A Note On The Novel Passive Sampling In Environmental Dna (Edna) Collection Technique To Detect Yellow Mud Turtle (Kinosternon Flavescens): Field And Laboratory Approaches In Turtle Edna, Sakib Tahmid Rishan, Richard J. Kline, Md. Saydur Rahman

School of Integrative Biological & Chemical Sciences Faculty Publications

Environmental DNA (eDNA) is a powerful and sensitive method for monitoring aquatic and terrestrial organisms, offering insights into their distribution. Usually, eDNA is collected using a filter membrane through water filtration. However, the passive eDNA method can simplify sampling and broaden its scope, offering new insights for ecological surveillance. This study examined the efficacy of six different membrane filters in detecting the yellow mud turtle (Kinosternon flavescens) through a novel passive eDNA method. After being immersed in water for 12 h, only the mixed cellulose ester (MCE) membrane filter consistently demonstrated specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification using …

Quicknotes January 2026, Southern Adventist University

QuickNotes – Advancement e-Newsletter

QuickNotes is an e-newsletter that comes from Advancement at Southern Adventist University. The January 2026 edition features an article about students serving around the world.

Music Education In My Band Room: A Personal Philosophy Statement, Dorothy Roorda

Honors Program Theses

I want to be the best band director I can be. As a pre-service music educator, I have received countless hours of instruction in content knowledge. At the end of the degree program, music education majors are certified to teach K-12 music of any kind. To receive that certification, we take dozens of classes in our content area. We are taught how to teach every band instrument, how to lead choirs, jazz bands, and marching bands, how to conduct and how to sing, how to play our primary instrument and many others. We spend hours in practice rooms, honing our …

Growth And Sustainability Of Ash Tree Replacements In Twin Lakes, Iowa, Emma Larsen

Honors Program Theses

The significant loss of mature ash trees at Twin Lakes Bible Camp (TLBC) has motivated efforts to restore green spaces by planting replacement trees. In summer 2024, 32 trees representing eight unique species were planted, and their overall health and site suitability were evaluated to inform future replanting efforts in summer 2025. The five soil series present at TLBC (Canisteo, Clarion, Webster, Okoboki, and Nicollet) were evaluated by soil chemistry testing through x-ray fluorescence spectrometry. This study presents site-specific data of tree growth measurements, visual health assessments, and soil compatibility analyses to identify practical recommendations for improving restoration success. The …

Using Simulations And Machine Learning To Improve Routing Algorithms In Wireless Sensor Networks, Luke Abels

Honors Program Theses

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used in fields such as environmental monitoring, smart agriculture, disaster response, and other applications where low-power devices must communicate reliably over time. Because these networks operate under limited energy and communication constraints, routing and broadcast strategies strongly influence performance, scalability, and network lifetime. This thesis examines how simulation and machine learning can be used to study interference-aware broadcasting in WSNs. The project first evaluates the usefulness of existing network simulation tools, including ns-3, and then describes the development of a custom Python simulator designed for rapid experimentation with broadcast behavior, mobility, and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio …

The Times They Are A-Changin’: How Bob Dylan’S Music Helped To Change An Era, Emily Newby

Honors Program Theses

No abstract provided.

Aging Across Cultures: How Cultural Attitudes Shape Senior Care In Japan And The United States, Ella Jane Gunn

Honors Program Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine how cultural perceptions of aging influence the structure and delivery of care for older adults in Japan and the United States. By comparing cultural attitudes, this study identifies implications for senior care in each country. While cross-cultural studies comparing senior care systems already exist, many lack the cultural context that shapes expectations about aging and care. This work focuses on this distinction. Ten individuals ranging in age from 21 to 83 participated in interviews about their perceptions of aging: five with an American background and five with a Japanese background. The interviews …

The Role Of Parent Involvement In Enhancing Pediatric Speech And Language Therapy, Katie Lynch

Honors Program Theses

As speech-language pathologists, we provide speech and language therapy for children in a variety of settings. It is crucial that we include a client’s family in therapy because family involvement has been shown to promote generalization of skills learned in therapy to a child’s typical environment. Despite this, various barriers exist for families as they aim to support their child’s speech and language goals. This literature review examines how speech-language pathologists can gain an understanding of these barriers and how they can promote family involvement in pediatric speech and language therapy.

