Digital Commons Network^™

Internationalization At Home? Exploring Domestic Students' Perceptions Of And Interactions With International Students At A Large Midwestern Research Institution, Sondra T. Schreiber

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this qualitative, interview-based study was to explore international and domestic student interactions and perceptions of international students from the domestic students’ point of view at a large Midwestern research institution. This study concentrated on domestic students who had not studied abroad or traveled outside the United States in order to focus on the concept of internationalization at home.

Eight students participated in the study. They were all classified as seniors (having completed 89 credit hours or more) at the time of participation. The participants’ ages ranged from 21-31 years old. The participants were asked about their interactions …

What Makes Good Climbing Rock? A Petrographic, Structural, And Mechanical Investigation Of The Lower Nuttall Sandstone In The New River Gorge, West Virginia, Katelyn A. Huffman Olcott

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The New River Gorge National River (NERI) consists of 300 km2 of public land including an 85 km length of the New River, covering parts of Summers, Raleigh, and Fayette counties in West Virginia (National Park Service, 2006). NERI is known for world class rock climbing because the Pennsylvanian lower Nuttall Sandstone of the Pottsville Group forms 15 to 30 m high cliffs along the gorge walls, containing more than 1500 documented climbing routes. This project investigates why the lower Nuttall Sandstone in NERI creates one of the premiere climbing areas in the Eastern United States, and why the lower …

Subsurface Horizontal Microfracture Propagation Within The Middle Member Of The Bakken Formation, Williston Basin, North Dakota: Evidence And Implications, Travis Blackburn Warner

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The Devonian-Mississippian Bakken Formation of the Williston basin does not outcrop. All rock samples are obtained by coring. Open, uncemented, horizontal mode I (joints, with no sense of shear) microfractures (with apertures typically 5 to 25 microns) in the Bakken Formation's middle member have debated origins: natural or induced by coring. Samples were taken from two cores associated with the Williston basin's Nesson anticline, and horizontal microfractures were characterized, counted, and compared with geologic variables to determine what controls, if any, existed. Results support the theory that some Bakken middle member horizontal microfractures propagated naturally in the subsurface.;The majority of …

From Peasant To Pariah: Changing English Perceptions Of The Irish From The 1820s Through The 1860s, Traci J. Scully

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

While the historiography of English perceptions of the Irish in the later period of the Victorian era is extensive, there is a dearth of research in tracing the origins of these perceptions. The connection between England and Ireland dates back centuries, and the relationship was neutral at best and extremely violent at worst. Historians such as L. Perry Curtis have analyzed the mass media of these later decades to argue that the English saw their neighbors as subhuman creatures in the racial hierarchy.;However, this image did not emerge from a single event, but rather evolved over the tumultuous earlier decades …

The Last Of The Rephaim: Conquest And Cataclysm In The Heroic Ages Of Ancient Israel, Brian R. Doak

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

This dissertation explores the role of giants in the narrative and historiographic worlds of symbol, geography, and religion in ancient Israel. The Nephilim, Anaqim, Rephaim, Emim, Zamzumim/Zuzim, some Gibborim, and other individuals (e.g., Goliath) can all be classified as “giants”—not only with respect to their height and other physical properties, but also with respect to the negative moral qualities assigned to giants in antiquity. Previous interpreters have treated giants as merely a fantastical prop against which God’s agents emerge victorious. I argue that giants are a theologically and historiographically generative group, through which we gain insight into central aspects of …

The Politics Of Self-Provisioning In North-Central West Virginia, Autumn Long

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Provisioning one's own food appears to be the next step in the politicization of food production and consumption choices. In contrast to more convenient forms of "ethical consumption" such as buying organic or local, household-level food production requires a great deal of labor-time, knowledge, and social support. But does food self-provisioning elicit or engender a particular political consciousness? Based on six months of fieldwork conducted during the spring and summer of 2010, this research employs qualitative methodologies, including surveys, semistructured interviews, and ethnography, to examine the political, economic, and cultural dynamics of household-level food provisioning amongst a sample of food …

Subsurface And Reservoir Analysis Of The Upper Devonian Fourth Sand In Taylor County, West Virginia, Julia Dare Mcconnell

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The Upper Devonian Venango Group of West Virginia is a major Appalachian gas play. Best known by their informal driller's names, these shallow, multiple sandstone and siltstone reservoirs formed in fluvial, deltaic, interdeltaic shoreline, shelf, and slope depositional environments of the Catskill delta complex. However, these numerous units are difficult to correlate, resulting in reservoir identification problems.;The "Fourth Sand", one of the many units of the Venango Group is the topic of study for an integrated subsurface reservoir analysis in Taylor County, north-central West Virginia. The data includes paper and electric log data, multiple rotary sidewall cores, and well-test data, …

Identification Of Design Guidelines For A Mobile Oncology Unit, Renee Melendez Thompson

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis will identify design considerations for future development of a mobile unit for delivery of Oncology services to those engaged directly or indirectly in cancer treatment. Mobile Oncology Units are relatively new to medical and design worlds but offer benefits as extensions of the healthcare system that provide care to those who would not normally receive it. This project targets rural communities, the elderly and those without transportation in West Virginia.

