Digital Commons Network^™

The Impact Of Standardized Testing On Student Performance In The United States, Stephanie Linden

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

In the United States, the current trend in education is the dependence on standardized testing to improve our current education system. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 mandates higher test scores and improved academic performance in schools nation-wide, especially inner city schools. This thesis will attempt to evaluate whether standardized testing and the methods used to assess high performance has helped to create a better education system in the United States, or whether it has hindered student performance. There has been much discussion about this topic, some positive and some not. In this paper I will present both …

Structural Adjustment Programs And The Delivery Of Health Care In The Third World, Bianca Brunelli

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

World Bank and International Monetary Fund became involved in the 1982 Third World debt crisis in order to solve global economic difficulties. While these institutions were not created for this purpose, after a series of economic shocks in the 1970s, they swept in order to alleviate the economic difficulties Third World countries faced. By following a strict regime of neoliberal inspired policies, they attempted to alleviate the debt crunch. Despite intentions, the World Bank’s and IMF’s involvement has exacerbated poverty in the Third World. As demonstrated, key factors in structural adjustment programs have impeded health care delivery and have contributed …

Spatial Analysis Of Topography For Glacier Mapping In The Western Himalaya, Lubica Cverckova

Student Work

Understanding climate change requires accurate assessment of the Earths cryosphere, as glacier fluctuations directly and indirectly reflect changes in radiative forcing and temperature and precipitation patterns. Direct assessment of alpine glaciers in high-mountains is notoriously difficult, and assessment from space represents the only practical alternative for assessing regional and global ice-fluctuation patterns. The mapping of debris-covered glaciers is especially problematic, as glacier surfaces exhibit spectral reflectance patterns similar to surrounding rock and sediment. Therefore, multispectral analysis of satellite imagery does not permit accurate delineation. Consequently, the use of satellite-derived topographic information and spatial analysis were evaluated for mapping the Raikot …

Dutch Women's Perceptions Of Childbirth In The Netherlands, Taralyn R. Johnson, Lynn Clark Callister, Donna S. Freeborn, Renea L. Beckstrand, Katinka Huender

Faculty Publications

Purpose: To explore the lived experience of childbirth in Dutch women who had given birth at home in the Netherlands.

Methods: Qualitative study using audiotaped interviews with 14 women.

Results: Themes included the advantages of giving birth in the home, where the women felt more in control of their environment; the difficulty and normalcy of the pain associated with giving birth; the feelings of fulfillment and empowerment that come with childbirth and motherhood; and the importance of the supportive role of the midwife–caregiver.

Nursing Implications: Women in a culture different from that of the United States who gave birth at …

Pay Now, Execute Later: Why Counties Should Be Required To Post A Bond To Seek The Death Penalty, Adam M. Gershowitz

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

May 2007 Commencement Program, Bowling Green State University

Commencement Programs

No abstract provided.

Effect Of Colony Size On Age Structure And Behavior Of Metabus Gravidus (Araneidae) In The Monteverde Cloud Forest, May 2007, Laura Peterson

Monteverde Institute: Tropical Ecology and Conservation

Metabus gravidus are semi-social orb-weaving spiders living in colonies of up to 70 individuals over slow moving water. Buskirk (1975a) found that the time budget of spider behaviors differs within colonies of various sizes. I recorded the frequency and time spent on orb maintenance, aggressive behavior, spider displacement, and prey capture for spiders of varying sizes. Spider and web sizes were measured and then I observed 21 spiders of each size for an hour to record the time and frequency of the four behaviors. In the twenty-four colonies studied, small spiders were more abundant. Small colonies had a greater number …

Murzaku's "Catholicism, Culture, Conversion: The History Of The Jesuits In Albania (1841-1946)" - Book Review, Dermot Quinn

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

No abstract provided.

Beyond Kyoto: North-South Implications Of Emissions Trading And Taxes, Kristen Sheeran

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Design Response To Humanitarian Crisis: An Analysis Of Low-Income Labor Camps In Doha, Qatar In The Context Of A Student Charrette, Holly Murdock

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

"Imagine a future where design can alter the quality of life." So began the instructions for "Charrette: A 48 hour Design Challenge" hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts in Qatar. ("Charrette," 2007.) Combining sustainable design solutions with issues of human rights, an experiment in design education was created to challenge students to improve the quality of life for some of the world's most disadvantaged workers.

Full Issue, No Author

Verbum

This is the full issue of Volume 4, Issue 2 of Verbum, published in Spring 2007 by the REST Club at St. John Fisher College. Articles from this issue are available as separate PDFs at http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/verbum/vol4/iss2/

Inventorying Landscape Assets In Rural Utah Communities: A Sociocultural Approach, Jennifer F. Hale

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A community's physical environment embodies distinct natural and built elements, which hold meanings and values that are formed through daily social interactions within that environment. Such elements, however, are not often recognized until they are dramatically changed or lost. As amenity-rich rural areas of the Intermountain West steadily attract new residents, consciously identifying these elements prior to rapid growth is critical to their preservation.

