Digital Commons Network^™

Identifying Formative Assessment In Classroom Instruction: Creating An Instrument To Observe Use Of Formative Assessment In Practice, Steven G. Oswalt

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Is formative assessment observable in practice? Substantial claims have been made regarding the influence of formative assessment on student learning. However, if researchers cannot be confident whether and to what degree formative assessment is present in instruction, then how can they make claims with confidence regarding the efficacy of formative assessment? If it is uncertain whether and to what degree formative assessment is being used in practice, then any claims regarding its influence are difficult to support. This study aims to provide a vehicle through which researchers can make stronger, more substantiated reports about the presence and impact of formative …

An Investigation Into The Water Budget And The Management Of The Snake River System, John Whitney Hildreth

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Future climate change poses a major conceptual challenge to the availability of water resources due to the uncertainty involved with changes to the hydrologic cycle. Over the past decades, observed warming temperatures across the Western United Sates have shown significant impacts on river basin scale hydrology. This research uses physically based modeling tools to assess the hydrologic impacts of climate change in the Snake River Basin. Physically based hydrologic modeling studies of future climate do not typically take into account interactions between groundwater and surface water. To account for these interactions, the Variable Infiltration Capacity model is coupled with the …

Strategies To Decrease Movement Variability In The Ankle Joint In Cyclists, Claudia Guadalupe Chavez

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Coordination variability is thought to be indicative of a cyclist’s skill level as novices have higher levels of variability than experts (Sides & Wilson, 2012). It was hypothesized that the externally focused instructions with visual feedback group would decrease coordination variability in the ankle joint to a greater extent than those in the internally focused instructions with visual feedback group. Six cyclists (30-40 years) completed a four day acquisition period and a retention test. During this time participants cycled for 10-15 minutes at a power output equal to 2.0-2.5W/kg of body mass. Participants were provided with internally or externally focused …

Tibial Tubercle Transfer To Correct Bilateral Patellar Tendinopathy In A Collegiate Football Player, Andrew D. Hamstra

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Objective: To present a case of a competitive football player with chronic patellar tendinopathy and the associated bilateral tibial tubercle transfer surgeries performed leading to the reduction of pain and return to participation.

Background: A 19 year-old male football athlete (height= 187.96 cm, mass= 112.037 kg) presented with chronic patellar tendinopathy that began in his high school career and continued to worsen with the increased physical demands associated with participation in collegiate sport.

Differential Diagnosis: Chondromalacia patella and Osgood Schlatters disease.

Treatment: After nonsurgical intervention resulted in no decrease of pain, bilateral tibial tubercle transfer surgery was conducted to correct …

Punishing Our Own Rascals: Great Britain, The United States, And The Right To Search During The Era Of Slave Trade Suppression, Mark T. Haggard

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the relationship between the United States and Great Britain during the era of slave trade suppression in the nineteenth century. Two ideals of international relations came into conflict when Great Britain’s humanitarian drive to rid the world of the international slave trade ran headlong into the United States’ claims to sovereignty under the Law of Nations. Under international maritime law a ship is the sovereign territory of the nation under whose flag it sails; the forcible boarding of a ship is tantamount to an invasion of the country itself. Britain sought to circumvent this rule in the …

Building The Modern World: Morrison-Knudsen Construction Company, James David Duran

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

After working on construction projects in Boise, Idaho, Morris Hans Knudsen and Harry Morrison combined their resources and skills to form Morrison-Knudsen Company (M-K) in 1912. The two of them built a world-class construction and engineering company that, at one time, was the industry leader in their field. Their success relied upon fast, cost-effective, construction and an uncanny ability to match their company’s mission to the goals of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. When Harry Morrison moved to the position of president in 1939, he took M-K international by presenting his company as the deliverer of modernization to the developing …

Distribution Of Chinook Salmon (Oncorhynchus Tshawytscha) In Upper-Columbia River Sub-Basins From Environmental Dna Analysis, Matthew Benjamin Laramie

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Determining accurate species distribution is crucial to conservation and management strategies for imperiled species, but challenging for small populations that are approaching extinction or being reestablished. We evaluated the efficacy of environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis for improving detection and thus known distribution of Chinook salmon in the Methow and Okanogan Sub-basins of the Upper-Columbia River, Washington, USA. We developed an assay to target a 90 base pair sequence of Chinook DNA and used quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) to quantify the amount of Chinook eDNA in 1-L water samples collected at 48 sites in the sub-basins. We collected samples once …

Analysis Of A Miniature Radio Frequency Ion Thruster With An Inductively Coupled Plasma Source, Peter Paul Bumbarger

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The performance of a 2 cm miniature ion thruster was analyzed. A thruster of this size was predicted to produce a thrust of 200 μN. The plasma density was measured against rf input power and propellant flow rate for three configurations: the ICP source by itself; the ICP source with discharge chamber; and finally, the ICP source, the discharge chamber, and the permanent magnet cusp system. Once the optimum case was determined, electrostatic grids were added and thrust measurements were taken with a set of segmented ion collector plates.

