Digital Commons Network^™

The Impact Of Teacher Licensure Programs On Minority Student Achievement, Rose S. Duke

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

This research examined the impact of teacher licensure routes, particularly those identified as either traditional or alternative on student achievement by comparing Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) end of year scores in math and reading for minority students in grades six through eight during the period from 2005 through 2009. To compare the achievement of students taught by either traditionally or alternatively prepared teachers, the Standards of Learning (SOL) scores were calculated for students and then aggregated for types of teacher preparation. The mean values were compared for statistically significant differences as a function of subject, teacher ethnicity, teacher gender, …

A Framework For Delivering Contextually Appropriate Opportunities For Warfighter Practice, Michael Allan White

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Computer-based modeling and simulation has been a training staple in the military domain since the first aircraft simulators were adopted. More recently, virtual environments based on modeling, simulation and serious games, have introduced relatively low-cost, yet high value additions to the learning environment. As these virtual environments have proliferated, many researchers have investigated the relationship between theoretical foundations of learning, learner development and content delivery, and applied their findings in an attempt to bolster learning, yet performance deficiencies continue to exist. This study asserts that performance deficiencies exist in part because of insufficient contextually appropriate opportunities to practice.

This work …

Perceptions Regarding The Michigan Merit Curriculum Reform Policy And Its Impact On Cte And Dual Enrollment In A Southeastern Michigan High School, Winifred L. Green

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Michigan joined Arkansas, Indiana, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Rhode Island in the high school reform effort. The Michigan Merit Curriculum (MMC), mandated in 2006, contained a new set of statewide graduation requirements. This qualitative case study used focus group interviews to examine the perceptions of students, teachers, parents, and key administrators in a southeastern Michigan high school about the effects of the MMC on students’ performances and outcomes as they relate to Career and Technical Education (CTE) and dual enrollment, and about problems that emerged from the MMC. Five themes emerged from the data: Transparency and Communication for Dual Enrollment, Loss …

The Lady Showroom: Optical Representations In The Works Of Joanna Baillie And Louisa Stuart Costello, Katherine Richards

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Much women's writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries attempts to depict other women visually through textual description, use of optical devices, and discussion of bodies and appearances. This thesis argues that they were trying to see and show other women as a way of understanding themselves and each other by examining intersections between visual culture and text through mirrors, miniatures, and portraits. This thesis demonstrates how these works reflect larger shifts in the optical unconscious of the eighteenth century. I focus on works by Joanna Baillie and Louisa Stuart Costello, who theorize the viewing process in their …

A Baseline Study Of Chemical Parameters And Microbial Diversity Of Two Streams In The Ten Mile Creek Watershed In Southwestern Pennsylvania, Jennifer Rutter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale becomes increasingly prevalent, both human safety and environmental concerns have arisen. The aim of this study was to assemble an environmental baseline to make an accurate assessment of its possible impacts. Water samples and chemical parameters were collected from Bates Fork, a stream with Marcellus Shale drilling activity and Fonner Run, a sister stream with no drilling activity, on a monthly basis beginning in the summer of 2010. Bacterial DNA was also extracted from water collected at each site and then amplified using primers for the variable ribosomal internal transcribed spacer …

Self-Report Anxiety And Depression Ratings Among Adolescents With An Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Comparison Of Individuals With And Without A History Of Sexual Offending, Stephanie N Marshall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following study seeks to determine if there are differences in anxiety and/or depression symptoms between adolescents with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have been adjudicated for a sexual offense compared to adolescents with an ASD who are not adjudicated. The scores of 26 adolescent offenders diagnosed with an ASD were compared to the scores of 14 non-offending adolescents with an ASD on the following measures: The Behavioral Assessment System for Children- Second Edition (BASC-2) depression and anxiety subscales, and the Beck's Depression Inventory- Second Edition (BDI-II). An examination of whether broad band (BASC-2) vs. narrow band (BDI-II) measures …

Graduation Recital, Piano, Jamie Mazza

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This graduate recital features significant piano works from the major periods in music history. The opening pieces - the Scarlatti sonatas - are technically challenging but allow the pianist to show a great deal of expression. Schumann's Liederkreis, Op. 39 as well as the Weisgarber Sonatine are collaborative works; the first features a soprano soloist and the second is written for flute, clarinet, and piano. Ending the first half of the program is Schumann's Concerto in A minor, op. 54, extremely challenging for both soloist and accompanist, especially during the cadenza. The second half of the recital includes another contemporary …

