Digital Commons Network^™

The Role Of Executive Function In Supporting Reading Fluency In Students With Dyslexia: A Latent Growth Curve Analysis, Ashley Mayhew

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to examine the role of executive function (EF) skills (i.e., working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibition) in supporting the development of reading fluency in elementary school students with dyslexia. Participants were 47 students (i.e., second to sixth grade) attending a private school in the Mid-South region of the United States that provides an intensive day-treatment program for students diagnosed with dyslexia. Latent Growth Curve Modeling (LGCM) was used to explore the concurrent and predictive relation between EF and oral reading fluency across a school year. Overall, results from the study indicated that executive function …

Multiaxial Fatigue Behavior Of Additive Manufactured Metals: Experiments And Modeling, Reza Molaei

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Additive manufacturing (AM) technology has gained significant attention in recent years due to several important advantages. However, design of critical load carrying parts using this technique is still at its infancy, partly due to the inferior performance and lack of sufficient understanding of fatigue behavior of AM metals as compared to their wrought counterparts. Similar to most other components in different industries, AM parts typically undergo cyclic loadings through their service life, therefore, fatigue performance is a key performance criterion. In addition, biaxial and multiaxial stresses are common for many components, even under nominal uniaxial loading conditions where the stress …

Physical Disabilities And Theatre: We Discover What It Is To Be Human And What Is Possible For Humans To Be., Jennifer Annette Nettleton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This dissertation examines the portrayal of physically disabled characters in dramatic literature over the course of the late nineteenth through the twentieth into the twenty-first century. My core argument is that performance art, sideshows, and theatre are safe means by which people have been able to look fixedly at those who are different. Additionally, this project will address the historical context of certain plays productions and how our evolving understanding of, representations of, and conceptions about those who are different change over time. Theatre allows individuals to be seen and to see; thus, by utilizing the core concepts and ideas …

Assessing The Factor Structure And Classification Accuracy Of The College Alcohol Problems Scale Using A Population Of Students With Disabilities, Kristi L. Nobbman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Alcohol use on college campuses is an issue of public health. Sixty percent of college students consume alcohol on a monthly basis. Identifying students risk of alcohol related problems is compounded when working with academically at-risk students. Students with disabilities (SWD) are considered an at-risk group and make up 11% of student population on college campuses. The College Alcohol Problems Scale (CAPS) is widely used on college campuses and has shown versatility with African American students, deaf and hard of hearing students, and Spanish speaking students. The purpose of this study was to determine if the two-factor model of CAPS …

Pap Testing Screening Experiences Of Hiv-Positive Women, Siri Alicia Ogg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted disease, and is known to cause genital warts, cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), and cervical cancer. HIV-positive women are at greater risk of contracting HPV, experiencing CIN, having more advanced-grade CIN, and developing cervical cancer due to their compromised immune status. Since becoming an essential part of womens preventive healthcare, the Papanicolaou test, commonly known as the Pap smear, has helped to reduce cervical cancer incidence and mortality; however, many HIV-positive women do not meet recommended Pap test screening guidelines. This study addressed the following research question: What psychosocial, cultural, contextual, …

Ambient Awareness On A Sidewalk For Visually Impaired, Faruk Ahmed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Safe navigation by avoiding obstacles is vital for visually impaired while walking on a sidewalk. There are both static and dynamic obstacles to avoid. Detection, monitoring, and estimating the threat posed by obstacles remain challenging. Also, it is imperative that the design of the system must be energy efficient and low cost. An additional challenge in designing an interactive system capable of providing useful feedback is to minimize users' cognitive load. We started the development of the prototype system through classifying obstacles and providing feedback. To overcome the limitations of the classification-based system, we adopted the image annotation framework in …

A Mechanism Design For Crowdsourcing Multi-Objective Recommendation System, Eiman Aldahari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Crowdsourcing is an approach whereby requesters call for workers with different capabilities to process a task for monetary reward. The emergence of crowdsourcing has drawn increasing attention in recent years as a revolutionary phenomenon. Although crowdsourcing is still considered a developing approach, early signs expectations are promising. The advantage of crowdsourcing resides in its ability to facilitate access to diverse skilled workers to process the outsourced tasks at reduced time and cost. Moreover, crowdsourcing helps reduce unemployment by offering on-demand employment opportunities. With the vast amount of tasks posted every day, satisfying the workers, requesters, and service providers who are …

Investigating Sequential Vocabulary Learning Strategies As A Means Of Improving L2 Vocabulary Acquisition, Adel Marzouq Alharbi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

One of the key aspects to learning a language is building good vocabulary knowledge. However, building vocabulary is considered to be as hard a process as developing the language itself in the long term. In second language acquisition (SLA), the larger vocabulary size has been connected to intelligence and as a major determinant of successful language use. With the constant use of vocabulary learning strategies (VLSs), language learners have reported successful growth of their language learning. The current study investigated SpanishEnglish bilingual speakers beliefs and practices about sequential VLS processes as a means of improving second language vocabulary acquisition. The …

