Digital Commons Network^™

Using Ict-Based Instructional Technologies To Teach Science: Perspectives From Teachers In Trinidad And Tobago., Rawatee Maharaj-Sharma, Aarti Sharma, Aditi Sharma

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The purpose of this study was to investigate how science teachers in Trinidad and Tobago use ICT-based instructional technologies in classroom science teaching. The participants were 30 secondary school science teachers who completed their Postgraduate Diploma in Education within the last 2 years from the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. The teachers were asked to prepare lesson plans which demonstrate their use of instructional technologies to teach science topics within their term’s schemes of work. They were subsequently asked to explain their reasons for using the selected instructional technologies. The findings revealed that PowerPoint was the …

Commercially Available Digital Game Technology In The Classroom: Improving Automaticity In Mental-Maths In Primary-Aged Students., John O'Rourke, Susan Main, Susan M. Hill

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

In this paper we report on a study of the implementation of handheld game consoles (HGCs) in 10 Year four/five classrooms to develop student automaticity of mathematical calculations. The automaticity of mathematical calculations was compared for those students using the HGC and those being taught using traditional teaching methods. Over a school term, students (n=236) who used the HGCs and Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training showed significant improvement in both the speed and accuracy of their mathematical calculations. Data collected in interviews during the intervention period from students, staff and parents were analysed to provide further information on the implementation and …

How Well Prepared Are Australian Preservice Teachers To Teach Early Reading Skills?, Linda J. Meeks, Coral R. Kemp

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Preservice early childhood and primary teachers from teacher preparation institutions across five Australian states were surveyed regarding their perceptions of preparedness and ability to teach early reading and spelling skills, as well as their knowledge of components of early reading, such as phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge and early spelling patterns. Surveys were conducted in the final year of the teacher training courses and targeted students attending teacher education institutions providing teacher training in the area of early literacy. Although preservice teachers generally rated themselves as prepared to teach early reading, most demonstrated minimal to very poor knowledge of the components …

Primary Mathematics Trainee Teacher Confidence And Its Relationship To Mathematical Knowledge, Stephen J. Norton

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The purpose of this paper is to examine trainee primary school teachers’ confidence in their mathematical content knowledge (MCK) and confidence to teach specific primary mathematics concepts (mathematics pedagogical content knowledge –MPCK) which was correlated to their actual MCK on specific tasks. For this correlational study survey and test data were collected from a cohort of 210 trainee teachers. It was found that confidence to do and to teach mathematics was reasonably strongly correlated with competence. Trainee teachers’ confidence varied greatly depending on the specific mathematics they were attempting. When presented with specific tasks, trainees were well aware of the …

Improving The Computational Thinking Pedagogical Capabilities Of School Teachers, Matt Bower, Leigh N. Wood, Jennifer W.M. Lai, Cathie Howe, Raymond Lister, Raina Mason, Kate Highfield, Jennifer Veal

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The idea of computational thinking as skills and universal competence which every child should possess emerged last decade and has been gaining traction ever since. This raises a number of questions, including how to integrate computational thinking into the curriculum, whether teachers have computational thinking pedagogical capabilities to teach children, and the important professional development and training areas for teachers. The aim of this paper is to address the strategic issues by illustrating a series of computational thinking workshops for Foundation to Year 8 teachers held at an Australian university. Data indicated that teachers' computational thinking understanding, pedagogical capabilities, technological …

School Leaders’ Perspectives On Educating Teachers To Work In Vulnerable Communities: New Insights From The Coal Face, Lynette Longaretti, Dianne Toe

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Classroom teacher quality can significantly impact student learning outcomes. Increased access to skilled teachers in low socioeconomic status (SES) schools could substantially improve the learning outcomes and engagement levels of young people.

The National Exceptional Teaching for Disadvantaged Schools (NETDS) programme is a university based Teacher Education programme that has been implemented by Deakin University in the Geelong/Werribee area. It seeks to prepare high achieving pre-service teachers (PSTs) to teach in low SES school settings.

