Digital Commons Network^™

Higher Education Administrators’ Perceptions Of The Influence On The Social Construction Of Disability And Institutional Antidiscrimination Policies, Pamela A. Kasyan-Howe

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Bridging Gaps In Childhood Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Treated At An Outpatient Clinic, Allen M. Savedra

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Staff Education Project To Improve Nursing Knowledge And Patient Safety, Njideka Maureen Okeke

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Wearable Fitness Trackers And Fitness Education On Physical Activity Participation, Physical Competence, And General Self-Efficacy In Inactive And Sedentary College Students, Tiffany Lough

Doctorate in Kinesiology

This study examined the combined effects of wearable fitness trackers and structured fitness education on physical activity participation, perceived physical competence, and general self-efficacy among inactive and sedentary college students. A six-week randomized pretest-posttest design was used. Undergraduate students aged 18–24 who were not meeting recommended physical activity guidelines were recruited from a private liberal arts university and randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. Participants in the experimental group received a wearable fitness tracker along with fitness education sessions integrating Social Cognitive Theory based behavior change techniques including self-monitoring, observational learning, mastery experiences, and goal …

Board-Certified Behavior Analysts Experiences In Providing Health Insurance Resources To Parents Of Children With Autism, Martins Acha

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

The Empathetic-Perverse: A Contemporary Exploration Of The Grotesque In Southern Gothic Literature, Halle Elizabeth Griggs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Contemporary scholars and critics alike can agree that much of our understanding of Southern Gothic literature and its relation to the grotesque comes from Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor often portrays a transformation within that of grotesque characters (characters with moral flaws and/or physical disabilities). These transformations, depicted through use of pain, violence, and outlandish behavior, help to bring these grotesque characters closer to God, experiencing a sort of divine grace or redemption. Yet, often these grotesque characters are depicted in a way void of compassion. Despite describing fiction from the middle of the last century, most critics still rely on the …

Poe: A Clarinet And Percussion Album, Paul Andrew Hayes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

​A clarinet and percussion duo is an underutilized chamber ensemble. This recording project focuses on repertoire that is more accessible to the performer and listener, and offers a varied selection of instruments in the percussion parts. In this project, some percussion parts feature Middle Eastern instruments. It contains three commissioned works: Poe by Andy Harnsberger, Light on the Ice by Josh Gottry for clarinet and marimba, and Quicksand by Marco Schirripa for clarinet and riq. Also included in the project are two works not well represented in recordings: Jubb Jannin by Yousif Sheronick for clarinet and bendir, and Three Pieces …

Barriers Experienced By Committee Members Planning A Center For Teaching And Learning: A Case Study, Vickie Renee Clark

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Increased demand for online and flexible classes after the COVID pandemic meant that college and university faculty were asked to incorporate more online components and emerging technology in their classrooms to meet the demand for more versatile course offerings. This time also brought increased pressure to create engaging classrooms and increase retention (Conner, 2021). Incorporating technology in classes requires training and professional development for instructors who are not accustomed to using technology or adjusting their course design to work with the technology they adopt (Prestridge, 2017). An effective teaching and learning center (TLC) could help focus professional development efforts and …

Dancing For Your Ka: Embodied Knowledge In The Ancient Egyptian Funerary Cult, Sydney A. Pickens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Dancing For Your Ka: Embodied Knowledge in the Ancient Egyptian Funerary Cult investigates the spiritual, cultural and social values and beliefs encoded in processional dances associated with the funerary cult at Beni Hassan. It assumes that, as is other ancient and modern religions, dance is a prayerful act that feeds into reciprocal relationships between humans and spiritual beings and asks what forms of embodied knowledges are archived in Middle Kingdom dance traditions. I propose the application Katherine Dunham’s Theories––Form and Function, Intercultural Communication and Socialization through the Arts––to help illuminate the relationship between dance, the dancing body and ritual knowledge. …

Staff Education On Stress Management And Coping Strategies For Psychiatric Nurses, Chidinma Uwakwe

