Digital Commons Network^™

No Child Left Behind (2001) And High Stakes Tests : How They Affect Teachers' Experiences In The Classroom, Emily N. Olson

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether No Child Left Behind (2001) and high-stakes tests affect teachers' experiences in the classroom, in areas such as instruction, attitude/anxiety, and job satisfaction. This study also investigates whether teachers in schools labeled "in need of improvement" are affected differently than teachers in schools that are not labeled. Thirty-eight teachers in four urban elementary schools in Iowa who work with 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students responded to a 30-question survey that used a 5-point Likert scale. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics as well as ANOVA to investigate a possible difference …

A Review Of Achievement Goal Theory In Physical Education, Julie A. Jahn

Graduate Research Papers

Terrell H. Bell once said there are three things to remember about education. The first one is motivation. The second one is motivation. The third one is motivation. These simple, yet profound words state the clear truth about the journey through education. To teachers, students, administrators, or parents - these words speak volumes. Motivation can be viewed as students' biggest asset or their biggest problem. All children are motivated to do something; however it may not always be what the teacher desires. Teachers want their students to achieve the product of learning, but they also want them to enjoy and …

Iowa Academy Of Science 118th Annual Meeting [2006]: Advance Program, Iowa Academy Of Science

Iowa Academy of Science Documents

Contains information about the schedule and presentations for the 2006 annual meeting of the Iowa Academy of Science.

Place As Metonym And Metaphore In Joyce Carol Oates's "Shopping", Robert Preissle

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Notes On Contributors

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Nesting Like Birds, Teaching Like Spiders: Emerging Visions In U.S. Higher Education For Biocultural Sustainability And Ecological Literacy Education, Ariana Marta Francesca Kramer

Dissertations and Theses

Sustainability education is a growing field still being defined. It draws from environmental education, but includes social justice and economic equity alongside environmental health. International efforts to define the parameters of sustainability education at the university level have called for interdisciplinary approaches that emphasize culture. However, in the United States most programs concerned with sustainability follow in the footsteps of environmental studies with a focus on science and public policy.

Seven interdisciplinary master's programs in sustainability education were reviewed as potential models for how the larger university system might approach teaching for sustainability. Document analysis was used to compare program …

Puncturing Ability Of Idealized Canine Teeth: Edged And Non-Edged Shanks, Patricia W. Freeman, Cliff A. Lemen

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Idealized edged and non-edged indenters, mimicking canine teeth, were used to puncture thin materials and thick materials. Less force was needed for the edged (triangular in cross section) indenter to penetrate thin Mylar, paper, leather, beetle elytra and turkey skin than the non-edged (circular in cross-section) indenter. Oak, grass and magnolia leaves responded equally to both indenters. In thick materials, the edged indenter punctured beetles, shrimp, bananas, and chicken flesh more easily than the non-edged indenter. Apple, tomato and avocado were punctured equally well. The edged indenter directs cracks at the corners so that the material can fold away in …

Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction And Customer Loyalty In Consumer Electronics E-Tailers: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach, Kuang-Wen Wu

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

The E-S-QUAL and E-RecS-QUAL scales have been successfully tested in a study by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Malhotra (2005). However, E-S-QUAL and E-RecS­ QUAL are newly developed and lack specific application to different types of e-business. This non-experimental, correlational study is the first to examine and explore the relationships among electronic service quality, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty for consumer electronics e-tailers.

Using quota and snowball sampling, participants from the continental United States received e-mail invitations and voluntarily forwarded the e-mail invitations to their friends and family. A total of 276 participants completed the online survey. This study's demographic characteristics included …

Bandit Problems, Dirk Bergemann, Juuso Välimäki

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We survey the literature on multi-armed bandit models and their applications in economics. The multi-armed bandit problem is a statistical decision model of an agent trying to optimize his decisions while improving his information at the same time. This classic problem has received much attention in economics as it concisely models the trade-off between exploration (trying out each arm to find the best one) and exploitation (playing the arm believed to give the best payoff).

Integrative Missing Value Estimation For Microarray Data, Jianjun Hu, H. Li, M. S. Waterman, X. J. Zhou

Faculty Publications

Background

Missing value estimation is an important preprocessing step in microarray analysis. Although several methods have been developed to solve this problem, their performance is unsatisfactory for datasets with high rates of missing data, high measurement noise, or limited numbers of samples. In fact, more than 80% of the time-series datasets in Stanford Microarray Database contain less than eight samples.