St. Catherine Of Siena: Vocation As Engaged Scholarship, Christina Mcdowell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The driving question of this project is: "How is St. Catherine of Siena an exemplar of engaged communication scholarship?" This project covers five essential facets of communicative inquiry into a deeper understanding of St. Catherine of Siena and her embodiment of engaged communication scholarship. The five areas trace her life from its historical context to its most personal revelations to her lived engagements with others. In the first chapter, the inquiry into St. Catherine of Siena begins with how she is understood by others for her knowledge and impact. Chapter Two assesses the historical moment in which St. Catherine of …

The Federal Workforce Development Program: An Analysis Of Probationers And Characteristics Associated With And Predictive Of Successful Reentry, Kelley Mcnichols

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With years of research focusing on soaring incarceration rates, the phenomena of prisoner reentry has been largely overlooked. The majority of incarcerated people will return to the community setting. In fact, millions of recently released offenders are on some form of community based supervision. Today, recidivism is a problem that plagues prisoner reentry. In order to address the challenge of prisoner reentry successfully, reentry initiatives have been established in an attempt to change the way corrections is conceptualized. The purpose of this study was to examine characteristics of probationers that are associated with and predictive of successful reentry. The data …

La Disputada Autoridad De Las Academias: Debate Lingüístico Ideológico En Torno A La Ortografía De 2010, José Del Valle, Laura Villa

Publications and Research

This article analyzes the linguistic polemics surrounding the publication of the new orthography of Spanish by the Association of Academies of the Spanish language.

Growing Green With Phytoremediation, Kyla Witz

Landscape Architecture Theses

This thesis is premised on the basis that students benefit from both theoretical and practical applications. In this project, I have created an outdoor, interactive space that demonstrates the intersection between the science of phytoremediation and its practical benefits. In this project I have designed an outdoor classroom space for a school in South Beach, Miami, where elementary school children, as well as their teachers, parents, and the community, can experience the science of phytoremediation at work.

Creating Celebrations, Food, And Spaces, Ashley Hansen

Landscape Architecture Theses

The city of Minneapolis, Minnesota in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood currently has one community garden dedicated to children. The neighborhood is one of the poorest in the city and is very ethnically diverse. With the University of Minnesota in the neighborhood it would be the perfect opportunity to have the latest technology for growing food. Using underutilized spaces such as walls, rooftops, and parks, will create the perfect area’s to grow food. By providing the area with different ways to grow food, people of all backgrounds can have access to healthy food while creating bonds.

Designed Desirable: Deteriorating Urban Communities Renewed, Ryan Hyllested

Landscape Architecture Theses

This thesis studies how designers and planners can create a desirable community in the deteriorating urban communities affected by urban sprawl. By its nature this project is a community planning effort. The results of this research are guided by the idea that society would benefit from transforming deteriorating urban neighborhood districts into desirable communities for a variety of people. Creating desirable urban communities will solve problems such as disparity between groups in the city and suburbs, pollution from fossil fuel, and reduction in the consumption of Greenfield sites. This project takes the principles and ideas of creating a desirable community …

Advanced Electrochemical Methods For Characterizing The Performance Of Organic Coatings, Vinod Upadhyay

Coatings and Polymeric Materials

Advanced electrochemical techniques such as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), electrochemical noise method (ENM) and coulometry as tools to study and extract information about the coating system is the focus of this thesis. This thesis explored three areas of research. In all the three research areas, advanced electrochemical techniques were used to extract information and understand the coating system. The first area was to use EIS and coulometric technique for extracting information using AC-DC-AC method. It was examined whether the total charge passing through the coating during the DC polarization step of AC-DC-AC determines coating failure. An almost constant total amount …

Are You Buying What They're Selling?: Ethnographically Exploring Organizational Identification Through Employees' Everyday Talk, Kai Janovsky Western

Communication

The purpose of this study was to explore how employees' reflect organizational identification strategies in their everyday talk at a big-box retailer. Previous studies on organizational identification have mostly been organization-centric, focusing on the strategies organizations employ to induce employee identification. This study fills this gap by exploring the employee side of the identification process. Using ethnographic methods, the researcher conducted complete participant observation and textual analysis to understand how employees reflect, mock, and/or rebel against the organization's identification strategies in their narratives and rites. This study used a three phase approach to gain a deeper understanding of how employees …

The Forgotten Gothic: Short Stories From The British Literary Annuals, 1823-1831, Katherine D. Harris Ph.D.

