Digital Commons Network^™

Autism Fast Start Checklist, Tina Taylor, Leeann Whiffen

Faculty Publications

This Fast Start Checklist was created to help parents in Utah who are concerned that their child is exhibiting signs of an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It serves as a general guideline for obtaining support through the evaluation and initial treatment process and is not intended to be all-inclusive. Early Intervention and school personnel can guide parents to these resources as they collaborate to determine the best route for serving children who exhibit signs of ASD. Parents should be encouraged to not try to do everything on this list, as they are provided as points to consider. This checklist is …

The Immediacy Of Objects: Reassessing The Contribution Of Art History To Feminist Medieval Studies, Jennifer Borland

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Sarah Higley, Hildegard Of Bingen's Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation And Discussion. (The New Middle Ages Series.) Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, Sandra Ballif Straubhaar

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Overreaction To Fearsome Risks, Cass R. Sunstein, Richard Zeckhauser

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Fearsome risks are those that stimulate strong emotional responses. Such risks, which usually involve high consequences, tend to have low probabilities, since life today is no longer nasty, brutish and short. In the face of a low-probability fearsome risk, people often exaggerate the benefits of preventive, risk-reducing, or ameliorative measures. In both personal life and politics, the result is damaging overreactions to risks. We offer evidence for the phenomenon of probability neglect, failing to distinguish between high and low-probability risks. Action bias is a likely result.

No Margin For Error: A Study Of Two Women Balancing Motherhood And Ph.D. Studies, Robin S. Grenier, Morag C. Burke

The Qualitative Report

This cogenerative ethnography explored the lived experiences of two graduate students balancing Ph.D. studies and motherhood through McClusky’s (1963) Theory of Margi n. Specifically, we asked ourselves: What impact does pregnancy have on personal and academic selves and how are multiple roles and responsibilities managed? Through an analysis of dialogues, artifacts, conceptual maps, and narratives, examples of internal and external lo ad revealed the dynamic nature of the female experiences in graduate school. Excerpts from the data showed how roles, relationships, and experiences are characterized and how similar or different those example s were, given individual context. Implications of this …

Adoption Of 3-D Virtual Worlds For Education, X. Chen, Keng Siau, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As an emerging phenomenon, virtual world education is rarely researched in MIS literature. With stiff competition among institutions using virtual worlds for education, a legitimate research question is: What factors influence students’ intention to adopt 3-D virtual world environment for their education needs? Drawing on existing technology acceptance models and studies in other IS contexts, we developed a model to predict students’ acceptance of a 3-D virtual world education environment and plan to empirically test the model using survey data collected from college students. From the academic research perspective, studies on the use of the new technology for education will …

Evaluating Descriptive Richness In Collection-Level Metadata, Oksana L. Zavalina, Carole L. Palmer, Amy S. Jackson, Myung-Ja Han

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

When many collections are brought together in a federation or aggregation, the attributes of the original collections can become difficult to discern. Collection-level metadata has the potential to provide important context about the purpose and features of individual collections, but the qualitative aspects of collections are difficult to describe in a systematic way. This paper reports on a content analysis of collection records in the Digital Collections and Content (DCC) aggregation, conducted to analyze the kinds of substantive and purposeful information represented across 202 cultural heritage collections. We found that the free-text Description field often provides more accurate and complete …

Cognitive Development And The Understanding Of Informed Consent, Lindsey Elizabeth Pearse

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The informed consent process is an important criterion for all research studies. However, researchers rarely ask or even consider how many participants truly understand the informed consent information and their research rights. Currently, researchers base a participant’s ability to understand informed consent information and research rights on age. In the present study it was hypothesized that cognitive development is a predictor of ethical knowledge. Accordingly, it was argue d that a participant’s ability to understand informed consent and research rights should not be based on a participant’s age but instead on the participant’s cognitive development. Students at the University of …