The miniature rf ion thruster obtained a thrust of 22.35 μN …

Characterization And Feasibility Of A Portable Oxygen Concentrator For Use With A Mass Casualty Ventilator, Paul Robert Williams

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The American Association for Respiratory Care has reported a need to stockpile 5,000-10,000 mass casualty ventilators with supplemental oxygen in preparation for pandemic emergencies (1). The American Medical Association specifies oxygen concentrators supply oxygen at 5 liters per minute at ≥90% purity (2). However, these design specifications may not be the most efficient use of system resources in portable oxygen concentrators using pressure swing adsorption. A testbed was developed to investigate the system performance of an oxygen concentrator while altering the system inlet and outlet pressures and flow rates. This investigation demonstrates that a more efficient portable oxygen concentrator, which …

Ordinary Effort, John Mcmahon

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The thesis is primarily concerned with how the search for knowledge is driven by a quest for certainty, resulting in a compulsion to fix knowledge in explicit rules and procedures. Rather than producing a satisfactory sense of stability, this produces comedy and tragedy as human endeavors play out against a backdrop of arbitrary structure.

Three videos explore this problem through the lens of professional sport, where the quest for certainty is evaluated against the application of rules, against rules governing the action of the body, and against the attempt to circumvent the rules. Theoretical background is provided by examining the …

Children's Recognition Of Pride: An Experimental Approach, Darren Jason Garcia

Theses and Dissertations

Pride is elicited when a child takes credit for an achievement or exceeds a socially valued standard or expectation. Evidence suggests that pride has a distinct nonverbal expression that is recognized by adults across cultures (Tracy & Robins, 2004). Research examining when children recognize pride has yielded age discrepancies between studies that use forced-choice response formats and those that use spontaneous-response formats. Differences in children's ability to use and comprehend language may account for some of these differences. The purpose of this thesis was to examine the age at which children reliably recognize pride, while minimizing the need for children …

Reading And Listening To Music Increase Resting Energy Expenditure During Indirect Calorimetry In Healthy Adults , Blaire Snell

Theses and Dissertations

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has developed an evidence analysis library (EAL) for Nutrition and Dietetics professionals. The EAL is updated by members through workgroups consisting of experts in their fields, most often in response to unanswered questions. One such question is: what kinds of activities can be done during the rest period of an indirect calorimetry test in a healthy population? The objective of our study was to determine if listening to self-selected relaxing music or reading on an electronic device or a magazine effects resting energy expenditure (REE) as measured by an indirect calorimetry test in a …

What Is Meant By Argumentative Competence? An Integrative Review Of Methods Of Analysis And Assessment In Education, Chrysi Rapanta, Merce Garcia-Mila, Sandra Gilabert

All Works

The need to enhance argument skills through education has become increasingly evident during the past 20 years. This need has resulted in an ongoing discussion that focuses on students' and teachers' argumentation and its support. However, apart from the extended competence-based discourse, no clear and homogeneous definition exists for argumentative competence and its constituent skills. To respond to this deficiency, we conducted an integrative literature review focusing on the methods of argument analysis and assessment that have been proposed thus far in the field of education. Specifically, we constructed an interpretative framework to organize the information contained in 97 reviewed …

Assessing Growth Response To Climate Controls In A Great Basin Artemisia Tridentata Plant Community, Lorenzo F. Apodaca

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An assessment of the growth response of key vegetative species to climatic variability is vital to identifying possible local impacts on ecosystems faced with imminent climate change. With current climate projections in Nevada predicting a shift to an even more arid climate with greater year-to-year variability, the imperative exists to identify the effects of specific climatic controls on plant growth and to research methods to assess large-scale vegetative changes, especially in more remote areas where readily available data sets may be lacking. This study utilized annual growth ring indices constructed from big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentatassp.tridentata) stems collected in Spring Valley, …

