Digital Commons Network^™

Exploring Teacher Perceptions And Implementation Factors Influencing Career Development Plan Completion In Middle Grades: A Study Of The Majorclarity Platform, Keri Marie Brewer

Doctor of Education Dissertations

This qualitative study investigated the implementation fidelity, teacher perceptions, and contextual factors influencing the use of the MajorClarity career readiness platform to support career development plan (CDP) completion among middle grade students in a North Carolina school district. Guided by Bandura’s (1986) Social Cognitive Theory and Darling-Hammond et al.’s (2001) Learning Theory, the study explored how instructional strategies, training quality, leadership support, and systemic barriers shape program outcomes. Data were collected through two rounds of semi-structured interviews with six Career and Technical Education teachers, using inductive thematic analysis to identify patterns across participant responses. Findings revealed that while educators recognized …

Teacher Perceptions Of Social-Emotional Learning In A Covid-Impacted Environment, Gina Gold

Doctor of Education Dissertations

Social-emotional learning (SEL) builds students’ resilience skills, which impact the biology of the brain connected to emotional regulation, safe behaviors, and positive learning outcomes. Diminished resilience is typically the result of childhood trauma, which affects physical and emotional health into adulthood. Teachers’ capacity, implementation, and data analysis practices for SEL are important to support building resilience skills in our students to help them grow to be emotionally and physically healthy citizens. The purpose of this research study was to investigate the perspectives of elementary school teachers from four elementary schools in the same school district in rural, southwestern North Carolina …

The Impact Of High-Stakes Summative Reading Outcome Measures On Student Self-Efficacy, Hayley M. Johnson

Doctor of Education Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to explore the influence of high-stakes reading tests on student self-efficacy, or confidence, as readers. The study focused on sixth-grade students who had taken the reading end-of-grade (EOG) test in Grades 3, 4, and 5. I analyzed their third-grade reading EOG scores to determine if that score was predictive of the fourth-grade reading EOG score and repeated the same analysis to see if fourth-grade reading EOG scores were predictive of fifth-grade scores. Then, those sixth-grade students' reading self-efficacies, as measured by the Butz and Usher (2015) Self-Efficacy Survey, were compared to their …

Connecting Principals To The Implementation Of A Multi-Tiered System Of Support, Douglas L. Rose

Doctor of Education Dissertations

The purpose of this explanatory sequential mixed methods study was to examine the implementation of a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) through the lens of secondary school administrators following professional development. The professional development was chunked and spread over time following the principles of Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 2010) to expand understanding of MTSS implementation. Following the professional development, 25 administrators completed a 42-question survey. Ten secondary administrators completed an 11-question interview to expand on the results of the survey. The culmination of results from the quantitative survey, qualitative interviews, and literature provided insight into the practices that increase administrator …

A Qualitative Study On The Perspective Of Instructional Coaching Through The Lens Of Teachers, Coaches, And Administrators, Lamonica D. Mcnair

Doctor of Education Dissertations

Instructional coaching can be a key puzzle piece in teacher improvement and the academic success of students. This qualitative study examined the perspectives of administrators, teachers, and instructional coaches on the role that instructional coaches play in education and how the process of instructional coaching works. Further, the study sought to determine the perceptions of specific supports and barriers to effective coaching, and to examine the effectiveness of coaching through the experiences of both the coach and the teacher. It also examined the role of the school leader in an effective coaching program. Knight’s (2022c) The Definitive Guide to Instructional …

The Recruitment, Retention, And Motivation Of Black Male Teachers In K-12 Schools: A Perception Study, Ann M. Brame

Doctor of Education Dissertations

Black male teachers have been underrepresented in K–12 classrooms since integration in the United States. This mixed methods exploratory sequential study investigated the recruitment, retention, and motivation of Black male teachers. The foundation of Maslow’s (1943) Hierarchy of Needs, Herzberg’s (1959) Two-Factor Theory, and Bell’s (1980) Critical Race Theory guided the investigation of the psychological, structural, and social-cultural variables that affect the experiences and retention of Black males in education. The quantitative phase examined survey data to determine patterns aligned with job satisfaction, motivation, and retention. Subsequently, the qualitative phase explored the individuals lived experiences through interviews that offered insights …

A Mixed Methods Study Of Teacher Perceptions Of Restorative Practice In The Classroom, Crystal Brown

Doctor of Education Dissertations

This mixed methods study explored the perceptions of teachers in North Carolina alternative schools regarding the implementation and impact of restorative practices (RPs) on professional practice, student behavior, academic progress, and reentry outcomes after behavioral incidents. A sequential explanatory mixed methods design was used, beginning with an 18-item Likert scale survey completed by 30 educators and followed by 10 semi-structured interviews. Quantitative findings revealed moderate agreement that RP improved classroom management and conflict resolution, though academic and attendance gains were limited. Qualitative findings offered deeper insight into how restorative circles cultivated trust, accountability, and student voice, enabling more effective student-teacher …

