Digital Commons Network^™

Relationship Between Adult Mentors And Placement Outcomes Among At-Risk Youth, Meagan Curtis

LSU Master's Theses

Approximately 1.3 million students drop out of school each year (National Guard Youth Foundation, 2012). The Youth ChalleNGe Program, which caters to at-risk youths who have dropped out of high school, utilizes a mentoring program. This study examines the relationship between the youth having regular contact with a mentor and the youth’s placement outcomes. The sample of this study included 215 youths who graduated in September of 2008 from the Youth ChalleNGe Program (YCP) at the Gillis W. Long Center in Carville, LA. Data regarding each youth’s placements during the post-residential phase and the number of contacts with his or …

Greenhouse Gas Emissions And Nutrients Dynamics In Restored Wetlands Of The Mississippi River Basin, Christopher Lundberg

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Greenhouse gases were sampled during spring and summer months in 2010 and 2011 at two sites in the Mississippi River Basin: a riparian forested wetland under restored flood pulsing near Memphis, TN and a coastal estuarine marsh complex impacted by a river diversion at Caernarvon, LA. Mean methane fluxes at Caernarvon (-0.09 g CH4-C m-2 d-1) were lower than those at Memphis (0.53 g CH4-C m-2 d-1), and did not differ between seasons. Nitrous oxide fluxes were generally below detection limits. Fluxes were uncorrelated with water depth, soil temperature, and ambient air temperature, though sampling occurred over a narrow range …

Writing In Geometry With The Common Core State Standards: Developing Mathematical Thinkers, Yvonne Mariki Chimwaza

LSU Master's Theses

The newly released Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were adopted with the goal in mind that in the future our students will leave high school ready and better prepared for college and careers. In particular, the CCSS insists that a faithful implementation of the eight Standard of Mathematical Practices will lead to a generation of mathematical thinkers who have learned how to read, write, model, reason, and solve problems in mathematical terms. Unfortunately, at present, my students and others do not know how to write and reason mathematically. By way of this thesis, I searched for ways to help forty-five …

Semantically-Aware Data Discovery And Placement In Collaborative Computing Environments, Xinqi Wang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

As the size of scientific datasets and the demand for interdisciplinary collaboration grow in modern science, it becomes imperative that better ways of discovering and placing datasets generated across multiple disciplines be developed to facilitate interdisciplinary scientific research.

For discovering relevant data out of large-scale interdisciplinary datasets. The development and integration of cross-domain metadata is critical as metadata serves as the key guideline for organizing data. To develop and integrate cross-domain metadata management systems in interdisciplinary collaborative computing environment, three key issues need to be addressed: the development of a cross-domain metadata schema; the implementation of a metadata management system …

Korean Parents' Attitudes, Motivations, And Home Literacy Practices Toward Bilingualism Between Korean And English In Korea, Byunghyun Jang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of the study is to examine Korean parents’ attitudes, motivations, and home literacy practices toward their children’s participation in bilingualism in Korean and English in Korea. The success of foreign language learning is influenced by positive attitudes and the level of motivation regarding the target language. Language learners’ attitudes and motivations toward a target language are closely related to their development of language proficiency, and children are often strongly influenced by their parents. The present study was conducted by the survey that was comprised of four-part Likert-type statements. The participants consisted of parents who have children enrolled in …

Analyzing Sustainability Impacts, Kristi Jane Yuthas, Marc J. Epstein

Business Faculty Publications and Presentations

Financial managers need basic models that incorporate the most significant variables, are robust enough to accommodate a wide variety of decisions, and provide results that are simple to communicate. We attempt to help fill this gap by providing a simple and familiar cost-benefit approach that's enhanced and improved through the addition of sustainability outcomes. We developed the cost-benefit tool presented here specifically with the needs of financial managers in mind. It allows them to simultaneously consider the financial and social outcomes of potential decisions without the need for advanced knowledge of sustainability models or methods. The tool is built on …

A Posthuman Curriculum: Subjectivity At The Crossroads Of Time, Brad M. Petitfils

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This investigation is focused on three critical issues facing educators in the 21st century: how technology is reshaping what it means to be human, the shift from the human era to the posthuman era and the implications of that shift on subjectivity, and the purpose of undergraduate education in a posthuman era. The current shift towards a posthuman worldview is a radical break from the modern and postmodern 20th century, when identity was constructed in terms of possibilities and multiplicities. Instead, in the hyperreal 21st century, subjectivity is complicated by homogenization and the radical sameness of simulated technological experiences. Also, …

Creating And Maintaining Environmentally Sustainable Organizations: Recruitment And Onboarding, Talya N. Bauer, Berrin Erdogan, Sully Taylor

Business Faculty Publications and Presentations

There is a growing realization that economic sustainability is intertwined with environmental sustainable development. The authors explore this topic, how recent changes in the global environment have led companies to realize that by solely focusing on maximization of shareholder financial returns, the long term economic viability of their firms is threatened.

