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Presidential Responses To Protest: Lessons Jefferson Davis Never Learned, Ashlee A. Paxton-Turner

Law Faculty Publications

In 1865, the Confederacy fell. This is not a secret. In April 1865, in the Virginia village of Appomattox Court House, Confederate General, Robert E. Lee, signed the terms of surrender, thus triggering the beginning of the end of the American Civil War. As writer and historian Fletcher Pratt describes the scene, after signing the terms of surrender, Lee “clasped hands with [Union General, Ulysses S. Grant], stepped to the door and rode out of history.” But neither Lee nor the Civil War has ridden out of history. Indeed, a deep fascination with the American Civil War persists. Well over …

The Effect Of Training And Institutional Support On Title Ix Coordinators' Responses To Sexual Violence On College Campuses, Mercedes M. Pino

Theses and Dissertations

One out of five women in college are victims of sexual assault. The uptick in cases being brought before the US Department of Education for the mishandling of sexual assault cases on college campuses raises a question about the adequacy of the training and support being received by Title IX Coordinators. This study was designed to determine whether Title IX Coordinators are receiving adequate support and sufficient training necessary to adhere to the federal mandates regarding sexual assault on campus, as well as how the Title IX Coordinators’ years of experience relate to the challenges they face.

Using SurveyMonkey, a …

Persons And The Point Of The Law, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

This short essay is a comment and reflection on a manuscript by Professors John Breen and Lee
Strang, "A Light Unseen: A History of Catholic Legal Education in the United States." It is based on remarks presented at a February 14, 2020 conference, sponsored by the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies and the Center for Law and Religion at St. John's University School of Law. It
addresses, among other things, Breen and Strang's argument that a Catholic law school should have a distinctive "intellectual architecture" and proposes that a distinctive moral anthropology -- that is, an account of what the …

A Student Journal To Celebrate, Preserve, And Improve Beginning Undergraduate Writing, Ann E. Biswas, Maureen E. Schlangen, Heidi Gauder

Books and Book Chapters by University of Dayton Faculty

At the end of each semester, composition instructors at the University of Dayton (UD) collected portfolios of student writing for the annual program assessment, encouraging their students to return the following semester to pick up their folders of work. However, the stacks of unclaimed portfolios that piled up in faculty offices each year was an indication that students cared little about what they had written, perhaps believing no one beyond their instructor was interested in reading their writing now or in the future. Nevertheless, academic scholars have recognized that student writing improves—as do a sense of ownership and pride in …

Bergson’S Philosophy Of Self-Overcoming, Messay Kebede

Books and Book Chapters by University of Dayton Faculty

This book proposes a new reading of Bergsonism based on the admission that time, conceived as duration, stretches instead of passes. This swelling time is full and so excludes the negative. Yet, swelling requires some resistance, but such that it is more of a stimulant than a contrariety. The notion of élan vital fulfills this requirement: it states the immanence of life to matter, thereby deriving the swelling from an internal effort and allowing its conceptualization as self-overcoming. With self-overcoming as the inner dynamics of reality, Bergson dismisses all forms of dualism and reductionist monism because both the absence of …

Investigation Of Amyloid Β Oligomer Dissociation Mechanisms By Single Molecule Fluorescence Techniques, Hope Cook Abdalla

Theses and Dissertations--Chemistry

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is currently considered the most prevalent neurodegenerative disease and places a large financial burden on society as healthcare resources are limited and the disease does not have a cure. Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by the presence of amyloid beta (Aβ) plaques and neurofibrillary tangles; however current literature suggests Aβ oligomers are the main aggregating species leading to AD symptoms. Therefore, the underlying cause of Alzheimer’s, accumulation of amyloid beta, is currently being studied in hopes of developing treatment options. Our research aims at determining the mechanism and kinetics of Aβ oligomer dissociation into non-toxic monomers in the …

Tools For Change: Measuring Student Conceptual Understanding Across Undergraduate Biology Programs Using Bio-Maps Assessments, Michelle K. Smith, Sara E. Brownell, Alison J. Crowe, N. G. Holmes, Jennifer K. Knight, Katharine Semsar, Mindi M. Summers, Cole Walsh, Christian D. Wright, Brian A. Couch

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

Assessing learning across a biology major can help departments monitor achievement of broader program-level goals and identify opportunities for curricular improvement. However, biology departments have lacked suitable tools to measure learning at the program scale. To address this need, we developed four freely available assessments—called Biology-Measuring Achievement and Progression in Science or Bio-MAPS—for general biology, molecular biology, ecology/evolution, and physiology programs. When administered at multiple time points in a curriculum, these instruments can provide departments with information on how student conceptual understanding changes across a major and help guide curricular modifications to enhance learning.

