injury, or neurological disorders in 2008, with over 18 million people affected by neurological disorders worldwide. Physical therapists assist people with movement disorders by providing interventions to reduce pain, improve mobility, avoid surgeries, and prevent falls and secondary complications of neurodegenerative disorders. Current gait assessments used by physical therapists, such as the Multiple Sclerosis Walking Scale, provide only semi-quantitative data, and cannot assess walking quality in detail or describe how one’s walking quality changes over time. As a result, quantitative systems have grownas useful tools …

Establishment Of A Melanoma Esc-Gemm Platform And Its Use To Study Pten Tumor Suppressor Functions, Ilah Bok

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The cumbersome and time-consuming process of generating new mouse strains and multiallelic experimental animals often hinders the use of genetically engineered mouse models (GEMM) in cancer research. In chapter 2, we describe the development and validation of an embryonic stem cell (ESC)-GEMM platform for rapid modeling of melanoma in mice. The platform incorporates 12 clinically relevant genotypes composed of combinations of four driver alleles (LSL-BrafV600E, LSL-NrasQ61R, PtenFlox, and Cdkn2aFlox) and regulatory alleles to spatiotemporally control the perturbation of genes of interest. The ESCs produce high-contribution chimeras, which recapitulate the melanoma phenotypes of conventionally bred mice. Using the ESC-GEMM platform to …

Re-Centering And De-Centering ‘Race’: An Analysis Of Direct-To-Consumer Genetic Testing Organizational Websites, Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing technologies become an ever-expanding business in the United States, this dissertation project investigates the ways in which two leading organizations, AncestryDNA and 23andMe, utilize discourses of ‘race’ to connect with their customers. This study is particularly significant because it opens up new avenues of research in the field of organizational communication by engaging with a new genre of organizations and the complexities of biocapitalism, in which genetic data is commodified for consumption. Blending computational scraping of data and manual qualitative analysis of organizational texts and videos available on the corporate websites, while using postcolonial studies …

Statistical Monitoring The Quality Of Healthcare Services, Yanqing Kuang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In today’s healthcare industry, quality of care is a growing focus in the delivery of healthcare. To improve the quality of care in healthcare delivery, many studies focus on the longterm operational decision making to meet the expectations of healthcare providers and users, such as medical resource allocation, bed planning, staff scheduling, etc. These problems are typically parts of long-term operational decision making, however, time is essential in healthcare system. To ensure the adherence to a high quality of care and detect deterioration in real time, the quality of service should be measured over days or hours instead of just …

Improving Robustness Of Deep Learning Models And Privacy-Preserving Image Denoising, Hadi Zanddizari

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Applications of deep learning models and convolutional neural networks have been rapidly increased. Although state-of-the-art CNNs provide high accuracy in many applications, recent investigations show that such networks are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. The black-box adversarial attack is one type of attack that the attacker does not have any knowledge about the model or the training dataset, but it has some input data set and theirlabels.

In this chapter, we propose a novel approach to generate a black-box attack in a sparse domain, whereas the most critical information of an image can be observed. Our investigation shows that large …

The Esea Waiver From The 1.0 Percent Threshold And Participation Rates In State Assessments., Justin N. Arner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Participation of students in standardized testing has been a long-debated topic in the field of education since the beginning of accountability movements. Federal laws require that all students in the public school system in grades 3 -8 and high school participate in these assessments. Monitoring of participation on these assessments is a requirement of a state’s annual reporting across many identifying categories. One such category is students with disabilities identified under the IDEA (2004). Within those students identified as having a disability is a small population of students with a “most significant cognitive disability.” This population of students participates in …

Individual Differences In Response To Hostile And Benevolent Sexism In A Stem Interview Context: The Moderating Role Of Behavioral Activation, Elizabeth Kiebel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Women continue to face sexism in workplace contexts, especially those that are male dominated, such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Yet, women often fail to confront the sexism they experience, despite confrontation being an effective way to cope with and prevent future harassment (Fitzgerald et al., 1995; Magley, 2002). To date, no one has assessed the potential moderating role of personality differences related to approach motivation on women’s confrontation of sexism. In this study, women were exposed to either a hostilely sexist or benevolently sexist question during a mock job interview that was purportedly being conducted as part …

Black Cemeteries Matter: The Erasure Of Historic Black Cemeteries In Polk County, Florida, Juliana C. Waters

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the past several years, the Tampa Bay area has experienced a reckoning with regard to the intentional erasure, destruction, and abandonment of historic African American cemeteries such as Zion Cemetery in Tampa or St. Matthews Baptist Church Cemetery in Clearwater. Scholars, journalists, community members, archaeologists, and others have contributed to a growing movement that aims to identify and document these sacred sites in an effort to prevent further destruction. In this vein, this project aimed to identify and record cemeteries in Polk County, examine the processes leading to the erasure of historic Black cemeteries, the history surrounding erasure on …

