Digital Commons Network^™

Selective Mutism And Art Therapies, Dalene Erickson

Theses and Dissertations

Selective Mutism (SM) is a social anxiety disorder characterized by a child's inability to speak in selected social situations, usually school. The causes of SM are multi-factorial. Affected children often have a history of anxiety, linguistic and motor disorders. Current therapies include a mix of anti-anxiety medication, behavioral modification therapy and anxiety reduction techniques.

Art therapy, (dance, drama and theater), has been shown to be beneficial in reducing anxiety and encouraging communication through forms other than speaking. Art therapy could be a valuable modality, benefitting children with SM.

I surveyed parents, teachers, former teachers of children with SM, and adults …

Fragmented Ethnopolitical Social Representations Of A Territorial Peace Agreement: The Mindanao Peace Talks, Cristina Jayme Montiel, Ma. Elizabeth J. Macapagal, Judith M. De Guzman

Psychology Department Faculty Publications

This article examines fractures in the social representations of a contested peace agreement in the longstanding territorial conflict of Mindanao. We compared representational structures and discourses about the peace talks among Muslims and Christians. Study One used an open-ended survey of 420 Christians and Muslims from two Mindanao cities identified with different Islamised tribes, and employed the hierarchical evocation method to provide representational structures of the peace agreement. Study Two contrasted discourses about the Memorandum of Agreement between two Muslim liberation fronts identified with separate Islamised tribes in Mindanao. Findings show unified Christians’ social representations about the peace agreement. However, …

Parental Efficacy, Experience Of Stressful Life Events, And Child Externalizing Behavior As Predictors Of Filipino Mothers' And Fathers' Parental Hostility And Aggression., Aileen S. Garcia, Liane Peña Alampay

Psychology Department Faculty Publications

This study assessed relations of parental efficacy, experience of stressful life events, and child externalizing behavior to Filipino mothers and fathers’ parental hostility and aggression. Orally-administered surveys were conducted with 117 mothers and 98 fathers for the first year of data collection, and again a year later with 107 mothers and 83 fathers. Path analyses showed that mothers’ report of child externalizing behavior predicted subsequent parental hostility and aggression. For fathers, child externalizing behavior and experience of stressful life events predicted parental hostility and aggression. Additionally, fathers’ parental efficacy was found to moderate the relationship between experience of stressful life …

Franco-American Cultures In A New World Perspective, Jonathan Gosnell

French Studies: Faculty Publications

This article explores cultural traditions from a little-known corner of the francophone world, what specialists call Franco-America. It represents a fertile site for reexamination of francophone postcolonial cultures. Beginning in the nineteenth century, French Canadians traveled to New England mill towns in search of work, established ethnic communities, and progressively became Franco-Americans. Today, endogamous Franco enclaves have all but disappeared, but French cultural expressions persist. Jack Kerouac is the most well known representative of this obscure French life. Franco-American written cultures, the focus of this essay, shed light on a distinct immigrant experience in the United States.

E Pluribus Urbes: Interest Group Organization’S Effect On The Fragmentation And Governance Of American Urban Areas, Matthew L. Howell

Theses and Dissertations--Public Policy and Administration

American cities have proliferated in the post-War era. More than 2,000 new cities were founded between 1950 and 2000. While the history of the local government boom has been documented, research into urban fragmentation has explored why there is no consolidation of metropolitan areas rather than exploring why Americans chose fragmentation initially.

This dissertation proposes that individuals create new jurisdictions because individuals prefer to have governments which give them the services individuals desire, even if they could have similar (but not perfect) services cheaper in a larger jurisdiction. Individuals, however, must balance the benefit they get from better fitting cities …

President's Annual Report, Brooks Keel

Office of the President: Annual Report (Archived)

No abstract provided.

School, Family, And Faith: Social Influences On Educational Outcomes Of Nonmetropolitan Sexual Minority Students, Christopher J. Stapel

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

Social institutions in rural communities tend to be highly interrelated and social ties tend to be dense and multiplex. Human ecological theoretical models posit that all institutions in which an individual is embedded interact in complex ways. As such, this dissertation examines the influences of school, faith, family, and risk contexts on the grade point averages of students who attended school in nonmetropolitan counties in Appalachian Kentucky. Using data disaggregated by gender from nearly 5,000 adolescents, I identified risk and protective factors on grade point averages by attraction type (exclusively opposite-sex attracted, same-sex attracted, and unsure of attraction), identified differences …

“What Do You Do With A Student Like That?”: Defiance, Disrespect And Lack Of Motivation In The High School Classroom, Cynthia Stallard Glass

