Digital Commons Network^™

The Two Types Of Society: Computationally Revealing Recurrent Social Formations And Their Evolutionary Trajectories, Lux Miranda

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Comparative social science has a long history of attempts to classify societies and cultures in terms of shared characteristics. However, only recently has it become feasible to conduct quantitative analysis of large historical datasets to mathematically approach the study of social complexity and classify shared societal characteristics. Such methods have the potential to identify recurrent social formations in human societies and contribute to social evolutionary theory. However, in order to achieve this potential, repeated studies are needed to assess the robustness of results to changing methods and data sets. Using an improved derivative of the Seshat: Global History Databank, we …

'Queertility', Daniel Thomas Bixby Sykes

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Daniel Sykes, an Anthropology student at Utah State University used his Honors Capstone opportunity to understand the evolution of reproduction over the course of two semesters. During Fall of 2019, he focused on overviewing what Biological Archaeologists, Biologists, and Chemists understand of the evolution of various forms of reproduction from the distant past. During the Spring, he focused on the cutting edge allopathic research in fertility treatments and some of the social implications. Sykes posits that human society has the opportunity to treat infertility in the queer (lgbtqia+) community, given these up-and-coming treatments, even those forms of infertility that arise …

Journeying Into A New World: Constructing A New Identity Through Language Acquisition, Hyrum Hansen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The following portfolio represents the author’s experiences and studies while he has participated in the Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program. It is the result of the author’s teaching experiences abroad and at Utah State University, his teaching observations of peers and colleagues, and insights from his studies in the MSLT program.

The portfolio is divided into three major sections, namely: teaching perspectives; research perspectives; and an annotated bibliography. The teaching perspectives demonstrate the author’s beliefs in regard to communicative language teaching and identity construction and their importance in the language acquisition process. The research perspectives further deal with …

Parental Involvement In Children’S Education At A Christian School: A Transcendental Phenomenological Approach, Deborah Ann Minix-Fuller

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Parents share collective experiences of either involving themselves or not in their child’s education. This transcendental phenomenological study’s rationale was to explore the views, experiences, beliefs, and motivations of parents who are involved in their children’s education. Eleven participants who engaged in this research are from a small-sized Christian school in Kentucky. The theory guiding this study is Urie Bronfenbrenner’s theory (1979), the Ecological System (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem). The data collected from interviews, a focus group, and two surveys. NVivo12 plus Qualitative Data Analysis Software (Q-DAS) implemented to analyze the qualitative data collected. Moustakas’ (1994) phenomenological seven …

The Effect Of Teacher-Team Generated Formative Assessments On Student Writing Achievement Test Levels, Justin Michael Calhoun

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Formative assessment has been studied for the last 2 decades. Increased high-stakes accountability requirements have intensified the focus on preparing students to demonstrate increased achievement on end-of-course summative tests. Districts have turned to common formative assessments as a means to increase student achievement on end-of-course testing. Therefore, more study was needed to determine if common formative assessments lead to increased students’ achievement on summative writing assessments. This causal-comparative study examined two groups of eleventh-grade students to determine if any differences existed between student achievement scores on teacher-created formative assessments and common formative assessments created by teacher teams. Data were gathered …

Easily Read, Easily Forgotten: Reassessing The Effects Of Visual Difficulties And Multi-Modality In Educational Text Design, Rebekah Cochell

Masters Theses

The graphic design of a book affects the way the reader receives and processes information. However, design is often focused on aesthetic principles and traditional wisdom, not taking into account how design aspects affect cognitive processes and educational outcomes. This thesis examines the efficacy of page design elements on educational outcomes, specifically disfluent fonts, handwritten fonts and multi-modal design. The traditional wisdom of typography has maintained that the faster the human eye can read a text, the more suited it is for reading materials. However, recent research suggests that disfluent, or difficult-to-read fonts result in significantly improved reading comprehension and …

Arguments From Evil And The Parenting Style(S) Of God, Kyle Dean Gazlay

Masters Theses

In scholarly debates there are two primary positions on whether a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent can coexist with the presence of evil in the world. Atheists claim that God and evil do not coexist, while theists proclaim that God and evil can and do coexist. Atheists have used arguments from evil as a chief weapon against the existence of God and evil. Within arguments from evil, atheists create arguments that take an evidential or probabilistic stance on the matter. These arguments are called evidential arguments from evil. The evidential arguments from evil will use parent analogies to …

A Case Study Comparing Fingerspelling Production Between Two Interpreters With Eipa Scores Of 3.0 And 4.0., Morgan Miller

