Digital Commons Network^™

Fifty Years Of Underrepresented Student Advocacy At One Jesuit Secondary School, Sonya Cotero Arriola

Doctoral Dissertations

Across the United States Conference, Catholic and Jesuit secondary schools are experiencing tremendous change in their student demographics. Schools of today are being challenged to consider what true inclusion looks like within their community vis-à-vis students whose racial, economic, sexual and gender identities do not fit the traditional Catholic or Jesuit school mold. The racial and social order of the United States is replicated within Catholic and Jesuit schools, even when those same communities claim to promote values of inclusion and opportunity. History offers valuable insights to school communities grappling with these questions.

This qualitative study centers the efforts of …

¿Tú Qué Sabes?: Latina Doctoral Women Disrupting And Resisting Dominant Knowledge, Sendy Ramos Madsen

Doctoral Dissertations

Education environments have systematically excluded, silenced, and erroneously spoken on behalf of Women of Color. Linear forms of scholarship and research practices propagate the dominant perspective and fail to address systems of oppression that result in epistemic suppression and academic hostility towards brown minds. Historically, Latina women have not been seen as creators of knowledge, and their access to educational spaces has been restricted. According to census projections, in 2036, Latinas/os will account for the largest minority group in the United States and one-third of the American educational system. Therefore, academic spaces must establish practices to include Latina women as …

International Law: Corpus Linguistics And Ordinary Meaning, Eric Talbot Jensen, James Lee Rex

Faculty Scholarship

The application of corpus linguistics to clarify ambiguity or provide insight in legal interpretation is quickly gaining recognition within the United States, especially among the judiciary. However, very little has been done to assess its application to international law, particularly as a means of assisting international courts and tribunals. In the international legal system—where ambiguity inevitably arises from the great diversity of linguistic and cultural systems throughout the world—the norm for understanding contested terms within a treaty or agreement is to look for the “ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in …

Development And Implementation Of An Electronic Clinical Dementia Rating And Financial Capacity Instrument-Short Form, Taylor Howell, John C Morris, Krista L Moulder, Connie Mayo, Maria Carroll, Yan Li, Et Al

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Introduction: To address the need for remote assessments of cognitive decline and dementia, we developed and administered electronic versions of the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR®) and the Financial Capacity Instrument-Short Form (FCI-SF) (F-CAP

Methods: The CDR and FCI-SF were adapted for remote, unsupervised, online use based on item response analysis of the standard instruments. Participants completed the eCDR and eFCI first in clinic, and then at home within 2 weeks.

Results: Of the 243 enrolled participants, 179 (73%) cognitively unimpaired (CU), 50 (21%) with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia, and 14 (6%) with an unknown diagnosis, 84% and 85% …

A Machine Learning Approach For Active/Reactive Power Control Of Grid-Connected Doubly-Fed Induction Generators, Jafar Tavoosi, Ardashir Mohammadzadeh, Bahareh Pahlevanzadeh, Morad Bagherzadeh Kasmani, Shahab S. Band, Rabia Safdar, Amir H. Mosavi

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

This paper suggests a new fuzzy method for active power (AP) and reactive power (RP) control of a power grid that includes wind turbines and Doubly Fed Induction Generators (DFIGs). A Recurrent Type-II Fuzzy Neural Networks (RT2FNN) controller based on Radial Basis Function Networks (RBFN) is applied to the rotor side converter for the power control and voltage regulation of the wind turbine equipped with the DFIG. In order to train a model, the voltage profile at each bus, and the reactive power of the power grid are given to the RT2FNN as the input and output, respectively. A wind …

Measuring Semantic Similarity Of Documents By Using Named Entity Recognition Methods, David Efraín Muñoz Morales