Following The Water: Tree Water Sources In Coastal Northern California Forests, Kaitlyn Briggs

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Increasing drought intensity and declining summer water availability in Mediterranean- climate forests raise concerns about forest resilience and streamflow persistence. This study evaluated how tree water sources vary with hillslope position, season, species, and watershed context across three coastal northern California forests. Stable isotopes of hydrogen (δD) and oxygen (δ18O), soil moisture time series, linear mixed-effects models, and site-specific Bayesian mixing models (MixSIAR) were used to estimate proportional contributions of shallow soil, deep soil, stream-associated, and fog water to tree xylem water. Across sites, xylem water isotopic signatures overlapped primarily with soil water, indicating dominant reliance on subsurface sources, while …

Subjective Glib Dynamics: Using An Alien Society To Investigate Reactions To Leader And Member Norm Deviance, Catie Burtch

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Social groups are built by members and leaders who form consensus on the defining attributes of their groups. Individual group members look to senior members and leaders to learn what it means to be a member of that group. Thus, norm maintenance is an important aspect of group health. The subjective group dynamics model details the specific group contexts under which people derogate ingroup members for transgressing norms. However, ingroup leaders are treated differently from regular group members and are given leniency for their transgressions. The current research extends these two bodies of work by directly comparing the consequences of …

Geographic Variation In Proteomic Responses To Ocean Acidification In A Cold-Water Coral (Balanophyllia Elegans), Keana A. Richmond

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In the face of a rapidly changing climate, assessing organismal responses to future stressors in the context of current, natural exposure to stress could provide key insights to understanding marine ecosystem resilience. I used Balanophyllia elegans, a cold-water, solitary, azooxanthellate coral as a model to better understand how varying oceanographic conditions across its geographic range have shaped its ability to tolerate and potentially adapt to current and future ocean acidification conditions. I collected B. elegans individuals from four sites across 2,500km of their range and subjected them to two pH treatments to investigate site-specific protein expression in response to …

Coho Salmon (Oncorhynchus Kisutch) Response To Habitat Restoration Through Space And Time: Monitoring Growth, Survival, And Movement In A Restored Habitat Network, Carter Perez Adamson

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Despite the decline of coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch), Prairie Creek, a tributary of Redwood Creek in northern California, remains a coho salmon stronghold. The restoration of juvenile coho rearing habitat was identified as a recovery objective in this watershed by the National Marine Fisheries Service. Among the restoration projects addressing this objective are an ongoing project on Prairie Creek and its tributary Skunk Cabbage Creek, and a prior effort on Strawberry Creek (a tributary of Redwood Creek’s estuary). Standard monitoring methods for assessing project success have limitations and may be improved by measuring salmon use of restored habitats …

Repairing Estranged Death: Care, Politics And Ecology In The Us Funeral Industry, Cecilia Catherine Rodriguez

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The industrialization of death practices in the US has separated humanity from natural cycles while centering white settler colonial norms that marginalize other cultural ways of caring for the dead. Through necropolitics, the contemporary death industry embodies capitalist values of commodification and a monopolization of care, separating death from community and its ecological cycles. Black and Indigenous feminist knowledges understand death as not a discrete event but instead as an ongoing process that shapes our relationships with both the human and more-than-human worlds. Engaging with feminist political ecologies, I extend a conversation about care and repair to contemporary death practices …

Decolonizing Restorative Justice: A Teaching Development Project, Lacy Felice Mitchell

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The coloniality of power serves as a central axis within the matrix of domination that characterizes global capitalist modernity, as Anibal Quijano famously argued. This power is rooted in particular ways of looking, seeing, and understanding social reality, anchored in Eurocentrism as an epistemological paradigm for the hegemonic discourse produced by the West against both internal and external categories of “other.” Such categories still inform the production of knowledge in educational settings. In this project, I engage in a critique of the coloniality of power to explore its implications and potential for critical pedagogical practice within the context of sociology …

Rethinking Belonging In First-Year Student Support: A Mixed-Methods Evaluation Of Eop/Sss Programing At Cal Poly Humboldt, Elizabeth Rose Silver

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This mixed-methods project examines the role of the Educational Opportunity Program and Student Support Services (EOP/SSS) first-year orientation programs, particularly STEM Summer Bridge, in supporting feelings of belonging and persistence. While institutional efforts often frame student success through metrics such as retention and concepts like sense of belonging, this project interrogates how these are experienced and understood by students themselves. Quantitative analyses compared one-year persistence rates between STEM Summer Bridge participants and multiple comparison groups across three cohorts (2022–2024). Results showed no statistically significant differences in persistence; however, STEM Summer Bridge participants demonstrated persistence rates comparable to or slightly higher …

Taking A Seat In The Circle: Decolonizing Gender Roles That Argue Against The Participation Of Feminine Bodies At The Big Drum, Juli Suzukawa

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The origins of the Big Drum can be traced back to the 1860s when Tail Feather Woman, a Dakota woman, had a vision of its creation as a tool of resistance. The Big Drum has since expanded and can now be seen at various Indigenous ceremonies and social events. However, there has been controversy regarding the participation of feminine and queer bodies. While reasons for this vary, it has also contributed to harm amongst Indigenous youths that have a more fluid stand on gender identity and may not conform to colonial “gender norms”. In this paper, I will explore how …