Adversarial And Data Poisoning Attacks Against Deep Learning, Jing Lin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Machine translation software, image captioning, grammar check (Grammarly), chatbot, real-time captioning and translation, music genre classification, and document classification are a few examples of deep learning applications that achieve outstanding performance in areas where traditional statistical techniques have difficulty performing classification and/or regression. Google translator has over 100 billion daily users and can translate 109 languages instantly (much faster than a human translator). AlphaGo won Lee Sedol, the eighteen-time world champion. Microsoft Team's living captioning provides accurate real-time captioning as a speaker speaks. Deep learning achieves undoubtedly remarkable performance. However, recent studies on adversarial attacks and data poisoning attacks show …

Geothermal Development In Kenya: Gender Based Socio-Cultural And Socio-Economic Implications, Faye N. Ricker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an ethnographic case study that analyzes the gendered socio-cultural and socio-economic implications for a community that was displaced in order to develop a geothermal energy system in Kenya. The implications are rendered particularly interesting because the displaced community is also one of the communities served by the geothermal power grid. The analysis employs a composite framework of Feminist Political Ecology and the Political Ecology of Climate Change Mitigation. This work explores gendered perceptions and control of energy, livelihood activities, place attachment, and the cultural/spiritual significance of geothermal energy.

Geothermal energy is a potentially promising source of low-carbon …

Medication-Assisted Treatment Versus 12-Step Group Therapy: A Comparative Analysis Of Adherence And Abstinence In Patients With Opioid Use Disorder, Derrick C. Glymph

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation was to do a comparative analysis of the effects of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) and 12-step group therapy on adherence and abstinence in adult patients with opioid use disorder (OUD). The specific aims were (1) to compare treatment adherence and illicit opioid abstinence of adult OUD patients enrolled in MAT and adult OUD patients enrolled in 12-step group therapy at three months and six months after initiation of treatment, and (2) to compare treatment adherence and illicit opioid abstinence of adult OUD patients enrolled in MAT to the treatment adherence and illicit opioid abstinence of adult …

First-Principles-Based Modeling Of Energy Converting Properties Of Conventional And Emerging Ferroelectrics, Maggie Kingsland

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ferroelectric materials are a type of multifunctional material that exhibit spontaneous polarization reversable by the application of an electric field. They are used in many technologies such as ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM), piezoelectric devices, RFID chips, and capacitors. However, the most commonly used ferroelectrics are often made with rare, expensive elements and are not environmentally friendly. For example, many prototypical ferroelectrics contain elements such as lead, zirconium, and titanium. As technology grows more advanced, there is a need to discover or manufacture cheaper ferroelectrics and to make them less impactful on human health and the earth as a whole. We set …

Comparing Participants In Discipline And Non-Discipline Specific First-Year Seminars: A Study On Student Characteristics, Expectations, And Changes In Major, Caroline Kaufmann Twachtman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

First-year seminar (FYS) courses tend to focus on preparing students for successful academic and social integration into the college environment. Many of the studies on FYS courses focus on measuring outcomes such as college grades, retention, and graduation rates. While there is notable documentation of several different types of FYS courses, relatively few studies compare the different types of FYS courses. What, if any, differences might there be in the profiles of students who take either type of course? Is there a certain type of student that enrolls in the discipline-specific course, or a certain type of student that enrolls …

A Mixed Methods Analysis Of Maternal-Infant Feeding Interactions Between Dyads With Opioid Exposure, Kailey T. Rinaldi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Infants diagnosed with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS) exhibit neurobehavioral dysregulation that may make them challenging to feed, potentially impeding positive early maternal-infant interactions. The goal of this study was to investigate dyadic behavior during the maternal-infant feeding interaction, specifically infant dysregulation and maternal sensitivity, between dyads with opioid exposure in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). This was a secondary data analysis using a mixed-methods design to analyze videorecorded feeding interactions of mothers with opioid use disorder (OUD) and their infants with NOWS. An integrative literature review investigating maternal sensitivity in mothers with OUD was conducted. Verbalizations expressed by …

A Statistical Method For Quantifying Animal Interaction; Combining Time Geography And Simulation, Zachary J. Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dynamic interaction (DI) describes the synchronous interaction of one or more individual animals over time. Current methods to quantify DI from tracking data are lacking. They typically require synchronized tracking data which limits their applicability to most studies. They also often do not have built-in tests of significance to evaluate interaction, and if so, rely on random walk models that lack biological realism. This research aimed to develop and evaluate a new way of measuring animal interaction that overcomes these limitations. The goal was to create a statistical method for quantifying and evaluating interaction that is relevant across computational, behavioural, …

Phenotypic Variability In Ipsc-Induced Cardiomyocytes And Cardiac Fibroblasts Carrying Diverse Lmna Mutations, Jiajia Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mutations in the LMNA gene (encoding lamin A/C) are the second most common cause of familial arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy. Diverse LMNA variants in cardiomyocytes have been associated with cardiac phenotypes. Moreover, cardiac fibroblasts make up a large fraction of the myocardium's non-myocyte component, intrinsically linked to extracellular matrix synthesis and turnover as well as secreting large amounts of bioactive metabolites. However, our understanding of how different mutation sites and the non-myocyte niche mediate cardiomyocyte function is limited. To fill this gap, in this thesis I investigated the hypothesis that variable LMNA mutations have significant effects on the genetic, structure and electrophysiological …