Results

We present the integrative Missing Value Estimation method (iMISS) by incorporating information from multiple reference microarray datasets to improve missing value estimation. For each gene with missing data, we derive a consistent neighbor-gene list by taking reference data sets …

The 2000 Amendments To The Discovery Rules, Richard L. Marcus

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Anything But A Hypocrite: Interactional Musings On Race, Colorblindness, And The Redemption Of Strom Thurmond, Osagie K. Obasogie

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Thematics And The Peculiar Federal Marriage Amendment, Scott Dodson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Go Out And Look: The Challenge And Promise Of Empirical Scholarship In Contract Law, David Snyder

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This introduction to the symposium on Empirical Scholarship in Contract Law, sponsored in January 2006 by the Contracts Section of the Association of American Law Schools and published in the Tulane Law Review, pushes for an increased focus on the real world and argues that highly quantitative statistical analyses of published judicial opinions are no more empirical than simple case notes. While this short essay argues for increased rigor in empirical research, it also recognizes the limits of scientific methods for legal analysis and suggests that the seduction of scientific appearances, now as in the days of Langdell's legal science, …

Exploring The Myths About The Ninth Circuit, Stephen Wermiel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

A Social Dimension In European Private Law The Call For Setting A Progressive Agenda, Fernanda Nicola

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

I. The Europeanization of Private Law: Legal Sources, Ideology and Process: 1. Legal Sources in European Private Law. 2. Technocracy at work: What is the Common Frame of Reference? 3. The Ideological Divide: Neo-liberalism versus Social Justice in European Contract law. 4. The Social Justice Manifesto and the Legitimacy of the Process. 5. The Scholarly Industry and its Dark Sides. II. Social contract law and Social Europe, part of the problem or part of the solution?: 1. The "Social" Critique of Formalism in Contract Law and its historical inadequacy. 2. The Critique of the Social and its erasure in the …

Database Anonymization Services, Chad B. Meador

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The progress of technology and the development of powerful databases have made it possible to store and easily access continually increasing amounts of sensitive data about people. Since personal information is becoming common in many different databases, it is vital that this data be hidden to ensure privacy of the individuals whose records are stored in these repositories. Database anonymization is the key to securing these databases by ensuring that database users will be unable to reveal sensitive personal information by intelligently structuring their queries.

We analyzed the structure of the BiomData database which contains images and sound recordings of …

Perspectives Of Key Stakeholders With Regard To Extended School Year Programs, Billie E. Bonnett

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

There is growing concern about the impact of summer vacation on the academic achievement of our children, especially those with special needs. In recognition of the magnitude of this problem, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), 1999, described the need for extended school year services. Additionally, IDEA, 2004, sought to clarify and further define extended school year services. This addition to IDEA provides guidance, but it does not change the previous provisions. Research suggests that effective extended school year programs include essential components: child centeredness, family involvement, community involvement and school commitment. Despite these regulations, key stakeholders including teachers, …

Performance Measurements Of Web Services, Sarita Damaraju

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Web services are rapidly evolving application-integration technologies that allow applications in heterogeneous environments to communicate with each other. In this thesis we perform a measurements-based study of an e-commerce application that uses web services to execute business operations. We use the TPC-W specification to generate a session-based workload. The component level response times and the hardware resource usage on the different machines are measured. The component level response times are extracted from the application server logs. From the results it is seen that as the workload increases the response times of the web services components increase. From the hardware resource …

An Investigation Of Supports And Barriers Experienced By Students With Learning Disabilities As They Transition To And Persist In The Postsecondary Setting, Shawn Mahoney Kuba

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This inquiry investigated supports and barriers experienced by students with learning disabilities as they transitioned to, and persisted in, a four-year liberal arts college setting. The goal of the inquiry was twofold: first, to understand from the perspective of the students themselves, the experience of being in and working through the postsecondary environment, especially what facilitates and what obstructs continued participation; and second, to extrapolate from these data, recommendations to inform postsecondary programming for students with learning disabilities.;Over a 3 year period, two cohorts of students with learning disabilities, transition and persistence phase students, volunteered to participate in semi-structured face-to-face …

The Effects Of A Specifically Designed Pre-School Inclusion Course On The Attitudes Of Early Childhood Personnel, Kellie J. Morgan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The intent of this study was to examine the attitudes of early childhood personnel on preschool inclusion before and after participating in a preschool inclusion class that was specifically designed for preschool teachers. The attitudes of teachers were measured using a 7 point Likert type pre and post-assessment scale. The items on the scale dealt with the inclusion of children with disabilities in a typically developing classroom. The participants in the study included 96 early childhood personnel working in West Virginia. In this pre-experimental design, the total scores of each item for the pre-test were compared to total scores on …

Thermal Stress In Concrete Slabs Under Different Constraints, Dhananjay Rao Hejamadi

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Previous research has shown that thermal stresses developed in concrete pavements due to daily and seasonal temperature variations may be larger than those induced due to traffic loading. Dowel bars that are used for load transfer at the transverse joints of concrete pavements introduce high stresses at their interfaces with concrete leading to various forms of transverse joint distress. To solve this problem, Shoukry et al. (2001) developed an alternative design of dowel bars called "Shok Bar" that was installed by Shoukry and his team in a concrete pavement section placed at the parking lot of WVDOT Maintenance Shop at …

