Digital Commons Network^™

The Underrepresentation Of Low Socioeconomic Status Children In Gifted And Talented Programs, Teresa Clark-Massey

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The problem is children from low socioeconomic status households are often underrepresented in gifted and talented programs. Only a small percentage of these students is selected to participate in the district's gifted program. The purpose of the study was to help appropriately identify and include low SES children in the district's gifted program. The social constructivist foundation was applied for a better understanding of how the environment affects a child's learning and how social factors contribute to cognitive development, which could possibly alter the perceptions of how successful children can be. The guiding questions revolved around the teachers' perceptions of …

Validating A Home Health Care Staff Educational Module For Wound Treatment And Documentation, Kimberly Sanders Hebert

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Although guidelines and minimal standards for the care and documentation of wounds in home health care settings in the United States are available, there is a lack of compliance among many home health care agencies (HHAs) with regard to the accuracy of wound documentation and care of wounds. Failure to follow guidelines for wound care according to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Home Health Outcome and Assessment Information System standards could result in loss of revenue for HHAs, improper treatment of wounds, and legal ramifications. The purpose of this doctoral project was to develop and validate a staff …

Empowering Cultural Competency In Healthcare Providers, Betty Antoinette Dement

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Racial and ethnic health disparities are highest in communities of color; providing culturally competent care could address these disparities. Culturally competent communication between the healthcare provider and the patient is an essential behavior that may improve health in racially and ethnically diverse women. A quality improvement project was completed with guidance from the 5 constructs of the Campinha-Bacote model as the conceptual framework, and the method used was the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey. The perspective of 20 Mexican American and 20 African American women in El Paso, Texas between ages 45 and 72 with menopausal symptoms …

Elementary Principals' Perceptions Of Special Education Teachers' Performance Evaluation Process, Nafees H. Rasul

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Evidence suggests that current special education teacher evaluation systems may not accurately reflect these teachers' unique duties and responsibilities. In a Midwestern, urban school district, the teacher evaluation system was not adequately aligned with the performance expectations of special education teachers. Guided by Danielson's framework for teaching, this qualitative case study explored elementary school principals' perceptions of teacher evaluation approaches, perceived effectiveness of these approaches, applications of key indicators of teaching quality, and barriers preventing accurate evaluations of special education teachers' performance. An online survey comprised of closed- and open-ended questions was distributed to 445 principals in the district with …

Trini To De Bone: The Impact Of Migration On The Cultural Identities Of Trinidadian Immigrants In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Stephanie Zukerman

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the impact of migration and the resulting intercultural interactions on the cultural identities of first-generation immigrant Trinidadians living in the Philadelphia area of the United States. It focused on four identities: race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and nationality. The goal of the study was to determine how Trinidadian immigrants define and reconceptualize these four dimensions of their identities as they make new lives in American society. Another goal was to determine whether identities shift and, if so, how, for Trinidadian immigrants when they move across cultures to a society where they are no longer in the racial, ethnic, …

Perceptions Of Employees And Supervisors Of A Skills Training Program, Lincoln Calcavecchi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Organizational leaders know that training improves worker performance, but training is often initiated without considering employees' work task requirements. This instrumental case study was conducted to understand the perceptions of employees who completed a skills training program and those of supervisors. The conceptual framework was andragogy, emphasizing self-efficacy and self-direction, motivation, and goal setting for adult learners. The guiding questions addressed the perceptions of employees about their self-directed participation in the skills training program and its relationship to work tasks and supervisors' perceptions of employees' participation in that program. Semi-structured interviews with 8 individual employees and a focus group with …

Health Literacy As A Measure To Reduce Cost, Improve Health And Access, Vivian Dee

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The United States dedicates greater than 17% of its gross national product to healthcare. This percentage is expected to go up to 20% by 2018. Despite the high cost of care, the health care system remains inefficient and ineffective. Barriers include reduced access to care related to low health literacy. Complicating low health literacy is the high readability score of patient education materials. The high readability score is in part due to tools that are not standardized and measure different aspects of education materials creating varying readability scores. The purpose of this quality improvement project was to adopt a tool, …

Examining Two Structural Equation Models To Determine The Effect Of Parental Practices And Familial Cultural Values On Mexican Adolescents’ Sexual Health, Efren A. Velazquez

