Digital Commons Network^™

Examining Construct Stability Across Career Stage Cohorts, Deborah L. Kinney

Online Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to evaluate construct stability of the same certification test taken at different points in a test taker's career, taking into account changes is experience over time. A single medical certification exam administration was used to analyze the construct stability of the certification exam across testing cohorts at varied stages in their medical careers. The Rasch model was used for item analysis to calibrate the difficulty hierarchy of the exam items for each cohort. Correlations between the item difficulty hierarchies for each cohort supported the overall construct stability of the certification exam. Individual item function …

Developing Culturally Responsive Preservice Teacher Candidates: Implications For Teacher Education Programs, Rose Gilmore Skepple

Online Theses and Dissertations

This study was designed to examine how the teacher education program impacts preservice teacher candidates' knowledge of culturally responsive teaching and the implementation of these practices in their classroom. For the purposes of this study, a sequential explanatory mixed methods approach was utilized to collect and analyze data through semi-structured interviews, focus groups and surveys. The participants in this study were (n=82) elementary preservice teachers and (n=11) teacher educators who taught a professional education course or supervised field or clinical experiences. This mixed method study was fourfold. First, this study sought to examine preservice teacher candidates' perceptions of the teacher …

Postwar Media Manifestations And Don Delillo, Joshua Adam Boldt

Online Theses and Dissertations

Media's influence on postwar American culture is undeniable. Don DeLillo's fiction is often a commentary on that influence. Hyperreality, Simulacra, Consumerism, and News Addiction are all regular themes in DeLillo's novels; this paper explores all of these concepts through the lens of media theory. Special attention is given to the novels White Noise, Americana, and Mao II, as well as to the media theorists Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, and Antonio Gramsci. The paper is both a history and a critique of postwar consumer culture and the role that media plays in the construction of that culture.

Substantial Limitations: Reflections On The Adaaa, Kerri Lynn Stone

Faculty Publications

This Article advocates several ways to reform the American with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA) and its jurisprudence. It begins with the premise that the “otherwise qualified,” “reasonable accommodation,” and “undue hardship” analyses are questions that call for a focus on, respectively, the plaintiff at issue, the accommodation at issue, and the employer at issue. The article calls for the abolition of the need to demonstrate a major life activity limitation required for coverage under the statute in accommodation cases, noting that this has already effectively occurred in the context of the rest of the ADA’s antidiscrimination jurisprudence. …

Franjo Tudjman's And Slobodan Milosevic's Operational Code And Leadership Trait Analysis, Arian Spahiu

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia played a prominent role in the Yugoslav politics and European politics during the 1990s, but the literature on them has advanced confusing interpretations of the two leaders whose political actions affected international politics. This dissertation is the first attempt at developing replicable measures of their psychological characteristics to inform our understanding of the role these two leaders played in Yugoslav and European politics. This dissertation examines the role of Tudjman's and Milosevic's psychological characteristics through at-a-distance analysis of their speeches, for Tudjman to the Croatian Parliament in the 1990s, and for …

Paradigmatic Peer-Pressure: Word-Medial, Syllable-Initial /S/ Lenition In Dominican Spanish, Earl K. Brown

Faculty Publications

Usage-based phonology (Bybee 2001, 2006, 2010), which is based on exemplar theory (Pierrehumbert 2001, 2003), proposes a memory capacity so expansive that, in theory, all tokens experienced in life could be mapped onto their respective exemplar clouds. However, if a token is similar enough to an existing one, it is simply mapped directly onto that existing token, reinforcing it in memory. This model proposes a very limited need for generative rules to produce the surface form, as the surface forms themselves are stored whole in memory and therefore can be directly accessed during production. It follows that derived words need …

Between Liberalism And Theocracy, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

Our symposium conveners have focused us on “the relationship between liberalism and Christianity and their influence on American constitutionalism.” My objective is to complicate the relationship and reorient the influence. The focus of my inquiry is the liberty of conscience and its implications for the relationship between church and state. By approaching these issues through the lens of political theology (as distinct from either political or constitutional theory), hope to show that some of the most significant embodiments of conscience in the American colonies can neither be squared with an individualistic liberalism (as some on the left are prone to …

A Grounded Theory Approach To Use Of Differentiated Instruction To Improve Students' Outcomes In Mathematics, Juniace Senecharles Etienne

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Teachers in a school district in a southeastern state are being challenged to meet the needs of students who have learning disabilities (LDs) and who require an individualized education program with a mathematics goal. The students are in danger of not passing state, district, and classroom mathematics tests, and not all the schools are meeting adequate yearly progress (AYP). Funding from the federal government is denied if a school does not achieve AYP; the school personnel must then complete a school improvement plan. The purpose of this study was to explore which differentiation instructional (DI) practices inclusion teachers were using …

