Digital Commons Network^™

South Dakota's Path Forward: Education Professionals On Formal Free-Standing Sel Competency Standards, Kirsten Biersbach

Dissertations and Theses

This study employed reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) to examine South Dakota general education teachers’ perceptions and experiences with the implementation of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) in the absence of formal, free-standing SEL competency standards. As one of the few states without such standards in K-12 education, South Dakota presents a unique context for examining how educators navigate SEL practices in the absence of consistent state-level guidance. Grounded in a qualitative, constructivist paradigm, this research aims to inform future educational policy and practice by amplifying the voices of practitioners who are often overlooked in top-down reform processes. A comprehensive literature review established …

Honors In Practice, Volume 21, 2025: About The Authors, National Collegiate Honors Council

Honors in Practice Online Archive

About the authors, Honors in Practice, volume 21 (2025).

Design And Evaluation Of A Thai Speech Emotion Recognition Corpus With Ambiguous Annotations, Chompakorn Chaksangchaichot

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

THAI-SER is the first large-scale Thai speech emotion recognition corpus, comprising 41.6 hours (27,854 utterances) from 100 recordings across diverse environments (Zoom and studio). The data includes both scripted and improvised speech by 200 professional actors (112 females, 88 males, aged 18–55), covering five emotions: neutral, angry, happy, sad, and frustrated. Utterances were labeled via crowdsourcing, with rigorous quality control ensuring a majority agreement score above 0.71. Annotation reliability, measured by Krippendorff’s alpha, reached 0.692 (above the 0.667 threshold), and human emotion recognition accuracy reached 0.772 after filtering. We also report benchmark results from models trained and evaluated on both …

Gatekeeping As An Online Adjunct Clinical Instructor In Counselor Education, Bernadet Dejonge, Deborah J. Rubel, Yun Shi

Counselor Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

This interpretative phenomenological analysis study examined how adjunct instructors teaching online clinical counseling courses experienced gatekeeping in the context of the university system. The research question was: How do online, adjunct instructors teaching master’s level clinical counseling courses experience their university interactions as a part of gatekeeping? The participants described five experiential themes. These were: a) Balancing marginalization in the system with advocacy for the profession; b) Maneuvering through dependency on the system in gatekeeping; c) Finding consultation while navigating gatekeeping interactions; d) Managing the intensity of clinical courses; and e) Navigating the steep learning curve of learning how to …

A Randomized Controlled Trial Of A Compassion-Centered Spiritual Health Intervention To Improve Hospital Inpatient Outcomes, Jennifer S Mascaro, Patricia K Palmer, Marcia J Ash, Marianne P Florian, Deanna M Kaplan, Roman Palitsky, Steven P Cole, Maureen Shelton, Charles L Raison, George H Grant

Faculty and Staff Publications

Background: Inpatient medical settings lack evidence-based spiritually integrated interventions to address patient care needs within a pluralistic religious landscape. To address this gap, CCSH™ (Compassion-Centered Spiritual Health) was developed to leverage the skillsets of healthcare chaplains to improve patient outcomes through spiritual consultation. Here, we report the results of a randomized, wait-list controlled, pre-registered (NCT03529812) study that evaluated the impact of CCSH on patient-reported depression and explored putative mediators of CCSH's effects.

Method: Chaplain residents were randomized to be trained in CCSH as part of their clinical pastoral education (CPE) residency in the fall (n = 8) or …

Engaging The Community, Providing Hopes, Mackenzie Peeke, Margaret West, Alyssa Wilkinson, Matthew Serrata, Michael Baroody, Conner Tembe, Chrisney Yerena

HOPES Free Clinic Publications

Founded in the 1970s as a grassroots effort to provide care to the underserved population of Hampton Roads, Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) has long been committed to community-centered care. The HOPES Free Clinic is a manifestation of that mission. Launched in 2011 as a student-run phone triage service, the Health Outreach Partnership of EVMS Students (HOPES) later transitioned to provide direct clinical services—becoming the first student-run free clinic in the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 2014, HOPES integrated into Community Engaged Learning to enhance and solidify its efforts. Since its inception, medical and health professions students have partnered with volunteer …

Building A Professional Learning Community To Improve Technical Services Librarians' Teaching Preparedness, Junli Diao

Publications and Research

The Applied Improvement Project (AIP) was conducted to address the inconsistency of academic librarians’ teaching engagement on the AIP site. The problem of practice was framed as the gap between having all librarians prepared to teach and technical services librarians’ unpreparedness to teach. The implemented intervention was developing a professional learning community among technical services librarians of different generations with a variety of teaching experiences to increase teaching preparedness by sharing, discussing, and reflecting. The learning topics covered library teaching basics, motivating students, self-assessment, planning to teach, using Wikipedia, embedded librarianship and credit-bearing courses, teaching and research, and building a …

Race, Gender, And Ordinary Peace: Assessing The Women, Peace, And Security Agenda Through A Coloniality Lens, Fionnuala Niaolain, Claire Wright

Articles

No abstract provided.

