Digital Commons Network^™

Bilingual Spanish-English Speaking 4-Year-Old-Children: English Normative Data And Correlations With Parent Reports, Brooke Leann Powers

Dissertations and Theses

Many bilingual Spanish-English preschool aged children are impacted by speech sound disorders; and research has shown that bilingual speech sound systems develop differently than monolinguals'. Research has also shown that, for monolingual English and Spanish speakers, parent reports can be a valid tool for identification and single-word assessments can effectively diagnose speech disorder, yet little, if any, normative data or information about the validity of parent reports as an identification tool exists for bilingual Spanish-English speakers. The purpose of the present study was to create bilingual speech normative data for English single-word assessment scores for percent consonants correct (PCC), percent …

Achieving Congruence: Building A Case For Implementing A District-Wide Interim Benchmark Assessment That Is Aligned With A Balanced Literacy Framework, Theodore Feller

Dissertations and Theses

For generations--and certainly for the last 30 years--proponents of traditional and progressive philosophies have argued over how best to educate our children. Although this debate is often carried out in the political and academic spheres, the difficulties created by not being able to resolve the differences between the two belief systems become blatantly clear in the pedagogy of early literacy. On the one hand, traditionalists argue for a direct and explicit instructional methodology, and on the other hand, progressives advocate for Whole Language or Balanced Literacy instruction. The classroom often becomes a battlefield as advocates of these opposing schooling paradigms …

A Comparison Of Single Word Identification, Connected Speech Samples, And Imitated Sentence Tasks For Assessment Of Children With A Ssd, Emily Katherine Snyder

Dissertations and Theses

Speech-language pathologists are constantly trying to use the most efficient and effective assessments to obtain information about the phonetic inventory, speech sound errors, and phonological error patterns of children who are suspected of having a speech sound disorder. These assessments may involve a standardized measure of single words and/or sentences and a non standardized measure, such as a spontaneous speech sample. While research has shown both of these types of assessments to give clinicians information about a child's speech production abilities, the use of delayed imitation tasks, either words or sentences, has not been a widely studied topic and has …

Cyclic Behavior Of Screen Grid Insulated Concrete Form Components, Carl Scott Werner

Dissertations and Theses

The principle of sustainability in the built environment has become much more significant in the past decade, resulting in a push to develop building systems that are more energy efficient, durable, and use fewer natural resources. For residential and light commercial buildings, insulated concrete forms (ICF) have enjoyed increasing popularity for their ability to meet these new demands. ICFs are a stay-in-place concrete formwork system for building structural walls that are also highly insulated, among other benefits. Screen-grid ICFs (SGICF) are a small subset of ICFs that tend to use less concrete than standard ICFs and are sometimes made of …

Child Welfare Workforce Turnover: Frontline Workers' Experiences With Organizational Culture And Climate, And Implications For Organizational Practice, Melanie Dawn Sage

Dissertations and Theses

Public child welfare agencies experience front line worker turnover rates as high as 25% a year. Worker turnover has significant financial costs to agencies, and has been linked to negative outcomes for children in care. Prior research has linked organizational factors, such as organizational climate, culture, and supervisor satisfaction, to turnover intent in child welfare populations. This research uses an empowerment framework to turn to workers directly to answer the question, "What are the organizational factors that lead frontline child welfare workers to stay or leave the agency, and what, then, are the implications for agency administrators?" This study relies …

Synthesis Of Reversible Functions Using Various Gate Libraries And Design Specifications, Nouraddin Alhagi

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation is devoted to efficient automated logic synthesis of reversible circuits using various gate types and initial specifications. These Reversible circuits are of interest to several modern technologies, including Nanotechnology, Quantum computing, Quantum Dot Cellular Automata, Optical computing and low power adiabatic CMOS, but so far the most important practical application of reversible circuits is in quantum computing. Logic synthesis methodologies for reversible circuits are very different than those for classical CMOS or other technologies. The focus of this dissertation is on synthesis of reversible (permutative) binary circuits. It is not related to general unitary circuits that are used …