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Approximately 14% of Deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) students in K-12 educational settings use a sign language interpreter for access to the general education curriculum and the classroom environment . The Educational Interpreter Performance Assessment (EIPA) is commonly used to evaluate the skills of an interpreter as a prerequisite of being hired. This case study analyzes and evaluates the fingerspelling (FS) production of two American Sign Language interpreters while interpreting a lesson. The two interpreters had different EIPA scores: one had recently attained a 3.0 and the other held a 4.0 rating. The data shows marked differences in fingerspelling production in …

Engagement And Retention In Depression Treatment Among Hispanics In An Integrated Health Care Intervention: A Mixed Methods Analysis, Brittany Hernandez Eghaneyan

Social Work Dissertations - Archive

Disparities in the underutilization of mental health services remain prominent among Hispanics in the United States. While integrated health care models can contribute to the elimination of mental health care disparities experienced by Hispanics, more research on how patient-level factors impact engagement and retention within these models is needed. The current study was a secondary data analysis informed by an integrative framework based on Andersen’s Behavioral Model of Health Service Use (1968) to examine what factors are associated with Hispanics’ depression treatment engagement and retention in an integrated health care intervention that took place in a community clinic. Utilizing a …

Online Instruction In Higher Education: Promising, Research-Based, And Evidence-Based Practices, Alison A. Lockman, Barbara R. Schirmer

Walden Faculty and Staff Publications

The purpose of this study was to review the research literature on online learning to identify effective instructional practices. We narrowed our scope to empirical studies published 2013-2019 given that studies earlier than 2013 had become quickly outdated because of changes in online pedagogies and technologies. We also limited our search to studies with undergraduate and graduate students, application of an empirical methodological design, and descriptions of methodology, data analysis, and results with sufficient detail to assure verifiability of data collection and analysis. Our analysis of the patterns and trends in the corpus of 104 research studies led to identification …

Finding Common Purpose: A History Of Community Organizing In Boise, Idaho, Emily Fritchman

History Graduate Projects and Theses

Members of neighborhood associations in Boise have long acted as advocates for historic preservation, environmental conservation, and effective urban growth management. However, little historical research exploring the impact of neighborhood activists on both the regional and national level exists. This project addresses the lack of scholarship through the creation of three key elements: a website that highlights both the history of neighborhood organizing in Boise and significant figures of the activist movement, a community lecture presenting these findings to the public, and a brochure detailing the goals of the project to neighbors. Additionally, this research highlights patterns that will provide …

Revisiting Immutability: Competing Frameworks For Adjudicating Asylum Claims Based On Membership In A Particular Social Group, Talia Shiff

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) defines a refugee as any person who has a “well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” An emerging issue in U.S. asylum law is how to define the category “membership of a particular social group.” This question has become ever-more pressing in light of the fact that the majority of migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border are claiming persecution on account of their “membership in a particular social group.” The INA does not define the meaning of “particular social group” and …

Narrating Homicide Chiastically, John W. Welch

BYU Studies

The truth be known, murder is an ugly, awful subject. Even when packaged in beautifully crafted literature, first-degree homicide is to be universally assailed as vile, horrible, and most terrible. Murder is disruptive to the very fabric of human life. It instills in the community anxieties, horror, fear, chaos, vengeance, and blood feuds. It throws the normal boundaries of human powers in the world into personal turmoil, into metaphysical uncertainty, and into cosmic imbalance.

Consuming Identities: Cultural Hybridity And Foodways, Christos Patelis

Research Papers

This paper explores the author’s hybrid cultural identity in terms of foodways. Autoethnography is used as the method to discuss the paternal—Latino, and maternal—White, foodways that the author has inherited. The author discusses how these foodways constitute his hybrid cultural identity as neither Latino nor White, yet both Latino and White simultaneously.

Planning A Culturally And Linguistically Appropriate Obesity Intervention For Hispanic/Latino Children Living In Rural Nebraska, Ada V. Luna

Capstone Experience: Master of Public Health

Childhood obesity is a public health concern in the U.S; however, for the Hispanic/Latino community these concerns have grown to epic proportions. In Nebraska, the rate of childhood obesity is 25.1%; among Hispanic / Latinos students, the obesity rate is 30.9%. Unfortunately, specific Nebraska obesity rates by race and ethnicity are limited among rural communities, and programs that can effectively address this problem in the Hispanic / Latino community are limited or non-existent. Consequently, disparities between urban and rural communities exist. The purpose of this capstone project is to design a culturally and linguistically oriented intervention to address childhood obesity …

Unreal Reality: Post-Socialist China's Massive Infrastructural Agenda In Jia Zhangke's "Three Gorges Films", Weiting Liu