Migration And Remittances, Seyedsoroosh Azizi

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation focuses on three topics: motivations behind remittances, cyclicality of remittances, and the impacts of remittances on human capital and labor supply in developing countries.

In the first chapter, I introduce the three topics. In the second chapter, I examine the primary incentives of remitting. Using estimated bilateral data on remittances, this chapter demonstrates that a rise in the remittance-receiving countries' GNI per capita leads to fewer remittances and that a rise in the host remittance-sending countries' GNI per capita motivates migrants to remit more. Real exchange rates and real interest rates have no effect on remittances. These results …

Exploring A Bayesian Analysis Of Opinion Dynamics Using The Approximate Bayesian Computation Method, Jessica L. Bishop

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Social media has created a whole new framework in the way we understand ones expression of opinion, and how ones' opinion can influence others. Models of opinion dynamics, such as a probabilistic modeling framework of opinion dynamics over time are given by Abir De, Isabel Valera, Niloy Ganguly, Sourangshu Bhattacharya, and Manuel Gomez Rodriguez in ``Learning and Forecasting Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks." In this paper, we will continue to explore their models, now coming from a Bayesian statistical standpoint, specifically looking at the Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) method for the computation of better estimations for the data. We will …

Study Of The Systematic Uncertainties Associated With The Tracking Detectors, Daniel William Boyden

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab looks to measure the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon to an unprecedented precision of 0.14 ppm to verify results from the E821 experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In addition to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon the project also seeks to search for a muon electric dipole moment with a better precision than has previously has been achieved. These measurement along with standard model predictions may result in a discrepancy between the standard model and experimental results which may give some insight to beyond standard model physics.

This thesis will present the …

Psychological Reactance Applied To Instruction To Disregard, Jessica Louise Bozeman

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study applies theory of psychological reactance to instructions to disregard (ITD). When inadmissible testimony is made in front of jurors, a judge may issue an ITD that orders jurors to not consider the inadmissible evidence when making their verdicts. The theory of psychological reactance proposes that when a person’s choices are limited or their freedom is threatened, there will be a resulting attempt to regain or prioritize their freedom. Using a jury transcript study, the experiment has both a control condition including the evidence but without an ITD and a condition where the ITD is included. Results showed that …

From Tony Soprano To Donald Trump: Situating The Rhetoric Of The 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign In The Antihero Genre, Harry Bodell

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, scholars and political pundits alike were left scrambling to understand what had occurred. While there is no single explanation for this unexpected turn of events, the present study argues that an overlooked and central aspect of Trump’s appeal was foreshadowed by the increased prominence of antihero protagonists in American media, particularly exemplified by the recent “Golden Age” of television wherein television series like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Dexter found critical and popular success by building compelling narratives around morally flawed …

Impact Of Agreeableness On Virtual Team Performance Through Team Identification And Shared Mental Models, Alexandria Brown

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Virtual teams help organizations efficiently utilize their employees for a task without the requirement of co-location. The literature on team performance suggests that teamwork is integral to a team’s success; however, in virtual teams this is often a challenge. Certain personality characteristics on virtual teams may be particularly important to the development of effective teamwork. An under-investigated factor is the role agreeableness in virtual team processes and how it affects the overall team performance. The main research question of this study is how the degree of agreeableness on a virtual team affects the overall team performance through predicted associations with …

Providing Counseling In A Rural Setting: A New Multicultural Perspective, Danessa Ann Carter

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Counseling research shows a lack of information regarding training counselors to work in rural communities. However, more than 80% of the United States land is considered rural. This appears to be an extremely desperate combination of lack of information and training for a large portion of the country’s population. An additional complication to this dynamic is that neither CACREP standards nor the ACA Code of Ethics mandate any specific trainings or address any specific needs of rural communities.

To improve the understanding of rural community dynamics, this qualitative study explored the phenomenological experiences of counselors working in rural communities. This …

Validation Of A Low-Cost Sensor For Development Of Wearable And Handheld Spectrometers, Justin Leslie Cathey

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study examined the possibility of creating a quantitative radiometric spectrometer from a low-cost relative radiometric spectrometer sensor through the use of statistical analysis and development of a correction factor (p > 0.05). Radiometric spectrometers are able to measure and fully characterize the radiometric and photometric characteristics of light, while relative spectrometers are not able to fully, quantitatively characterize the radiometric response from a light source, thus they are less expensive. The spectrometer created in this research is able to measure and produce comparative lighting parameters as well as an actual radiometer spectrometer.