Evaluation Of The Relationship Between Nutrition Knowledge And Disordered Eating Risk In Female Collegiate Athletes, Amy L. Miracle

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Involvement in collegiate sports among female athletes is at an all-time high with approximately 198,000 currently participating, (National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2012). With this increase in female participation in collegiate sports, the pressures of sport participation and academics lead some women to engage in harmful eating behaviors. These harmful eating behaviors may lead to the development of disordered eating (C. Johnson, Powers, & Dick, 1999; Quatromoni, 2008; Reel, SooHoo, Petrie, Greenleaf, & Carter, 2010; Reinking & Alexander, 2005). Many factors have been identified as contributing to the development of disordered eating but nutrition knowledge or lack thereof, has yet to …

Comparative Direct Democracy: A Study Of Institutions And Individuals, Donald D. Mirjanian

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Do institutions matter? This dissertation examines the role of institutions in the context of comparative direct democracy. Through an institutionalist framework, this study considers how the context in which the mechanism of direct democracy is first introduced has an impact on later usage, and how individuals operate when constrained by those very institutions. In particular, I examine the cases of Italy, France, Uruguay, and Venezuela and find that the inclusion of direct democracy mechanisms (most commonly, the referendum device) is more likely to occur when previously excluded "out-groups" participate in constitutional formation. In addition, I find that institutional design is …

On High-Performance Parallel Fixed-Point Decimal Multiplier Designs, Ming Zhu

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

High-performance, area-efficient hardware implementation of decimal multiplication is preferred to slow software simulations in a number of key scientific and financial application areas, where errors caused by converting decimal numbers into their approximate binary representations are not acceptable.

Multi-digit parallel decimal multipliers involve two major stages: (i) the partial product generation (PPG) stage, where decimal partial products are determined by selecting the right versions of the pre-computed multiples of the multiplicand, followed by (ii) the partial product accumulation (PPA) stage, where all the partial products are shifted and then added together to obtain the final multiplication product. In this thesis, …

Media Bias Through Facial Expressions On Local Las Vegas Television News Programs: A Visual Content Analysis, Jessica Zimmerman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Trust in news media has been considered an important base for social order and cohesion in society and is a crucial variable for evaluating news media. Media credibility has been questioned by the audience for some time and the audience's trust in the media has been slowly diminishing over the years. When a news broadcaster communicates a story on local television news, it is possible for his own opinions to leak through nonverbal communication, specifically facial expressions. This thesis explores the six local Las Vegas television news stations' anchors and reporters to visually analyze whether facial characteristics reveal media bias …

Ucc Minutes, December 10, 2013, University Curriculum Council

UCC Agendas/Minutes

No abstract provided.

The Partial Characterization Of The 142r Protein Of Tanapox Virus, Krystal N. Seibert

Dissertations

Due to the complex nature of cancer, a variety of strategies are being employed to treat patients. Among these are oncolytic viruses that conditionally replicate in tumor cells with specific cellular landscapes. Several viruses including Herpesviruses, Adenoviruses, and Poxviruses, predominantly vaccinia virus (VV), have been explored for their oncolytic potential. Most of these viruses can productively infect a variety of cell types and it is one goal to create conditionally lethal viruses that can only replicate in tumor cells. Due to the prevalence of p53 inactivating mutations in cancers viruses that are restricted to p53 null cells are desirable and …

Lack Of Timeliness, Noise And Transitory Components In Earnings As Explanations For The Apparent Decline In The Value Relevance Of Earnings, L. Dwight Sneathen

Accountancy: Faculty Publications

Prior studies identify three factors that contribute to the low contemporaneous association between returns (prices) and earnings: lack of timeliness of earnings capturing value relevant information, noise in earnings, and transitory elements in earnings. This study seeks to identify whether these factors contribute to the observed inter-temporal decline in the contemporaneous association between returns (prices) and earnings documented in recent literature. Prior studies do not explicitly examine the affect of these factors on the inter-temporal decline, and the extant evidence is mixed. Empirical evidence presented here indicates that lack of timeliness of earnings and value-irrelevant noise in earnings have increased …

Staphylococcus Aureus Sara Regulates Inflammation And Colonization During Central Nervous System Biofilm Formation, Jessica N. Snowden, Matthew K. Beaver, Karen Beenken, Alexander R. Horswill, Tammy L. Kielian