Introduction To New Studies On The Fantastic In Literature, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Cultural Scenarios Of The Fantastic, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Cultural Scenarios of the Fantastic," Asunción López-Varela Azcárate explores the relationship between technological development, the materiality of objects, the concept of ontological presence, and the emergence of abstract and fantastic models. López-Varela Azcárate argues that since the early twentieth century there has been a return to the fantastic in literature and that this is related to neo-baroque attitudes whose foundations are a systemic way of knowing that unveils a world understandable from an epistemology of complexity and ambiguity. In postmodern neo-baroque aesthetics, with its focus on technological re-mediating, that is, transferring information across different media, originality is …

Death And Love In Poe's And Schwob's Readings Of The Classics, Ana González-Rivas Fernández, Francisco García Jurado

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics," Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Francisco García Jurado propose that although Gothic literature usually relegates the theme of love to the background, devoting most of its attention to the supernatural and to darkness, there are also literary texts in which love is mixed with life beyond the grave. This is the case, for example, of Théophile Gautier's La Morte amoureuse (1836), the story of a vampire who comes back to life in her "undead" condition in order to seduce a priest. The theme of love and death …

Entropy And The Fantastic In Pynchon's Narratives, María Rosa Burillo Gadea

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Entropy and the Fantastic in Pynchon's Narratives" María Rosa Burillo Gadea postulates that dealing with Pynchon's fiction one is not sure if paranoia is presented as an alternative way of grasping other possible spheres, a more comprehensive vision of the world, or merely a joke. Pynchon's stories try to reproduce reality in different fictional grounds. He uses the notion of entropy, the level of molecular disorder of a thermodynamic system when heated as a metaphor for a disorderly and chaotic universe, necessary, however, in order to avoid the fatality of system exhaustion or death. A kind of …

Metamorphosing Worlds In The Cinema Of The Fantastic, Juan González Etxeberria

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Metamorphosing Worlds in the Cinema of the Fantastic" Juan González Etxeberria reads fantastic films as appealing products of both unconscious psychological and institutionalized sociological anxieties. A result of the binary opposition of rhetorical strategies that shaped modern culture, the genre is an open door to other worlds where to dream of uncertainties and to indulge in our traumas. Its transgressive indeterminacy against the Cartesian system is traced from the origin of creative filmic language to postmodern disturbing fantasies about the unknown, having social control and individual free will as the only limits of its imaginary trips across …

Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, And Literary Intertexts, Pilar Andrade

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts" Pilar Andrade analyzes the figure of the double as an element of cinema. Andrade does not take under consideration films in which the double is considered merely as a clinical case with no mystery (for example as in David Fincher's Fight Club or Brad Anderson's The Machinist) or in which it is used as a useful piece to make the plot without referring to the fantasy world (as in Joel Schumacher's Bad Company); instead, Andrade focuses on films that make a clear connection between the alter ego and fantasy, including …

Making Sense Of The Access Problem: A New Methodology For Analyzing The Postsecondary Education Decision, Farrah Graham

Theses and Dissertations

This study is interested in defining new variables that contribute to the explanation of whether or not an individual applies to postsecondary institutions. Prior research has explained differences based on demographic variables, such as first generation status, income and race, and differences in information and social support that an individual possesses. While these variables have a significant effect on the decision, they do not completely explain why individuals decide to pursue postsecondary education. This research suggests that how an individual moves through the decision process, as well as how information is interpreted and used will have an effect on the …

Promoting Hope: Suggestions For School Counselors, Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti, Lisa M. Edwards, Shane J. Lopez

College of Education Faculty Research and Publications

School counselors need multiple resources to assist today's students in developing to their fullest potential. This development might often be measured outwardly by academic success; however, psychological and emotional well-being of students is a large part of this success. The construct of hope is defined as a bidimensional characteristic consisting of an agency component (willpower to move toward one's goals) and a pathways component (ability to develop multiple routes to one's goals) and has been linked to academic success, athletic performance, psychological adjustment, and physical health in students (Snyder et al., 1991). Helping school counselors to enhance individual strengths through …

A Study Of Utah Teachers' Developmentally Appropriate Beliefs And Practices As Related To Perceptions Of Kindergarteners' Successful School Entry, Mary Mceuen Darnell

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This study was an exploration of 450 Utah kindergarten teachers' perceptions of problems children face at the time of kindergarten entry, as well as an examination of the teachers' developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices. Consistent with previous research, teachers' beliefs were found to be more developmentally appropriate than their reported practices. This study also investigated the relationship between both teacher and classroom/school demographics and teachers' developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices. Further, the relationship between teachers' perceptions of children's transition to kindergarten and beliefs, practices, teacher demographics, and classroom/school demographics was studied.