The photoreceptors cells within the human eye allow …

Resonant Extraction For Mu2e, Prudhvi Raj Varma Chintalapati

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Charged Lepton Flavor Violations (CLFVs) are probed in an attempt to search Beyond Standard Model (BSM) Physics. The sensitive channel available for experiments around the world is to probe through muons. No conclusive evidence of CLFV is found so far but $\mutoe$ experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) aims to improve the current experimental sensitivity by searching for $\mu^{-}N \longrightarrow e^{-}N$ transition. To provide the high intensity beam that can be handled to achieve desired sensitivity, slow spill using resonant extraction is used at the accelerator complex.

Understanding the motivations behind the experiment and simulating the crucial stage in …

"Bachelor Buttons": Feminist And Womanist Essays And Poems, Billy E. Clem Jr.

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this critical and creative dissertation, I sketch a brief study of selected multicultural hybrid texts in contemporary US Anglophone literary studies; discuss their implications for reading, writing, and teaching; and present my own hybrid text.

Second-wave feminist and womanist theories and practices opened literary and cultural studies to new and exciting ideas and methods for reading, teaching, and writing both canonical and non-canonical Anglophone texts. One genre emerging anew by these theories, practices, and practitioners is the literary hybrid text, a multi-genre form composed of a variety of prose genres, poetry, drama, and/or visual imagery. Hybrid texts ask readers …

Still A Hollow Hope: Significant Social Change, The Second Amendment, And State Political Culture, Anthony David Cooling

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation expands the literature on law, courts, and social change. The Supreme Court increasingly matters in American political life when those across the political spectrum look at the Court for relief from policies they oppose and as another venue for advancing their own policy agendas. This dissertation expands the volume of case studies that research the ability of Courts to make major political and social change to include the topic of firearms in the wake of the Supreme Court’s controversial and divided opinions in D.C. v Heller (2008) and McDonald v Chicago (2010). These decisions interpreted the Second Amendment …

An Assessment Of The Effectiveness Of Positive Self-Talk On Engagement With Feared Stimuli And Control Related Beliefs, Sara Louise Conley

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a disorder characterized by obsessions and compulsions that causes noticeable impairment across multiple life domains. Various mechanisms have been implicated in the development of OCD, including maladaptive control-related beliefs related to: (1) individuals’ sense of control over any given situation, and (2) trait motivation for desire of control. Specifically, low levels of perceived control and/or an elevated desire for control have been linked to obsessive-compulsive symptoms across a variety of OCD subtypes, including contamination concerns. The current gold-standard treatment for OCD is exposure and response prevention (ERP), which requires individuals to yield control and confront a …

Reactions To Daily Abusive Supervision: Exploring Day-To-Day Fluctuations With A Justice Perspective, Rushika Nadia De Bruin

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Abusive supervision is a widely-studied phenomenon experienced by a multitude of workers across organizations. While abusive supervision is typically studied in terms of negative outcomes (i.e., supervisor-directed retaliation), there is some preliminary evidence that not all consequences of abusive supervision are negative. While there have been several studies exploring employee reactions to abusive supervision, they predominantly take a cross-sectional design perspective. The current study utilized 102 full-time employees from the U.S. who responded to 932 daily surveys assessing personality, workplace behaviors, and justice perceptions. The current study explored how perceptions of abusive supervision changed on a day-to-day basis and how …

Studying The Effect Of Vacancies On The Thermal Conductivity Of Metal-Coated Carbon Nanotubes Using Molecular Dynamics Atomistic Simulations, Ravindra Sunil Dhumal

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Breakthroughs in nanotechnology have made it possible for the size of electronic gadgets to be scaled down to micro/nano level. What follows however, is the side effect of high power densities and overheating as the heat dissipation is restricted to very small surface area. Thus, the need of an effective thermal management system is central to these developments. One way to counter this problem is to use Thermal Interface Materials (TIMs) which promote heat transfer between heat source and sink.

Owing to their high thermal conductivity (up to 6000 W/mK), Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) are thought of as strong candidates for …

Two-Dimensional Bloch Electrons In Electric And Magnetic Fields, Edward Aris Diaz Fajardo

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Due to their extraordinary mechanical, and fascinating electronic properties, atomically flat two-dimensional materials are attractive avenues in the search for new and interesting physical phenomena. Symmetry is a powerful tool in studying the dynamics of Bloch electrons in these crystalline solids. Here, using a tight binding description, a systematic scheme is developed to derive the symmetry labels, called irreducible representations (IRs), characterizing the Bloch eigenstates in a crystal, including an extensive discussion on the possibility that these IRs are not always unique. This theory is illustrated using monolayer MoS$_2$ and few-layer graphene as examples. Using this symmetry analysis in conjunction …

Dekalb, Illinois, Muslim Women’S Agency Negotiating And Re-Affirming Their Muslim Identity, Sinta Febrina