The Design Of A Novel Tip Enhanced Near-Field Scanning Probe Microscope For Ultra-High Resolution Optical Imaging, Derek Brant Nowak

Dissertations and Theses

Traditional light microscopy suffers from the diffraction limit, which limits the spatial resolution to λ/2. The current trend in optical microscopy is the development of techniques to bypass the diffraction limit. Resolutions below 40 nm will make it possible to probe biological systems by imaging the interactions between single molecules and cell membranes. These resolutions will allow for the development of improved drug delivery mechanisms by increasing our understanding of how chemical communication within a cell occurs. The materials sciences would also benefit from these high resolutions. Nanomaterials can be analyzed with Raman spectroscopy for molecular and atomic bond information, …

Modeling Terahertz Diffuse Scattering From Granular Media Using Radiative Transfer Theory, Kyung Moon Nam

Dissertations and Theses

Terahertz (THz) spectroscopy can potentially be used to probe and characterize inhomogeneous materials, however spectroscopic identification of such materials from spectral features of diffuse returns is a relatively underdeveloped area of study. In this thesis, diffuse THz scattering from granular media is modeled by applying radiative transfer (RT) theory for the first time in THz sensing. Both classical RT theory and dense media radiative transfer (DMRT) theory based on the quasi-crystalline approximation (QCA) are used to calculate diffuse scattered intensity. The numerical solutions of the vector radiative transfer equations (VRTE) were coded and calculated in MATLAB. The diffuse scattered field …

Anatomy Of Mishima's Most Successful Play Rokumeikan, Mami Harano

Dissertations and Theses

Mishima Yukio premiered the play Rokumeikan in 1956 and published it in 1957. For more than half a century, this play has been praised as one of the finest Japanese plays in the Post-War period. Rokumeikan is a multi-act tragic melodrama, set in 1886 (Meiji Period) in the Rokumeikan building. The play intertwines complex political cabals, intense loves and hatreds, and multiple deceptions embodying the conflict between political power and love. This essay explores the reasons why Rokumeikan has maintained its popularity over its fifty year long performance history and examines the critical reception of the play. My analysis of …

Transformative Teacher Evaluation: Self Evaluation For High Performing Teachers, Carla Ann Sosanya-Tellez

Dissertations and Theses

Public schools are in crisis, as educators and legislators seek to provide high quality education to diverse students in a measurement-driven environment. The public educator's moral imperative is to assure that all children are literate when they leave school so they can thrive in our democracy (Dewey, 1944; Freire, 1998a; Giroux & Giroux, 2004). Yet, the achievement gap persists, as poor African-American and Latino students under-perform as compared to white middle-class students (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). Additionally, public school teachers are predominately middle-class and White, while they teach increasingly diverse children of poverty. In legislation, student assessment, teacher licensure, and …

Stochastic Orders In Heterogeneous Samples With Applications, Maochao Xu

Dissertations and Theses

The statistics literature has mostly focused on the case when the data available is in the form of a random sample. In many cases, the observations are not identically distributed. Such samples are called heterogeneous samples. The study of heterogeneous samples is of great interest in many areas, such as statistics, econometrics, reliability engineering, operation research and risk analysis.

Stochastic orders between probability distributions is a widely studied concept. There are several kinds of stochastic orders that are used to compare different aspects of probability distributions like location, variability, skewness, dependence, etc.

In this dissertation, most of the work is …

A Structural And Functional Analysis Of Codeswitching In Mi Vida Gitana 'My Gypsy Life,' A Bilingual Play, Gustavo Javier Fernandez

Dissertations and Theses

The present study analyzed the language in the script of the bilingual play Mi Vida Gitana 'My Gypsy Life' (Malán, 2006) in order to better understand issues relating to codeswitching (CS). The analysis was done from a structural and a functional perspective and utilized various models developed by renowned CS scholars.