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

Educators face multiple forms of misbehavior in the classroom on a regular basis. Quantitative data in the academic literature indicates that some subgroups, particularly minority students, lower income students and boys, face higher rates of disciplinary actions than their peers. Whether this indicates that those students misbehave more often, whether their actions are perceived differently by educators, or whether they are punished more harshly for their misbehavior are issues that are not well-settled by academic research. This research project addresses this gap in the literature, by addressing how the overrepresentation of subgroups may occur and by addressing the decision-making process …

Graduate Employees’ Work And Organizing In Today’S University: A New Social Movement Theory Approach To Internal And External Struggles, Michael Carl Ide

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

This is a mixed-methods comparative study of union and non-union graduate employees’ work experiences, following Wicken’s (2008) call for additional research into the graduate union movement. I used focus group interviews, finding that nonunionized participants had significantly more negative views of their work and faculty members than unionized participants. Non-unionized participants were also more likely to display greater internalization of neoliberal views and neoliberal subjectivity, and were more likely to see their problems in fatalistic terms. I found increased activity with the union to be associated with both decreased fear and anxiety as well as an increased sense of personal …

Supporting Informed Learners In The 21st Century, Christine S. Bruce, Hilary Hughes, Mary M. Somerville

University Libraries Librarian and Staff Articles and Papers

This article elaborates the concept of informed learning and locates it in educational, workplace, and community settings. Drawing on existing research into people’s experience of information literacy, it identifies critical experiences of informed learners in each of these three settings. It also explores the support required in educational, community, and workplace contexts, which makes informed learning possible. Recognizing strong implications for policy makers in different sectors, the article presents a set of guiding principles for developing informed learning and learners. The idea of informed learning represents and advances understandings of information literacy that incorporate the broader concept of using information …

The Importance Of Using Technology-Enhanced 21st Century Literacy Skills To Support Culture And Diversity In The Classroom, Sonia Isabel Lopez-Lopez, Ibtesam Hussein, Maysoun Ali

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Teaching in today‘s classrooms is not the same as it has been in the past; that is what teachers claim. There is a new generation of students, with new expectations and capacities, coming into the classroom. The Internet and technology in general are used everywhere to communicate and interact with others. Today, students are looking for different interactions and ways of learning in the classroom. Therefore, technology should be used not only because students are using new technologies ubiquitously outside of the classroom, but also because the use of technology can enrich students‘ understandings of diversity and culture, which can …

The Law Of Nations As Constitutional Law, Anthony J. Bellia Jr., Bradford R. Clark

Journal Articles

Courts and scholars continue to debate the status of customary international law in U.S. courts, but have paid insufficient attention to the role that such law plays in interpreting and upholding several specific provisions of the Constitution. The modern position argues that courts should treat customary international law as federal common law. The revisionist position contends that customary international law applies only to the extent that positive federal or state law has adopted it. Neither approach adequately takes account of the Constitution’s allocation of powers to the federal political branches in Articles I and II or the effect of these …

Direct Optimization Of Ranking Measures For Learning To Rank Models, Li Li Guo

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The main challenge in learning-to-rank for information retrieval is the difficulty to di- rectly optimize ranking measures to automatically construct a ranking model from training data. It is mainly due to the fact that the ranking measures are determined by the order of ranked documents rather than the specific values of ranking model scores, thus they are non-convex, nondifferentiable and discontinuous. To address this issue, listwise approaches have been proposed where loss functions are defined either by exploiting a probabilistic model or by optimizing upper bounds or smoothed approximations of ranking measures. Even though very promising results have been achieved, …

Linked Open Data Alignment & Querying, Prateek Jain

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The recent emergence of the "Linked Data" approach for publishing data represents a major step forward in realizing the original vision of a web that can "understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content" i.e. the Semantic Web. This new approach has resulted in the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud, which includes more than 295 large datasets contributed by experts belonging to diverse communities such as geography, entertainment, and life sciences. However, the current interlinks between datasets in the LOD Cloud, as we will illustrate,are too shallow to realize much of the benefits promised. …

Knowledge Acquisition In A System, Christopher J. Thomas

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

I present a method for growing the amount of knowledge available on the Web using a hermeneutic method that involves background knowledge, Information Extraction techniques and validation through discourse and use of the extracted information.

I present the metaphor of the "Circle of Knowledge on the Web". In this context, knowledge acquisition on the web is seen as analogous to the way scientific disciplines gradually increase the knowledge available in their field.