Theses and Dissertations

Sexual behavior is a normative part of adolescence and it is important to understand how familial factors influence Latina/o adolescents’ sexual health. The current study examined two structural equation models (SEM) and the associations between familial cultural values (i.e., familismo and filial piety), maternal and paternal monitoring (i.e., disclosure and solicitation) and Latina/o adolescent’s sexual behavior (i.e., intentions to have sex, sexual behavior, sexual responsibility). A hypothesized SEM examined whether paternal/maternal monitoring mediated the relation between familial cultural values and adolescents’ sexual health, while an alternative SEM examined whether familial cultural values mediated the association between paternal/maternal monitoring and adolescents’ …

Judging Well, Francis J. Mootz Iii

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

Can judges interpret the law in a manner that is objectively verifiable, or do judges necessarily – even if unconsciously – inject their own predispositions and biases into their decisions? It is difficult to decide whether such a question is frivolous in the post-Realist age, or whether it is the is the single most important question that we can ask about our legal system. I endorse both responses. The question, as phrased, is both vitally important and unanswerable on its own terms. Rather than seeking an elusive objective standard by which to measure the correctness of “a judgment,” I argue …

Second-Grade Teachers' Brain-Based Teaching Strategies For Struggling Readers, Tong Ba Nguyenguyen

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In the era of this 21st Century, there are numerous known and unknown causes of reading impairments which have destructively affected elementary school students. Some causes are linguistic, and others are nonlinguistic. Lack of research on how previous teaching methods and experiences in implementing brain-based teaching (BBT) strategies became critically important, and were the concerns for this study. Developed by Hart's brain-based learning (BBL) theory together with other BBL theorists such as Jensen and Caine, the purpose of this qualitative study was to observe and explore the implementation of BBT strategies from 4 distinct second-grade participant teachers/subjects, located at the …

The Predictability Of Facebook Memorial Page Participation On Grief, Colleen Grote

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

As the world's largest social networking site, Facebook, continues to grow in popularity, it is imperative for counselors and counselor educators to better understand how online environments impact all facets of life, including death. Grief behaviors on Facebook have been a focus of scholars since the launch of the social networking site in 2004. Researchers have demonstrated that Facebook memorial pages have a significant impact on the social and cultural practices related to death and memorialization for Facebook users. However, despite a rapid rise in research related to online mourning, researchers have yet been able to establish the potential risk …

Employers' Perceptions And Employment Of Individuals With Disabilities, Barbara Ann Rosemond

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In a Midwest school district, individuals with disabilities (IWD) graduating from high school are not successful in obtaining employment in the local community. District leaders were unable to make evidence-based decisions regarding the transition program due to a lack of data regarding employers' perceptions related to employment of IWD. The purpose of this qualitative intrinsic case study was to explore employers' perceptions regarding the employment of IWD. Using Tinto and Pusser's model of institutional action for student success, 12 employers were purposefully sampled in the target community, and data were collected through face-to-face interviews. Data were analyzed using comparative, inductive …

Strategies For Motivating Sales Employees' Performance Within Small Businesses In The United States, Wesley Chikwanda Chishimba

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The loss of revenue, profits, brand, and corporate sustainability are possible for companies whose managers do not use strategies to motivate employee sales performance. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the strategies managers use to motivate sales employees' performance. A purposeful sample of 3 managers from U.S. companies with sales employees shared their strategies to motivate sales employees' performance. Methodological triangulation was used to review and analyze information from semistructured interviews, journal notes, member checking data, and review and analysis of relevant company documents. Additionally, coding indicated 4 main themes supporting the benefits of strategies to …

A Twitter-Based Study For Understanding Public Reaction On Zika Virus, Roopteja Muppalla

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

In recent times, social media platforms like Twitter have become more popular and people have become more interactive and responsive than before. People often react to every news in real-time and within no-time, the information spreads rapidly. Even with viral diseases like Zika, people tend to share their opinions and concerns on social media. This can be leveraged by the health officials to track the disease in real-time thereby reducing the time lag due to traditional surveys. A faster and accurate detection of the disease can allow health officials to understand people's opinion of the disease and take necessary precautions …

Too Long And Too Boring: The Effects Of Survey Length And Interest On Careless Responding, Cheyna Katherine Brower

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Careless responding (CR), also called insufficient effort responding (IER), occurs when survey participants respond to items without regard to item content. The presence of careless responding threatens the validity of inferences made from self-report data (Huang et al., 2012; Huang et al., 2015). This study examines the effects of two proposed causes of careless responding (Mead & Craig, 2012): questionnaire length and participant disinterest. Specifically, I hypothesized that (a) questionnaire length is positively related to careless responding, (b) participant interest is negatively related to careless responding, and (c) questionnaire length has a weaker relationship with careless responding among participants who …