For the structural analysis, I utilized concepts and ideas put forth in the three-tiered typology created by Muysken (2000) and the Matrix Language Frame model developed by Myers-Scotton (1993). The results of this portion of the study showed that some form of CS, whether occurring between turns or within …

Globalization; But Under What Conditions? -- The Case Of The E.U., Michaelangelo Anastasiou

Dissertations and Theses

The present study explores the relationship between trust placed in national institutions and opinion of globalization. A secondary data analysis is conducted using data collected by the European Commission in a 2004 Eurobarometer survey of European Union (EU) citizens on various issues regarding the EU, globalization and national challenges. A prominent theme in the literature is that, in recent times, globalization has had the effect of compromising the sovereignty of nation-states. This has generated a backlash of nationalistic attitudes wherein globalization is posited in opposition to the nation-state. This surge in nationalism has reinforced a culture wherein any external force …

Investigation Of Speech Samples From Typically Developing Preschool Age Children: A Comparison Of Single Words And Imitated Sentences Elicited With The Paba-E, Matthew William Olsen

Dissertations and Theses

Assessment of speech sound production in young children provides the basis for diagnosis and treatment of speech sound disorders. Standardized single-word articulation tests are typically used for identification of speech sound errors because they can provide an efficient means of obtaining a speech sample for analysis and comparison to same-age peers. A major criticism of single-word articulation tests is that they may not accurately reflect speech sound production abilities in conversation. Comparison of performance in single-word and conversational contexts has produced conflicting results in the available research.

The purpose of the present study was to compare speech samples obtained using …

Teacher Evaluation Of Item Formats For An English Language Proficiency Assessment, Jose Luis Perea-Hernandez

Dissertations and Theses

An abstract of the thesis of José Luis Perea-Hernández for the Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages presented February 11, 2010. Title: Teacher Evaluation of Item Formats for an English Language Proficiency Assessment. Language testing plays a significant role in the collection of systematic information about English Language Learners' ability and progress in K-12 public schools in Oregon. Therefore, the following thesis reports on a process of the development of this assessment as I was at some point one of the members in the test development team and then drew upon teachers' opinions and judgments …

Music And Conflict Resolution: Exploring The Utilization Of Music In Community Engagement, Mindy Kay Johnston

Dissertations and Theses

This study is based on interviews conducted with twenty-two musician-activists in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States in 2009 to explore perspectives about the role of music in community engagement with the aim of considering how music might be used in the field of conflict resolution. The study followed the qualitative approach of constructivist grounded theory as designed by Charmaz (2000, 2002). Two themes, "Music for Self," and "Music for Society" emerged from interviews and comprise the internal and external meanings of music to the research informants. The results of the study indicate that the relationships people have …

A Logic Formulation For The Qca Cell Arrangement Problem, Marc Stewart Orr

Dissertations and Theses

Some people believe that IC densities are approaching the fundamental limits inherent to semiconductor technologies. One alternative to semiconductors is Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA); QCA is a nanotechnology that offers the potential to build denser IC's that switch at higher frequencies and run on lower power. QCA's most basic building block, the QCA cell, is inherently binary; digital circuits are implemented by arranging these QCA cells in pre-defined configurations on a two dimensional plane. This paper proposes a logic formulation that describes arranging QCA cells on a two dimensional plane; it is presented as a set of rules that can …

La Palabra Es Salud: A Comparative Study Of The Effectiveness Of Popular Education Vs. Traditional Education For Enhancing Health Knowledge And Skills And Increasing Empowerment Among Parish-Based Community Health Workers (Chws), Noelle Wiggins