Study findings indicated that teachers perceive 20% of kindergarten …

Longitudinal And Reciprocal Effects Of Ethnic Identity And Experiences Of Discrimination On Psychosocial Adjustment Of Navajo (Diné) Adolescents, Matthew D. Jones

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This study examined the relationships among ethnic identity, cultural identity, experiences of discrimination, their interactions, and their effects on various psychosocial outcomes (self-esteem, depression, sense of school membership, social functioning, substance abuse, substance related problems, delinquent behaviors, and grade point average [GPA]). Data were collected twice over a 2-year period.

Change across time was observed in male adolescents' experiences of discrimination. Affirmation and belonging to Navajo culture was the strongest protective predictor at Time 1, but at Time 2 less consistent patterns of association emerged. Also at Time 2, experiences of discrimination emerged as a powerful negative predictor of psychosocial …

Student Achievement And Affective Traits In Electrical Engineering Laboratories Using Traditional And Computer-Based Instrumentation, Matthew D. Lammi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Distance education has the ability to transcend distance and time, reaching students anywhere at any time, particularly those underrepresented in engineering. Engineering is a practice-oriented profession requiring an interweaving of scientific theory and applied hands-on activities. Despite the need for distance education in engineering, few studies have systematically investigated the impact of student achievement and attitude in distance engineering laboratories. This quasi-experimental research addressed that need by studying the cognitive and affective domains of achievement in engineering laboratories while employing computer-based and traditional oscilloscopes. The students from two courses, electrical engineering for nonmajors and electronic fundamentals, were randomly assigned into …

Student Teachers' Beliefs And Practices About Developmentally Appropriate Practice For Infants And Toddlers, Trisha Haws

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this study was to examine students’ beliefs and practices about developmentally appropriate practice with infants and toddlers. This study examined whether coursework in child development, combined with a lab experience engaging with children of the same age group, was related to developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices of student teachers. In particular, the study examined how coursework and practicum taken concurrently may have differed from taking the coursework alone. The relationships between descriptive data and student teachers’ developmentally appropriate beliefs and practices were also of interest.

A total of 390 college students participated in this study. These students …

Rereading And Rewriting Women's History, Jacqueline Harris

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In Margaret Atwood’s nonfiction book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), Atwood discusses the importance of the female writer’s responsibility, that to write as a woman or about women means that you take upon yourself the responsibility of writing as a form of negotiation with our female dead and with what these dead took with them—the truth about who they were. By rereading and rewriting our communal past, women writers pay tribute to our female ancestors by voicing their silent stories while also changing gender stereotypes, complicating who these women were, and acknowledging their accomplishments.

In her …

Transforming Teachers’ Knowledge And Skills: Lesson Study In Mathematics Instruction Sensitive For Diverse Learners At Middle Level, Vessela Ilieva

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This study investigated the learning of middle school mathematics teachers as they worked in a student-sensitive lesson study group. Three mathematics teachers collaborated to develop and teach student-sensitive math lessons. The original Japanese lesson study model was extended to involve a diversity consultant with experience and expertise in providing student-sensitive instruction. Collaboratively, the members of the lesson study group tailored their mathematics lessons to provide enhanced mathematics instruction to the diverse groups of students in their classrooms. The lesson study team held weekly meetings to develop three student-sensitive lessons over a six-month period.