Masters

The work presented in this thesis was born from the desire to map documents with similar semantic concepts between them. We decided to address this problem as a named entity recognition task, where we have identified key concepts in the texts we use, and we have categorized them. So, we can apply named entity recognition techniques and automatically recognize these key concepts inside other documents. However, we propose the use of a classification method based on the recognition of named entities or key phrases, where the method can detect similarities between key concepts of the texts to be analyzed, and …

Common Data Set, 2021-2022, Planning, Research, And Policy Analysis

Common Data Set (2001-present)

Common Data Set 2021-2022 for Illinois State University

Hinterlands To Cities: The Archaeology Of Northwest Mexico And Its Vecinos, Matthew C. Pailes, Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

Tis approachable book is a comprehensive synthesis of Northwest Mexico from the US border to the Mesoamerican frontier. Filling a vital gap in the regional literature, it serves as an essential reference not only for those interested in the specific history of this area of Mexico but western North America writ large. A period-by-period review of approximately14,000 years reveals the dynamic connections that knitted together societies inhabiting the Sea of Cortez coast, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, and the Sierra Madre Occidental. Networks of interaction spanned these diverse ecological, topographical, and cultural terrains in the millennia following the demise of …

Neo-Emancipatory Sex Education In Germany: Sexual Abuse And Gender Confusion, Bernd Ahrbeck, Karla Etschenberg, Marion Felder

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

This article focuses on two related areas of concern with regard to sex education and implications for children and youth in Germany. The first one is the history of the currently dominant neo-emancipatory sexual education and its implications for today. This direction of sex education is highly influenced by theories of Helmut Kentler who with the help of the German city of Berlin youth protection services department sent homeless and troubled boys to known pedophiles for care. This experiment went on for 30 years, ending in 2001. Only now has the extend of this horrific practice been fully discovered. The …

A Generic Qualitative Study Of Primary Grade Reading Teachers' Challenges And Personal Teaching Solutions, Jennifer Lynn Nunes

Theses and Dissertations

Not all children enter school with the same skill set. Teachers of young children know this. Despite this, schools prescribe curriculum and pacing guides as well as assessments that may fit only a subset of students’ instructional levels. Teachers are left to determine the best way to meet the student and mandated requirements. Teachers from two elementary schools from a neighborhood area were interviewed about their perspectives and how they manage instructional expectations to help students learn grade level expectations.

The following research questions were addressed.1. How and why do teachers report adapting literacy instruction for students who are deficient …

Reconceptualizing Mathematical Word Problems To Reflect Social Justice Principles And Culturally Relevant Teaching, Michelle Aryam Jackson

Theses and Dissertations

As currently developed and written, mathematical word problems lack cultural relevance for an increasingly culturally diverse population in elementary schools in the United States. The design and context of mathematical word problems promote the norms, values, and beliefs of the dominant culture while potentially negatively influencing students from non-dominant culture engagement and achievement in mathematics.

The purpose of this sequential, explanatory mixed-methods study was threefold: to (a)examine in-service teachers’ preexisting beliefs about the relevance of social justice and culturally relevant teaching related to their mathematics instructional practices before receiving a synchronous online professional development program; (b) assess the impact of …

Aprendizaje En Inglés En Línea: Efectos Sobre La Elaboración De Textos Escritos Y Relación Con La Percepción De Los Docentes Sobre La Integración De Tecnología, Yetzy Limarys Díaz Maldonado

Theses and Dissertations

Los estudiantes de una escuela secundaria del área sur de Puerto Rico presentan un bajo aprovechamiento académico en los cursos de ESL para realizar trabajos escritos en inglés. Por lo tanto, esta disertación aplicada fue diseñada con el propósito de examinar el efecto del uso del programa de aprendizaje de idiomas en línea Grammarly sobre la elaboración de textos escritos y la percepción del docente sobre la integración de tecnología.