Early Childhood Educators Teaching And Learning In Professional Learning Communities: A New Approach To Professional Development For Preschool Teachers In A Southern California School District, Robin Fairfield

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Early childhood education teachers have been challenged with the demands for accountability in literacy and English language development, as well as kindergarten readiness skills of preschool children. Researchers have studied professional learning communities (PLCs) as a framework for professional development and student achievement. However, few have studied the effects of PLCs in preschool. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how PLCs support preschool teachers in Head Start and other preschool programs. The research questions involved understanding teaching and learning opportunities for early childhood education (ECE) that can produce positive child outcomes. Using social constructivist assumptions, data …

Museveni's Centralization Of Power: The Political Economy Of Development In Uganda, Nathan Vasher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis develops a model of structural power in society that builds upon Weber's notion that several types of power exist in societies and that these types of power operate differently within societies. The purpose of this model is to help explain the political economy of development during Museveni's tenure. The thesis argues that Museveni has centralized power through a complex system of patronage and repression. Furthermore, Museveni's transformation from the leader of a cadre of `new breed leaders' to `just another African big man' results from his choice to centralize power as a means of achieving his revolutionary goals. …

Urban Leadership : A Study In Contextual Ministry, Claude Solano

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Current Knowledge, Practies, And Desired Goals Of Small Group Ministry For Training Implications In The Churches Of The Trinity Annual Conference Of The Methodist Church In Malaysia, Andrew Kok-Khoon Tan

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Offer Them Life!: Investigating The Implications Of A Life-Based Evangelistic Vision, Dan W. Dunn

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

An Essay On The Stages Of The Clinical Year In Law School: Group Process With Existentialist Roots, Richard J. Wilson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This short article focuses on "units," or stages of group process, part of my shared experience in law teaching and in adult education at St. Mark’s Church, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. The article explores the context of the functional education program of church teaching and its common elements with clinical law teaching. The unit structure from church teaching translates well, I conclude, into the structure of clinical legal education.

Multiculturalism & Multicultural Education : Where Do Minority Teachers Teaching Minorities Fit?, Jessica Salas

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Upon the abundance of literature pertaining to multiculturalism and multicultural education, there appeared to be a large gap in the research: how do minority teachers teach minority students when in reality, they are both the majority? In an attempt to fill a portion of the gap, a study was conducted at Fremont Elementary in Salinas where not only the teachers and students were predominantly Latino, but the community as well. Key elements for the study consisted of teacher surveys and one-on-one interviews with both students and teachers. Ultimately, a research report filled with the analyzed data was created and presented …

Europe At The Receiving End: Historical Background On Adventists And Immigration, Børge Schantz

Journal of Adventist Mission Studies

No abstract provided.

Ancient Maya Cave Use At Caracol, Belize, Reiko Ishihara, Jaime J. Awe

KIP Articles

No abstract provided.

Government Speech Law Review Symposium 2010: Government Speech: The Government's Ability To Compel And Restrict Speech: Introduction, B. Jessie Hill

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Single-Parent Families In Bangkok, Thailand: Factors Affecting Children Living In Single-Parent Families, Waruesporn Jiumpanyarach

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

There has been a transformation in family structure in Thailand due to the changes in economic and social structures over time. Though not recorded in census data the rise in single-parent families can be expected due to a rise in divorce rates, that have been recorded, over the past decades. However, the literature on single-parent families is limited and little is known about the experiences of single-mothers and children of singlemother families in Thailand. This study examines the factors that have major impacts on the well-being of children of single-parent families in Bangkok, Thailand.

A qualitative methodology was employed to …

Towards Recognizing And Reconciling The Multiplicity Of Values And Interests In Trademark Law, Michael S. Mireles Jr.

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

In the last seventy years, trademark rights have expanded enormously. Many commentators believe this has led to an unjustified increase in the rights and remedies available to trademark owners. This expansion has been approved and led by trademark owners, Congress, and courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. However, in the last ten years or so, the Supreme Court and Congress have begun attempting to restrain trademark rights, and trademark law is striving to recognize the multiplicity of values implicated by trademark law and reconcile the interests of mark owners and the public generally—particularly users of marks, consumers, and the competitors …

Hermenêutica Americana Feia / Ugly American Hermeneutics, Francis J. Mootz Iii

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

This article is part of a Symposium that provides a forum for comparing legal herme-neutics as articulated by four scholars from the United States and four scholars from Brazil. The article embraces this cross-cultural event by asking whether American legal hermeneutics is “ugly” and is practiced by “ugly Americans.” The pejorative cast of this terminology is obvious and intentional, but it is also ambiguous and multi-layered. The Essay unfolds various dimensions of ugly American hermeneutics and suggests that - ugly though they may be -American scholars still can make some important contribu-tions to the worldwide conversation regarding legal hermeneutics. It …

Installments, Issue 46, January/February 2011, Renee Montgomery

Libraries' Newsletters

No abstract provided.