Here, formal models of interest domains are created automatically or manually and then validated by implicit and explicit validation methods before the statements in the created models can …

The Impact Of Minority Faith On The Experience Of Mental Health Services: The Perspectives Of Devotees Of Earth Religions, Alison Niblick

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

In response to an identified need in the psychological literature for research on minority religion, especially earth-centered religion, this dissertation was developed to 1) present an overview of the three main branches of contemporary earth religion, 2) illuminate the realities of minority religious identity in the United States of America, 3) collect data regarding the demographic and identity variables of devotees of earth centered religion, and 4) solicit feedback from the earth religious community regarding its understanding of psychological distress, preferred ways of coping with distress, and perceptions and experiences of professional mental health services. A total of 64 self-identified …

Cultural Competence And Clergy Unite: The Need For Multicultural Considerations For Seminarian Applicants, Monica Sue Richards

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The evaluation of candidates to Catholic seminaries prior to their admission is not an uncommon practice. However, in the past 40-50 years psychologists have played a vital role by adding psychological measures and their clinical perspectives to this evaluative process. Although these psychological evaluations have gathered insightful information that has better informed individuals in making a choice about a candidate, recent research suggests that many of the psychologists conducting these evaluations have not taken measures to ensure cultural competencies within these evaluations. This project outlined the ethical obligation psychologists have in providing culturally competent evaluations to these applicants and seminaries. …

Item Development And Scoring For Japanese Oral Proficiency Testing, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Hitokazu Matsushita

Faculty Publications

This study introduces and evaluates a computerized approach to measuring Japanese L2 oral proficiency. We present a testing and scoring method that uses a type of structured speech called elicited imitation (EI) to evaluate accuracy of speech productions. Several types of language resources and toolkits are required to develop, administer, and score responses to this test. First, we present a corpus-based test item creation method to produce EI items with targeted linguistic features in a principled and efficient manner. Second, we sketch how we are able to bootstrap a small learner speech corpus to generate a significantly large corpus of …

Blood On The Tongue: Reading Abjection In Nationalist Blood Libels From Nazi Germany To Hamas And The British National Party, Damon T. Berry

Journal of Hate Studies

The blood libel is usually known as the Medieval European legend about Jews killing Christians to consume their blood or otherwise use it in rituals. However, in this paper I explore more recent instances of the blood libel that have emerged in nationalist contexts. What I call the nationalist blood libel is more overtly politicized than its predecessors, as there is a relationship between the accusatory portrayals of groups signified as alien and what Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers (2006) called an “anxiety of incompletion” inherent in the modern nation-state as a result of the political discourses of …

The America Invents Act 500: Effects Of Patent Monetization Entities On Us Litigation, Robin Feldman

Faculty Scholarship

Any discussion of flaws in the United States patent system inevitably turns to the system’s modern villain: non-practicing entities, known more colorfully as patent trolls. For many years, however, discussions about non-practicing entities have been long on speculation and short on data. In 2011 Congress directed the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office to study the effects of non-practicing entities on patent litigation. At the request of the GAO, we collected and coded a set of patent lawsuits filed over the past five years. This article presents our analysis of the data and its implications. The data confirm in a dramatic fashion …

Figurative Language In The Immigration Debate: Comparing Early 20th Century And Current U.S. Debate With The Contemporary European Debate, Ensieh Biria

Dissertations and Theses

This study analyzes newspaper coverage of immigration reform in mainstream newspapers prior to, and following the debate in June 2007. The newspaper text is analyzed using metaphor interpretation supported by content analysis. The quantitative result categorizes the identified metaphors in three distinct metaphor categories about: immigrants and immigration, immigration policy and enforcement, and metaphors about the debate and immigration issue itself. The relative distribution of metaphors among categories is provided. Using an open coding process, emergent metaphor categories are identified. The qualitative findings describe metaphors and schemas that were potentially activated by particular metaphorical phrases in this context. Lastly, this …

A Qualitative Study Of Language Beliefs And Linguistic Knowledge In Preservice Teachers Using The Intercultural Communicative Competence Framework, Kimberly K. Ilosvay

Dissertations and Theses

Since 1980, the number of people in the United States who speak a language other than English at home has increased by 140% (United States Census Bureau, 2010). Therefore a greater percentage of students now are multilingual. Throughout the world, multilingualism is considered the norm and monolingualism is the exception (Auer & Wei, 2008). In the United States, however, policies regarding instruction in schools are still influenced by monolingual ideology that carries expectations and assumptions of assimilation, loss of mother tongues, and defined hierarchical structures. As classroom populations become socially, ethnically, racially, and linguistically more diverse, it is increasingly important …

