Digital Commons Network^™

Environmental Enrichment Effects On The Activity Of A Nearctic River Otter, Kenneth O. Nelson

Theses

Environmental enrichment has been used to identify and change a stimulus in a captive environment to increase the animal's welfare by bring out species-appropriate behaviors and combating stereotypic behaviors. One captive North American river otter (Lontra canadensis) was presented four enrichment initiatives (live fish, frozen fish, swim tube, PVC scent tubes) in a random order and placement throughout the exhibit. Baseline data showed that the otter preferred to spend mornings in the lower level of the exhibit and the afternoons in the upper level. Food initiatives (i.e. live fish, and a lesser degree frozen fish) were most effective in deterring …

Gothic Cordelias: The Afterlife Of "Lear" And The Construction Of Femininity, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

Addresses the gap for an analysis of Shakespeare's relation to the Gothic.

The Gothic novel transports you to a strange and fascinating world quite unlike your own, far away from the calm drawing rooms of Regency England. It is the ultimate escapist literature. It is this world, and its mutually beneficial relationship with Catholicism, that Dr Maria Purves so beautifully illuminates for the reader.

Development Of Cognitive Capabilities In Humanoid Robots, Vadim Tikhanoff

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics Theses

Building intelligent systems with human level of competence is the ultimate grand challenge for science and technology in general, and especially for the computational intelligence community. Recent theories in autonomous cognitive systems have focused on the close integration (grounding) of communication with perception, categorisation and action. Cognitive systems are essential for integrated multi-platform systems that are capable of sensing and communicating. This thesis presents a cognitive system for a humanoid robot that integrates abilities such as object detection and recognition, which are merged with natural language understanding and refined motor controls. The work includes three studies; (1) the use of …

Revealing Choices: Using Taxpayer Choice To Target Tax Enforcement, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

People pay their taxes for many different reasons. Some choose to game the system, paying only when the cost of noncompliance outweighs its benefits. Others comply out of habit, a sense of duty or reciprocity, a desire to avoid feelings of guilt or shame, and for many other reasons. Our tax enforcement system has ignored this variety of taxpaying motivations for decades. It continues to rely primarily on audits and penalties, at least where information reporting and withholding are impossible. Fines and audits deter those rationally playing the tax compliance game, but are wasteful or even counterproductive when applied to …

Decisional Dignity: Teenage Abortion, Bypass Hearings, And The Misuse Of Law, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

How might we think about reforming abortion regulation in a world in which the basic legality of abortion may, as a matter of constitutional law, at last be relatively secure? I have in mind the era just upon us in which the overturn of Roe v. Wadeno longer looms so threateningly over the reproductive rights community in the United States and is no longer necessarily its central concern. There is now a general and seemingly well-founded optimism that under the Obama administration, those who support and rely on reproductive rights will not have to pray nightly for the health …

On Capturing The Possible Significance Of Institutional Design And Ethos, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

At a recent conference, a new judge from one of the federal courts of appeal – for the United States, the front line in judicial control of administrative action-made a plea to the lawyers in attendance. Please, he urged, in briefing and arguing cases reviewing agency actions, help us judges to understand their broader contexts. So often, he complained, the briefs and arguments are limited to the particular small issues of the case. We get little sense of the broad context in which it arises – the agency responsibilities in their largest sense, the institutional issues that may be at …

Intimate Discrimination: The State's Role In The Accidents Of Sex And Love, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

This is a challenging moment for the law of discrimination. The state's role in discrimination has largely shifted from requiring discrimination – through official policies such as segregation – to prohibiting discrimination – through federal laws covering areas such as employment, housing, education, and public accommodations. Yet the problem of discrimination persists, often in forms that are hard to regulate or even to recognize.

At this challenging moment, the intimate domain presents a vital terrain for study in two main ways. First, conceptually, studying the intimate domain permits new insights into discrimination and the law's identity categories, because people are …

Born Under A Lucky Chinese Sign, Just Wish I Was Chinese., Suzanne Newsham

Theses

This thesis is a cumulation of my life and my career as a student at Lindenwood University. Each essay is a comedic peek into the chaos that is my life. I was heavily influenced by the writing styles of David Sedaris and Sloane Crosley. Their views and easy read style of writing influenced me to write the same type of stories.

The first essay speaks to the influence that my parents had on me by making me feel overly loved and accepted even though I was adopted. "Not a dirty word in my house."

