Digital Commons Network^™

A Study Of The Motives, Barriers, And Enablers Affecting Participation In Adult Distance Education Classes In An Iowa Community College, Roger Joseph Rezabek

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of this study was to explore the motives, barriers, and enablers that affect adult students in their decision to enroll in community college distance learning credit classes.

Three methodologies were used in the study: an online focus group of distance learning and adult education experts, enlisted to identify the main issues and questions that would be used in interviews with distance students; a questionnaire distributed to a sample of 210 distance students to determine motives, demographic information, and to act as a screening device for the interviews; in-depth interviews with 23 community college distance learners in northeast Iowa, …

Dimensions Of Roles, Responsibilities, Training Background And Needs, Policies, And Procedures For Paraeducators Dealing With Students With Special Needs, Beverly Anne Plagge

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The problem of this research study was to delineate and synthesize the roles, responsibilities, skill level, and training background and needs of paraeducators working with students with special needs from a state that requires paraeducator certification and a state that does not require paraeducator certification. The five core areas of roles and responsibilities were: (a) instructional support, (b) behavior management, (c) diagnostic support, (d) classroom organization, and (e) personal care assistance from the special education paraeducator and the special education teacher who teams with the paraeducator. Very few differences existed between what paraeducators and their teachers felt were appropriate and …

Perceptions Of Iowa High School Principals On The Relationship Of Leadership, School Size, And Socioeconomic Level To School Culture, Kevin Wayne Fiene

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

American society is changing. Consequently, public schools are being called to change as well. Previous reform efforts have failed to bring about substantive change and improvement. Current reform efforts are calling for the changing of school culture. What factors influence school culture? What role does leadership, school size, and socioeconomic levels play in developing school culture?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship of leadership, school size, and socioeconomic level to school culture utilizing the Competing Values Framework. The Competing Values Framework provided four ideal culture types and eight leadership roles. Culture types included group, developmental, rational …

Juergen Habermas And Marx: Critique Of An Incipient Public Sphere, Russell Lee Rockwell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the relationship of Jurgen Habermas's ideas to those of Marx. A close reading of Habermas's major works, in conjunction with a close reading as well of the Marx texts he analyzes, comprises the thematically first part. The Habermas texts include the following, with original German publication dates: "Between Philosophy and Science: Marxism as Critique" (1960); Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962); Knowledge and Human Interests (1968); Legitimation Crisis (1973); "Reconstruction of Historical Materialism" (1975); and, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). These texts are shown to contain a two decade-long argument that, (a) the relevance of …

The Development Of The Meanings Of Think And Know Through Conversation, Lea Kessler Shaw

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An apparent discrepancy in the literature on mental verbs between findings of experimental studies (young children fail to contrast terms) and observational studies (children use terms correctly in conversation) can be reconciled using Nelson and Lucariello's (1985) theory of word meaning development. According to their analysis, three aspects of word meaning develop in order: reference, denotation, and sense. For success at experimental tasks, children must have attained a system of interrelated word meanings (sense). However, children's initial uses of think and know take their meanings from the roles in the language games in which they occur (Wittgenstein, 1953).

In this …

Leadership In Student Organizations: Do Women And Men Lead Stereotypically?, Jennifer Cullen Danielson

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Men and women are believed to vary along stereotypical male and female leadership behaviors (Cann & Siegfried, 1990; Eagly & Johnson, 1990). Stereotypic leadership behaviors for men are defined as task and goal oriented behavior, whereas for women, it is interpersonal or social behavior. The present study explored the leadership behavior of male and female students in student organizations at a mid-western state university. The Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI; Posner & Kouzes, 1988) was used to assess leadership behavior in the student organizations. The leaders of 100 student organizations, 50 males and 50 females, were contacted and asked to fill …

Panjabi Women's Attitudes Towards Seeking Professional Psychological Help, C Meera Chohan

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

An Evaluation Of The Accountancy Program Of De La Salle University, Gina T. Manatigod

DLSU Business & Economics Review

One of the most popular course taken by college freshmen in business schools and colleges is a course leading to a degree in Bachelor of Science Major in Accountancy (BSA). The BSA program normally takes about four years to finish. It culminates in taking one of the toughest licensure examinations given by the government, the CPA board exams. From 1993 to 1998, the highest national passing percentage for this examination was registered only at 21.83%. De La Salle University's (DLSU) performance in the board exams leaves much to be desired. For the same timeframe the highest passing percentage of DLSU …

A Cloud-Removal Algorithm For Ssm/I Data, David G. Long, Douglas L. Daum, Quinn P. Remund