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Predictive Importance Sampling Based Coverage Verification For Multi Uav Trajectory Planning, Snehashish Ghosh

Master’s Dissertations

In next-generation wireless networks, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks are emerging as a promising solution for ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). A key challenge in millimeter-wave UAV networks is ensuring that mobile users are always in line-of-sight (LoS) coverage, since the current snapshot-based trajectory planning approach does not consider the mobility of the users during the decision interval, resulting in disastrous LoS gaps. For continuous coverage verification, standard uniform sampling is too computationally expensive, as it would need a large number of samples to estimate rare failure events that have latencies that are not suitable for real-time requirements. In this work, …

Critical Care Nurses’ Self-Efficacy In Responding To Emergency Code Situations, Nesheemah Sabree

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Experiences Of Black Francophone Students Entering The United States For Higher Education, Anu Nifemi Ferguson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Navigating Mental Health After Purity Culture: Women’S Voices From The Southern United States, Abby Frazee

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Transport And Interfacial Dynamics Of Electrochemical Formation Processes In Li-Based Batteries, Penghao Zhang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Next-generation high-capacity batteries often rely on electrochemical formation processes rather than conventional intercalation alone. Such processes include lithium metal deposition and Li–O2 discharge-product formation, in which new phases form at the electrochemical interface during operation. As a result, the measured response reflects both electrochemical driving forces and the evolving product morphology. This coupling makes it difficult to interpret electrochemical data, microscopic observations, or model results in isolation. This dissertation examines this problem through three main studies and one preliminary extension on Li–O2 batteries and lithium metal deposition, each addressing a different factor that affects how electrochemical product formation is measured, …

Improved Method Of Evaluating Gas-Phase Air Cleaners Considering Adsorption And Desorption Mechanisms To And From Internal Test Chamber Surfaces, Casey Douglas Coffland

Dissertations and Theses

Portable air cleaners are playing an increasingly important role in managing indoor air quality in response to pressing issues like wildfire smoke events. Smoke is a complex mixture of gases and particulate matter; while established test methods exist for particulate matter, the dynamic behavior of gaseous pollutants is not well accounted for in current test methods. This is because prevailing air cleaner testing methods typically treat background losses as irreversible, whereas gases can engage in partitioning to and from test chamber surfaces. Ignoring these sorption interactions causes inaccurate estimation of an air cleaner's impact.

A new approach has been developed …

Movement Ecology And Population Dynamics Of Box-Nesting Black-Bellied Whistling-Ducks (Dendrocygna Autumnalis) In Louisiana, Katie E. Miranda

LSU Master's Theses

Understanding demographic and behavioral processes underlying population dynamics is essential for effective wildlife management, especially for species subject to harvest pressure or experiencing population shifts. Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks (Dendrocygna autumnalis) are currently undergoing a notable northward range expansion and are increasing in abundance across the southeastern United States, raising management concerns for both ecological and economic reasons. As a result, there is growing public support for a special Black-bellied Whistling-Duck-specific harvest season, yet little research has been conducted on this species, particularly within newly-established populations. To address this gap, I conducted this study with the goal of evaluating seasonal …

Self-Compassion And Meaningful Work: Examining The Role Of Personal Resources In Veterinary Medicine Student Burnout Through A Jd-R Framework, Swathi Prabhu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Rates of burnout are known to be markedly high among veterinary professionals but less is known about burnout among U.S. veterinary students. The Job Demands-Resource (JD-R) Theory provides a framework through which veterinary students’ experiences can be investigated in a way that centers supportive organizational and personal resources, instead of focusing on the detrimental aspects of training that have dominated the literature. Using a sample of 469 students enrolled in U.S. colleges of veterinary medicine, the current study examined if two personal resources (self-compassion and work as meaning) mediated the relationship between two sources of support (student peer support and …