Teacher Preparedness For Teaching And Assessing Depth Of Knowledge, Shelly Rankin Holmes

Dissertations

In the state of Mississippi, students in grades 3 through 8 are required to take an annual assessment, called MCT II, in Language Arts, Mathematics, and, more recently, Science. The results of this assessment may cause punitive consequences for each school and school district. State leaders have become increasingly concerned with student performance and accountability. Therefore, they have redesigned this assessment to accommodate a more challenging curriculum and to ensure alignment with national standards. The unanswered question is whether or not we have adequately prepared teachers for the increase in rigor and depth of knowledge for this assessment. A questionnaire …

Online Church: A Biblical Community, Jefferson Todd Mullins

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Faith and spirituality widely exist in the virtual world of the Internet, spanning the continuum of expression from the traditional to the abstract. This religious presence online includes every religion, and included Christianity. Whether one believes the Christian church is capable of existing online has much to do with one's perspective of the Internet and one's definition of church. The author will address the use of the Internet to build Christian community and establish the church in a virtual environment. Arguments for and against the church online will answer the question, "Is church online truly the church?"

A Cohesive Theology Of Christian Living: Principles From The Book Of Daniel, Jeremy Shaffer

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The propensity to force preconceived ideologies and theological systems upon the interpretation of the book of Daniel is evident. The purpose of this project is to provide a proper interpretation of Daniel 1-6 so that proper applications can be made for preaching and teaching, trying to eliminate any preconceptions along the way that are forced upon the text. A six-part theology of Christian living is developed from the preaching outlines of each chapter, all connected to the book's theme of sovereignty and thereby forming a cohesive unit. Ultimately, a greater appreciation for the value of the Old Testament in Christian …

From High School To College: Factors Shaping The Collegiate Experience, Mary Jane S. Secuban

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose for conducting this study was to develop an understanding of undergraduate college students' Social readiness for the collegiate experience. The study made use of a qualitative approach and a narrative research design that used focus group interviews. The seven focus group interviews were conducted at four sites across the Southern and Midwest United States, including different institutional types. These institutions included a community college, private college, research and comprehensive state university. A total of 21 undergraduate first- and second-year students participated. The findings included external factors such as parents, siblings, friends and teachers having a significant influence over …

Defining The Regional And Seasonal Climatic Response Of Long Douglas-Fir Tree-Ring Chronologies In Central Mexico, Grant Howard West

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Problems with instrumental climate data and difficulties arising from the distribution of sensitive, long-term tree-ring chronologies across Mexico's complex terrain have made it difficult to model the climate signal of tree-rings in Mexico. The objective of this research is to utilize the improved long-term, high-resolution, gridded instrumental climate dataset for Mexico recently developed by Zhu and Lettenmaier (2007) to document the climate signal of Douglas-fir in central Mexico. Through correlation analysis between five Douglas-fir tree-ring chronologies created by the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville Tree-Ring Laboratory and Zhu and Lettenmaier's (2007) gridded historical climate dataset, this research aims to define the regional …

Early Modern Evil Genius: Hyperconformity And Objectivity In Sixteenth And Seventeenth-Century English Literature, Christine Hoffmann

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies the response among early modern and postmodern audiences to the experience of information overload, and suggests that the most appealing response to living in a communications network that appears both systematic and random is to use a rhetoric of struggle that is ambiguous in the same way. >The reasons for this appeal are twofold: firstly, the rhetoric of struggle is a way to cope with the difficulty of situating oneself within a system of circulating information that operates according to its own arbitrary rules. Mimicking that arbitrariness is a way of finding aesthetic synchronicity between how one's …

Burning Down The House : Reclaiming Homeplace In Gloria Naylor’S Linden Hills And Mama Day, Jenny Elizabeth Mundell

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The last eighty years have been marked by a large body of work by black American women authors who contemplate the effects of place on character. These authors both use and transform the notion of space itself as a way to bring to light traditionally marginalized voices that have been denied a place amongst the annals of history and in literature. Gloria Naylor, whose body of work spans the 1980’s through the present day, is one such contemporary revisionist. My analysis of Naylor’s novels, Linden Hills and Mama Day, considers how Naylor employs geographic structure and landscape to expos e …

The Aputu: An Examination And Analysis Of A War Club-Form Distinctive To The Guianas, Donald Arp Jr.