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Post 9/11 American Muslim women are stereotyped as victims of their patriarchal religion and as perpetrators of terror. These conditions led to the discrimination of American Muslim women which requires them to continuously strategize and negotiate their identity. This thesis examined DeKalb, Illinois Muslim women’s agency to strategize and negotiate their identity in lager American society. In this study, fifteen Muslim women from three different categories were interviewed: American-born citizens, naturalized citizens, and immigrants. This study found that Muslim women’s various backgrounds (country of origin, education, socio-economic status, and immigration status) affected their strategy and agency to negotiate and re-affirm …

Minimum Dropout Age And Juvenile Crime In The United States, Md. Abdur Rahman Forhad

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

My dissertation examines how an increased minimum dropout age (MDA) affects juvenile crime not only in the community, but also in school. I first empirically estimate the magnitude of the impact of a higher MDA on high school enrollment. I then develop an economic model of crime that explains the relationship between an MDA and contemporaneous juvenile crime and empirically examine how a higher MDA affects juvenile crime both in the community and in school. I find that raising the MDA from 16 to 18 significantly increases school enrollment by 2.57%. Next, I find that raising the MDA to an …

Steady Flows In Annular Wedge Lid-Driven Cavities, Anandan Ganapathy

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The lid-driven cavity is a well-known canonical problem in the field of analytical and computational fluid dynamics. It is comprised of a square domain of an incompressible fluid with its upper lid has a specified velocity and the remaining wall boundaries are subjected to fixed, no-slip, zero-velocity constraints. There are numerous examples found in the literature that address the well-known, stable behavior of this system, which includes a primary recirculating vortex, secondary corner vortices, and a velocity profile through the center midpoint y-axis that is shown to be dependent on the Reynolds number. In this investigation, the shape of the …

Newcomer Educational Programming: In Response To Increasing Social-Emotional Needs Of Adolescent Newcomer Refugee Students, Rachel Louise Wixson Gilbertson

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This research study sought to understand how newcomer teachers address the social-emotional needs of their students in conjunction with English language and academic needs by using a qualitative approach. Literature thus far about newcomer education has focused on the language and academic needs of newcomer students, omitting the need to also address social-emotional learning. The study included interviews with four newcomer teachers from across the United States and found that for every teacher, social-emotional learning was the foundation for how they approached their students and made decisions about curriculum in their classroom. Despite the variation of program structure and level …

A Study Of Progression In Science Process Skills During A Midwestern Public Research University’S Stem Summer Camps, Anila Fiaz Gill

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This study explored the impact of STEM summer camps (held at a Midwestern university) on campers’ science process skills (SPS). Upon analysis statistically significant positive growth in SPS was observed, evidenced by the increase from presurvey to postsurvey SPS scores, over the period of these short duration camps. There were no statistically significant differences in growth (presurvey to postsurvey) by gender, grade level, or ethnicity. While there were no significant main effects for gender (male vs. female) and grade level (middle vs. high school) on science process skill scores, there was a significant main effect of ethnicity (white vs. nonwhite) …

Exploring The Use Of Podcasts On Students’ Language Learning And Change Of Students’ Self-Efficacy About The Use Of Podcasts, Silvia Rehulina Ginting

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Similar to other types of mobile technologies, podcasts are believed to provide many advantages for language instruction, including English as a second language (ESL) learners’ listening skills and pronunciation and changes in their self-efficacy from using the podcasts for learning ESL. The convergent parallel mixed methods design used Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning and Bandura’s self-efficacy as foundations. It used 11 different instruments to collect quantitative data and qualitative data from two sections of an upper-intermediate ESL class at one university in Midwest United States. Quantitative data were collected using a pre-test, a post-test, and the note taking quizzes …

Student Perceptions Of A Customer Service Model In A For-Profit Higher Education Institution, Leonard J. Grinstead

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the impact on students of customer service-oriented behaviors exhibited by faculty members and student advisors in a single geographic segment of a large institution of higher education in the for-profit sector headquartered in the midwestern United States. A single-case case study approach was used in order to explore students’ degree of satisfaction with customer service experiences and the extent to which these impacted their decisions to persist toward graduation from the university. A survey approach with a questionnaire distributed by email was used in order to gather data from students for …

The Downfall Of Colonial And Dark Romantic Masculinity In The Witch: A New England Folktale, David Miles Harrington

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This thesis discusses the film The Witch (2015), directed by Robert Eggers, specifically, the character of William and his failures as a Puritan man. Puritan masculinity is a surprisingly understudied area of American literature and, to enter into the field, I use William and The Witch as a portal into various historical and literary interpretations of seventeenth-century Puritan maleness. The project takes a palimpsestic approach to these layers of influence on Eggers’s film. From Hawthorne’s Reverend Hooper in “The Minister’s Black Veil” and Young Goodman Brown in “Young Goodman Brown” to real-world Puritans Roger Williams and Samuel Sewall. This thesis …