Learning Trajectories Of Online Batch Selection Methods, Luke Green

Theses and Dissertations

Modern deep neural networks achieve strong performance on large-scale datasets, but often require substantial training time. Online batch selection methods seek to reduce this cost by updating models on informative subsets of each batch rather than on all available examples. Recently introduced methods leverage teacher models and report substantial speedups, particularly in noisy-label settings. However, comparisons are often based on the number of epochs required to reach a target test accuracy, a coarse metric that is sensitive to implementation details and may obscure important differences in learning dynamics. In this thesis, we implement several online batch selection methods in a …

Advancing Data Usability, Activity Modeling, And Stability Optimization In Computational Enzyme Design, Spencer Gardiner

Theses and Dissertations

A grand challenge of computational biology is to computationally design, in a single pass, a protein sequence that catalyzes an arbitrary chemical reaction at a high rate under specified conditions [1]. This work details advances in three essential areas on the path to that goal: data quality, activity prediction and modeling, and stability optimization. The structure and implementation of the Allotrope Simple Model (a FAIR data format for many scientific instruments) was examined in [2], setting the stage for training deep learning models on high-quality experimental datasets from diverse sources. In [3], the limits of physics-based and deep learning tools …

Beyond Single Images: A Comprehensive Benchmark For Album-Level Vision-Language Understanding, Shawn Huang

Theses and Dissertations

Automatic album organization has been studied extensively over the past decades due to significant progress in digital photography. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance on multi-image understanding, making them natural candidates for automating album organization workflows. While VLMs’ abilities in multi-image understanding have been widely studied, their performance on album organization remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce AlbumBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for automatic album organization. Specifically, we (1) define album organization tasks as photo selection for album-specific user objectives, photo rating according to how well user intents are fulfilled, and album-specific photo grouping given a …

English For Speakers Of Other Languages Program: Compliance Vs Realities Of Practice, Ana Sofia Rodriguez-Oronoz

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

This research study examined the misalignment between policy compliance and instructional practice within English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) programs in K–12 public education. Although federal and state mandates require equitable access and services for English language learners (ELLs), compliance with these requirements has not consistently resulted in effective classroom practice. The problem of practice focused on how educators interpreted and enacted ESOL policies and the extent to which these practices aligned with the intent of the Multicultural Education, Training, and Advocacy (META) Consent Decree and related accountability frameworks.

A qualitative research design was used to explore educators’ perceptions …

An Evaluation Of The Leader In Me Program’S Influence On Time And Project Management In Secondary Pbl Classrooms, Tiffany L. Brandenburg

Education Theses and Dissertations

This mixed-methods evaluation examined the implementation of the Leader in Me (LIM) framework and its relationship to secondary students’ time and project management skills within project-based learning (PBL) environments. Conducted across Grades 6–12 in a public charter school district, the study analyzed teacher surveys, student reflections, classroom observations, and Measurable Results Assessment (MRA) data to evaluate perceptions and implementation patterns related to student self-management practices. Findings indicated variability in LIM implementation across classrooms and inconsistencies in how leadership and organizational practices were integrated into daily instruction. Teachers frequently reported challenges related to students’ planning, prioritization, and task management skills, while …

Quality Improvement Project The Impact Of The Interact “Stop And Watch Tool” In A Skilled Nursing Facility, Lorraine Hicks

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Avoidable hospitalizations from skilled nursing facilities (SNF) contribute to increased healthcare costs, resident distress, and adverse health outcomes. Many readmissions result from delays in identifying and communicating early signs of resident deterioration. The purpose of this project was to implement an evidence-based intervention to recognize early changes in residents’ conditions, empower nursing staff to detect and promptly communicate concerns, and impact 30-day hospital readmission rates. Problems identified included delayed recognition of early changes in residents’ conditions, fragmented staff communication, and the absence of standardized reporting practices, which were associated with preventable hospital readmissions. A quasi-experimental pre-/post-intervention design guided by Jean …

Enhancing Teaching Effectiveness Through Professional Development For Part-Time Nursing Faculty, Amanda Moss