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis focuses on Chinese Six-Generation film director Jia Zhangke’s “Three Gorges films” Still Life (2006) and Ash Is Purest White (2018) to demonstrate the impact of post-socialist China's massive infrastructural agenda on Chinese citizens’ lives and psyches in contemporary Chinese society. Starting with the analysis of Still Life, this thesis first examines Jia’s experimentation with the computerized UFO imagery incorporated into the film’s realist narratives and themes to deliver the sense of unreality people feel towards the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric power station and post-socialist China’s largest infrastructural project. Revisiting the subject …

Table-To-Text: Generating Descriptive Text For Scientific Tables From Randomized Controlled Trials, Qiang Wei

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Unprecedented amounts of data have been generated in the biomedical domain, and the bottleneck for biomedical research has shifted from data generation to data management, interpretation, and communication. Therefore, it is highly desirable to develop systems to assist in text generation from biomedical data, which will greatly improve the dissemination of scientific findings. However, very few studies have investigated issues of data-to-text generation in the biomedical domain. Here I present a systematic study for generating descriptive text from tables in randomized clinical trials (RCT) articles, which includes: (1) an information model for representing RCT tables; (2) annotated corpora containing pairs …

"Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning To Breathe Free": A Case Study Analysis Of U.S. Immigration Policy And Public Perceptions Of Latin American Immigrants, Erin Thomason

Honors Program Theses

Through this analysis, I hope to shed light on how public perceptions of Latin American immigrants can impact United States immigration policy, and likewise, how changes in United States immigration policy can alter how Americans view Latin American immigrants. My findings may provide some explanation for how we have arrived in the state we are in today, with a president who has pledged to build a wall between ourselves and our southern neighbor, even going so far as to declare a national emergency at the border; a deadlocked Congress unable to pass any sort of protections for Dreamers, despite bipartisan …

Middle School Teachers’ Perceptions Of Goal Orientations, Teacher Self-Efficacy, And Authentic Outcomes-Based Assessments, Tamela W. Hoak

CUP Ed.D. Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine middle school teachers’ attitudes towards authentic outcomes-based assessments and to relate teachers’ perceptions of patterns of adaptive learning to authentic assessment scores of middle school students. Multiple learning theories were used to shape the conceptual framework. The correlational portion of this study was designed to seek relationships between the participants’ perceptions of patterns of adaptive learning and their students’ mean authentic assessment scores. The descriptive survey portion of this study was designed to gather middle school social studies teachers’ opinions of authentic outcomes-based assessments used to evidence mastery of intended learning outcomes. …

Undergraduate Textbook Representations Of Meiosis Neglect Essential Elements, Leslie Kate Wright, Grace Elizabeth C. Dy, Dina L. Newman

Articles

The process of meiosis is an essential topic that secondary and postsecondary students struggle with. The important meiosis-related concepts of homology, ploidy, and segregation can be described using the DNA Triangle framework, which connects them to the multidimensional nature of DNA (chromosomal, molecular, and informational levels). We have previously established that undergraduate biology students typically fail to describe and/or link appropriate levels to their explanations of meiosis. We hypothesize that students' understanding mirrors the resources they are given – in other words, textbook figures often lack many of the important connections that experts include when talking about meiosis. Prior work …

Chaprates, Brinly Xavier, Micole Amanda Marietta, Nidhi Vedantam

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

On the Chapman campus, through taking and choosing various classes, there is a significant need for communication and feedback between students and peers, professors, tutors, and study groups. With this, we wanted to create an application that enables users from various majors to not only easily and effectively communicate with various people in their field, but one that also enables them to give and receive feedback on various classes through a rating system. We believe that the application will aid students in a myriad of specific ways, including being involved in study groups and getting tutoring help, determining which classes …

At The Intersection Of Scribal Training And Theological Profundity: Chiasm As An Editorial Technique In The Primeval History And Deuteronomy, Bernard M. Levinson

BYU Studies

There can be little doubt that ancient Near Eastern scribes, including those in ancient Israel, were well-trained in a wide range of technical devices associated with the composition, copying, transmission, editing, collation, revision, reworking, and interpretation of texts.1 My focus in the present study will be on one of the most interesting of these devices, the literary chiasm, in which textual content is ordered in an ABC::CʹBʹAʹ chiastic, or “x-shaped,” pattern. In many cases, once this pattern is recognized within a chapter or literary unit, an ostensibly haphazard or difficult to follow textual sequence gains a sense of order, as …

Selected Bibliography On Chiasmus, 1980–2020

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

From “Linguistic Turn” And Hebrews Scholarship To Anadiplosis Iterata: The Enigma Of A Structure, Gabriella Gelardini

BYU Studies

In 1963, when the “linguistic turn” had evidently taken hold of New Testament studies, Albert Vanhoye, a linguistically trained Catholic priest, published a monograph entitled La structure littéraire de l’épître aux Hébreux.¹ The manifold reactions to his refined literary-rhetorical approach and conclusions in favor of a concentric structure oscillated between euphoric approval and offensive disapproval. Along with its translation into German (1979/1980) and a decade later into English (1989), Vanhoye’s study influenced and stimulated Hebrews scholarship like none other in the twentieth century.