This project investigated the views of school leadership teams in low SES schools including their views of an exemplary teacher, and the understandings and skills …

Becoming Exceptional: Exploring Selves And Assemblages In The National Exceptional Teaching In Disadvantaged Schools Program, Jo Ailwood, Margot Ford

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

This paper explores the work of ‘becoming exceptional’ amongst a group of preservice teachers taking part in the National Exceptional Teaching for Disadvantaged Schools program (NETDS). The NETDS program is directed towards mentoring and supporting outstanding preservice teachers to transition into the schools where they can make a significant difference. For us, as teacher educators leading the teaching of our University’s NETDS program, the most important questions became ones of self and transformation for the participating preservice teachers. To begin these explorations we make use of concepts provided by Deleuze and Guattari, and expanded upon by Braidotti; the …

Thinking With/Through The Contradictions Of Social Justice In Teacher Education: Self-Reflection On Netds Experience, Keita Takayama, Tiffany Jones, Rose Amazan

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Improving teacher quality has become the hallmark of Australian education reform with a plethora of measures introduced in teacher education to improve future teachers’ instructional competencies. This policy focus has also changed the discussion of strategies for addressing disadvantages in schools; improving teacher quality, as opposed to addressing structural inequalities in the system and larger society, has become the “solution.” This paper looks at the National Exceptional Teaching for Disadvantaged Schools (NETDS), which aims to channel high performing teacher education students to disadvantaged schools. Using the taxonomy of conservative, liberal and critical approaches to education reform, the …

Any Time, Any Place, Flexible Pace: Technology-Enhanced Language Learning In A Teacher Education Programme, Jocelyn M. Howard, Adèle Scott

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Ongoing developments in e-learning, improved internet accessibility and increased digital citizenry provide exciting opportunities to integrate effective classroom pedagogies with online educational technologies, creating mixed-mode courses to enhance student engagement and facilitate greater autonomous learning. This research examines pre-service teacher education students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of experiential and digitally-mediated tools which take them beyond the constraints of traditional lecture-type delivery. Quantitative and qualitative results from distance and face-to-face cohorts show the value the students ascribe to tools employed in a modified language course. These are discussed in relation to reported changes in students’ proficiency in the target language and …

Dungeons And Dragons And Literacy: The Role Tabletop Role-Playing Games Can Play In Developing Teenagers' Literacy Skills And Reading Interests, Stefanie L. B. Kaylor

Graduate Research Papers

The purpose of this study was to explore the role that tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) play in developing the literacy skills and leisure reading interests of teenagers who play them. Additionally, this study sought to determine what role or roles educators should play in developing the gaming culture of teenage students. In order to answer these questions, seven people who played TRPGs as teenagers were interviewed about their past and current TRPG interests, past and current leisure reading habits, and the effects that playing TRPGs had on their literacy skills. This study revealed that all participants felt that playing TRPGs …

Network Investigation Techniques: Government Hacking And The Need For Adjustment In The Third-Party Doctrine, Eduardo R. Mendoza

St. Mary's Law Journal

Modern society is largely dependent on technology, and legal discovery is no longer limited to hard-copy, tangible documents. The clash of technology and the law is an exciting, yet dangerous phenomena; dangerous because our justice system desperately needs technological progress. The clash between scientific advancement and the search for truth has recently taken an interesting form—government hacking. The United States Government has increasingly used Network Investigation Techniques (NITs) to target suspects in criminal investigations. NITs operate by identifying suspects who have taken affirmative steps to conceal their identity while browsing the Internet. The hacking technique has become especially useful to …

First They Came For The Child Pornographers: The Fbi's International Search Warrant To Hack The Dark Web, Zoe Russell

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming.

“Fly The Friendly Skies”: How Implementing A Private Security System Can Improve The Safety Of The Nation And An Industry, Courtney Luster

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

No abstract provided.

The Epa’S Endangerment Finding On Aircraft Greenhouse Gas Emissions: A Preliminary Analysis, Katherine A. Bechina, John C. Nettels, Brett A. Shanks

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

No abstract provided.

Insider Threat: The Unseen Dangers Posed By Badged Airport Employees And How To Mitigate Them, J. Peter Greco

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

Security breaches involving badged airport employees1 are a growing risk in today’s commercial aviation industry. Currently at almost every commercial airport in the United States, employees of airports, airlines, purveyors, and other tenants enjoy unfettered access to the airport’s Security Identification Display Area (SIDA), sterile, and secured areas. In recent years, there have been several high profile incidents deriving from this freedom of movement and lack of oversight which have resulted in the introduction of dangerous contraband into the aviation system. Several alternatives can be implemented to combat this problem.