Journal Articles: Pediatrics

Infection is a frequent and serious complication following the treatment of hydrocephalus with CSF shunts, with limited therapeutic options because of biofilm formation along the catheter surface. Here we evaluated the possibility that the sarA regulatory locus engenders S. aureus more resistant to immune recognition in the central nervous system (CNS) based on its reported ability to regulate biofilm formation. We utilized our established model of CNS catheter-associated infection, similar to CSF shunt infections seen in humans, to compare the kinetics of bacterial titers, cytokine production and inflammatory cell influx elicited by wild type S. aureus versus an isogenic sarA …

The Relationship Between Health Literacy And Health Outcomes: A Mixed-Methods Study Of African-American Adult Patients With Asthma, Courtnee Erin Melton

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Introduction: Asthma affects 24.6 million people in the United States, and AfricanAmericans share a disproportionate burden of the disease. African-Americans have a higher prevalence of asthma, worse asthma control, higher hospitalization rates, and higher asthma mortality rates African-Americans are also more likely to have low health literacy. Low health literacy has been linked to increased use of emergency care, increased hospitalization, decreased use of preventive services, poorer medication adherence, poorer interpretation of prescription labels, nutrition labels, and health messages, and poorer health outcomes. Consequently, health literacy is one of the modifiable individual factors that contributes to asthma disparities among African-Americans. …

Syntheses And Characterization Of Advanced Nanocomposites And Platinum Complexes, Jing Fang

Theses (Pre-2016)

The present research focuses on the following two areas: (1) to prepare advanced nanocomposites through electropolymerization, and (2) to synthesize novel platinum complexes. (1) Substrate-Enhanced Electrodeposition of Polypyrrole on Carbon Nanotubes. Silver membrane filter (SMF) was utilized as a substrate, where carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were anchored and evenly distributed in its highly porous yet interconnected microstructure through vacuum filtration. Taking advantage of SMF's superb electrical conductivity, the CNTs-loaded SMF could be engaged as a working electrode, where pyrrole was electropolymerized on the surface of CNTs. Scanning electron micrograms demonstrated that polypyrrole (PPy) grew more evenly on the H202/HCl-pretreated single-walled CNTs …

Cross-Reporting Of Interpersonal Violence And Animal Cruelty: The Charlotte Project, Dennis D. Long, Shanti J. Kulkarni

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The overlapping nature of interpersonal violence and animal cruelty is well established, however historically each issue has been addressed by distinct and separate protective systems. An innovative community-based project is described that utilized crosstraining as a mechanism to foster collaboration between human services and animal control agencies. Findings are useful for professionals and community stakeholders interested in facilitating the cross-reporting of interpersonal violence and animal cruelty.

Conservation Genetics Of Gar (Atractosteus Spp.), Sandra Elizabeth Bohn

Master's Theses

The alligator gar (Atractosteus spatula) is a large-bodied species of fish that historically was widely distributed in coastal drainages around the Gulf of Mexico and well north in the Mississippi River basin. Currently this species is experiencing population declines across much of its range. However, in some parts of its range, such as Texas, this species has shifted from being viewed as a trash fish to being the target or a growing sport fishery. As populations decline and angling pressure increases, different state agencies are faced with the common challenge of developing the most effective methods for managing …

Rct Of Web-Based Personalized Normative Feedback For College Drinking Prevention: Are Typical Student Norms Good Enough?, Joseph W. Labrie, Melissa A. Lewis, David C. Atkins, Clayton Neighbors, Cheng Zheng, Shannon R. Kenney, Lucy E. Napper, Theresa Walter, Jason R. Kilmer, Justin F. Hummer, Joel Grossbard, Tehniat M. Ghaidarov, Sruti Desai, Christine M. Lee, Mary E. Larimer

Heads Up!

Objectives

Personalized normative feedback (PNF) interventions are generally effective at correcting normative misperceptions and reducing risky alcohol consumption among college students. However, research has yet to establish what level of reference group specificity is most efficacious in delivering PNF. This study compared the efficacy of a web-based PNF intervention employing eight increasingly-specific reference groups against a Web-BASICS intervention and a repeated-assessment control in reducing risky drinking and associated consequences.

Method

Participants were 1663 heavy drinking Caucasian and Asian undergraduates at two universities. The referent for web-based PNF was either the typical same-campus student, or a same-campus student at one (either …

In The Valley With Jeffrey Vallance, Damon Willick

Art History Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

An American Indian Supreme Court, Eugene R. Fidell

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Utility Of Amicus Briefs In The Supreme Court’S Indian Cases, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.