Professors And Students Perceptions About English As An International Language (Eil) In Speaking Instruction In Saudi Arabia, Shatha Ahmed Alkhalaf

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

AbstractAlkhalaf, Shatha. Ph.D. The University of Memphis. May 2018. Professors and Students Perceptions about English as an International Language (EIL) in Speaking Instruction in Saudi Arabia. Major Professor: Emily Thrush, Ph.D.Driven by the critical period hypothesis (CPH), Kachrus (1985) World Englishes paradigm, and Krashens (1982) theory of second language acquisition (SLA), this study examined instructors and learners attitudes toward English as an International Language (EIL) speaking instruction in Saudi Arabia and whether exposure to EIL speaking instruction influenced participants beliefs. Participants consisted of 23 professors teaching in the Department of English at Qassim University and 30 Saudi undergraduate students majoring …

Saudi Esl/Efl Learners Metacognitive Online Reading Strategies In Arabic And English, Hamad Mohammed Alluhaydan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Historically, Saudi readers have demonstrated poor metacognitive reading skills and literacy practices. This study investigates what online metacognitive reading strategies ESL and EFL Saudi learners believed they used more frequently in Arabic and English. It also shows perceived differences between Saudi male and female ESL/EFL learners in their strategy use while reading online texts. The lack of practice reading in Arabic or English affects comprehension skills; less than 25% of participants felt they could answer reading comprehension questions in class. Male and female participants did not differ in their use of global, support, and problem-solving metacognitive online reading strategies when …

The Impact Of School Profiles With The Competing Values Framework (Cvf) On The Decision Of Educators To Leave The Profession Entirely, Erika M. Ashford

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between the perceived ways in which 248 Tennessee high schools address the organizational tensions, trade-offs, and conflicts (Cameron, Quinn, DeGraff, & Thakor, 2006, p. 50) embodied in the Competing Values Framework (CVF) and the percent of educators at those schools intending to leave education entirely. To this purpose, item-, scale, and quadrant-level responses aligned with the CVF were selected from data derived from the 2013 administration of the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning survey in Tennessee (TELL Tennessee). To control for school characteristics that might confound the aforementioned relationships, …

Becoming A Science Teacher Together: Course Creation And Exploration Through Participatory Action Research, Rachel Diane Askew

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

States across the nation are reporting a shortage in teachers, with science being a particular area of need (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, & Carver-Thomas, 2016). Research has been done, and is still taking place, centered around elementary school teachers and their beliefs on science teaching (Avraamidou, 2014; 2016), due in part to a noticeable trend in low science teaching self-efficacy, which can impact students beliefs in science (Bergman & Morphew, 2015; Krajcik, Czerniak, & Berger, 2003; Menon & Sadler, 2016; Ramsey & Howe 1969;).Studies on science teacher identity are not often representative of elementary education teachers (Mensah, 2016); nor do they approach …

Sovereign Justice: Royal Prerogative And Justice In The Works Of Spenser, Shakespeare, And Milton, Melissa Haickel Bagaglio

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

My dissertation joins a vibrant conversation in the intersection of literature and law to investigate the changing attitude towards the royal prerogative as it relates to law, mercy, and equity in the English early modern period. The royal prerogative, the sovereigns rights and privileges under English law, has long been a contentious aspect of the British legal system with many attempts over the centuries to limit the use of these powers. During Tudor times, royal prerogative was closely associated with the courts of Chancery and Star Chamber, which were highly regarded courts of equity. However, the same courts became associated …

Southeast U.S. Severe Thunderstorm Climatology And 1932 Tornado Outbreak, Bradley Wayne Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

There is a poor understanding of severe thunderstorm variability over the Southeast U.S. due to the lack of a reliable, homogeneous, long-term observational records. A potential avenue to address severe thunderstorm variability involves computing environmental indices derived from reanalysis datasets and use those as proxies for severe thunderstorm days. Unfortunately, reanalysis datasets have known issues with inhomogeneity that are not related to climatology. Thus, this research first sought to reconstruct a climatology of severe thunderstorm days back to 1925 from the Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR) dataset, while developing methods that potentially minimize non-climatic inhomogeneities. Severe thunderstorm day proxies were reconstructed …

Building A Case For Culturally Responsive Practices Used With Response To Intervention Models To Reduce Disproportionate Representation Among African Americans In Special Education, Sonia Perry Barber

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The federal law, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which was enacted to provide funds to states to support special education programs and to ensure that children and parents rights are protected, has been reauthorized several times. Yet, despite the multiple amendments to improve the law, there remains a disproportionate representation of minority students in special education. Such disparity creates a plethora of problems for African-American students. This study extends a previous case study in relation to using culturally responsive practices to reduce disproportionate representation among African Americans in special education. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent …

Assessment Of Psychometric And Empirical Differences Between The Population Of Male General Inmates And The Population Of Male Inmate Hso's (History Of Sex Offense) Within A Sample Of U.S. Prisons, Rickey Lee Bates

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

As research concerning males with a history of sex offense has increased, dynamic risk factors have become a primary focus. This leads to a need for instruments that can measure these dynamic factors in the male HSO population. The purpose of this study was to determine if it was possible to identify dynamic factors that are characteristic of males with a history of sex offense using an existing instrument developed for and normed on a wide geographic U.S. prison sample. Dynamic risk factor differences between136 males in the general inmate population and 139 male inmates with a history of sex …

Don't Touch Me Like That: Masculinity, Touch, And The Role Of Affect In Media Representations Of Animal Attacks, Carolyn Grace Block

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This dissertation analyzes masculinity and touch in three highly publicized cases where men intentionally interacted with wild animals and were harmed in the process. I focus predominately on the first week of media coverage following Steve The Crocodile Hunter Irwin who was killed by a massive stingray while filming for a television series off the Great Barrier Reef, Roy Horn of the famed Las Vegas magician duo Siegfried and Roy who was mauled by one of his performing tigers in front of a live audience, and Antoine Yates, an African American man bitten by the pet tiger he kept in …

Problems In Graph Theory And Partially Ordered Sets, Stephen Gene Zane Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This dissertation answers problems in three areas of combinatorics - processes on graphs, graph coloring, and antichains in a partially ordered set.First we consider Zero Forcing on graphs, an iterative infection process introduced by AIM Minimum Rank - Special Graphs Workgroup in 2008. The Zero Forcing process is a graph infection process obeying the following rules: a white vertex is turned black if it is the only white neighbor of some black vertex. The Zero Forcing Number of a graph is the minimum cardinality over all sets of black vertices such that, after a finite number of iterations, every vertex …

Three-Dimensional (3d) Image Formation And Reconstruction For Structured Illumination Microscopy Using A 3d Tunable Pattern, Hasti Shabani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Specific needs in live-cell microscopy necessitate moving fluorescence microscopy toward 3D imaging with enhanced spatial and temporal resolution. Exciting the sample by non-uniform illumination instead of uniform illumination is the main idea of developing techniques to address Abbes diffraction limit in the conventional widefield fluorescence microscopy. In this dissertation, we characterized a novel tunable structured illumination microscopy (SIM) system using a Fresnel biprism illuminated by multiple linear incoherent sources (slits), in which the lateral and axial modulation frequencies of the 3D structured illumination (SI) pattern can be tuned separately. This is a unique feature, which is not the case of …

Medical Condition Or Childcare Choice? Breastfeeding And Lactation Discrimination After Young V. Ups, Madeleine Gyory

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Women returning to work after giving birth, and who wish to breastfeed their child often need modest adjustments to their job or workplace that allow them to pump breast milk at work, such as break time and a clean, private room. But what if an employer denies this request or fires a woman for asking? The federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act ("PDA") prohibits employers from discriminating against workers based on their pregnancy, childbirth, or "related medical conditions." Under the PDA, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Young v. UPS, employers must grant pregnant workers accommodations only if they grant similar …

What Am I Really Saying When I Open My Smartphone: A Response To Orin S. Kerr, Laurent Sacharoff

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

In his forthcoming article in the Texas Law Review, Compelled Decryption and the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Orin S. Kerr addresses a common question confronting courts. If a court orders a suspect or defendant to enter her password to open a smartphone or other device as part of a law enforcement investigation, does that order violate the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination?

To answer this question, Kerr appropriately looks by analogy to existing Fifth Amendment case law as applied to document subpoenas, the “act of production” doctrine, and its mysterious cousin, the “foregone conclusion” doctrine. From these materials, he gleans a …

A Feminist Epistemological Framework: Preventing Knowledge Distortions In Scientific Inquiry, Karina Bucciarelli

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how scientific knowledge claims can become distorted due to socially constructed conceptions of gender. Further, it delves into the key components of an epistemological framework that will minimize these distortions.