I continue with various lengths of …

Past Due: A Collection Of Poems, Byron Lee

Theses

"Past Due" is a co1lection of poems written almost entirely in free verse and almost exclusively based on personal experience. I find, at least at this point in my growth as a writer, that when I try to adhere to poetic structure, I feel confined. My style is sparse because I feel that this aesthetic best cuts to the emotion I'm trying to convey. I also love playing with line breaks, since I find that doing so can give several lines in a poem their own statement, like each poem makes its own statement even when bound in a co1Iection …

Seven Hour Education, Amy Recktenwald

Theses

Seven Hour Education is a hybrid of a collection of personal essays, and a short memoir. It chronicles my experience at the death of my son, Nicholas, and the resultant aftermath, some of which has come still years later. At times the material is contradictory in content and emotion, but this is to be expected as grief is a conflicting and fluid state of being. Much of the writing focuses on the "unexpected," situations and considerations most people aren't aware of in the life and perspective of the recently bereaved.

"Seven Hour Education" narrates the even of my son's birth, …

Accession And Original Ownership, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Although first possession is generally assumed to be the dominant means of establishing original ownership of property, there is a second but less studied principle for initiating ownership, called accession, which awards new resources to the owner of existing property most prominently connected to the new resource. Accession applies across a wide variety of areas, from determining rights to baby animals and growing crops to determining ownership of derivative rights under intellectual property laws. Accession shares common features with first possession, in that both principles assign ownership uniquely in a way that imposes minimal information cost burdens on society. But …

A House With Two Rooms: Final Report Of The Truth And Reconciliation Commission Of Liberia Diaspora Project, Dulce Foster, Dianne Heins, Mark Kalla, Michelle Garnett Mckenzie, James O'Neal, Rosalyn Park, Robin Phillips, Jennifer Prestholdt, Ahmed K. Sirleaf Ii, Laura A. Young

DRI Press

From 1979 to 2003, more than 1.5 million Liberians were forced from their homes to escape from the violence and destruction of a protracted civil conflict. Hundreds of thousands became refugees and many eventually made their way to countries of resettlement including the United States and the United Kingdom. Most of their stories have never been told. This report on the experience of the Liberian diaspora, entitled A House with Two Rooms, is the culmination of three years of work in the United States, the United Kingdom and Buduburam Refugee Settlement in Ghana. The report has been submitted to the …

A Study Of Georgia Elementary Teachers' Beliefs And Practices Concerning Grade Level Retention, Anna Jean Hill

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to identify Georgia elementary teachers' beliefs and practices of student grade-level retention. Overall, elementary teachers consider grade level retention to be an acceptable school practice to improve a student's academic success and that grade level retention also provides for long-term academic success. Georgia elementary teachers with master's degrees and above, teachers in suburban communities, teachers with more experience, and fourth grade teachers believe more strongly than elementary teachers with bachelor's degrees, teachers in rural and urban areas, and third and fifth grade elementary teachers, that students who do not meet academic standards should be …

School Size And Its Effect On School Climate And Academic Achievement In Rural South Georgia High Schools, James Benjamin Lawhorn

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

While leaders in rural South Georgia have continued to debate the notion of school size as it applies to high schools, limited research was available to support staying small or continued growth through consolidation. In this study, schools from rural South Georgia were examined in order to collect data that could provide communities with the resources available to either advocate for large or small rural high schools. Moreover, it could also provide the rationalization necessary for some larger schools to split. The purpose was to establish the relationship between school size and academic achievement, and the relationship was between school …

The Perspective Of School Personnel In A Georgia School District Concerning The Recruitment Of Minority Teachers, Shyla D. Ridley

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Recruiting and attracting minorities into the teaching profession is difficult. Given the competitiveness of the current job market and the heavy emphasis on standardized testing for all teacher candidates, the difficulties of attracting quality minority teachers are becoming more challenging. The lack of a racially and culturally diverse teaching staff remains a major issue in education nationally and locally, especially since projections indicate that the representation of minority teachers is declining while the number of minority students is increasing. This need for more minority teachers is even more critical in urban public schools characterized by large percentages of minority students …

Military Children And Holistic Education: A Narrative Reflection On Classroom Practice, Edith Allison