Applicability Of Periodization To Orchestral Audition Preparation On Trombone: A Case Study, Christopher Evan Green

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The process of auditioning can seem daunting because of the high standards of performance required to win. Brass players have a finite amount of time they can practice each day because of the small muscles of the embouchure. Despite the vast amount of information available on preparing for a brass orchestral audition, little has been written on how to organize a practice schedule leading up to the audition. An analysis of literature in the major brass journals confirm which strategies have been considered to be most important when preparing for an audition, but an important component from the world for …

Fixing Mechanics: A Study In Cross-Curricular Use Of Rubrics To Grade Writing, Jeanette Martin Miller

LSU Master's Theses

Teachers who assign and grade writing sometimes use rubrics to assist in this process. A rubric usually consists of a set of rules, guidelines, or criteria that must be met for students to obtain a passing grade. Rubrics are intended to take the subjectivity out of grading writing and to give feedback to the student for further improvement. Because even English teachers disagree about the use of rubrics to grade writing, and the criteria that is most important within the rubrics, hearing from teachers in other subject areas could help all teachers better understand how to grade writing assignments. This …

The Effects Of Teaching Style On Student Learning Of Dna, Rebecca Branton

LSU Master's Theses

New methods and practices are constantly being introduced in education due to new research that emerges as a push for student achievement increases. We as teachers must adapt to these new ideas to ensure student success. This study was completed to determine if inquiry-based teaching methods would be more beneficial in learning Biology concepts than traditional lecture instruction. The students were divided into two groups, which differed based solely on their instructional format. The activities involved in this study included inquiry-based activities and traditional activities, i.e. PowerPoints, guided notes, experiments and worksheets. The participants in this study, students in a …

Efficacy Of Multifunctionalized Saccharide Constructs For The Attenuation Of Amyloid-Beta Toxicity, Dhruva Dilip Dhavale

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

There is evidence that amyloid-beta (Aβ) toxicity is mediated through interactions and binding with neuronal surface sialic acids in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The binding affinity is higher if the sialic acids are clustered and toxicity of Aβ was attenuated by removal of neuronal sialic acids. Thus, interfering with cell membrane-Aβ binding using biomimetics that could reproduce the clustered sialic acid structure could present us with a potential target for therapeutic intervention in AD. Based on this hypothesis, we developed several multifunctionalized sialic acid labeled chitosan compounds of different valency, or number of sialic acid per chitosan molecule, to attenuate Aβ …

Social Policy, Social Action And The Black Church: A Praxis For Social Vision, Errol K. Domingue

LSU Master's Theses

Given the nature of the current political, social, and economic climates in the United States with home foreclosures, jobless rates, and high-school dropout rates hovering around record numbers, those who are indigenous to the plight of the people must play a role in securing policies and actions that will support better opportunities for better living. The faith community, especially the Black Church, can play a role by engaging in the development and maintenance of social policy and a responsibility to engage in social action that will energize and empower people in order to improve the quality of living. While there …

Ensemble Methods For Malware Diagnosis Based On One-Class Svms, Xing An

LSU Master's Theses

Malware diagnosis is one of today’s most popular topics of machine learning. Instead of simply applying all the classical classification algorithms to the problem and claim the highest accuracy as the result of prediction, which is the typical approach adopted by studies of this kind, we stick to the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier and based on our observation of some principles of learning, characteristics of statistics and the behavior of SVM, we employed a number of the potential preprocessing or ensemble methods including rescaling, bagging and clustering that may enhance the performance to the classical algorithm. We implemented the …

Technology In The Classroom: Effect Of Student Blogging On Learning Gains In A High School Classroom, Mandy Lynn Lebourgeois

LSU Master's Theses

This study explores the benefits of student use of web logs (blogs) in a high school Biology classroom. Students were assigned to blog by answering questions on topics from the Miller and Levine (2010) Biology textbook, which correlated to the Louisiana Grade-Level Expectations (GLEs), benchmarks that should be familiar to students at the end of a course. Raw gains (from pretest to posttest) were compared for the study group of 124 ninth and tenth grade students to determine if blogging increased student learning gains by increasing student accountability. The Louisiana Enhanced Assessment of Grade-Level Expectations (EAGLE) test bank was used …

Pressures, Centralization, Economics, Technology, And Ethics: Factors That Impact Public Information Officer - Journalist Relationships, Christopher Jon Mccollough

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A study of public information officers (PIOs) in three states and the journalists that cover state government finds five primary factors that shape the working relationships between both groups. Institutional pressures on both PIOs and journalists impact the ability of both parties to meet the needs of the other party on a daily basis. High levels of centralization in state government communication limit the ability of PIOs to meet the needs of journalists, fostering journalists’ antagonism and a more combative working relationship. The economic decline of journalism is creating a dichotomous situation where PIOs can help journalists manage increasing demands …