El diseño de este estudio fue uno cuasi-experimental. El marco teórico que sustenta el estudio se basa en la teoría del procesamiento de información cognitiva de Atkinson y Shiffrin (1968). …

A Phenomenological Study Of The Lived Experiences Of Siblings Of Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Adrielle Benini

Theses and Dissertations

This applied dissertation was designed to better understand the experience of having a sibling with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Research has historically focused primarily on parents of individuals with ASD and their perceptions of how siblings were impacted; however, there was a lack of adequate research where information was obtained from conducting interviews with the siblings themselves.

The researcher conducted a qualitative study with 10 neurotypical siblings, ages 10 to 17, of individuals with ASD. These siblings were interviewed to explore their individual experiences and perceptions about areas in which they found and needed support. The researcher also utilized demographic …

Teacher Perceptions Of Classroom Management Programs To Improve Whole-School Measures Of Attendance, Disruptive Classroom Behaviors, And Academic Outcomes, Charles E. Natt, Jr

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative case study explored how the implementation of Capturing Kids’ Hearts (CKH) and Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) classroom management programs when implemented together affected students and teachers of a Louisiana K-12 school compared with using the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) program alone. Teachers at the school who had used the PBIS alone and then also used the newly implanted CKH and MTSS programs participated in in-depth interviews to examine the practical effectiveness of both program implementations upon students and classroom learning effectiveness. Teacher perceptions were also compared with ex post facto data for the school from …

The Writing Brain: Writing As An Exercise Of Functional Network Optimization To Facilitate Psychologically Healing Effects, Isabelle Antolin

Scripps Senior Theses

James Baldwin wrote, “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know” (as cited in Plimpton 1989). Writers, like James Baldwin, have for a long time acknowledged that writing has some psychological effect. However, the neural basis of this effect has yet to be understood. Neuroimaging studies have examined writing as a creative process, identifying a predominantly left fronto-parieto-temporal network activation during writing tasks (including brainstorming, drafting, and revising). Importantly, one study examining poetry composition found that a generative phase of writing was associated with a significant anti-correlative activation pattern between the dorsal attention network (DAN) …

Rapid Automatized Naming (Ran) And Real Word Reading Fluency: An Eye-Tracking Study, Alexia Martins

Open Access Master's Theses

Although literacy skills, as typically measured by reading accuracy and fluency, are known to greatly influence a child’s later academic and social success, national literacy rates continue to decrease across grade levels. Research has shown that serial rapid automatized naming (RAN) is one of the best predictors of reading fluency; however, there is significant variability regarding the specific relationship between RAN and reading as noted between meta-analyses, age groups, RAN stimuli, and measures of socioeconomic status (SES). This study aims to investigate the relationship between serial RAN and 1) real word reading fluency and 2) socioeconomic status (SES) across thirty-three …

Expert Elicitation Regarding Effectiveness Of Recent North Atlantic Right Whale Protection Agreement, Jessica Marie Hiltz

Open Access Master's Theses

With the rise of offshore wind energy in the United States, there has been increasing concern about how offshore wind turbine installation and operation is affecting benthic and pelagic marine life (Bailey et al. 2010). Increased, localized ocean noise resulting from project-related activities, such as vessel traffic, surveying, and turbine installation, has the potential to disturb or injure nearby marine life. Increased vessel traffic heightens the probability of a vessel strike occurring, and noise produced during the turbine installation phase, in which pile-driving is used to hammer and secure turbines to the seafloor, is significantly loud and widespread. This noise …

Modeling Rhode Island Food Production Potential Under Different Production Scenarios, Nina Oberg

Open Access Master's Theses

Food sovereignty emphasizes the rights of people to have control over their food system. Relocalizing food production and limiting dependence on global industrial supply chains is necessary to increase food sovereignty in regions dominated by conventional food systems. In the US, the New England region aims to relocalize production by producing 50 percent of food consumed in the region by the year 2060. Rhode Island can contribute to this goal by expanding production and strengthening local food systems, thus serving as a model for New England and other urbanizing regions globally. For this study, a site suitability analysis was performed …