Research suggests that strong social capital has the potential to encourage the identification of a place's visual assets prior to such change. A documentary research approach was used to understand why citizens do not actively participate …

Culture, Community, And Class In The Bavarian Marriage Process, 1789-1849: Leonhard Büttner, Margaretha Weiss, And Their Illegitimate Children, F. Warren Bittner

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The marriage process for the poor in nineteenth-century Bavaria involved a delicate interplay between cultural bias, economic constraint, the prejudice of social rank, and the will to power in the peasant community by those who controlled marriage. This study follows Leonhard Büttner and his fiancée, Margaretha Weiss. Leonhard was a day laborer who had few marriage options due to his poverty and low social status. The insanity of Margaretha's father restricted her marriage choices. Cultural, financial, and legal limits prevented the couple from marrying, and they chose to have children out of wedlock in 1812 and 1816.

The dating traditions …

Integration, Clarification, Substantiation: Sex, Gender, Ethnicity And Migration As Social Determinants Of Women’S Health, Bilkis Vissandjee, Ilene Hyman, Denise L. Spitzer, Alisha Apale, Nahar Kamrun

Journal of International Women's Studies

The aim of this paper was to examine, via a scoping review, how the literature focusing on immigrant women’s health, based on selected criteria, has been able to capture not only sex and gender differences but also the other socially grounded determinants of health. Using selected health databases as well as a diversity of keywords, a final sample of 59 was obtained after a number of steps to increase validity and credibility of the process were taken. Since “women” was one of the main keywords, all of the studies included women either by themselves (n=20/59) or along with men (n=39/59). …

The Fortunes And Misfortunes Of Women Rice Producers In Ndop, Cameroon And The Implications For Gender Roles, Lotsmart N. Fonjong, Mbah Fongkimeh Athanasia

Journal of International Women's Studies

In most communities in Cameroon, traditional norms mandate that rural women fulfill the reproductive roles of child bearing, home management and food provision for the family. Thus, these women are unable to exercise any influential economic voice- they can hardly earn income. Cash agriculture like rice production provides a possible outlet for the empowerment of these women in rice producing areas. However, this agricultural work would solve one problem for the women and create another. Any attempt to encourage these women to work outside their homes may increase their workload. This paper examines the situation of female rice farmers in …

The Evolution And Impact Of Documentary Films, Amma Marfo

Senior Honors Projects

Long considered either high art or the bane of every student’s existence when a substitute teacher came to class, documentary film has developed into a popular and visible form of entertainment. As a result, they are starting to have a bigger effect on society, as they begin to address issues with the goal of informing the public and pushing for social change. This project will first address historical documentaries, the reasons that they were made, and what techniques were established that have carried through to documentary film today. My paper will then examine today’s documentary films, what techniques they use …

Liturgy And Revolution Part 1: Georgian Baptists And The Non-Violent Struggle For Democracy, W. Benjamin Boswell

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

No abstract provided.

Secondary Beginning Teacher's Preparedness To Teach Literacy And Numeracy: A Survey, Marion Milton, Mary Rohl, Helen House

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

This paper reports the findings of an Australia-wide survey conducted as part of a national teacher education research project that explored the preparation of teachers to teach literacy and numeracy in Australian schools (Louden, Rohl, Gore, Greaves, McIntosh, Wright, Siemon & House, 2005) 1. The project included various phases of inquiry, beginning with a desk audit of teacher education program characteristics and an international literature review (Gore & Griffiths, 2002), that drew on literature published in English in the last few decades. The issues identified in the literature review guided the construction of a set of national focus groups that …

The Role Of Exigencies In Marketing: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Three Online Social Networks, Greg Martin

All Theses

Over the last few years, the use of online social networks has increased exponentially, and some of these 'virtual communities' are among the most visited sites on the Internet. With this boom in popularity has also come a rise in the need for marketing within these spaces, and very little academic literature exists on how to best utilize this new and budding arena for advertising ventures. Traditional business approaches to marketing are no longer adequate because of the radicalization of new media found within online social networks. This thesis, therefore, provides a new metric of success for social network marketing, …

Analysis Of Topological Characteristics Of Huge Online Social Networking Services, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Seungyeop Han, Haewoon Kwak, Sue Moon, Hawoong Jeong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social networking services are a fast-growing business in the Internet. However, it is unknown if online relationships and their growth patterns are the same as in real-life social networks. In this paper, we compare the structures of three online social networking services: Cyworld, MySpace, and orkut, each with more than 10 million users, respectively. We have access to complete data of Cyworld's ilchon (friend) relationships and analyze its degree distribution, clustering property, degree correlation, and evolution over time. We also use Cyworld data to evaluate the validity of snowball sampling method, which we use to crawl and obtain partial network …

Cultural Icons And Urban Development In Asia: Economic Imperative, National Identity, And Global City Status, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Global cities are characterized by the multiplicity of flows that they are implicated in - flows of people, goods, services, ideas, and images. Yet, global cities do not derive their status only on the basis that they are networked nodes. They also require particular forms of cultural capital. Cities with global aspirations have thus increasingly recognized the need to accumulate cultural capital, for which one means is to create new urban spaces, in particular, new cultural urban spaces (e.g. grand theatres, museums, libraries). These often monumental structures are intended to support a vibrant cultural life, in order to attract and …