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

This work examines a type of war club unique to South America and to the area of the three Guianas. The so-called block war club of the Guianas, often noted in the memoirs of explorers and soldiers in the New World, has received little academic attention. Mining firsthand accounts and what little academic attention has been focused on the clubs, this paper examines a set of clubs from the Heye Foundation Collection now housed in the National Museum of the American Indian. This thesis seeks to classify the block type club as the flared quadrilateral club, which is a more …

The Materiality Of The Self: A Multimodal, Communicative Approach To Identity, Sachi Sekimoto

Communication ETDs

The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a multimodal approach as an alternative way of theorizing and researching identity. The multimodal approach utilizes four modes of interaction--multidirectional interpellation, spatiality, temporality, and corporealit--to explore the processes of interaction and engagement between an individual and his/her social worlds. The multimodal approach focuses on the materiality of lived experience and the process of interaction and engagement between an individual and his/her social worlds through which his or her identity materializes. I apply the multimodal approach to analyze two autobiographical texts in which the authors deal with Asian identity in different cultural and …

Focusing A Swedish Lens On Canadian Immigration Policy, Daniel Hiebert

Western Migration Conference Series

Bio:

Daniel Hiebert is a Professor of Geography at UBC and Co-Director of Metropolis British Columbia, a centre of excellence dedicated to studying immigration and diversity. His research focus on the integration of immigrants in Canadian cities, particularly on issues related to their participation in housing and labour markets. He has published this research in a series of Metropolis Working Papers and a variety of academic journals. He is also engaged in international collaborative projects on these subjects, with scholars in Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden, and occupied the position of Guest Professor of Migration Studies, in …

Residents' Perceptions Of Community And Environmental Impacts From Development Of Natural Gas In The Marcellus Shale: A Comparison Of Pennsylvania And New York Cases, Kathryn J. Brasier, Matthew R. Filteau, Diane K. Mclaughlin, Jeffrey Jacquet, Richard C. Stedman, Timothy W. Kelsey, Stephan J. Goetz

Journal of Rural Social Sciences

Communities experiencing rapid growth due to energy development (‘boomtowns’) have reported positive and negative impacts on community and individual well-being. The perceptions of impacts vary according to stage of energy development as well as experience with extractive industries. Development of the Marcellus Shale provides an opportunity to examine these impacts over time and across geographic and historical contexts. This paper describes case study research in Pennsylvania and New York to document preliminary impacts of development occurring there. Cases vary by level of development and previous extractive history. The study finds that, in areas with low population density, higher levels of …

The Impact Of Afterschool Tutoring On Reading Achievement Of Elementary Students In A Mississippi Rural School Setting, Sharone Sanders Lacy

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine what impact a No Child Left Behind-related afterschool tutoring program had on reading achievement of elementary students in a Mississippi rural school setting. The research questions that guided this study were (1) Is there a significant difference between the 2008 and 2009 Mississippi Curriculum Test, 2nd Edition language arts scores of elementary students who participated in a No Child Left Behind-related afterschool tutoring program in a Mississippi rural school setting? and (2) Is there a significant difference between the 2009 Mississippi Curriculum Test, 2nd Edition language arts scores of elementary students who …

Modeling Eurasian Watermilfoil (Myriophyllum Spicatum) Habitat With Geographic Information Systems, Joby Michelle Prince

Theses and Dissertations

Eurasian watermilfoil (Myriophyllum spicatum) habitat was predicted at multiple scales, including a lake, regional, and national level. This dissertation illustrates how habitat can be predicted for M. spicatum using publically-available data for both presence and environmental variables. Models were generated using statistical procedures and quantative methods to determine where the greatest likelihood of presence was located. For the single lake, presence and absence data were available, but the larger-scale models used presence-only methods of prediction. These models were paired with a Geographic Information System so that data could be visualized on a map. For the selected lake, Pend Oreille (Idaho), …

Crossing The Border; Historical And Linguistic Divides Among The Bunaq In Central Timor, Antoinette Schapper

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

The Bunaq are a Papuan language-speaking people straddling the border of Indonesian West Timor and independent East Timor. This paper looks at the history of the Bunaq as a "border" people in Timor. "Border" is interpreted here in two ways, as referring to: (i) a political division, the boundary line separating one country from another, and (ii) a linguistic division, the distinguishing line between Papuan and Austronesian languages. I examine the effect that the Bunaq position at the political and linguistic borders of Timor has had on the people and their language.