Unmasking Covid-19: The Pandemics Effect On Mental Health Through The Lens Of Social Media, Jamie Vittoria Swanberg

Open Access Master's Theses

This study examined the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on mental health through the lens of social media. This study content analyzed user posts related to depression on Twitter during 2019 and 2020 to determine if there was an increase in tweets about depression due to the pandemic. A total of 2,000 tweets were randomly selected using the keyword or hashtag “depressed” and “depression”. A sample of 1,000 tweets from April 18 to December 31, 2019, and another sample of 1,000 tweets from April 18 to December 31, 2020, were analyzed. Using the Uses and Gratifications Theory as a framework, …

The Home Literacy Environment's Effect On Language And Literacy Outcomes In Monolingual And Bilingual First And Second Grade Students, Sarah Carney

Open Access Master's Theses

The Home Literacy Environment (HLE) is well researched to support early literacy development in children (e.g., Niklas et al., 2020; Inoue et al., 2018). The majority of research has investigated how the HLE supports children’s preschool literacy development and skills upon entry to kindergarten; however, few research studies have addressed how the HLE contributes to vocabulary, phonological awareness, and reading scores in Spanish-English bilingual first and second grade students. Our present study aims to answer two questions; if Parental Occupation Education (POE) and the HLE affect performance on inside out (phonological awareness and decoding) and outside in (language and vocabulary) …

Transnational Construction Site: Building American/Buying Chinese At The Panama Canal, 1885-1887, Jenny Elkus

Open Access Master's Theses

This thesis is a case study in ethnic relations and identity formation. It attempts to problematize Jewish American immigration history by examining the actions and personal development of one 19th century Jewish immigrant, not through the literature of Jewish American immigration, but through the history and literature of the Chinese migrants with whom he interacted. In 1885, Dr. Felix A. Bettelheim launched a year-long venture to obtain 5,000 Chinese contract laborers to work on the construction of the Panama Canal. This thesis is an attempt to understand how, as a migrant and a member of a persecuted minority himself, Bettelheim …

Making The Invisible Visible: Redefining Giftedness To Include Ell Students’ Community Cultural Wealth And Funds Of Knowledge, Molly I. Pargas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study used improvement science methods to investigate a problem of practice surrounding the underrepresentation of ELL students in GT programming. This research addressed how teachers define giftedness using their underlying knowledge frameworks. The researcher conducted empathy interviews with parents of ELL students and a team of teachers to determine what the underlying issues are regarding the underrepresentation of ELL students in GT. The parent empathy interviews were coded using the combined conceptual framework of community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) and funds of knowledge (Moll et al, 1992). Through this process the types of capital and funds of knowledge were …

Financial Market Liquidity, Informed Trading, And Stock Price Crash Risk: Evidence From Corporate Tone, Exchange Competition, And Corporate Culture, Rasheek Irtisam

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Prior literature documents a temporary spike in information asymmetry between sophisticated and unsophisticated traders around corporate disclosures because the former process new information faster. In Essay 1, using advances in textual analysis, we show that when management issues more uncertain financial statements, the resulting spike in information asymmetry is significantly lower than for firms which use less uncertain text. Furthermore, textual uncertainty measures of the disclosures are negatively associated with Intermarket Sweep Order (ISO) volume, an order type commonly used by sophisticated traders. This suggests sophisticated traders and algorithms are less able to extract value-relevant information from financial disclosures when …

Mask On, F*Ck It, Mask Off: Assessing The Role That Hip-Hop Plays In The Identity Development Of Young Black Professionals, Re'sean James Jetson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Young Black professionals are faced with unique challenges in navigating their ethnic and professional identities, especially in the workplace. They are underrepresented in high-status professional jobs and often assume they must adhere to behavioral and linguistic norms associated with the dominant culture in order to be accepted in predominately White workspaces. The process of adjusting one’s style of speech or behavior based on the social setting is known as code-switching. This study examined the experience of code-switching for young Black professionals in non-diverse workspaces with particular attention to the role of Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop has served as a tool for identity …