A case study design was used to …

Demographic Factors That Predict Breastfeeding In The Early Postpartum Period In Utah Women, Amyanne Wuthrich-Reggio

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Breastfeeding is considered to be the optimal choice of infant feeding methods, yet the rates of breastfeeding are consistently lower than national recommendations despite efforts to reverse this trend. Designing effective interventions to increase breastfeeding requires a thorough understanding of the women who choose to breastfeed their infants as well as those who do not choose this infant feeding method. In order to determine which demographic factors predicted breastfeeding in the early postpartum period in Utah women, 600 "intercept interviews" were conducted in the spring and early summer of 2007. Women included in the study were 18 years or older …

Complex Systems In Engineering And Technology Education: A Mixed Methods Study Investigating The Role Computer Simulations Serve In Student Learning, Douglas J. Walrath

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This research was conducted to determine if students receiving complex systems instruction in the form of software simulations recognize patterns and underlying elements of complex systems more effectively than students receiving traditional instruction. Complex systems were investigated with an analytic (reductive) approach in a control group and with a synthesis approach in the treatment group. Exploration of this top-down approach to learning complex systems counters traditional bottom-up methodologies, investigating systems and subsystems at the component level. The hypothesis was that students experiencing complex systems scenarios in a computer-based learning environment would outperform their counterparts by constructing a greater number of …

Teaching Patterns: A Pattern Language For Improving The Quality Of Instruction In Higher Education Settings, Daren Olson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

One method for improving the appeal of instruction is found in Christopher Alexander’s work on architectural design patterns. In this qualitative research study, student comments on teacher/course evaluation forms were analyzed to generate six instructional design patterns. The teacher enthusiasm pattern encourages teachers to show (a) increased scholarship and enthusiasm towards the subject matter, (b) genuine concern and enthusiasm towards the students, and (c) mastery of and enthusiasm towards the act of teaching. The balanced curriculum pattern recommends that teachers (a) determine the appropriate depth or breadth of subject matter and communicate it to the students, (b) create a balanced …

Application Of Resiliency Theory And Adaptive Cycles As A Framework For Evaluating Change In Amenity-Transition Communities, Scott L. Hoffmann

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In recent decades, many rural, natural resource-dependent communities have experienced ubiquitous and oftentimes substantial economic decline due to downturns in their commodity-oriented industries. In spite of this, communities with access to varying forms of natural capital have experienced an upsurge in activities such as recreation, tourism, second home growth, and retirement in-migration. If managed properly, amenity-oriented development has potential to reverse economic decline by attracting tourists, entrepreneurs, younger and more educated workers, and retirees, and may ultimately generate economic diversification, local growth, and an improved quality of life for residents. While there are literally thousands of potential measures of well-being, …

A Comparative Analysis Of Factors Contributing To The Biblical Worldview Among High School Students In The American Association Of Christian Schools Of Georgia, North Carolina, And South Carolina, Michael Hugh Bryant

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This non-experimental quantitative study is a comparative analysis of factors contributing to the biblical worldview of students attending select Christian schools in the states of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The research design uses non-randomized control groups, an instrument which includes original questions in addition to items from three other instruments, and a Likert-type scale. Results imply that the subjects appear to consistently reflect orthodox doctrine in their responses, if not always in their behavior. The subjects were homogenous in many of their answers even though there were particular questions that evoked a wide disparity of answers. The particular …

Teacher And Technology: How Faculty Resource Centers Can Enhance Higher Education Teaching And Learning, John T. Freden

Theses and Dissertations

As many classrooms around the world utilize instructional technology to attempt to enhance student learning, the faculty resource centers that support this instructional technology are sometimes left out of the equation. This study asks the question "What can faculty resource centers do to help teachers integrate instructional technology to improve student learning?" To help answer this question surveys were sent out to educators at two different higher education institutions. Questions were asked in a survey about the educators' background information, instructional technology, and faculty resource centers. The , information gathered from this survey is useful to faculty resource centers as …

Deafdigest: Blue Edition, November 30, 2008, Barry Strassler

DeafDigest Blue 2008

No abstract provided.

Deafdigest: Gold Edition, November 30, 2008, Barry Strassler

DeafDigest Gold 2008

No abstract provided.