To set up the analysis, I first explore how ‘traditional’ scientific explanations of human fertilization map stereotypes of the passive female and the active male onto the scientific participation of the egg and the sperm in human reproduction, thus rendering this knowledge claim problematic. We then turn to arguments presented by prominent feminist epistemologists. I argue that in order to produce knowledge claims free of distortions due …

Written In Bone: Damage Patterns In Agonopsis Vulsa Armor, Morgan Stewart

Scripps Senior Theses

Naturally occurring armor has evolved in many different classes of organisms, often in response to predation, although other factors may play a part. In this study, the scales of the benthic armored fish Agonopsis vulsa were examined for damage patterns in order to illuminate the life history and environmental interactions of the fish. Scales from the fish were systematically destroyed in the lab, and observations made from the damaged scales were used to create a categorical damage rating, which was applied to 34 specimens ranging in trunk length from 2.3 cm to 14.2 cm. The specimens were rendered as three-dimensional …

Deep Learning Of Human Apparent Age For The Detection Of Sexually Exploitative Imagery Of Children, Jared Rondeau

Open Access Master's Theses

Over the last decade, advancements in deep learning and computer vision have led to a tremendous growth in performance at the tasks of automated human age estimation and nudity detection. Modern machine learning models can predict whether or not an image contains nudity or the presence of a minor with startling accuracy. When used in conjunction, these technological advancements can be used to identify new instances of child pornography without ever coming into contact with the illicit material during model training.

In this thesis, a label distribution learning framework for modeling human apparent age is proposed. Instead of directly modeling …

Platform For Hadal Autonomy And General Experimentation (Phage), Lillian Muir

Open Access Master's Theses

Due to the harsh environment and inaccessibility of the deep-sea, most oceanographic equipment is rated to sample above the hadal region (6000 meters and below). A few deep-sea landers and piloted vehicles have ventured into deep ocean trenches to sample at the ocean floor, but the hadal water column remains under-sampled. A full ocean depth profile and hadal samples can provide information on ocean circulation, deep-water mixing, trench overturning rates, and the ocean environment.

The Platform for Hadal Autonomy and General Experimentation (PHAGE) is a full ocean depth profiler rated to 11 km. Designed around a 24 bottle CTD rosette, …

Assessing The Feasibility Of Intergrating An Inertial Navigation System And Dvl Into An A-Sized Auv, Anthony Scudere

Open Access Master's Theses

This work accesses the feasibility of integrating an inertial navigation system (INS) and Doppler Velocity Logger (DVL) into an A-size AUV that is 4.875” in diameter. The mechanical integration solution developed during this effort focused on developing a low size, weight, power, and cost (i.e. low SWaP-C) navigation module for the Bluefin SandShark. Unlike other approaches currently pursuing this same navigation problem, including those attempting novel acoustic based tracking or novel hydrodynamic model based navigation, this effort, instead, integrated a novel navigational software system developed by Charles River Analytics, called CAMINO, into the available internal volume of an A-size …

A Pilot Qualitative Evaluation: Youth Perception On Plastic Straws Before And After Education Intervention, Elizabeth Smith

Open Access Master's Theses

The objective of this work was to conduct a qualitative pilot study investigating the change in youth perceptions of single-use plastic straws before and after an educational intervention. To achieve this goal six female students, ranging from 12 to 14 years old, were interviewed on their knowledge about single-use plastic straws, their frequency of use, and their general understanding of current environmental issues. They were then shown two educational videos pertaining to the history of single-use plastic straws and their current usage status. After one week students were interviewed again and asked questions to reflect on the information shown to …

Damn Spot: Navigating Emotional Trauma In The Body, Emma M. Elliott

Scripps Senior Theses

I researched the history of emotional trauma and its portrayal in modern media and Shakespearean plays and created a film based on my personal experience with the topic. This film utilizes Shakespearean song and monologue from Hamlet and Macbeth to narrate the inner journey of a girl working through emotional trauma. We follow her as she feels the impact of her trauma in her body and as she tries to hide it from her friends and maintain a normal facade. This film does contain a fictionalized portrayal of an anxiety attack, so viewer discretion is advised. This project does not …

New Technology, Old Ways? The Gender Price Discount In Online Contemporary Art Auctions, Madeleine Peterson

Scripps Senior Theses

There is evidence there is a global gender price gap in traditional global art auctions. Taking into account recent technological advances in the secondary art market, this study examines if there is a gender gap for the sale prices of female artists’ work in the contemporary, online art auction market. The analysis uses a unique data set of art works sold in Christie’s Online-Only Auctions for the year of 2018. We regress measures of price on gender and controls for various characteristics of the art work and artist. We find that while there is discount in prices of 17% for …

Doggone Smart: A Canine-Assisted Reading Program And The Effect On Self-Efficacy And Standardized Test Scores, Valerie Daifotis

Scripps Senior Theses

The use of dogs in a reading program is not a new concept. However, this study addresses the gap in the literature by exploring the connection between reading to dogs, reading self-efficacy, and reading standardized test scores. Using an experimental control group design, this study will look at below-average readers in the fifth grade with half randomly assigned to read once a week to a certified therapy dog and volunteer and the other half randomly assigned to read to just an adult volunteer with no dog. This study will use a reading self-efficacy questionnaire (Carroll & Fox, 2017) and the …