Individual Differences In The Comprehension And Categorization Of Sarcasm, Megan Boatman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The present study investigated whether exposure to sarcasm can predict a person’s categorization of sarcasm. Participants (N = 44) were asked to complete a picture matching task. In this task, they would listen to a sentence and look at two images. Sentences had pause durations along a six-point continuum scale. One image was a sarcastic interpretation of the sentence, and one was a literal interpretation. They were asked to choose the image they felt best fit the sentence they heard. Afterwards they were asked to fill out a sarcasm self-report scale. It was predicted that stimuli would follow a linear …

Effects Of Stimulus Rate And Periodicity On Auditory Cortical Entrainment And Their Relation To Speech Rhythms, Sara Momtaz Bokharaei

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The neural mechanisms underlying rapid exogenous coding and the neural entrainment to auditory stimuli have been the subject of controversy. Using inter-trial phase-locking (ITPL) and phase-locking value (PLV) analyses applied to high-density human electroencephalogram (EEG) data, this dissertation investigated the degree to which the brain entrains to speech and non-speech (i.e., click) sounds and how changes in the rate and periodicity of the ongoing streams alter brain oscillation patterns. Temporal processing of cortico-acoustic tracking was investigated in N=24 normal young adults utilizing EEG time-frequency and source analyses that isolated neural activity stemming from both auditory temporal cortices. We manipulated the …

Speech Perception Performance In Ecological Noise, Bhanu Shukla

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

A variety of noises, including multi talker babble (MTB), speech spectrum noise (SSN), and several other environmental auditory scenes that had MTB as the dominant noise, have been used in research in the field of audiology to evaluate speech perception in individuals with normal hearing and hearing loss. These different noises and environmental auditory scenes have been employed independently to evaluate speech perception performance. Given that there are several sounds in the real world that might impair communication, the evaluation of speech perception accuracy should encompass all noises that a listener may encounter in typical conversation. Combining several auditory scenes …

Language Policy And Indigenous Language In The Linguistic Landscape Of Asunción, Paraguay, Perry Hardin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The field of Linguistic Landscape (LL) has been increasingly used as an effective way of researching, discovering, and better comprehending complex sociolinguistic phenomena. One focus of LL study is the way public displays of language in signs reflect and shape society’s beliefs about language, which in turn influences language practices. In addition, LL research frequently deals with the policies that attempt to influence what languages are used in signs. This study explores the multilingualism and language policy of Paraguay through a sociolinguistic lens by documenting the LL and investigating the factors that influence its construction in the capital city, Asunción. …

Educator Identity Development For International Graduate Teaching Assistants Through Community Of Practice: A Design Case, Jaclyn Joy Gish-Lieberman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This design case provides a transparent tale of building an international graduate teaching assistant (IGTA) orientation as a virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) during the COVID-19 era. The design case is situated in an English as a Second Language Composition (ESLC) Program at a large midwestern university for new GTAs, both international and domestic. Studies show that IGTAs who do not fit the prototype of GTAs in predominately white institutions (PWI), face marginalization, damaging their sense of belonging and identity as legitimate educators. Their salient social identities as both multicultural and multilingual become oppressed as they attempt to develop their …

Role Of Sex In Rate Of Infant Vocalization And Canonical Babbling, Janine Peca

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

A female language advantage has been widely reported, although it has not been consistently shown across the literature. Perhaps surprisingly, the possibility of sex differences in prelinguistic vocalizations in the first year has not been widely studied. A paper published in Current Biology in 2020 found that infant males produced a significantly larger number of speech-like vocalizations through 12 months of age than infant females based on human coding of randomly-selected samples from all-day recordings. The authors argued that their sampling method offered a maximally representative view of infant vocalization. The present study also investigated possible sex differences in the …