Fostering Hope And Closing The Academic Gap: An Examination Of College Retention For African-American And Latino Students Who Participate In The Louis Stokes Alliance Minority Participation Program (Learning Community) While Enrolled In A Predominately White Institution, Aisha La'chae Hollands

Dissertations and Theses

Colleges are struggling to retain students of color at four-year academic institutions (Kuh, 2005). The result is that while African-American and Latino students are entering college, fewer successfully complete their programs of study and obtain an undergraduate degree (ACE, 2006). For this reason, institutions are establishing supportive learning communities to not only recruit, but to retain this population.Learning communities have become welcoming places in the academy, and are designed to help students succeed in college by providing a formative, integrated academic experience that builds strength, perspective, and commitment. Employing Vincent Tinto`s (1975) student integration theory as a conceptual framework, this …

Communication Accommodation In Context: An Analysis Of Convergence And Divergence In Action, Nathan Thomas Sand

Communication

This collection of essays examines nature and relationship of discourse and social distance by focusing largely on the concepts of divergence and convergence throughout the communication process. The first essay examines the risk communication strategies used by officials to effectively and accommodatively confront and manage the outdoor New York City smoking ban. The second essay performs a rhetorical criticism of former-President Bush’s September 11th Speech, outlining specific instances in discourse that both decrease and increase social distance with the audience. And the third essay steps into the ESL classroom to propose ways in which we can better recognize and understand …

Segmentation Cues In Spontaneous Speech: Robust Semantics And Fragile Phonotactics., L White, Sl Mattys, L Wiget

School of Psychology

Multiple cues influence listeners’ segmentation of connected speech into words, but most previous studies have used stimuli elicited in careful readings rather than natural conversation. Discerning word boundaries in conversational speech may differ from the laboratory setting. In particular, a speaker’s articulatory effort – hyperarticulation vs. hypoarticulation (H&H) – may vary according to communicative demands, suggesting a compensatory relationship whereby acoustic-phonetic cues are attenuated when other information sources strongly guide segmentation.We examined how listeners’ interpretation of segmentation cues is affected by speech style (spontaneous conversation vs. read), using cross-modal identity priming. To elicit spontaneous stimuli, we used a map task …

The Silent But Gifted Law Student: Transforming Anxious Public Speakers Into Well-Rounded Advocates, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

The premise of this Article is that a certain cluster of students in every law school experiences severe public speaking anxiety (as contrasted with standard low-grade nerves) — whether because of childhood upbringing, adolescent or college experiences, or new environmental triggers — and needs support to gain control of this fear instead of repressing it as a perceived weakness. This Article proposes that, with the right level of awareness and a thoughtful psychological approach, law schools can, and should, develop programs to assist students in overcoming this stumbling block. To do so, law professors first must understand that it is …

Direct Manipulation Tablet Apps For Education: How Should We Understand Them?, Rich Burkhard, Timothy Hill, Shailaja Venkatsubramanyan, Chang Kim

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

As the iPad and its competitors create a new product category – apps for mobile, multimedia tablets with touch and gesture interfaces – many are convinced that tablet apps will revolutionize education. For example, hand-controlled, direct manipulation features offer new ways to convey both spatial and abstract concepts, and progressive storylines can adapt to users in real-time. While the effectiveness of tablet apps for learning may seem obvious to new users, how and why particular apps might be effective is new research territory, and the relevance of existing learning theory is unknown. We describe a research program that will explore …

Centennial Reflections On The California Law Review's Scholarship On Race: The Structure Of Civil Rights Thought Centennial Tribute Issue, Richard Delgado

Articles

No abstract provided.

Irrationalism: The Foundation Of Hate Propaganda, Robert Lanning

Journal of Hate Studies

This article proposes that hate propaganda be examined in terms of its basis in irrationalism as a philosophical orientation. In the first part of the paper, irrationalism is discussed from the perspectives of various 20th century philosophers engaged against the rise of fascism or responding to it. In the second part, selected examples of contemporary propaganda are discussed, demonstrating continuity in the use of irrationalism as a limitation to thought and analysis.

The Effectiveness Of Parental Involvement In Preschool Education Programs On Parent Perceptions Of Their Child’S School Readiness, Judith Ann Konerza

Education

The purpose of this study was to determine if the Gearing Up for Kindergarten program created a significant impact on parent understanding of children's development and aspects of school readiness. Parent perceptions of their child's readiness to make the transition to school were also assessed. The study also measured the Gearing Up for Kindergarten impact on children's scores on selected academic measures. A selected sample of 75 parents were surveyed with pre, post, and post post program assessments using the Practical Parent Assessment of School Readiness survey. The survey used Likert scale measures to assess parent perceptions of readiness in …