True Law As Genre: Narrative Nonfiction And The Law, Jorge L. Contreras

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

The Genome Defense, which offers a book-length narrative nonfiction account of the civil litigation that led to the elimination of patents on human genes in the United States, is a member of a distinct literary subgenre that I term True Law. Like the older and better-known True Crime genre, True Law narratives blend the conventions of journalism and novelistic writing to describe complex legal disputes in a manner that is engaging and accessible to the general public. True Law accounts, which have increased in number and popularity since the publication of Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action in 1995, serve …

Decision-Making Supports And Cognitive Decline, Rebekah Diller

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

For persons with a range of cognitive disabilities, supported decision-making, rooted in a human rights approach to disability, has emerged as a tool that permits them to make legally binding decisions and avoid guardianship. As supported decision-making policy has evolved in the United States, state statutes have primarily focused on formal agreements through which individuals can designate trusted supporters to assist in obtaining information, processing that information, and communicating a decision. This Article argues that supported decision-making has promise for preserving the autonomy of persons living with dementia, but that the model of a supported decisionmaking agreement embodied in the …

Editorial Note, Antonio Medina-Rivera

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

No abstract provided.

From Language ‘Standards’ To Speaker Agency: Exploring Spanish Heritage Language Instructors’ Ideologies, Gabrielle Yocupicio

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

This study explores the language ideologies of six university-level Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) instructors in Arizona, focusing on how they reproduce or challenge standard language ideologies (SLIs) in their teaching. SLIs often devalue the language varieties spoken by SHL learners, portraying them as informal or deficient compared to a perceived “standard” Spanish. Such views can undermine learners’ confidence and linguistic agency. Using qualitative methods, including interviews and observations, the study examines how instructors’ beliefs and practices align with or diverge from critical language awareness (CLA) frameworks that promote the legitimacy of all language varieties.

Findings reveal a spectrum of ideological …

Book Review -- Language Attitudes And The Pursuit Of Social Justice, Identity, Prejudice, And Education, Patricia Gubitosi Dr

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

No abstract provided.

Entrevista A John Lipski, Rafael Orozco

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

No abstract provided.

Cultural Conquest: Russia's Strategic Assault On Ukrainian Heritage As Both A Catalyst For And A Casualty Of Conflict, Brittan Harrell

American University International Law Review

Vladimir Putin and his government have disseminated fabricated claims about Ukraine’s history, language, and sovereignty as a rationalization for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Not only has the war resulted in grave human loss, but it has also caused widespread destruction throughout Ukraine. Nongovernmental organizations, foreign governments, academics, and Ukrainian citizens have collected robust evidence that Russian forces are purposefully targeting repositories of Ukrainian identity. The intentional destruction of this protected property is considered a war crime under the Rome Statute. Following the International Criminal Court’s (“ICC”) first successful prosecution for the destruction of protected property in 2016, there has …

Resilience And Reality: Exploring The Lived Experiences Of People Living With Hiv In Texas During The Covid-19 Pandemic – A Qualitative Study., Ahmed F. Alanazi

Social Work Dissertations - Archive

This study investigated the lived experiences of individuals living with HIV (PLWH) in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) area of Texas during the COVID-19 pandemic, using an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) framework. The research examined the intersection of health, social dynamics, and psychological resilience among PLWH, who faced compounded vulnerabilities due to systemic inequities and the dual public health crises of HIV and COVID-19. Through semi-structured interviews with ten participants from diverse backgrounds, the study captured the profound impacts of disrupted healthcare systems, heightened stigma, and social isolation on this marginalized population. The findings reveal that the pandemic exacerbated existing inequities …

Unmet Family Planning Care And Health-Literacy Needs Among Low-Income Immigrant Women In The United States, Priyanjali Chakraborty