Three Essays On Ipo, Liquidity, And Corporate Governance, Saurav Roychoudhury

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The first essay looks at the issue of long run performance of initial public offerings (IPOs). We provide a liquidity based explanation for why certain IPOs underperform in the long run. By separating IPOs into sub-samples based on excess liquidity, considered relative to benchmarks based on size, we find that IPO underperformance from 1993 to 2005 differs significantly based on the excess liquidity of an IPO. In general, positive excess liquidity portfolios tend to underperform compared to negative excess liquidity portfolios one to two years after the initial post IPO portfolio formation period. A potential explanation of the magnitude and …

Suggestibility In An Adolescent And Young Adult Sample: Age And Individual Differences, Rebecca G. Ryan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The current study was an investigation of age differences in interrogative suggestibility and its components; Yield, Shift, and Total Suggestibility. Adolescents and young adults were compared on these measures and it was found that young adults Yield significantly less than adolescents and that Total Suggestibility was lower for the young adults compared to the adolescents. Young adults were also found to display significantly higher levels of both memory and source monitoring ability. Regressions were conducted with individual difference factors associated with Yield, Shift, and Total Suggestibility. For Yield, memory was found to be a unique contributor. For Shift and Total …

Three Essays On Political Regimes, Military Spending, And Economic *Growth, Pavel A. Yakovlev

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation is a collection of essays on the issues in political and defense economics. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the role that political and institutional arrangements play in affecting government policy and economic well-being. The second chapter examines how different political regimes and military manpower systems affect the value of life in military conflicts. The results in Chapter 2 show that democracies suffer lower battlefield casualties than dictatorships. Also noteworthy is that more volunteer based armies, per capita income, and economic freedom lead to lower battlefield deaths. Thus, political and economic liberties are found to increase the …

Iqgap1 Knockdown Enhances The Endothelial Barrier In Vitro, Wentao Zhang

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

IQGAP1 overexpression inhibits E-cadherin-mediated epithelial cell-cell adhesion by distabilizing the adherens junctions, and activated Rac1 and Cdc42 may prevent these effects by removing IQGAP1 from the adherens junction complex. In the present study, we determined if IQGAP1 associates with the adherens junction of endothelial cells and affects endothelial barrier function. In human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs), IQGAP1 associated with VE-cadherin, the catenins, beta, gamma, alpha, and p120, but not with N-cadherin or the tight junction proteins, occludin, claudin-5, and ZO-1. Detergent extracted most of the IQGAP1 associated with VE-cadherin. Treatment of endothelial cells with sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P), which increases the …

Caution, Cooperative Agreements, And The Actual State Of Things: A Reply To Professor Fletcher, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This short article argues that tribal governments considering entering into cooperative agreements with federal, state, or local governments ought to maintain a healthy skepticism regarding the non-tribal governments sitting across from them at the negotiating table and the appropriateness of entering into cooperative agreements.

The United States As Global Sheriff: Using Unilateral Sanctions To Combat Human Trafficking, Janie Chuang

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In recent years, the issue of human trafficking - the recruitment or movement of persons by means of coercion or deception into exploitative labor or slavery-like practices - has moved from the margins to the mainstream political agenda. The rapid proliferation of international, regional and domestic anti-trafficking laws bespeaks universal condemnation of the practice, but belies deep divisions among States over how to define and approach the problem. It is thus significant that the international community was able to reach consensus and conclude a new international law on trafficking - the Palermo Protocol. But just weeks before the signing of …

Beyond A Snapshot: Preventing Human Trafficking In The Global Economy, Janie Chuang

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Current legal responses to the problem of human trafficking often reflect a deep reluctance to address the socio-economic root causes of the problem. Because they approach trafficking as an act (or series of acts) of violence, most responses focus predominantly on prosecuting traffickers, and to a lesser extent, protecting trafficked persons. While such approaches might account for the consequences of trafficking, they tend to overlook the broader socioeconomic reality that drives trafficking in human beings. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to reframe trafficking as a migratory response to current globalizing socioeconomic trends. It argues that, to be effective, counter-trafficking …

Fielding A Team For The Fans: The Societal Consequences And Title Vii Implications Of Race-Considered Roster Construction In Professional Sport, N. Jeremi Duru

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Professional sports organizations' relationships with their players are, like other employer-employee relationships, subject to scrutiny under the antidiscrimination mandates embedded in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Professional sports organizations are, however, unique among employers in many respects. Most notably, unlike other employers, professional sports organizations attract avid supporters who identify deeply with the teams and their players. To the extent an organization racially discriminates, therefore, such discrimination creates the risk that fans will identify with the homogenous or racially disproportionate roster that results. The consequences of such race-based team identification are wide-reaching and potentially tragic. Through …