Genomic Approaches To Understand Sweetpotato Root Development In Relation To Abiotic Factors, Julio Solis Sarmiento

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Storage root development is the most important physiological process in sweetpotato. Understanding the underlying genetics is the overall objective of this research. A secondary objective is examining the impact of abiotic stress on gene expression and storage root development. A comprehensive analysis of a high-throughput RNA sequencing data (sweetpotato root, stem, and leaf) and public Expressed Sequences Tags was done to generate a genome-wide transcriptome assembly. About 33 million sequences were assembled into 77,663 unigenes; 52,322 (69.55%) of these unigenes matched to a protein sequence from UniprotKB. Data from de novo root transcriptome enriched the existing sweetpotato gene index by …

Perpetual Requirements Engineering, Manuel Alfonso Peralta

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to make a contribution within the fields of distributed systems, security, and formal verification. We provide a way to formally assess the impact of a given change in three different contexts. We have developed a logic based on Lewis’s Counterfactual Logic. First we show how our approach is applied to a standard sequential programming setting. Then, we show how a modified version of the logic can be used in the context of reactive systems and sensor networks. Last but not least we show how this logic can be used in the context of security systems. Traditionally, change …

Kinetic Studies On Lactonization Of Quinone Propionic Acid Derivatives For The Development Of Redox Responsive Liposomes, K. L. Iresha Sampathi Perera

LSU Master's Theses

ABSTRACT Stimuli-responsive liposome systems that utilize endogenous triggers of tumor microenvironment have generated great attention in recent drug delivery research. Among such formulations, redox-responsive liposomes seem highly promising for cancer treatment due to their potential to release high drug concentrations upon reduction (by reductase enzymes). The research described in this thesis involved the evaluation of kinetics of trimethyl-lock quinone propionic acid reduction and lactonization, which accounts for payload release from trimethyl-lock quinone propionic acid-decorated liposomes. To achieve the ultimate goal of this research, several trimethyl-lock quinone propionic acid-based amide compounds were synthesized and characterized. Kinetic studies were carried out with …

Use Of Expanded Shales, Clays And Slates-Light Weight Aggregate For Erosion Control And Grass Establishment On Un-Vegetated Embankments, Murilo De Santana Martins

LSU Master's Theses

High salinity concentrations in soils used to renovation and construct levees adversely affect levee’s performance due to increased susceptibility for erosion problems. Dispersion of the soil particles caused by salts and seal formation affect levee structure stabilization and vegetation establishment is impaired due to lower water infiltration capacity in levees; and high osmotic pressure exerted by salts reducing water availability for seed germination leaving levee surface prone to severe rilling and soil loss from runoff erosion. The objectives of this research were determine if expanded shales, clays, and slates-light weight aggregate (ESCS-LWA) over clay reduces erosion and evaluate how ESCS-LWA …

A Method For Securing Online Community Service: A Study Of Selected Western Australian Councils, Sunsern Limwiriyakul

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Since the Internet was made publicly accessible, it has become increasingly popular and its deployment has been broad and global thereby facilitating a range of available online services such as Electronic Mail (email), news or bulletins, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and World Wide Web (WWW). Progressively, other online services such as telephony, video conference, video on demand, Interactive Television (ITV) and Geographic Information System (GIS) have been integrated with the Internet and become publicly available. Presently, Internet broadband communication services incorporating both wired and wireless network technologies has seen the emergence of the concept of a digital community which has …

Diva Voce : Reimagining The Diva In Contemporary Feminist Performance, Dawn Albinger

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This practice-led contemporary performance study investigates and invigorates the diva icon’s usefulness to feminist theatre praxis. It traces the research journey from an unexamined belief in the diva as an icon of empowered, independent and expressive womanhood, to a more nuanced conception of the diva as boundless feminist performer and philosophical subject. Two major questions emerge from and drive the process. The primary research question asks: How can the diva icon (in all her fury and glory and wretchedness and perversity and mastery and mortality) usefully inform a feminist theatre praxis? Early investigations give rise to a subsequent social query: …

Coevolutionary Algorithms For The Optimization Of Strategies For Red Teaming Applications, Tirtha Ranjeet

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Red teaming (RT) is a process that assists an organization in finding vulnerabilities in a system whereby the organization itself takes on the role of an “attacker” to test the system. It is used in various domains including military operations. Traditionally, it is a manual process with some obvious weaknesses: it is expensive, time-consuming, and limited from the perspective of humans “thinking inside the box”. Automated RT is an approach that has the potential to overcome these weaknesses. In this approach both the red team (enemy forces) and blue team (friendly forces) are modelled as intelligent agents in a multi-agent …

Application Of Cultural Metaphors And Cross-Cultural Paradoxes In The Classroom, Yochanan Altman, Michael Berry, Paul R. Cerotti, Claire Davison, Martin J. Gannon, Tine Koehler, Christine Nielsen, Rajnandi Pillai, Lawrence C. Rhyne, Carl A. Scheraga

Online Readings in Psychology and Culture

This article consists of eight “mini-articles,” which describe how each author or authors employ cultural metaphors and/or cross-cultural paradoxes in their classrooms (see also the article “Cultural metaphors and cross-cultural paradoxes” in unit 7.1).