Social Work Dissertations - Archive

Unintended pregnancies have been linked to adverse outcomes such as pre-term births and low infant birthweight (Harron et al., 2020), psychological distress(Abbasi et al., 2013; Barton et al., 2017; Gauthreaux et al., 2017; Mercier et al., 2013), relationship strain (Barton et al., 2017; Moseson et al., 2019), intimate partner violence (IPV) and reproductive coercion (K. T. Grace & Anderson, 2018), and economic strain from unanticipated medical costs despite insurance coverage (Trussell, 2007). Unintended pregnancy outcomes offer crucial insights into the complexities of women's reproductive desires and intentions (CDC, 2023; Rossen et al., 2023). These outcomes inform public health interventions to …

Biomedical Relation Extraction In The Era Of (Large) Language Models, Yuhang Jiang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Biomedical relation extraction is a key task in information extraction supporting downstream applications such as knowledge discovery, information retrieval, and question answering. As such, improvements in relation extraction (RE) are expected to have major implications for other information needs in biomedicine. In this dis- sertation, we pursue biomedical relation extraction in several advanced settings with recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). First, we address an important slot filling task on social media that arose during the Covid-19 pandemic, using the idea of continuous prompts with encoder models. Next, we handle a tricky dynamic n-ary …

Selling Trust: The Evolution Of Relationship Selling In The Investment Industry, Kaden N. Kroslak, Frederik Beuk

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This honors research project examines how relationship selling in the investment industry, especially within registered investment advisory firms, has evolved over time. Advisor-client relationships are being shaped by technology, analytics, regulations, and a frenzy of information. This literature review explores whether the stated factors of technology, credibility, regulations, information access, and fiduciary duty, caused change in how investment advisors create, maintain, and grow client relationships within the context of trust. The project styling, in form of a literature review analyzes peer-reviewed studies on financial technology, artificial intelligence, psychological approaches, and regulatory systems. The outcome is a paper which helps fill …

The Devil Sounds Out: Affect And Intentionality In Conservative Evangelical Anti-Rock Discourse, 1965-1990, Philip Bixby

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Scholars have often described the evangelical reception of rock music as a discourse that changes in a positive direction, from the full-sail rejection of rock in the 1960s to the cautious acceptance of the genre as legitimate worship music throughout the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. This dissertation surveys anti-rock texts written by conservative evangelicals from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, observing an alternative trajectory of the discourse. The dissertation shows that an uncompromising trend of anti-rock criticism persists well into the 1980s, especially promoted by preachers and writers (for example, Jeff Godwin and Jimmy Swaggart) who sought to deny …

Digital Identity Infrastructure, Jonathan Evan Hochman

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation proposes a uniform infrastructure for identifying users and data on the Internet. It identifies the questions we need to ask, provides terminology to think and speak about digital identity, introduces new cryptographic primitives to support digital identity services, and finally presents a sequence of applications that could be built upon the foundation of a shared digital identity infrastructure. These solution sketches are not meant as final specifications. They are examples to demonstrate how digital identity infrastructure could make it easier for digital platforms to deploy new services, improve privacy, reduce user frustration, and support the rule of law …

Deep Learning For Large-Scale Harmonic Analysis: A Corpus Study Of Western Harmony From 1700-1900, Malcolm Sailor

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation trains deep learning models for the Roman numeral analysis and applies these to the analysis of a corpus of over 12,000 movements of Classical music composed between 1700 and 1900. The Roman numeral analysis models obtain performance that is, as of this writing, state of the art. At the same time, this is the first work of scholarship to employ such models at scale for a music-theoretic corpus study. Consistent with music-historical expectations, this corpus study shows that, along many dimensions, such as the distribution of keys employed or the proportion of chromatic scale degrees, harmonic complexity rose …

Teaching Object-Oriented Design Through Interactive Uml: A Dual-Approach Framework For Code-Based Generation And Direct Diagram Manipulation, Moses Kayuni

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis introduces an interactive educational framework for teaching object-oriented design through UML class diagrams. The framework implements a dual-approach methodology: code-based generation, where students write Java code that automatically transforms into UML diagrams, and direct diagram manipulation, where students build diagrams by interacting with highlighted terms in problem descriptions. This approach addresses common challenges in teaching UML, including cognitive load difficulties, visualization problems, and the disconnect between code implementation and visual design. Built on the Mermaid diagramming framework, the system features a React frontend for diagram creation and manipulation, and a Flask backend that handles some code parsing and …

Makers Of Identity: Those That Hold It, Or Those That Create It?, Valentina K. Quintero

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Throughout the semester, the topic of AI potentially achieving personhood has been a deeply debated topic. Issues rise and fall depending on perspective, and there are still too many unknowns to be completely certain that AI has either managed to become a person or has not. One of the key details of personhood is the modern understanding of the word identity. This paper will go into the origins of the word and how it may have changed, and how it is important in regards to AI and its potential. Wittgenstein’s language games, personal opinion, and cultural influences will be explored …