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This collection of gothic short stories takes us further than perhaps eighteenth or nineteenth-century scholars are comfortable with – to extend our discussions about the Gothic in such a way that the tradition does not die at 1820, as is purported by Robert Mayo. We will, however, move past the deaths of Shelley, Keats and Byron – the spokespersons for the second wave of traditional Romanticism. Queen Victoria won’t ascend to the throne for another six years, and Tennyson has not yet become the powerhouse poet who will eventually rise to Poet Laureate of England. Scholars touted 1820-1830 as a …

Mining For Significant Information From Unstructured And Structured Biological Data And Its Applications, Omar Ghazi Al-Azzam

Computer Science

Massive amounts of biological data are being accumulated in science. Searching for significant meaningful information and patterns from different types of data is necessary towards gaining knowledge from these large amounts of data available to users. However, data mining techniques do not normally deal with significance. Integrating data mining techniques with standard statistical procedures provides a way for mining statistically signi- ficant, interesting information from both structured and unstructured data. In this dissertation, different algorithms for mining significant biological information from both unstructured and structured data are proposed. A weighted-density-based approach is presented for mining item data from unstructured textual …

Evaluating The Gap Between The Skills And Abilities Of Senior Undergraduate Computer Science Students And The Expectations Of Industry, Alex Radermacher

Computer Science

A large emphasis is placed on improving student education. Every year researchers propose new teaching methods and suggest improvements to existing methods. However, recent computer science and software engineering graduates continue to face difficulties when beginning their professional careers. This thesis reports the results of a systematic literature review that examined the knowledge deficiency among graduating students beginning work in the software industry. Following the literature review, interviews with industry managers and surveys of graduating students were undertaken to examine additional knowledge deficiencies among graduating students. The results from the literature review and the additional studies show that students lack …

The Restyled Federal Rules Of Evidence, Roger C. Park

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Tracing The Development Of Japanese Choral Tradition, And The Influence Of Buddhism And Western Music, Masashi Kishimoto

Music

This research deals with the origin and development of Japanese choral music emphasizing Japanese folk tunes. The process of how modern styles of Japanese choral music evolved is rather complicated, and has been greatly influenced by the paralleled development of society, tradition, culture, language, politics, and religion. In order to truly understand the essence and evolution of traditional Japanese music, it is crucial to recognize the cultural influences that make up Japanese history. In the late fifth century, Japan started to absorb new music from mainland Asia into its own culture. This led to the development of new musical ideas, …

Harnessing The Cloud: International Law Implications Of Cloud-Computing, Vineeth Narayanan

Chicago Journal of International Law

For decades, with the advent of better and faster computer chips, processor speed has grown exponentially, and with it, the demand for computing power. Now, as that growth slows due to technological bottlenecks, the world will look to solutions like cloud-computing to ensure that the ever-increasing demand of computing power is met. Thus, the need for efficient, reliable, and powerful cloud-computing services will lead to and necessitate global cloud-computing service providers. But their vitalness will also bring cloud-computing under the scrutiny of government regulation, as countries struggle to ensure that the data of their citizenry is protected. This Comment explores …

Current Problems And Trends In The Administration Of Transnational Insolvencies Involving Enterprise Groups: The Mixed Record Of Protocols, The Uncitral Model Insolvency Law, And The Eu Insolvency Regulation, Anthony V. Sexton

Chicago Journal of International Law

That commerce has become international in scope is a fact known to all in the legal community. Many large companies now have operating subsidiaries in a large number of countries, and those countries have radically different legal regimes. The law of insolvency is no different; indeed, the differences in legal regimes are of particular import as insolvency law is largely driven by jurisdictions' policy preferences on the relationship between debtors and creditors. But when international enterprise groups go bust, domestic bankruptcy law is incapable of handling the private international law issues that are implicated. While there have been efforts in …