Investigating Teacher Self-Efficacy And Teacher Attitudes Toward Stem In North Carolina High School Science And Mathematics Classrooms, Kelly J. Ruff

Doctor of Education Dissertations

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if North Carolina high school science and mathematics teachers differ in their STEM teacher self-efficacy, outcome expectancy, and attitudes toward STEM instructional practices. The data collection instrument used in this study was the T-STEM survey. Science and math teachers voluntarily participated in the study and answered Likert-type survey items focusing on STEM teacher self-efficacy, STEM instructional practices, and outcome expectancy. Additionally, study participants answered demographic questions on gender, years of teaching experience, and the type of degree earned. Sub-scores for each survey section were calculated and analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistical …

Stakeholder Perspectives On A Strand Within A Traditional School Chinese Immersion Program: A Case Study, Erica M. Caine

Doctor of Education Dissertations

Dual language immersion programs have continued to grow in North Carolina, providing students with learning opportunities focused on bilingualism, biliteracy, and sociocultural competency. This qualitative case study explored the influence of ecological systems on internal stakeholders (teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators) within one dual language strand within a school’s Chinese immersion program in North Carolina. Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Ecological Systems Theory was utilized as the framework for this study. Data were collected through focus groups, interviews, and document analysis to examine the perceptions and experiences of key stakeholders pertaining to the program’s integration into the larger school setting. The analyzed data …

Teacher And Parent Perspectives Of Young Children's Development Since The Covid-19 Pandemic In A Rural Public School District, Regina L. Lineback

Doctor of Education Dissertations

Face to face education for young children was interrupted in March of 2020 due to mandatory school closures precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Virtual learning was forced upon teachers and students at a time when many families and teachers had limited or no access to internet. When face to face learning resumed, teachers and students were required to wear facial masks and maintain social distancing protocols. This study sought to explore teacher and parent perspectives of young children’s development in a rural public school district since the COVID-19 pandemic. A qualitative study was completed using teacher interviews, a teacher focus …

The Impact Of Professional Learning Communities On Teacher Efficacy In North Carolina K–12 Public Schools: A Comparison Of Beginning And Experienced Teachers, Geneva Bell

Doctor of Education Dissertations

Teacher efficacy remains a critical factor in education, particularly within North Carolina K–12 public schools, where beginning and experienced educators encounter distinct professional challenges. Professional learning communities (PLCs) demonstrate potential in enhancing teacher efficacy, yet the differentiated impact across career stages remains understudied. This mixed methods study examined relationships between PLC dimensions and teacher efficacy among beginning and experienced educators. The Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) and the Professional Learning Communities Assessment-Revised (PLCA-R) were administered to 96 participants to analyze statistical relationships between PLC components and teacher efficacy. Results indicated significant correlations between shared vision, supportive leadership, and collaborative …

Remote Learning During Covid-19: A Qualitative Exploration Of Parental Experiences In A Time Of Educational Disruption, Kendra N. Alston

Doctor of Education Dissertations

This qualitative study investigated how parents experienced remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular attention to how they managed educational challenges within the home. Using focus group interviews, the research explored the contextual factors that shaped parental engagement in their children’s virtual learning environments. The study was informed by the interpretive lenses of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), experiential learning (Kolb, 1984), and critical pedagogy (Hooks, 1994), which guided the analysis but were not treated as data sources. The findings reflect firsthand narratives rather than theoretical assumptions, ensuring that conclusions remain grounded in participants’ lived realities. Key themes that emerged from …

Improving Understanding And Connections For Preparedness, Mitigation, Response, And Recovery For Tornado And Straight-Line Wind Events In Virginia: Summary Of The Inaugural Virginia Tornado And Straight-Line Wind Summit, Wie Yusuf, Monica Arul, Joshua Behr, Kaleen Lawsure, An Huy Pham, Henry Attivor

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

Background

The Virginia Tornado and Straight-Line Wind Summit, the first of its kind in the Commonwealth, was held on October 15, 2025 in Isle of Wight County, Virginia. The Summit had several goals, including:

• Understanding Virginia’s wind risk and learning the science behind it.
• Hearing lessons learned from emergency managers who have experienced extreme wind events.
• Learning about practical steps to prepare, mitigate, and respond to severe wind events.
• Learning best practices for timely and actionable communication with the public before and after events.
• Strengthening interagency coordination and connecting with others to share resources, align priorities, and coordinate resilience planning. …