What is perhaps the most effective of these is also …

Privacy Literacy: From Theory To Practice, Christina L. Wissinger

Communications in Information Literacy

Libraries and librarians have dealt with patron privacy issues since their inception, often serving as educators and advocates. In today’s social media-filled landscape, patron privacy has moved from the safeguarding of traditional library records to the creation, use, and ownership of information maintained in an online world. As the core educators for many aspects of literacy, librarians need to keep pace with the issues their users face daily. This paper centers on privacy literacy as an independent area of instruction for library sessions. It reviews a theoretical framework to support privacy literacy instruction and showcases resources and tools for creating …

Socio-Cognitive Factors And Perceived Consequences Associated With Alternative Forms Of Alcohol Use, Abbly L. Braitman, Ashley N. Linden-Carmichael, Amy L. Stamates, Cathy Lau-Barraco

Psychology Faculty Publications

Objective: Popular media have highly publicized alternative forms of alcohol use (eg, eyeballing, inhaling alcohol vapor) among college students as a growing concern, possibly associated with severe health risks. Formative research indicates rarity of use.

Participants and Methods: College students (Study 1: n = 411; Study 2: n = 687) completed an online survey.

Results: Findings confirmed infrequent use of alternative methods of alcohol use and low likelihood of trying them in the future (Study 1). Participants indicated varied reasons for possibly trying each alternative form of alcohol use, but consistently perceived consequences for all forms (ie, health concerns), as …

Fibroblast Growth Factor 21 Is A Novel Protein Sensor In Pregnancy, Elizabeth Frost Sutton

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The twenty-first century has experienced a shift in cause of death worldwide from communicable diseases to noncommunicable diseases. Interestingly, many of these implicated chronic diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, have been shown to be programmed in the womb. As first posited by the Barker Hypothesis, adverse exposures in utero can increase an individual’s risk for chronic disease later in life. Therefore, pregnancy is an opportune time for intervention to improve the health of future generations. Studies of exposures known to negatively impact infant health, e.g. states of overnutrition (obesity, diabetes, excess gestational weight gain) and undernutrition (starvation, …

From Products To Politics: Understanding The Effectiveness Of A Celebrity Political Endorsement, Melissa Sanati

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

From Scott Baio’s endorsement of Donald Trump to Sarah Silverman’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders and subsequent rejection of the “Bernie or Bust” crowd at the DNC, celebrities have habitually inserted themselves into the political sphere, however, there has been little empirical research on celebrity endorsements of political candidates. Rooted in branding theory, this study seeks to understand the effectiveness of celebrity political endorsements by utilizing advertising effectiveness models. The primary model, derived from work done by Amos, Holmes, and Strutton (2008), translates source factors of a celebrity product endorser to those of a celebrity candidate endorser, such as credibility, attractiveness, …

Reduced Order Models For Beam-Wave Interaction In High Power Microwave Sources, Lokendra Singh Thakur

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

We apply an asymptotic analysis to show that corrugated waveguides can be represented as cylindrical waveguides with smooth metamaterial coatings when the corrugtions are subwavelength. Here the metamaterial delivers an effective anisotropic surface impedance, effective dielectric constant, and imparts novel dispersive effects on signals traveling inside the waveguide. These properties arise from the subwavelength resonances of the metamaterial. For sufficiently deep corrugations, the waveguide exhibits backward wave propagation, which can be understood in the present context as a multi-scale phenomenon resulting from local resonances inside the subwavelength geometry. Our approach is well suited to numerical computation and we provide a …

Selected Works Of Richard Burchard: A Resource Guide, William Floyd Plummer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This document serves as a resource guide for selected choral works of Richard Burchard, including pertinent background information and biographical details about the composer’s life, information concerning the compositional style and musical structure of his choral works, and accessibility and interpretive considerations for the choral conductor. Works were selected for this study chronologically by publication date, from Burchard’s first published work (Miserere mei, published 2009) through the beginning of this project in early 2012. Born in 1960, Richard Burchard is the Chair of the Music Department at Bellarmine University in Kentucky. Burchrd has written over 50 pieces, many of which …

Tribological And Dynamical Study Of An Automotive Transmission System, Meng Li

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The transmission system is critical for automotive and heavy duty equipment due to its prominent role in the powertrain system, which is often challenged with degraded torque capacity and harsh dynamic response. Simulation-guided design can provide appropriate guidelines to resolve these problems with virtual analyses. In current study, the tribological and dynamical study of an automatic transmission is performed at two levels: a wet clutch and powertrain. In this dissertation, tribological study is performed for a wet clutch based on the thermohydrodynamic (THD) analysis that takes the following factors into account. • The groove effect (depth, area, and pattern) is …

Evaluation Of Compositional Effects On Gas-Oil Miscibility And Gas-Assisted Gravity Drainage (Gagd) Eor Process, Mohamed Al Riyami