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Part-time nursing faculty play a vital role in nursing education; however, many institutions lack standardized professional development opportunities for part-time faculty, resulting in inconsistent preparation and teaching practices. This Doctor of Nursing Practice policy change project examined whether revising an institutional professional development policy to include part-time faculty and implementing a structured faculty development program would improve faculty preparedness, confidence, and comfort with evidence-based teaching practices and instructional strategies that support ACEN faculty development expectations. Guided by the Iowa Model–Revised of Evidence-Based Practice, Kotter’s Organizational Change Theory, and the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) framework, this quantitative policy change project was conducted over …

Characterizing The Relationships Between Hydrology, Soil Biogeochemistry, And Green Ash Canopy Structure In Emerald Ash Borer-Affected Wetlands, Eva Switala

Theses

The invasion of the emerald ash borer (EAB; Agrilus planipennis) has caused mass mortality of native ash trees (Fraxinus spp.), devastating forested wetlands in the northeastern United States. Fifteen years post-introduction, the long-term ecological shifts and "new normals" of these ecosystems remain poorly understood. This project characterized patterns in EAB-affected forested wetlands by evaluating soil characteristics, biogeochemical cycling, hydrology, and green ash canopy across 12 sites with varying initial ash presence. Results revealed a clear separation between biogeochemically active and less active sites. Hydrologic differences emerged as a key driver of biogeochemical cycling, with higher soil moisture significantly increasing rates …

Integrated Sources Of Photon-Pairs For Quantum Networking, Vijay Soorya Shunmuga Sundaram

Theses

Quantum networking enables the distribution of quantum information across distant nodes, unlocking capabilities such as secure communication, distributed quantum computing, enhanced metrology, and tests of fundamental physics. Photons serve as the natural carriers of quantum information over long distances due to their low loss in optical fibers and robustness to environmental decoherence. However, the practical realization of quantum networks remains limited by the lack of photon sources that are simultaneously compatible with diverse quantum systems, stable over long timescales, and suitable for deployment in real-world fiber infrastructure.  This dissertation addresses these challenges through the co-development of photon-pair sources and a …

The Effect Of Aquatic Pollution On (Green) Microbial Communities In The Greater Rochester Area, Francesca Molee

Theses

Retention ponds are built in urban and suburban areas to catch the polluted runoff that would otherwise go into highly-valued freshwater ecosystems like the Great Lakes. They therefore make ideal model ecosystems to consider the effect of chemical, common pollution on aquatic communities. To understand the impact this aquatic pollution on both microbial community composition alongside green microbial physiological stress response, water column and sediment microbial communities were sampled from three retention ponds, and three non-retention, created ponds. The first part of this study focused on the microbial community composition. Using 16s amplicon sequencing on and subsequent analysis using Qiime2, …

Enhancing Sleep Quality Through Sleep Hygiene Education Among Adults In A Faith-Based Community, Denielle Earle-Thompson

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Background

Adults between 18 and 64 years of age require at least seven hours of sleep per night; however, many adults do not meet this recommendation, contributing to increased risks for chronic disease, impaired functioning, mood disturbances, and reduced quality of life. Poor sleep quality has been associated with weakened immunity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, anxiety, depression, and decreased daytime performance. Obtaining adequate, good-quality sleep is essential for maintaining overall health and well-being. In faith-based communities, combining health education with spiritual support may provide a holistic approach that addresses both physical and emotional contributors to poor sleep.

Purpose

The purpose …

Understanding The Needs And Practices Of Cut Flower Growers In Louisiana, Jessie M. Hoover

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The specialty cut flower industry is expanding nationwide, including southeastern states such as Louisiana. Existing studies and market analyses focus on national trends of other regions with established floriculture networks, leaving a critical gap in understanding the unique challenges and opportunities faced by growers in Louisiana. This lack of data limits the ability of extension professionals, policymakers, and industry stakeholders to develop targeted strategies that support local production and market development. This study used qualitative case study methods to investigate the practices, challenges, and needs of 13 specialty cut flower growers in Louisiana. The study utilized Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, 1986) …