Relationships Between Organizational Variables And The Inclusive Language Used By Leaders, Matthew J. Keller

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

I investigated relationships between organizational variables and leadership, as measured by inclusive language use. Specifically, I examined whether organization size and profitability relate to the organization leader's use of language. I expected language use to be more inclusive in smaller and more profitable organizations, relative to larger and less profitable organizations. In this study, I used a regression approach to test my hypotheses. Results indicated that organization size was positively related to passive voice indicators, in support of Hypothesis 1. However, profitability was negatively related to inclusive pronouns and positively related to passive voice indicators, both of which were opposite …

Large Scale Distributed Semantic N-Gram Language Model, Yuandong Jiang

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Language model is a crucial component in statistical machine translation system. The basic language model is N-gram which predicts the next word based on previous N-1 words. It has been used in the state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems over years. However, the N-gram model ignores the rich syntactic and semantic structure in natural languages. We propose a composite semantic N-gram language model which combines probabilistic latent semantic analysis model with N-gram as a generative model. We have implemented the proposed composite language model in a super-computer with thousand processors that is trained by 1.3 billion tokens corpus. Comparing with simple …

Semi-Supervised Contrafold For Rna Secondary Structure Prediction: A Maximum Entropy Approach, Jianping Feng

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

A novel probabilistic discriminative model based on conditional random fields, CONTRAfold, has recently been proposed for single sequence RNA secondary structure prediction. By incorporating most of the features which closely mirror the local interaction terms of thermodynamics-based models, the CONTRAfold model has outperformed both probabilistic and physics-based techniques, and received the highest single sequence prediction accuracies. CONTRAfold, like most other RNA secondary structure prediction techniques, requires a collection of RNA sequences with known secondary structure to serve as training data for the algorithm. Manual annotation of RNA sequences is both expensive and time-consuming, and there remains a great deal more …

Transnational Languages: Beyond Nation And Empire? An Introduction, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

This article discusses changes in the conditions under which linguistic repertoires are conceptualized as nationalist paradigms come to co-exist with post-nationalist ones. It discusses the persistence and demise of linguistic nationalism, linguistic imperialism and linguistic commodification.

The “Non-Cumulation Clause”: An “Other Insurance” Clause By Another Name, Chris French

Faculty Scholarship

How long-tail liability claims such as asbestos bodily injury claims and environmental property damage claims are allocated among multiple triggered policy years can result in the shifting of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from one party to another. In recent years, insurers have argued that clauses commonly titled, “Prior Insurance and Non-Cumulation of Liability” (referred to herein as “Non-Cumulation Clauses”), which are found in commercial liability policies, should be applied to reduce or eliminate their coverage responsibilities for long-tail liability claims by shifting their coverage responsibilities to insurers that issued policies in earlier policy years. The insurers’ argument …

Cognitively Sensitive User Interface For Command And Control Applications, Michael James Findler

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

While there are broad guidelines for display or user interface design, creating effective human-computer interfaces for complex, dynamic systems control is challenging. Ad hoc approaches which consider the human as an afterthought are limiting. This research proposed a systematic approach to human / computer interface design that focuses on both the semantic and syntactic aspects of display design in the context of human-in-the-loop supervisory control of intelligent, autonomous multi-agent simulated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A systematic way to understand what needs to be displayed, how it should be displayed, and how the integrated system needs to be assessed is outlined …

Growth Attenuation, Sterilization, And Cochlear Implants: Ethical, Legal And Social Themes, Jenna Nicole Mercadante

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Individuals with disabilities have been the subject of invasive medical procedures throughout history, violating their bodily rights and integrity. Because of a history of abuse, medical procedures performed on individuals with disabilities, especially those who cannot consent, require close scrutiny and analysis. This paper explores three controversial medical procedures performed on individuals with disabilities, which include sterilization, cochlear implants, and growth attenuation. Embedded in each medical procedure mentioned above are social, legal, ethical, and psychological variables that influenced the emergence of each procedure and the receptiveness of society. This project explores each of these variables in detail as it relates …

Deaf Group Identification And Sexual Esteem, Anne M. Willis

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine sexuality in persons who are deaf. Specifically, it examined group identification and sexual esteem, sexual satisfaction, and sexual preoccupation. Deafness was viewed in this study as not only a level of hearing loss, but as a source of identity and culture. While varying levels of group identification are well defined in the literature, it is unclear as to how this impacts the individual's experience. Analysis of the current sample (N = 68) suggested that there was a slight difference in sexual esteem between subjects who identified as Bicultural, Immersed, Marginalized, and Hearing. …