Faculty Publications

Microwave radiometers, while traditionally utilized in atmospheric and oceanic studies, can also be used in land surface applications. However, the problem of undesirable atmospheric effects caused by clouds and precipitation must be addressed. In this paper, temporal composite surface brightness images are generated from special sensor microwave/imager (SSM/I) data with the aid of new algorithms to eliminate small-scale distortion caused by clouds or precipitation. Mean, second-highest value, modified maximum average (MMA), and hybrid compositing algorithms are compared. The effectiveness of each algorithm is illustrated through simulation and real data distribution analysis. The results show that the second-highest value algorithm is …

Performance Surface Prediction For Wan-Based Clusters, Mark J. Clement, J. Kelly Flanagan, Glenn M. Judd, Bryan S. Morse, Joy L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

The last five years have been a period of exponential growth in the number of machines connected to the Internet and the speed at which these machines communicate. The infrastructure is now in place to consider a nationwide cluster of workstations as a viable parallel processing platform. In order to achieve acceptable performance on this kind of a machine, performance prediction tools must provide information on where to place computational objects. Incorrect object placement can result in poor performance and congestion in the network. This research develops a new paradigm for predicting performance in the Wide Area Network (WAN) based …

Gathering To Nauvoo: Mormon Immigration 1840-46, Fred E. Woods

Faculty Publications

The gathering of the Mormon pioneers to Utah (commencing in 1847) has received extensive attention; however, the earlier LDS immigration to Nauvoo has not been adequately treated. This paper is the inspiring story of the British Saints who traveled to Nauvoo between June 1840 and February 1846. The international call to gather was received by the Prophet Joseph Smith during the second presentation of the Restored Church, less than six months after its organization in 1830.

The Swabian War Of 1499: 500 Years Since Switzerland's Last War Of Independence, Albert Winkler

Faculty Publications

At the end of the fifteenth century, Emperor Maximilian I of the Germany Empire was trying to unite his country. He also tried to force the Swiss Confederation to become closer members of the empire. This lead to the Swabian War of 1499. In a series of battles and campaigns, the Swiss were successful in defeating the famous Swabian Landsknechte who had learned to fight in the Swiss manner. As an outcome of the war, the Swiss Confederation were even more independent of the German Empire.

Health And Educational Outcomes Of Children Who Experienced Severe Neonatal Medical Complications, Timothy B. Smith, Glenna C. Boyce, Glendon Castro

Faculty Publications

To determine the long-term developmental and educational outcomes of a sample of low birthweight infants with intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH), developmental assessments and interviews were conducted eight years after the initiation of an early intervention project. At the time of the follow-up, 62% of children were experiencing some developmental or behavior problems, with visual impairments, cerebral palsy, and attention deficits occurring most frequently. Grade of IVH and the number of days spent in the neonatal intensive care unit were the best predictors of later developmental delays. The sample also scored below average on school achievement; approximately 30% of those in school …

Multiple Category Decision Making: Review And Synthesis, Gary J. Russell, S. Ratneshwar, Allan D. Shocker, David Bell, Anand Bodapati, Alex Degeratu, Lutz Hildebrandt, Namwoon Kim, Seshan Ramaswami, Venkatesh H. Shankar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In many purchase environments, consumers use information from a number of product categories prior to making a decision. These purchase situations create dependencies in choice outcomes across categories. As such, these decision problems cannot be easily modeled using the single-category, single-choice paradigm commonly used by researchers in marketing. We outline a conceptual framework for categorization, and then discuss three types of cross-category dependence: cross-category consideration cross-category learning, and product bundling. We argue that the key to modeling choice dependence across categories is knowledge of the goals driving consumer behavior.

Local Coherence And Its Limits: A Second Look At Second Sentences, Desmond Allison, Susheela Varghese, Siew Mei Wu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Our article takes up Joy Reid's (1996) proposal that second sentences deserve a second look in academic writing research and pedagogy. Reid's data and commentaries indicate that second sentences, the sentences following topic sentences, make important but generally underrated contributions to the (in)coherence of students' written paragraphs. Her study, in a U.S. university, found that English as a second language (ESL) student writers often developed paragraphs that did not meet the expectations of experienced native English speaker (NES) readers. We offer a contextualized critique and partial replication of Reid's exploratory study. Our research, in Singapore, investigates second sentence writing by …

The Case For Sound Symbolism, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

proposal that linguistic sounds such as phonemes, features, syllables, or tones can be meaningful, or sound-symbolic, contradicts the principles of arbitrariness and double articulation that are axiomatic to structural linguistics. Nevertheless, a considerable body of research that supports principles of sound symbolism has accumulated. This review discusses the most widely attested forms of sound symbolism and the research programs linked to sound symbolism that have influenced linguists and anthropologists most. Numerous reports of magnitude sound symbolism in the form of experimental studies and comparative surveys have been integrated into a biologically based theory of its motivation. Magnitude sound symbolism also …