10. The Language Of Teaching Excellence: Describing Pedagogical Expertise Through A Framework Of Care, Beth Buyserie

Documenting Teaching Excellence

During my 20 years of college-level teaching, I have engaged in countless conversations where instructors communicate their passion for teaching, their commitment to student learning, the depth of their disciplinary expertise, their continued pedagogical innovations, and their thoughtful reflective practices. Yet often these same teachers confide that they find it quite challenging (sometimes nearly impossible) to write about their teaching for promotion—not because they are not strong teachers, but because the language expectations for documenting teaching accomplishments can be formidable. For example, at my particular institution, teaching-centered instructors are specifically directed in our role statements to “demonstrate excellence” in our …

Toward Automated Thesis Classification: Open-Sourced Ai Foundations For Libraries, Courtney Rowe

IdeaFest 2025

University libraries often face challenges in making student research more accessible. Manual tagging of theses is time-consuming, while commercial AI tools can be costly and limit institutional control. This project, in collaboration with the Cal Poly Humboldt Press and the TIDE computing cluster, fine-tuned an open-source AI model, ModernBERT, to automatically classify theses using the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The model performed well, demonstrating a promising, cost-effective approach for libraries to enhance research discoverability while retaining ownership and flexibility.

Contributors, Karin Dejonge-Kannan, Travis N. Thurston, Amanda Deliman, Amanda Morris, Anna Kuthy, Anne Cook, Beth Buyserie, Bethany B. Stone, Caroline Wienhold, Casandra E. Harper, Chris Kilgore, Cynthia Korpan, Elisabeth Schussler, Ferlin Mcgaskey, Gabrielle Stecher Woodward, Hannah Mae Lewis, James Agutter, Janette R. Hill, Jeff Spears, Jim Lamuth, Jordan Shipley, Kate Tregloan, Kim Hales, Letizia Guglielmo, Melissa E. Ko, Michael Morrone, Miranda Yaggi Rodak, Peggy Brickman, Raoul A. Mulder, Shannon M. Sipes, Sharon Lyman, Shihua Brazill, Stephen A. Klien, T. Adam Halstrom, Terri A. Dunbar, Victoria Mondelli, Vijay R. Kannan, Virginia Stormer

Documenting Teaching Excellence

No abstract provided.

The Shadow Of Exceptionalism: Morality, Pragmatism, And Covert Action In American Cold War Foreign Policy, Kyle Stacy

History Theses - Archive

The complex forces of national identity, economic ambition, and ideological justification created a dynamic and contested landscape that shaped America’s Cold War policies. A carefully curated useful past, bolstered by religious convictions, fostered a belief in American exceptionalism and moral leadership that provided both the impetus and justification for 11 America’s actions abroad. Yet, America’s stated ideals—freedom and democracy—existed in stark tension with the pursuit of its national interests, often clashing with its self-perceived moral superiority. The Cold War environment fostered a culture of secrecy within the highest levels of government. Here, transparency and accountability were readily sacrificed for strategic …

Power Quality Event Diagnosis Using Multi-Rate Neural Networks, Jordan D. Lloyd

Electrical Engineering Theses - Archive

Power quality disturbances (PQDs) are among the primary challenges facing modern electrical systems, as they degrade the performance and lifespan of connected equipment. This thesis investigates the relationship between the rate at which voltage waveform data are sampled, the reliability of these measurements, and the ability of deep neural networks to classify PQDs accurately. A one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) was trained and evaluated across multiple sampling rates and signal-to-noise ratios to quantify how information loss in the temporal and spectral domains affects classification reliability. The results demonstrate that model accuracy degrades nonlinearly as sampling rate and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) …

Submission To Ireland’S Electoral Commission- An Coimisiún Toghcháin’S Consultation On Education And Public Engagement Strategy, Brendan K. O'Rourke, Ewan Macdonald, Richard Woodward

Other Resources

An Coimisiún Toghcháin’s establishment and its work is very welcome in a world where democracy is being buffeted by many forces that are undermining it. There is a lack of trust and trustworthiness in the media (O’Neill, 2018). The public sphere is being fractured in the splintering niches of media (Nechushta,2024), in the filter bubbles, echo chambers & behavioural manipulations of the online world (Nguyen, 2020; Zuboff, 2022) and in the increasingly homosocial interactions of most people’s everyday face-to-face encounters. This submission uses, in addressing some of the main issues in democratic participation, the concept of the ‘endarkenment’ danger in …