Experiences Of Educational Leadership Faculty In The First Year Of The Professoriate: A Phenomenological Study, Patricia Sims Tresey

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The researchers purpose of this study was to describe and explore the experiences of educational leadership faculty in the first year of the professoriate. A qualitative, phenomenological methodology was used to illuminate the lived experiences of these new faculty members. Research instrumentation and data collection consisted of three separate instruments used in three phases. First was a focus group interview given to three new educational leadership faculty from a regional university campus located in the Southeastern part of the United States. The second instrument was an individual, in-depth interview with the three new professors. The third and final instrument was …

Descriptive Analysis Of Georgia High School Teachers' Perceptions Of Academic Dishonesty, Amy Manning Rowland

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This research study was conducted with the assistance of Georgia high school teachers for the purpose of examining teachers' perceptions of academic dishonesty during the 2006-2007 school year. Data were gathered to establish teachers' perceptions of academic dishonesty by exploring what behaviors teachers felt to be academically dishonest, how teachers addressed such occurrences, whether teachers felt any internal conflict regarding academic dishonesty, whether any external pressures were involved in instances of academic dishonesty, and how these experiences affected teachers attitudes toward their profession. Results of the study indicated that high school teachers in Georgia consider academic dishonesty to be a …

New Voices In The Old South: Latino Immigrant Students' Experiences At One Georgia Middle School, Lucy Joanna Bush

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This research study investigated the experiences of Latino immigrant students as they negotiated and developed their academic identities at one Georgia middle school in Athens, Georgia, U.S.A. Seventy-five students took part in the survey portion of the research study, while six students participated in in-depth interviews that formed the ethnographic case studies of this research. I utilized an ethnographic case study approach (Stake, 1995; 1998) in order to explore how these students' academic experiences influenced the negotiation and development of their academic identities into three distinct forms: cholo or low-performing, medio or average-performing, and cabezon or highperforming. Each of the …

China's Nuclear Forces: Operations, Training, Doctrine, Command, Control And Campaign Planning, Larry M. Wortzel Dr.

Books, Monographs & Collaborative Studies

Recent books and journal articles published in China provide new insights into nuclear doctrine, operations, training, and the employment of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) strategic rocket forces. The major insights come from exploiting sections of a doctrinal text published for PLA institutions of higher military education by the Chinese National Defense University, A Guide to the Study of Campaign Theory (Zhanyi Lilun Xuexi Zhinan). In the view of many in the PLA, the military power of the United States, the potential to use that power to coerce or dominate China, and the ability to threaten China’s pursuit of its …

Zach's News, Georgia Southern University

Library Publications (1999-2023)

• Future GALILEO Initiatives Presented at September 28 Friends of Library Luncheon

• New and Enhanced Electronic Resources Now Available

• Library Completes Processing of the Papers of a Medical Pioneer

• Library Offers Free Research and Computer Workshops

• All Periodicals Returned to Library Building

• Delivering Henderson Library Resources to Faculty Offices

• Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Offers Off-Campus Download Capability and Temporary Accounts for Class Training Sessions

• Linking to Library Resources via WebCT and Faculty Web Pages

• New Library Photocopiers

Modelling Spatial Dependence And Social Interactions, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Spatial dependence or social interaction among economic agents or social actors, such as neighbourhood effects, copycatting, and peer group effects, has recently received increased attention from regional scientists, economists, econometricians, and statisticians.

Slope County : A Review Of Rural Depopulation And Change, Zach Karsky

Undergraduate Theses and Senior Projects

No abstract provided.

Perceptions Of Calf Pool Participants Toward West Virginia Calf Pool Organizations, Carrie M. Stemple

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The purpose of this study was to determine perceptions of West Virginia calf pool producers with their local organization. This study was a descriptive survey research conducted with West Virginia calf pool producers who participated in a calf pool in 2005 and/or 2006. The majority of participants in the study reported that they were satisfied with the calf pool organizations, and would continue to participate. Over half reported that they planned to increase their production within five years in order to market more calves through the calf pool. The average calf pool producer in West Virginia is over 50 years …

A Catalog And The Perceived Effectiveness Of Stormwater Best Management Practices Bmps Used On Municipal Sites In Northern Utah, Saadia E. Ahmed

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Stormwater, as a result of hydrological events and urbanization, has contributed to problem s of water quality and flooding. Stormwater picks up pollutants and flows into sewer systems ultimately impacting water sheds and wildlife habitat. The primary method to control storm water discharge is by the use of best management practices. This research seeks to evaluate the perceived effectiveness of stormwater structural Best Management Practice s (BMPs) installed on municipal sites in northern Utah. A representative sample of sites is chosen using a snowballing sampling method. Selected sites are visited and surveys addressing effectiveness and maintenance issue s are answered …