China's Indigenous Innovation Policies Under The Trips And Gpa Agreements And Alternatives For Promoting Economic Growth, S. James Boumil Iii

Chicago Journal of International Law

China's intricate web of Indigenous Innovation policies affords preferences in government procurement to certain high-technology products whose intellectual property is owned or registered in China. While the the policies were intended to strengthen China's national economy, they have been heavily criticized, notably by the US and the EU, as a strategic attempt to commercialize non-Chinese proprietary ideas in China and as a trade barrier that harms all stakeholders in the world marketplace. Although China's State Council recently committed the county to repealing several key Indigenous Innovation measures, the extent to which Indigenous Innovation preferences will be implemented by the local …

Design For Bereavement, Nathan Larson

Architecture Theses

This project seeks to explore how the built environment can create a healthy atmosphere for grieving the death of a loved one by examining psychological research to develop the form of the building, a space can be created to foster closure and community socialization and support.

Cartelizing Taxes: Understanding The Oecd's Campaign Against Harmful Tax Competition, Andrew P. Morriss, Lotta Moberg

Faculty Scholarship

Formed in 1961 to promote global economic and social well-being, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has become the collective voice of rich countries on international tax issues. After an initial focus on improving commerce through addressing double taxation issues, the organization shifted to a focus on restricting tax competition and increasing automatic exchanges of tax information. In this paper we analyze the reasons for this shift in policy focus. After describing the history of the OECD's work on taxation, we examine the OECD's project against "harmful tax competition" as it has played out since its launch in …

Sustaining Rural Communities, Samantha Parkinson

Architecture Theses

Sustaining Rural Communities This thesis analyzes the use of sustainable architecture to satisfy the socio-economic needs of a rural community. The research methodology used to create this project is a mixed-method, quantitative and qualitative, approach. A mixed-use development allows an opportunity to solve and satisfy more than one need in a rural community. Bowbells, North Dakota, is a good example of a community that can benefit from this type of project. Research was conducted on green development and its benefits; the needs of Bowbells, North Dakota; and current solutions to providing opportunities in rural North Dakota. In response to the …

The George T. Bisel Company And Its Publications (1875-2011), Joel Fishman

Law Faculty Publications

Research in the area of law book publishing is an open field of study. Michael Hoeflich's Antebellum Law Book Publishing (2010) is a model work on the rise of the law book industry in the first half of the nineteenth century. Philadelphia served as a major city for law book publishing throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as reflected in Morris Cohen's Bibliography of Early American Law (BEAL).

Architecture And Cultural Definition, John Nelson

Architecture Theses

Typology: North Dakota American Indian Center Site: Chief Looking’s Indian Village Bismarck, ND Area: 23,000 sq ft This thesis will investigate the role of architecture in representing and retaining a culture through architecture’s inherent characteristic as a symbol of past and present cultures. This project focuses on the Native American populations of the Bismarck/Mandan area and the effect a cultural center could have on the larger community. The project is placed within the landscape of the historic site Chief Looking’s Indian Village located within Bismarck, North Dakota. In the project I work towards a higher goal of creating an artifact …

Community Identity: Re-Connecting City + River, Shane Nies

Architecture Theses

This project will examine a growing city’s historical origin that has been lost. The typology will be community center and library accompanied by a bridge/site rennovation. The guiding idea is that the design will be re-discovering the city’s historical influence to aid in restoring a sense of community identity. The relationship between the paper mill and the Mississippi River has historical value and is a framework for the re-vitalization of the city’s origin. The project is located in Sartell, MN along the west bank of the Mississippi River, near the paper mill, where the city founded its historical roots. My …

Superheroes And Media: Commentaries About The American Media In Mark Millar And Brian Hitch's The Ultimates, Kelli Marie Muzzy

English

Millar and Hitch’s The Ultimates, a reboot of the Marvel Avengers published shortly after the events of 9/11, provides a critique of the role of the American media in American society and politics. By tracing instances where reader participation is required to complete meaning in the text, we can examine how the creators construct the text to engage the reader through: audience participation, the construction and use of panels, and by discussing how the media shapes the reactions of American viewers. The reader learns to examine the text for instances where media or media events occur and to critically examine …