Ai-Generated Messaging For Life Events Using Structured Prompts: A Comparative Study Of Gpt With Human Experts And Machine Learning, Christopher Lynch, Erik Jensen, Ross Gore, Virginia Zamponi, Kevin O'Brien, Brandon Feldhaus, Katherine Smith, Joseph Martínez, Madison H. Munro, Timur E. Ozkose, Tugce B. Gundogdu, Ann Marie Reinhold, Hamdi Kavak, Barry Ezell

VMASC Publications

Large Language Models (LLMs) play an increasingly integrated and pivotal role in generating diverse types of texts, such as social media messages, emails, narratives, and technical reports, among other textual communication forms. As AI-generated messaging filters into human communication, a systematic exploration of their effectiveness for mimicking human-like communication of life events is needed. In this study, we employ a zero-shot structured narrative prompt to generate 24,000 life event messages for birth, death, hiring, and firing events using OpenAI's GPT-4. From this dataset, we manually classify 2880 messages and evaluate their validity in conveying these life events through the form …

Electrochemical And Nanomaterial Based Strategies For Nonenzymatic Glucose Detection: A Review, Reagan Aviha, Gymama Slaughter

Center for Bioelectronics Publications

Electrochemical glucose sensing technologies have undergone significant evolution, with continual advancements aimed at improving sensitivity, selectivity, and user convenience. This review systematically explores the development of emerging nonenzymatic glucose sensor designs. Nonenzymatic sensors are critically evaluated for their ability to overcome enzymatic limitations, leveraging novel materials and catalytic mechanisms. Additionally, the emergence of smartphone-integrated glucose monitoring systems is highlighted as the fifth generation, representing a paradigm shift toward personalized, real-time healthcare management. Emphasis is placed on the strategies employed to reduce the working electrode potential and enhance analytical performance. Key analytical metrics and real-sample applicability are evaluated, and persistent challenges …

Qos-Aware Link Adaptation For Beyond 5g Networks: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach, Ali Parsa, Neda Moghim, Sachin Shetty

Center for Secure and Intelligent Critical Systems (CSICS) Publications

Modern wireless communication systems face increasingly complex challenges due to rapidly changing channel conditions and the growing diversity of application-specific Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Traditional link adaptation mechanisms primarily aim to maximize throughput and often lack the flexibility to support emerging applications, such as Extended Reality (XR) and Virtual Reality (VR), which demand simultaneous guarantees for high data rates, ultra low latency, and high reliability. These stringent and multidimensional QoS needs call for more intelligent and adaptive solutions. In this paper, we propose QDRLLA (QoS-aware Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Link Adaptation), a novel framework that employs deep reinforcement learning to …

A Trust-By-Learning Framework For Secure 6g Wireless Networks Under Native Generative Ai Attacks, Md Shirajum Munir, Sravanthi Proddatoori, Manjushree Muralidhara, Trinidad Mario Dena, Walid Saad, Zhu Han, Sachin Shetty

Center for Secure and Intelligent Critical Systems (CSICS) Publications

Sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks will become vulnerable due to native generative AI (GenAI)-driven intelligent poisoning attacks in both the radio unit and the core network. In particular, network parameters and metrics in cross-layer design pose fundamentally uncertain conditions and can be compromised through the native GenAI mechanism, which leverages data augmentation and reconstruction capabilities. This work investigates the capabilities of native GenAI to create novel poisoning attacks in wireless networks, while investigating their impact through uncertainty-informed root analysis. Then, detected attacks are mitigated by developing a trustworthy service aggregation in the wireless network. First, a joint decision problem is formulated …

Essays On Innovation And Labor Market Benefits, Kyoungah Noh

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The first chapter examines the impact of bank failures on team-based innovation, focusing on the persistence of inventor teams under credit supply constraints. Using U.S. patent and FDIC data from 2000 to 2012, this paper presents three main findings. First, bank failures significantly reduce both the number of team patents and the number of inventors with collaborators. Second, negative banking shocks decrease the likelihood that inventor teams remain together for projects in subsequent periods. However, team-specific factors, including geographic proximity, prior collaboration experience, and smaller team sizes, mitigate the adverse effects of bank failures and help preserve the stability of …

Technology Integration In Online Feminist Pedagogy, Xinyue Ren

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Feminist pedagogy refers to a liberatory way of teaching to develop democratic and transformative learning experiences in which students can be empowered to make a social change (Grissom-Broughton, 2020). Previous research showed that feminist pedagogy was often used to guide course design and development in various disciplines, such as music, art, language, and environmental education (Cannizzo, 2021; Grissom-Broughton, 2020; Jespersen, 2014; Springgay & Zaliwska, 2017). For example, in music education, instructors increased the representations of multicultural voices in course materials and applied in-depth discussions and essays as learning assessments to develop critical and reflective thinking among students. In a feminist-oriented …