Reclaiming Presence: An Anthropological Study Of Digital Disconnection And Meaning-Making, Leslie De Paz

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Human attention is increasingly at risk in an unregulated digital ecosystem where overconsumption shapes neurological function, social interaction, and the ways people make meaning of everyday life. Dominant discourse around digital overuse tends to medicalize the problem, framing it as individual addiction or clinical dysfunction. In this thesis, I argue that such framing obscures what a cultural phenomenon is fundamentally, one in which people are actively questioning their relationship with technology, building awareness, and developing practices that help them slow down and reclaim agency within algorithmically mediated environments. This study draws on 22 semi-structured interviews with Gen Z and millennial …

Testing Adaptive Habitat Selection In Breeding Swainson's Hawks (Buteo Swainsoni), Elizabeth Meisman

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Adaptive habitat selection theory predicts that individuals preferentially select habitats that maximize or improve their fitness. However, patterns of habitat preferences may dampen with increasing population density and become decoupled from habitat quality when environmental conditions change. Such dynamics may be especially important in long-lived territorial species that exhibit site fidelity. One of the longest running raptor studies in North America has tracked an increasing population of breeding Swainson’s Hawks (Buteo swainsoni) in Butte Valley, California since 1985, where agricultural practices have shifted over the decades, providing an ideal system for studying these processes. Using nest records from …

“Thank You For Listening To Us”: Incorporating Community Context And Perspectives Into Sea-Level Rise Adaptation Planning For Fields Landing & King Salmon, California, Clara Riggio

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Fields Landing and King Salmon, California are two low-lying, coastal communities on Humboldt Bay (Wigi). These communities already experience coastal flooding during the highest astronomical tides each year, and flood conditions are expected to worsen as sea levels continue to rise. The Fields Landing & King Salmon (FLKS) Living with Water Project was created as a partnership between Humboldt County departments of Planning & Building and Public Works, along with support from social science researchers at Cal Poly Humboldt, including the author. In Chapter 1, I describe the co-production approach used throughout the project, including analysis of four dilemmas that …

Assessing The Ecological Drivers Of Wildfire Hazard Mitigation Of Fuels In The California Home Ignition Zone, Christopher David Benterou

Master's Theses

Consecutive years of devastating home losses to wildfire indicate the need for home fuel reduction and construction improvements. Existing research correlates house survival with modifications to the home ignition zone (HIZ) and is required in high fire hazard areas of California (CA). Mitigations, designed to disrupt continuous fuel patterns, (e.g., separating surface and canopy fuels), can also introduce ecological changes that can alter overall code compliance. Previous compliance studies used respondent and agency-generated data, which may lack accuracy. Assessing additional house and ecological features (e.g., canopy cover and construction) would improve prediction of compliance, but these relationships are poorly studied. …

The Operation And Control Strategy Of Microgrids: A Brief Review, Mohammad Alam, Salsabila Zaman

Electrical Engineering Student Publications

A microgrid is an effective approach for integrating various distributed energy resources to meet local energy demand. It possesses the capability to operate independently or in conjunction with the main utility grid. Typically, a microgrid is a small-scale power system (usually several megawatts or less) comprising three primary components: the ability to function in both grid-connected and islanded modes, distributed power generation sources, and autonomous control centers. Microgrids enhance system resilience by ensuring uninterrupted operation during grid disturbances. Additionally, they are environmentally sustainable and contribute to improved power quality. As a crucial element of modern power systems, microgrids can effectively …

Perceptions Of Georgia Elementary School Administrators Toward Elementary Agricultural Education, Addie Tucker

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Elementary agricultural education (EAE) is a growing component of K-12 agricultural education, yet limited research exists on how school leaders perceive its value. The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of Georgia elementary school administrators regarding the implementation and value of EAE programs. Specifically, this study examined elementary principals’ and district superintendents’ views on the benefits, effectiveness, and value of EAE. A descriptive research design was used. Georgia elementary principals and district superintendents with active EAE programs during the 2025-2026 academic year were surveyed in the fall of 2025. The sample consisted of 18 principals and 18 …

Identifying The Knowledge And Skills That Students Enrolled In Agricultural Systems Technology Degree Programs Need: Perspectives From University Faculty, Jerry Blake Kennedy

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

National trends have highlighted the need for a knowledgeable, skilled workforce in advanced agricultural systems. University-level Agricultural Systems Technology (AST) undergraduate degree programs and closely-related degree programs are vital to equipping the agricultural workforce with the knowledge and skills needed to support the industry. Ensuring that AST curricula are relevant and appropriate is vital to equipping undergraduate students in such programs with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the modern agricultural workforce. This study sought to identify the essential knowledge and skills needed by undergraduate AST degree program students from the perspectives of university-level faculty across the …