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation uses autobiographical narrative inquiry as a source of knowledge-generating reflection to examine how the educational needs of military children might be met through the use of holistic educational practices rather than a (well-intentioned) traditional, standardized curriculum. Data were gathered through observation; personal experience as a military child, military member, mother of military children and teacher of military children; journal entries and vicarious experiences shared by students, parents, educators and other invested in this population of learners. Experiences were compiled into fictional composites to protect the identity of all parties as well as national security. These composites were then …

High School Transformation: The Lived Experience Of Teachers Moving To Small Learning Environments, Reginald Lawrence

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Author's abstract: Educators faced with a decline in student achievement and increases in dropout rates are seeking ways to provide the best possible educational environment for students (Oxley, 2005). High school transformation, also known as the small schools movement, is a reform that is gaining currency in the world of education (Meier, 2006). Alien (2001) observed that high school transformation is the process of altering the makeup of a large comprehensive high school, also known as a traditional high school, into small high schools or small learning communities at the same location. The teacher is the most important component of …

Approaches To Promote Active, Conceptual Learning In A Pedagogically Hybrid Introductory Statistics Course, Brittany L. Allred

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

Statistics education is an active area of research where discovery-based learning is becoming more prominent. This project reviews how the USEI and GAISE recommendations can be implemented in the statistics classroom. Further, the project describes the creation of a library of classroom materials for an introductory statistics course. The results are also discussed from implementing various library materials, along with the student response to hands-on learning techniques.

A Fair Trial, Not A Perfect One: The Early Twentieth-Century Campaign For The Harmless Error Rule, Roger Fairfax

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

From just after the turn of the twentieth century through World War II, there was a great deal of activity around criminal justice reform. Much like today, many commentators in the early twentieth century considered the American criminal justice system to be broken. With regard to all of its phases-substance, sentencing, and procedure-the criminal justice system was thought to be inefficient and ineffective, and it failed to inspire the confidence of the bench, bar, or public.

Against this backdrop, a group of reformers sought to address the shortcomings of early twentieth-century criminal justice-during what I consider the "Golden Age" of …

Is There Such A Thing As Postmodern Copyright?, Peter Jaszi

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Back in 1992, artist/entrepreneur Jeff Koons suffered a humiliating setback when the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit repudiated the suggestion that his reuse of objects from public culture might constitute a "fair use" defense to a copyright infringement claim. Fourteen years later, in a case that again involved a photographer's claim of copyright infringement, Koons triumphed in the same judicial forum. What had changed? This Article explores, in particular, one among a variety of alternative explanations: Koons may have caught the very leading edge of a profound wave of change in the social and cultural conceptualization …

Urban Planning, Transportation, And Land -Use Planning: The Effects On Attitudes And Political Behaviors, Abraham Goldberg

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Public policy decisions made across levels of government have an effect on the way in which cities and city neighborhoods are built and maintained. Places vary in several ways including by the level of diversity or uniformity of the types of available amenities, transportation options, cleanliness, safety, affordability, and the availability of basic services. A growing body of literature, through empirical research, demonstrates that these variations affect several domains of people's lives. Personal health, the natural environment, and social capital have all been linked to characteristics of the built environment and attributes of the public realm. In line with this …

Lifestyle Behaviors And Illness Related Factors As Predictors Of Recurrent Headache In Us Adolescents, Suzy Mascaro Walter

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Purpose. Successful management of recurrent headache among adolescents requires an understanding of the lifestyle behaviors (skipping meals, water intake, tobacco use, alcohol use, and physical activity) and illness related factors (depression, somatic complaints, insomnia and obesity) reported to be associated with this headache type. This study describes a multivariate model demonstrating how lifestyle behaviors and illness related factors work together to predict recurrent headache in an adolescent population.;Method. A descriptive, cross-sectional, secondary analysis using survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) (1996) will be reported. Add Health is a large database providing a nationally representative …

Dispositional Mindfulness And Cardiovascular Reactivity To Sensory Rejection And Sensory Intake Tasks, Paula R. Prentice

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Mindfulness is a trained or dispositional state of "being" that has been linked to positive mental and physical health effects. Although preliminary findings on cortical activation have shown mindfulness to be associated with increased frontal activation and reduced limbic activity, very little is known regarding the influence of mindfulness on autonomic nervous system activity. The present study sought to determine how participants varying in self-reported levels of dispositional mindfulness reacted to tasks differing on attention to environmental stimuli. Cardiovascular reactivity [heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), and systolic and diastolic blood pressure] to a sensory intake task (computerized reaction time …