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Vanishing interface technique (VIT), offers fast and accurate determination of minimum miscibility pressure (MMP) between the reservoir crude oil and the various gases injected for enhancing oil recovery (EOR). The technique is based on miscibility being the condition where an interface between the injected fluid and the reservoir crude oil vanishes. This research has evaluated the effect of the gas-oil ratio on zero-IFT pressure. VIT experiments were simulated using an equation of state (EOS) and the Parachor model. This work proves the robustness of VIT in estimating miscibility pressures for gas injection EOR projects. Also this work presents a …

Ethnic Audiences In A Fragmented Media Era: Ethnic Audiences' Selective Exposure To Likeminded Media, Mingxiao Sui

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The conventional wisdom that U.S. and ethnic media have distinctive effects on ethnic populations’ assimilation into the American society inspires two closely related questions: (1) how do English- and ethnic-language media differ in news content?, and (2) to what extent is ethnic audiences’ preference for English- versus ethnic-language media systematically biased such that they seek to use media congenial to their most salient ethnic identity? The first question is expected to provide insights into what ethnic audiences learn about the U.S. and their country of origin from distinct news outlets, and to explain whether and how U.S. and ethnic media …

Spatio-Temporal Modeling Of Louisiana Land Subsidence Using High-Resolution Geo-Spatial Data, Hanyu Xiang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Land subsidence, defined as a land sinking or a gradual inward caving of land, presents a common disturbance observed in many areas of the world. In Louisiana, this specific problem posed a serious threat to the populace living there. Considered by denizens to be an adverse impact of land use, the extant Louisiana subsidence causes serious problems that tend to worsen, such as excessive wetland formation or land loss. Unless researchers find appropriate treatments to address this increasingly serious problem, the present issues will be exacerbated. To visualize the spatio-temporal subsidence patterns, this study used data collected by high-precision GPS …

On The Skein Theory Of 0-Framed Surgery Along The Trefoil Knot, Andrew Robert Holmes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, we will give a generating set of the Kauffman bracket skein module over the field Q(A) of 0-framed surgery along the trefoil knot. This generating set is described as a certain subset of a known basis for the skein module over Z[A^±1] of the trefoil exterior.

An Elusive Peace: The Foreign Policy Challenges Of The Clinton Administration In A Post-Cold War World, Jennifer Perrett Galiouras

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT In modern US history, the 1990s are often regarded as “The Decade of Peace and Prosperity.” Though the liberalization of markets and a technology boom fueled American prosperity, expectations of post-Cold War peace remained elusive. The purpose of this study is to observe how in the moment when the US became the world’s superpower, it also began to retreat from a position of active leadership. Elected in 1992, President Bill Clinton looked towards the United Nations as the answer to keeping peace around the globe. His administration’s policies of democratic enlargement and aggressive multilateralism aimed to combine the spread …

Healing Mechanism Investigation Of Self-Healing Concrete By Microencapsulated Calcium Nitrate, Gabriel Andres Arce Amador

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Durability of reinforced concrete structures depends highly on the integrity of the concrete which protects the structure from the environment. However, concrete is a brittle material and as such it is prone to cracking which allows for detrimental agents to penetrate the structure and produce early deterioration. Embedding microcapsules with chemical healing agents in concrete materials for self-healing applications as well as implementing SMAs as reinforcement of concrete structures for self-closing of cracks are both state-of-the-art techniques with enormous potential for enhancement of concrete infrastructure durability. In this work, both techniques are combined as an alternative for superior self-healing of …

An Integrated Framework For Self-Disclosure On Social Networking Sites, Asim Shrestha

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Social networking sites usage has shown a meteoric rise over the past decade. Social networking sites survive and thrive based on the information that users disclose. The willingness of users to disclose their information lies at the core and is the driving force of the economies of these sites. This study proposed and tested an integrated theoretical framework for self-disclosure on social networking sites. Drawing from three different theoretical perspectives viz. self-congruency theory, privacy calculus theory, and extension of unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2), a research model was formulated. The model was tested using survey data …

Design, Synthesis, And Evaluation Of Innovative Bodipy-Peptidic Conjugates For Biological Application, Tyrslai Menyaee Williams

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Abstract Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to colorectal cancer (CRC), methods of detection, photodynamic therapy (PDT), and EGFR as an attractive targeting strategy for imaging CRC. Chapter 2 details the synthesis of ten peptide sequences for targeting EGFR receptors at the site of CRC, as a collaborative work with Dr. Seetharama Jois. This chapter also investigates the efficacy of these peptides for EGFR. Chapter 3 offers the first synthetic strategy for developing BODIPY-peptide conjugates via amide linkages. All conjugates were optimized for the best reaction conditions and good yields were observed. Each conjugate was subjected to photophysical, SPR, and …