Speaking For The Families: Organizational Socialization Of Military Spouses In Volunteer Leader Positions, Virginia Klaus

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Military spouses holding volunteer leadership positions in military unit family readiness groups, provide a link between commanders and families of service members. They act within military organizations as the only official voice of spouses, a stakeholder group recognized as influential in retention rates and force readiness. Despite their importance, military spouses are often portrayed in research as passive members, taking on roles to meet the expectations of their peers and military organizations. That contradicts historical evidence of military spouses as active organizational members who have socialized other spouses, and as family advocates who have challenged military organizational practices and policies. …

The Effect That Positive And Negative Self-Concepts Have On Adolescents' Behavior And Personalities, Portia L. Davis

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

The development stage of adolescence is a complex process in which adolescents begin to explore their identity and form either a positive or negative self-concept. Self-concept plays a crucial role in shaping adolescents' personalities and behaviors. Self-concept includes how adolescents view themselves and how others see them. An adolescent's self-concept can influence their self-confidence, social relationships, and decision-making abilities. This study examines the relationship between overall self-concept and adolescents' personality traits and behaviors. To gather this information, a quantitative research design is used, in which adolescents complete assessments such as the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale (TSCS), the Woodcock-Johnson IV (WJ-IV), …

Personality Assessment Inventory Profiles In Adults Seeking Autism Spectrum Disorder Assessment, Emily Kinsey

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

The current study aimed to examine differences in interpersonal functioning and response validity among adults presenting for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) assessment compared to those seeking services for other clinical concerns. The study used archival data from 238 client files collected in an outpatient clinical setting. Interpersonal functioning was assessed using the Dominance (DOM), Warmth (WRM), and Nonsupport (NON) subscales of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 1991). Response validity was evaluated using the Negative Impression Management (NIM) and Positive Impression Management (PIM) scales. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed no significant group differences across DOM, WRM, and NON …

Wired For Inclusion: Leveraging Strengths Of Neurodivergent Special Educators, Brok Hess, Teresa Clark Ed.D.

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Special education teachers face unique challenges, and neurodivergent special educators possess distinctive strengths that can allow them to excel in the classroom. However, barriers, stigma, and ableism persist that have prevented neurodivergent individuals from accessing this career, receiving support, and thriving as special educators. Self-efficacy and executive functioning both correlate to success and retention within education. This research analyzed the relationship between special education teachers’ self-efficacy and executive functioning, specifically among neurodivergent special educators. Results concluded that a significant positive correlation exists between neurodivergent special education teachers’ executive functioning and self-efficacy. Attention to these results will highlight the importance of …

Out In The Arena: Examining The Lgbtq+ Experience In Ihsa, Katharine C. Didier

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated factors influencing Intercollegiate Horse Show Association (IHSA) LGBTQ+ riders’ perceptions of inclusion, safety, and belonging, with the hypothesis that teams with diversity and inclusion policies would be perceived as more accepting. An online survey was developed to gather information from self-identified LGBTQ+ IHSA students. Questions covered demographics, team environment, and perceived inclusivity within their equestrian programs. Question types included multiple choice, Likert-type, short answer, and open-ended. IHSA coaches were asked to share the survey link with team members. Students were able to respond anonymously. The survey was open for 8 weeks. Reminders were sent out at 3 …

Attention Or Affect? Evaluating The Discriminant Validity Of Cpt-3 Performance, Gavin F. Price

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

The Conner Continuous Performance Test Third Edition (CPT-3) is a behavior-based measure of attention-related problems commonly used to assess Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Research into the discriminant validity of the CPT-3 remains limited, particularly regarding the influence of internalizing symptoms such as anxiety and depression on performance. The current study examined whether CPT-3 performance was more strongly associated with cognitive indicators of inattention or internalizing symptoms, such as depressive or anxious symptoms. Archival data from 105 adult clients at Murray State University Psychological Center was analyzed. Cognitive inattention was measured using Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI) – Working Memory Index (WMI) discrepancy …

Comprehensive Postsecondary Transition Planning For Students With Intellectual Disability In Florida, Sonia Y. Clark-Rosier

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the impact of early transition planning on parents’ postsecondary expectations for their child with an intellectual disability and to examine the benefits of planning, particularly when considering higher education opportunities. This study also probed the factors that contribute to the development of self-efficacy in special education teachers facilitating comprehensive transition planning. Schlossberg’s transition theory, with its four S’s—situation, support, self, and strategies—served as the theoretical framework. The data collection methods were document analysis, focus groups with special education teachers, high school teachers, and parents, and researcher observations. Seven themes emerged to …