The Integration Of Artificial Intelligence And Ontologies: Transformations In Knowledge Representation And Application, Grazia Serratore, Julaine Clunis

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the landscape of knowledge representation. There is an increasingly strong bidirectional relationship, between AI techniques and ontologies. AI techniques revolutionized traditional, manual ontology development and contribute to automated ontology construction, while ontologies enhance the performance of AI systems and their semantic accuracy. Through a comprehensive review of current literature, this paper aims to examine: i) how Machine Learning (ML) techniques contribute to the automated construction, refinement, and validation of ontologies; ii) the most widely used and effective ML approaches for ontology construction; iii) how domain-specific requirements influence the selection and adaptation of AI techniques for …

Exploring The Impact Of Generative Ai Chatgpt On Critical Thinking In Higher Education: Passive Ai-Directed Use Or Human-Ai Supported Collaboration?, Nesma Ragab Nasr, Chih-Hsiung Tu, Jennifer Werner, Tonia Bauer, Cherng-Jyh Yen, Laura Sujo-Montes

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Generative AI is weaving into the fabric of many human aspects through its transformative power to mimic human-generated content. It is not a mere technology; it functions as a generative virtual assistant, raising concerns about its impact on cognition and critical thinking. This mixed-methods study investigates how GenAI ChatGPT affects critical thinking across cognitive presence (CP) phases. Forty students from a four-year university in the southwestern United States completed a survey; six provided their ChatGPT scripts, and two engaged in semi-structured interviews. Students’ self-reported survey responses suggested that GenAI ChatGPT improved triggering events (M = 3.60), exploration (M = 3.70), …

Bridging The Gap: The Role Of Parent-Teacher Perception In Child Developmental Outcomes, Mckayla Jensen, Mikaela J. Dufur, Jonathan A. Jarvis, Shana L. Pribesh

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Background/Objectives: Time spent with parents and educators encompasses a large portion of a child’s waking hours, with the home and early childhood education and care serving as two of the first settings in which children develop social and cognitive abilities. While previous studies have used social and cognitive tests to examine antecedents of child behavior, we extend such studies to take into account the congruence and incongruence of parents’ and teachers’ views on those antecedents. We examine the importance of parent-teacher alignment on the perceptions of a child’s personality and abilities in early development. Methods: Parents and teachers of 2968 …

Addressing Anti-Black Racism In Library And Information Science Curriculum, Amber Matthews

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This paper explores the development of the graduate course Anti-Racism in Library and Information Science that was piloted at Western University in 2022 and 2023. The one-semester (13-week) course was designed with Black-led community organizations and students contributed to anti-racist information and memory work through experiential learning partnerships. The course used critical Library and Information Science (LIS) literature alongside Black Canadian scholarly perspectives that were grounded in anti-oppression and anti-racism frameworks. The course goals were for students to develop an understanding of how race and other structural inequities inform lived experiences and tools to support collaborative community-led projects. The LIS-tailored …

University Of Texas At Tyler Course Catalog, 2025-2026, University Of Texas At Tyler

Catalogs

No abstract provided.

University Of Texas At Tyler Catalog, 2025-2026, University Of Texas At Tyler

Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Fascist Government Speech, G. Alex Sinha

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

On the day he was sworn in for a second term, President Donald Trump issued pardons and commutations to all of his supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This sweeping act of clemency gave legal effect to a longstanding grievance: since the attack, which disrupted congressional certification of his 2020 election defeat, President Trump has consistently glorified the attackers and denounced their prosecutors. In defending the clemencies two days after issuing them, President Trump reiterated familiar themes. Once more he refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, celebrated the patriotism of his supporters, and …

The Antitrust-Copyright Interface In The Age Of Generative Artificial Intelligence, Daryl Lim, Peter K. Yu

Emory Law Journal

The U.S. government’s antitrust actions against Big Tech have recently surged in response to the growing dominance of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. In fall 2023, the Federal Trade Commission filed a controversial submission in response to the U.S. Copyright Office’s request for comments on artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright. The agency’s submission hinted at its eagerness to fully deploy its enforcement powers in the AI sector, including targeting AI developers that have used copyrighted works without authorization to train AI models. This Article examines the changing interface of antitrust and copyright law in the age of generative AI. …

Arcadia Magazine, 2025-01

Alumni Magazine

No abstract provided.

First Amendment Rights On Trial: A Critique Of The Time, Place, And Manner Doctrine, Alec Greven

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Front Pages

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.