Moving In A Hierarchized Landscape; Changing Border Regimes In Central Kalimantan, Dave Lumenta

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

Transnational mobility is a common feature among borderland communities. Central Borneo has been a relatively fluid and open riverine-based socio-cultural and economic space since the arrival of colonial states, without much interference from the establishment of international boundaries on local cross-border mobility practices. This applies to the Kenyah, a cluster of related ethnic groups occupying the Apokayan plateau in East Kalimantan (Indonesia), who are historically an integral part of the socio-cultural and economic fabric throughout the major riverine systems of Sarawak (Malaysia). Despite the relative absence of states, Central Borneo has not escaped the onslaught of social differentiation embedded in …

Contested Meaning Of The Nation-State Through Historical Border Narratives; A Case Study Of The Batang Kanyau Iban, West Kalimantan, Iwan Meulia Pirous

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

Nation as a cultural-psychological phenomenon is best understood in terms of how a sense of nationhood operates in order to construct social identities or a social imagination about the modern nation-state (Anderson 1983). The forging of nationalism as a national identity cannot be seen in isolation of the rise of modernization and industrialization (Gellner 1987). Although the nation appears to be a modern phenomenon, Smith (1991) stresses that every nation preserves its own past historical artefacts, narratives, and symbols for present-day needs. This model needs to be elaborated further as it is insufficient to understand how a sense of nationhood …

The Relationship Between Dibels Oral Reading Fluency Scores And Reading Scores On High-Stakes Assessments, Alicia Lenise Curry

Theses and Dissertations

Early identification of children with reading problems is a vital element of academic success at all grade levels. Thus, it is crucial that educators select and implement efficient reading assessments and procedures. The purpose of this study was to investigate third grade archival data of students over a 2-year period at one school to determine if a relationship existed between the DIBELS 3rd grade oral reading fluency scores and the reading scores on Stanford Achievement Test and the reading scores on the Alabama Reading and Math Test. Archival data from 80 third grade African American students who were assessed with …

Resource Analysis Of Small-Diameter Tree Above-Ground Biomass In Mississippi, Mohan P. Tiruveedhula

Theses and Dissertations

Small diameter trees refer to the trees with diameter at breast height (DBH) ranging from 5 to 11 inches. This research focuses on the resource analysis and spatial distribution of small-diameter tree (SDT) volume in Mississippi by a set of grouping variables including DBH class, species, stand size, forest cover type, ownership, and county groups. Regression and spatial interpolation techniques were used to predict the SDT volume for pine, hardwood, and mixed forest covers. Regression analysis resulted in a low regression coefficient (R2) without inventory data for all the forest cover types. The mean SDT volume to the total volume …

National Board Certification And Student Achievement: Do They Relate In Louisiana?, Barbara Ann Foster

Theses and Dissertations

Candidate for Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Elementary, Middle, and Secondary School Administration The state of Louisiana has spent a large amount of money over the past years to ensure highly qualified teachers for every student. This study aimed to discover whether or not there was a statistically significant association between teachers who attain National Board Certification and student gains in achievement on standardized tests specifically the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) in an urban Louisiana school district. The research was to determine if students taught by Nationally Board Certified teachers (NBCTs) outperformed students of comparable backgrounds taught by …

Consequences Of Gis Classification Errors On Bias And Variance Of Forest Inventory Estimates, Michael Keith Crosby

Theses and Dissertations

The use of remotely sensed imagery (e.g. Landsat TM) for developing forest inventory strata has become increasingly more common in recent years as data have become more readily available. Errors are inherent with the use of this technology, either from user mis-classification of conditions represented in the imagery or due to flaws in the technology. Knowledge of these errors is important, as they can inflate the variance of inventory estimates. Forest inventory estimates from the Mississippi Institute for Forest Inventory (MIFI) were applied to determine the extent that classification errors affect volume and area estimates. Forest strata (e.g. hardwood, mixed, …

A Village-Level Economic Evaluation Of The Southwest Poverty Reduction Project, Xiugen Mo

Theses and Dissertations

This research evaluates the post-program treatment effects of the Southwest Poverty Reduction Project (SWPRP), a large-scale ($463.55 million) rural development project jointly funded by the World Bank and the Chinese Government from 1995 to 2001. The SWPRP aimed at reducing poverty and increasing living standards for the absolute poor in southwest China. The treatment effects are measured by the changes in 21 indicators at the village level. The dataset for this research includes 327 project villages and 3887 non-project villages in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Rigorous econometric methods are employed to remove selection bias. A probit model is established to …

Formation Of Geomorphic Features As A Response To Sea-Level Change At Ritidian Point, Guam, Mariana Islands, Blaz Miklavic

Theses and Dissertations

Geomorphic features have been one of the major tools for sea-level change studies. The present work shows an example of sea-level change study on karst terrain in the tropics. Sea-level notches as well as flank margin caves were identified in the research area and their elevation measured. The time of formation of the sea-level indicators was constrained by lithology study and dating methods such as facies comparison and U-Th dating. Denudation and uplift were also studied for the same purpose. From this study it can be concluded that sea-level stands within the glacial cycle can cause the formation of flank …