An Analysis Of U.S. History Textbooks: The Treatment Of Primary Sources, Misty D. Rodeheaver

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation examines the treatment of primary sources in three of the most widely adopted secondary U.S. History textbooks. Specifically examined were the types of primary sources, location of corresponding questions, classification of corresponding questions according by the Depth of Knowledge and the Library of Congress steps in examining primary sources, and presence of answers in the narrative. An instrument was created to assure transparency in assessing the textbooks. The results were examined through the interpretative frame works of historians and the various perspectives within the social studies. All texts incorporated many primary sources but varied greatly in their presentations …

Age Differences In Younger And Older Adults' Experience Of Interpersonal Problems, Leo Schlosnagle

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Differences between younger (N=78) and older (N=78) adults' frequency of experience of interpersonal problems were examined. Previous research has shown age-related declines in contact frequency and negative interactions (Akiyama, et al., 2003; Carstensen, 1992). Aging has also been associated with concurrent increases in emotional closeness and relationship satisfaction with social partners (Birditt, et al., 2005; Lang & Carstensen, 2002), and social self-efficacy and problem-solving effectiveness (Artistico, Cervone, and Pezzuti, 2003; Blanchard-Fields, Mienaltowski, & Seay, 2007; Lachman, 1986). In the current study, older adults reported experiencing interpersonal problems significantly less often than younger adults. Older adults also reported less contact frequency …

An Individualized Multimodal Mental Skills Intervention For College Athletes Undergoing Injury Rehabilitation, Jamie L. Shapiro

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Since the response to injury is both physical and psychological (e.g., Brewer & Cornelius, 2003; Wiese-Bjornstal, Smith, Shaffer, & Morrey, 1998), numerous researchers have advocated using psychological interventions in conjunction with physical therapy to optimize an athlete's recovery from injury. No empirical study has examined how to craft a mental skills intervention for injured athletes from initial post-injury assessment. The purpose of the present study was to explore injured athletes' experiences with a multimodal mental skills intervention to gain insight into how to create a mental skills plan for rehabilitation from initial post-injury assessment. Single subject and qualitative methodology were …

Encouraging Testicular Self-Examination Behaviors In College Males: Examining The Role Of Fear Appeals In Protection Motivation Theory, Cara L. Slider

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Testicular cancer is the most common cancer occurring in males between the ages of 15 & 35. Although testicular cancer holds a survival rate of 99% when detected and treated early, prior research shows most males do not perform regular testicular self-examinations. This research examined the role of fear appeals in the revised protection motivation theory (PMT) model to predict the performance of testicular self-examination behaviors in college males. An experiment was conducted among a convenience sample of 156 (N = 156) males enrolled in a state university. All males answered a set of questions measuring their threat appraisal concerning …

The Role Of Emotional Intelligence On Coach-Athlete Relationships And Motivational Climate, Eric E. Steege

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Research has revealed that Emotional Intelligence is linked to improved conflict resolution, enhanced social attachments and mental health, and the ability to create a collective set of goals that motivate others (Pau & Croucher, 2003). The recent surge of research assessing the role EI may play in leadership effectiveness, motivation, and social attachments within non-sport domains overlaps with similar research within sport that assesses the influence of emotion on coaching effectiveness (Frijda & Mesquita, 1994; Mageau & Vallerand, 2003). Thus, the purpose of this investigation was to examine if higher EI coached athletes (N=34) varied compared to lower EI coached …

A Study Of The Relationship Between The Leadership Images Of West Virginia Superintendents And Directed Modes Of Thinking, Dianna M. Vargo

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This study examines the relationship between leadership images of West Virginia public school superintendents and their directed modes of thinking. The Leadership Images: A Leadership Self-Inventory Instrument was used to collect data from the superintendents regarding their leadership images. The Keirsey's FourTypes Sorter was used to collect data from the superintendents regarding their directed modes of thinking. Also, the superintendents were asked to respond to five qualitative questions related to the work they do as superintendents. The surveys were used along with a demographic questionnaire that collected information regarding gender, size of the student population, student free and reduced status, …

Body Image And Celebrity Tabloids, Sarah Young

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This research aims to find a relationship between celebrity--obsessed tabloids, and the effect on body image of women ages 18-24 living in West Virginia, versus outside the state of West Virginia, based on a numeric scale.