Opioid Crisis In Dayton: The Role Of Facebook Comment Sections In Meaning-Making, Dylan Marie Colvin

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a foundational understanding of the ways in which Facebook is being used as a location for meaning making around the opioid epidemic in Dayton, Ohio. A content analysis of the Dayton Daily News Facebook page analyzes four posts that were randomly selected from 2017 and their corresponding 1,336 comments. This work will identify and describe discursive civility and incivility. This work adds to the growing conversation about incivility in political discourse by bringing the focus to the opioid epidemic and Facebook as a location where understandings of drug use and prevention are co-constructed. This construction, along with …

Symbol Grounding In Social Media Communications, Andrew J. Hampton

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Social media data promise to inform the disaster response community, but effective mining remains elusive. To assist in the analysis of community reports on disaster from social media, I draw on an integrated model of psycholinguistic theory to investigate the patterns by which language use changes as a function of environmental influence. Using social media corpora from several disasters and non-disasters, I examine variations in patterns of lexical choice between domain independent paired antonyms with respect to an Internet-specific base rate to determine generic sentinels of breach of canonicity. I examine social media content with respect to disaster proximity and …

Semantic And Structural Influences On Spatial Knowledge Acquisition, Robert B. May

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Spatial memory for the layout of large-scale environments, configural spatial memory, has typically been construed as being very structured, using something like a metric coordinate system and using environmental objects to define that coordinate system. Inside of buildings, rectangular rooms have walls at right angles that have been considered to fulfill this role. However, the influence of non-spatial factors and considerations of relatively unstructured environments have not received much attention. Semantic organization was found to improve configural spatial memory for landmark objects in rooms with walls and it was independent of the structural relations among landmark objects (Colle & Reid, …

A Therapeutic Storybook For Adjustment And Acculturation In Middle Eastern Refugee Children, Christina E. Zawalski

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The current global sociopolitical climate has resulted in the influx of refugees to the United States from all over the world. Those coming from the Middle East represent a large portion of refugees in the U.S., and children within this group make up a large percentage. The refugee process is characterized by stressful experiences in the premigration, migration, and resettlement stages. These experiences put refugee children at risk for distress and other mental health difficulties. Refugees must learn how to adjust and acculturate once in the host country, which can be a difficult task. Teachers are in a unique position …

The Feasibility Of Dementia Caregiver Task Performance Measurement Using Smart Gaming Technology, Garrett G. Goodman

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Dementia caregiver burnout is detrimental to both the familial caregiver and their loved ones with dementia. As the population of older adults increases, both the number of individuals with dementia and their corresponding caregivers increase as well. Thus, we are interested in developing a potential tool to non-invasively detect signs of caregiver burnout using a mobile application combined with machine learning. Hence, the mobile application "Caregiver Assessment using Smart Technology" (CAST) was developed which personalizes a word scramble game. The CAST application utilizes a heuristically constructed Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) optimized via a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to provide an individualized …

Development Of A Human-Ai Teaming Based Mobile Language Learning Solution For Dual Language Learners In Early And Special Educations, Saurabh Shukla

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Learning English as a secondary language is often an overwhelming challenge for dual language learners (DLLs), whose first language (L1) is not English, especially for children in early education (PreK-3 age group). These early DLLs need to devote a considerable amount of time learning to speak and read the language, in order to gain the language proficiency to function and compete in the classroom. Fear of embarrassment when mispronouncing words in front of others may drive them to remain silent; effectively hampering their participation in the class and overall curricular growth. The process of learning a new language can benefit …

Revisiting Afghanistan's Modern History: The Role Of Ethnic Inclusion On Regime Stability, Rahimullah Akrami

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the role of ethnic inclusion as a factor of regime stability in Afghanistan through an historical case analysis from 1880 until 2009. By utilizing case study research methods, the goal of the study is to examine all the past regimes in order to show whether there is a relationship between the dependent variable regime stability and the independent variable ethnic inclusion. The study assumes the hypothesis that an ethnically inclusive regime will be stable while an ethnically exclusive regime will be unstable. Five indicators are used to measure each variable respectively. Each indicator is assigned a score …

A Framework To Understand Emoji Meaning: Similarity And Sense Disambiguation Of Emoji Using Emojinet, Sanjaya Wijeratne

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Pictographs, commonly referred to as `emoji’, have become a popular way to enhance electronic communications. They are an important component of the language used in social media. With their introduction in the late 1990’s, emoji have been widely used to enhance the sentiment, emotion, and sarcasm expressed in social media messages. They are equally popular across many social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In 2015, Instagram reported that nearly half of the photo comments posted on Instagram contain emoji, and in the same year, Twitter reported that the `face with tears of joy’ emoji has been tweeted 6.6 …