Orff Schulwerk And Autism: Unlocking The Gifts Of Students With Autism In The Music Classroom Through Orff Schulwerk, Mckenzie E. Garrett

Honors Theses

The concept of teaching for each student’s needs is called differentiated instruction. For students with autism in the general music classroom, differentiated instruction has received limited attention from researchers and practitioners. Although teacher education programs do include a review of special education resources and needs, music teacher education programs do not always include intensive study of accommodation for students with special needs that specifically apply to the music classroom. One strategy music teachers can use for differentiating education for their learners with disabilities is the process of Orff Schulwerk instruction. Orff Schulwerk is an approach, originally and commonly used in …

Making Racial Difference: A Foucauldian Analysis Of School Memories Told By Undergraduates Of Color In The United States, Debbie Sonu

Publications and Research

This paper draws from the writings of Michel Foucault and his recently reconsidered provocations on race and racialization. Using Foucault’s de!nition of ‘internal racism,’ race is understood as a complex set of correlations that are employed for the purpose of establishing (ab)normality and exercising various forms of expul- sion. Racialization is then seen as the circulation of knowledge that makes racial categorization evident as scienti!c truth, linked to themes of science, developmentality, and the governing of popula- tion. To illustrate its subjective materialization, I analyze childhood memories of school told by undergraduates of color at one large public university in …

Analyzing Efl Teachers’ Technology Preparedness To Promote Call In Indonesia, Eugenie Mainake

Theses

In recent decades, technology has played a significant role in English language teaching. Current Indonesian policies in education encourage teachers to integrate technology into teaching and learning activities to bolster the effectiveness and efficiency of their teaching practice (Ministry of National Education Indonesia, 2013). Previous studies found that various technology-based pedagogies yielded rewarding results for learners’ language skills in Indonesia, yet teachers report a lack of skills and knowledge necessary for CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) integration (Cahyani & Cahyono, 2012; Ridwan, 2017). There are, however, limited studies examining teachers’ readiness and skills to implement technology use in their classroom …

The Emergent Prosodic System(S) Of Bilbao-Area Standard Basque, Airica C.R. Thomas

Theses

The aim of this study is to contribute to the larger body of research concerned with the prosodic systems of the Basque dialects currently spoken in Southern Basque country. More specifically, the author focuses on Standard Basque from the Bilbao area and its potential prosodic system(s). Standard Basque was phonologically codified by the Basque Academy, but there was no prosodic system provided by the Basque Academy. Although initial investigations have been undertaken by Hualde, more current research has shown that the standard spoken outside of the classroom is different from that which is taught (Lantto, 2019; Rodríguez-Ordóñez, 2016). Given that …

Introduction, Donald W. Parry, John W. Welch

BYU Studies

This book comprises fourteen of the papers presented at “Chiasmus: An Open Conference on the State of the Art,” held at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, on August 15–16, 2017. That date marked the fiftieth anniversary of events in Germany and Austria which soon grew into the publication of Chiasmus in Antiquity: Structures, Analyses, Exegesis (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), edited by John W. Welch. Generated forty years ago, that widely-cited volume with a preface by David Noel Freedman featured contributions by authors including Yehuda T. Radday, Jonah Frankel, Bezael Porten, Wilford G. E. Watson, John W. Welch, and Robert F. Smith, …

Chiasmus In The Text Of Isaiah: Mt Isaiah Versus The Great Isaiah Scroll (1qisaa), Donald W. Parry

BYU Studies

The Isaiah scrolls are significant finds, signaling one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. The Qumran caves, located near the northwestern area of the Dead Sea, yielded twenty-one copies of the book of Isaiah—two from cave 1, eighteen from cave 4, and one from cave 5. An additional copy (making a total of twenty-two copies) of Isaiah was discovered south of Qumran in a cave at Wadi Murabba‘at. Scholars have labeled these scrolls as follows: 1QIsa^a, 1QIsa^b (1Q8), 4QIsa^a-r (4Q55–4Q69b), and 5QIsa (5Q3). All twenty-two copies of Isaiah are written in Hebrew. …