Effects Of Parenting Styles, Academic Self-Efficacy, And Achievement Motivation On The Academic Achievement Of University Students In Ethiopia, Abesha A. Gota

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The prime purpose of this study was to propose and test an integrated parental and social-cognitive model of academic achievement and examine the effects of parenting styles, academic self-efficacy, and achievement motivation on academic achievement by employing an ex-post facto prospective research design. The data on demographic characteristics, parenting styles, academic self-efficacy and achievement motivation were collected through self-report questionnaires from a sample of 2116 (763 females and 1353 males) undergraduate first year students selected via multi-stage cluster random sampling technique from Addis Ababa University, Kotebe College of Teacher Education, and Wolayta Soddo University in Ethiopia and accessing their second …

Enhancing Teachers' Knowledge For Using Multiple Representations In Teaching Chemistry In Nigerian Senior Secondary Schools, Bolanle Omotoke Olaleye

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The quality of the teaching and learning of chemistry in Nigeria is of great concern to parents, teachers, and students and has been tied to various factors such as a lack of teaching resources, learning materials and well qualified teachers, large class sizes and poor funding. This resulted in poor student performance and lack of interest in chemistry. Also, learning chemistry concepts tends to be by rote and memorising of content, and as such, students do not perceive learning chemistry as relevant to their lives. These issues motivated the Researcher to explore how teaching and learning of chemistry could be …

Geostatistical Methods For Estimating Iron, Silica And Alumina Grades Within The Hardcap Of The Section Seven Iron Deposit, Tom Price, Philip John Savory

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Many iron ore deposits have a weathered zone (Hardcap) near the surface which is highly variable in grades. Estimating the amount of ore grade material (HG) in this zone is difficult as a result of this variability. The Section Seven Deposit at Tom Price is largely mined out and has production data available in the form of grade blocks that were marked out during mining as HG and non- HG. Hardcap domains and a block model representing them were created and estimates were made from original exploration data using Ordinary Kriging, Global Change of Support, Indicator Kriging and Median Indicator …

Parent-Teacher Interactions: A Study Of The Dynamics Of Social Influence, Michelle K. Ellis

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The focus of this study was to explore the nature of parent-teacher interactions and to find evidence of social influence strategies used within their interactions. The literature showed that schools, internationally, nationally, and locally, have implemented parental involvement programs advocated by their respective governments. These programs are designed to encourage parents to interact more with the school and the teachers, forming parent-teacher partnerships to enhance student achievement levels. However, in practice, previous research has also signalled that there are underlying tensions in these parent-teacher partnerships that impact on parent-teacher interactions. This study sought to identify factors that parents and teachers …

An Interdisciplinary Intervention : The Potential Of The Orff-Schulwerk Approach As A Pedagogical Tool For The Effective Teaching Of Italian To Upper Primary Students In Western Australia, Annamaria Paolino

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Since the second half of the twentieth century, Italian has been the second language spoken in Western Australia. In the primary school sector, there are over two hundred Italian teachers engaged with primary students. Many Italian teachers also use music/song as a pedagogical tool. The first part of the research examines the extent that music/song is used in primary Italian classes, as well as how and why they are used. The second part of the research centres on the use of the Orff-Schulwerk approach as an integrated music approach to teaching Italian. The research examines the success of a trialled …

The Effectiveness Of Airway Management In The Pre Hospital Treatment Of Traumatic Brain Injury : A Retrospective, Observational Study Of Pre Hospital Treatment Of Traumatic Brain Injury (Tbi) In The Western Australian Ambulance Service, Joseph Cuthbertson

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

There is concern over mortality and the potential for secondary brain injury in the head-injured patient. The use of advanced airway management and rapid sequence intubation in the pre hospital treatment of patients with Traumatic Brain Injury is controversial. Currently in St John Ambulance Service Australia (WA) Inc. three forms of pre hospital treatment are utilized to manage the airway of the adult head-injured patient. If attended by on-road paramedic staff, basic airway management is utilized unless the patient is unconscious and areflexic, in which case advanced airway management utilising endotracheal intubation or laryngeal mask insertion is authorised. In the …