Abandoned By Home And Burden Of Host: Evaluating States' Economic Ability And Refugee Acceptance Through Panel Data Analysis, Ummey Hanney Tabassum

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This research examines the relationship between the number of refugees hosted by states and the economic ability of host states by using UNHCR’s refugee data and World Bank’s GNI per capita data. To identify the relationship between these two variables, this study uses two sets of panel data covering 145-178 countries, around 43-55 years and 3000-5000 observations. For the two sets of panel data, four models are produced to test the null and alternative hypotheses. In all four cases, results show that there is a statistically significant negative correlation between the number of refugees hosted by states and GNI per …

Shifting Binaries: American War Fiction From Vietnam To Iraq, Elizabeth Eggert

English Honors Projects

This project builds off historical and literary war theories about binaries to interrogate whether the nature of war writing has changed as war has changed. I analyze two Vietnam and two Iraq war novels for the ways they challenge or uphold the binaries of war, and how these binaries shift over time. I argue that the breakdown of a coherent ‘enemy’ due to the increase of a diffuse and decentralized insurgent force increasing from the Vietnam War to the Iraq War begins to collapse the binaries of ally versus enemy and combatant versus noncombatant in the countries in which the …

Transitioning From A Monolingual To A Dual Language Program: A Case Study Of An Elementary School, Alex Davies

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study investigated the lived experiences of administrators, teachers, and parents from an elementary school that was in its first year of dual language transition. The majority of past studies conducted on dual language education focused on students' linguistic and academic outcomes (Lindholm-Leary, 2012). Studies investigating dual language schools' planning, policies, and classroom implementation are significantly less, and those that have, were at schools that were already functioning as dual language with the intent to examine what made the school successful (Alanis & Rodriguez, 2008; Freeman, 1996; Hunt, 2011). Through a phenomenological and case study approach, the current study …

The Proceedings Of The International Civil Aviation English Association (2018) Conference, Jennifer Roberts, Dominique Estival Ph.D., Ana Monteiro, Aline Pacheco, Patricia Tosqui-Lucks, Neil Bullock, Catalin Popa, Ahmed Mahmoud Ahmed, Ashleigh Cox

International Civil Aviation English Association

The 2018 International Civil Aviation English Association (ICAEA)1 hosted its annual conference at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University2 in Daytona Beach, Florida, USA. The conference, entitled “Building on the ICAO LPRs– Communication as a Human Factor: New Perspectives on Aviation English Training and Testing,” explored issues beyond the ICAO Language Proficiency Requirements (LPRs) including:

• incorporating communication strategies into best practices for training and testing,
• the effect of language and culture on communication as a human factor,
• considerations for future policy developments in language and communication.

The event featured plenary presentations, Q&A panels, interactive panel presentations, practical workshops, and poster sessions. With more …

Sense Relations And Sensory Clustering In Pastaza Quichua Ideophones, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

Ideophones are sound-imitative words that simulate senses, perceptions, and emotions. Using archived, audiovisual data consisiting of over 500 ideophones utterances from the Pastaza Quichua language of Amazonia Ecuador acquired over the last 6 years of fieldwork, I argue that although ideophone semantics have been charatierized as highly specific, semantic generalization and structred semantic realtions such as a synonymy, antonymy and homonymy may be found when a sizable corpus is available. Semantic regualrity and stucture are hypothesized to be linked with a senory clustering effect whereby more sensory modalities encoded within an ideophone generate more possibilited for sense relations and semantic …

Language Learning And Study Abroad, Christina Isabelli-Garcia, Jennifer Brown, John L. Plews, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Pragmatism And Pluralism: A Moral Foundation For Stakeholder Theory In The 21st Century, Paul C. Godfrey, Ben William Lewis

Faculty Publications

Donaldson and Preston (1995) defined the three pillars of stakeholder as descriptive, instrumental, and normative. Because of their close alignment between the instrumental and normative pillars and the moral philosophies of utilitarianism and deontology, the latter became the default moral foundations of stakeholder theory. In this chapter, we argue that the moral foundation of the descriptive pillar, pragmatism, provides a moral foundation for twenty-first century stakeholder theory. As we show, pragmatism and its close cousin pluralism fits a stakeholder theory concerned with the descriptive questions that characterize current work in stakeholder theory. Pragmatism and pluralism both see eudemonia, or human …