Dissertations and Theses

Popular education is a mode of teaching and learning which seeks to bring about more equitable social conditions by creating settings in which people can identify and solve their own problems. While the public health literature offers evidence to suggest that popular education is an effective strategy for increasing empowerment and improving health, there have been no systematic attempts to compare the outcomes of popular education to those of traditional education. The goal of La Palabra es Salud was to conduct such a comparison among Latino, parish-based Community Health Workers (CHWs). The study employed a quasi-experimental design, mixed methods, and …

A Case Study: The High/Scope Preschool Curriculum And Kindergarten Readiness In The Pittsgrove Township School District, Loren D. Thomas

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Investigation Of The Nature Of Science Views Of Undergraduate Natural Science And Nonscience Majors In Biology Courses, Marie Christine Desaulniers Miller

Biological Sciences

Science educators have the common goal of helping students develop scientific literacy, including understanding of the nature of science (NOS). University faculties are challenged with the need to develop informed NOS views in several major student subpopulations, including science majors and nonscience majors. Research into NOS views of undergraduates, particularly science majors, has been limited. In this study, NOS views of undergraduates in introductory environmental science and upper-level animal behavior courses were measured using Likert items and open-ended prompts. Analysis revealed similarities in students' views between the two courses; both populations held a mix of naYve, transitional, and moderately informed …

An Examination Of The Effectiveness Of A Professional Development Program On Teacher Knowledge And Practice To Address Adolescent Health Issues, Narima Aliya Shahabudeen

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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An Historical Analysis Of The Virtual Va Program, Linda G. Reviea

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Attachment To God: Its Impact On The Psychological Wellbeing Of Persons With Religious Vocation, Innocent F. Okozi

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Comparing Racial Identity, Acculturative Stress, And Feelings Of Alienation In African-American College Attendees And Non-Attendees, Raymond Brock-Murray

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Influences On Middle Income, First-Generation Prospective College Students: Perspectives Of College-Bound High School Seniors, Mary A. Dillon

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Adaptable Ideology And Policymaking In Contemporary China: A Case Study Of The Government Response To The Rich-Poor Gap, Gary Stephen Andrasko

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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An Examination Of The 2003 Looting Of The Iraq National Museum: How The Protection Of Iraq's Cultural Property Was Overlooked, Laura Gawron

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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American And Chinese Personality Traits And Task Load In Simulated Flight Crews: Individual And Team Level Effects, Matthew Edward Loesch

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Understanding the impact of pilot interpersonal dynamics may be crucial for flight team success as well as the prevention of air crash disasters. Achieving optimum performance from flight teams requires limiting unnecessary pilot task load. This study examined American and Chinese simulated flight crews. Factors believed to affect cockpit interpersonal dynamics and subsequent crew task loads were pilot personality and nationality. Pilot personality, team personality elevation, team personality variability, and team nationality were analyzed for their potential impact on task load perceptions. Twenty-four American, 23 Chinese, and 23 mixed nationality two person teams were created and used for comparisons. Increasing …

An Empirical Assessment Of The Can Spam Act, Alex Conrad Kigerl

Dissertations and Theses

In January 2004, the United States Congress passed and put into effect the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN SPAM). The Act was set forth to regulate bulk commercial email (spam) and set the limits for what was acceptable. Various sources have since investigated and speculated on the efficacy of the CAN SPAM Act, few of which report a desirable outcome for users of electronic mail. Despite the apparent consensus of anti-spam firms and the community of email users that the Act was less than effective, there is little to no research on the efficacy of …

Somatization And Engagement In Mental Health Treatment, Teresa Chianello

Dissertations and Theses

Somatization, the presentation of physical symptoms without an identifiable cause, is among the most common problems in primary medical care. Treatment approaches are typically offered within the medical consultation interview once the medical provider distinguishes between physical and emotional etiology. This dualistic strategy is especially troublesome for patients whose physical complaints cannot be validated and who are recommended for only mental health therapy. The aim of this study was to examine how medical practitioners can instead motivate patients to consider both physical and emotional treatment. An analogue intervention consisting of an enhanced consultation interview was compared to a care as …