Digital Commons Network^™

From Written Curriculum To Classroom Practice: Teacher Supplementation In The Teaching Of American Slavery In Florida And New York, Matthew T. Maloof

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This study examined how K–12 public school teachers in Florida and New York perceived the adequacy of curriculum standards and instructional materials for teaching American slavery, how they responded when those materials were perceived as limited, and how the standards and materials aligned with Shuster’s (2018) Ten Key Concepts for Teaching American slavery. Using a qualitative multi-method design, the study combined qualitative survey research with document analysis. Teachers’ open-ended survey responses were analyzed through a Modified Grounded Theory approach, while curriculum standards and instructional materials were analyzed in relation to Shuster’s framework. The final sample included 41 teachers, including 20 …

Cognate Awareness Training For Novice L2 Learners: Orthographic And Phonological Routes To Vocabulary Learning, Jennifer M. Martin

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Within the study of cross-linguistic influence, research on cognate facilitation has consistently shown that proficient bilinguals process cognates (e.g., English “sock” and German “Socke”) more efficiently than non-cognates. However, less is known about how novice adult learners may benefit from these similarities during the earliest stages of second language acquisition or how instructional interventions might facilitate this process. This dissertation addressed this gap through experiments with English-speaking adults learning German. A series of experiments examined the effects of cross-linguistic similarity and explicit cognate awareness training on vocabulary acquisition. Experiment 1A found robust similarity effects in written recall and …

Psychometric Assessment Of The Facilitative Systemic Intervention Skills Rating System– Spanish Version, Sarah J. Crosky

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Despite the growing understanding of therapist factors in client outcomes, there remains limited understanding of the skills that distinguish effective family therapists. The aim of the present study was to assess the interrater reliabilities and factorial structure of a Spanish version of the Facilitative Systemic Intervention Skills (FSIS; Jones et al., 2023a), an observational rating system for evaluating the skillfulness of family therapists in delivering systemic interventions. The FSIS includes eight empirically and theoretically informed systemic therapy skills (Inclusiveness, Empathy for Relational Difficulties, Responsiveness to Safety Concerns, Collaborative Stance, Conceptualizing Family Problems Systemically, Responsiveness to Disparate Goals, Focus on Family …

The Predictability And Verification Of Precipitation From Landfalling Tropical Cyclones Using An Object-Based Framework, Melissa Piper

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Precipitation from landfalling tropical cyclones (TCs) poses a significant risk to life and property in both coastal and inland communities. Early warning systems can help mitigate the impacts of TC-induced flooding; however, this requires accurate quantitative precipitation forecasts (QPFs). Forecasting precipitation from landfalling TCs is a challenge, as the intensity, duration, and location of precipitation can be dependent on numerous storm-related and environmental factors. Previous studies have attempted to identify and correct NWP model deficiencies and reduce forecast uncertainty by applying traditional and advanced verification metrics to TC QPF. However, these studies have mostly used gridpoint verification metrics, limited samples …

Sorting By Income And Housing Subsidy Status: Residential Attainment, Unit Turnover, And The Mobility Process Among Renter Households, Sarah A. Mccarthy

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The aim of this dissertation is to identify differences in the mobility process and residential attainment across different types of renters with different incomes and by housing subsidy status. More specifically, I compare subsidized renters to unsubsidized, low-income renters as well as unsubsidized, moderate-income renters. The guiding question of this dissertation is, “what processes around mobility help or hinder subsidized households in attaining residential outcomes?” The motivations for addressing this question and the related gaps in the literature are discussed in Chapter 1.

Using data from the American Housing Survey (AHS), I address this question over three analytical chapters in …

Weather-Related Road Condition Detection Using Co-Developed Machine Learning Methods, Carly Sutter

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Transportation agencies make critical operational decisions during hazardous weather events, including assessment of road conditions and resource allocation. In this study, machine learning models are developed to provide additional support for the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) by automatically classifying road conditions across the state. Convolutional neural networks and random forests are trained on NYSDOT roadside camera images and weather data to predict road surface conditions. This task draws critically on a labeled dataset of 22,000 camera images containing six road surface conditions (severe snow, snow, wet, dry, poor visibility, and obstructed) generated from an iterative hand-labeling process …

Dynamic Effects Of Economic Shocks Under Uncertainty, Seojin Jung

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This dissertation studies the dynamic effects of economic shocks under uncertainty across three self-contained essays.

The first essay introduces a two-stage model averaging estimator for impulse response functions that flexibly combines local projection (LP) and vector autoregression (VAR) methods, as well as different statistical paradigms (Bayesian or frequentist). In the first stage, we compute weights within the LP and VAR groups. A second-stage weight then integrates the two groups by accounting for their structural differences and incorporating their respective strengths. Monte Carlo simulations illustrate a typical bias-variance trade-off: LP-based estimators tend to exhibit lower bias, whereas VAR-based estimators display lower …

Bloodstain Pattern Analysis And The Gatekeeping Role Of Canadian Courts, Sara Gordon

All Faculty Publications

Despite its long history of admission throughout North America, there appears to be no published Canadian case subjecting bloodstain pattern analysis to the special scrutiny Canadian law demands for novel or contested scientific evidence. Instead, courts have admitted the evidence based largely on the training and experience of forensic examiners, taking it for granted that the field is sufficiently reliable. However, the application of the White Burgess framework reveals that there are serious and severe concerns about the underlying scientific validity of the technique which should render it generally inadmissible. At Stage One of White Burgess, bloodstain pattern analysis fails …

Race And Racism In Canada’S Immigration Detention System, Efrat Arbel, Prasanna Balasundaram, Hanna Gros, Nana Yanful

All Faculty Publications

Race and Racism in Canada's Immigration Detention System is the first comprehensive, independent study to examine race and racism in Canada's immigration detention system. Grounded in rigorous legal analysis and qualitative research, the study draws on interviews with 50 participants, including people with lived experience of immigration detention, as well as lawyers, paralegals, and service providers who work in immigration detention. The research was guided by an advisory board of people with lived-experience in immigration detention and co-led by a collaborative research team.

Taking A “Persuade Me” Approach: Gatekeeping Forensic Firearms Comparison Evidence In Canadian Courts, Sara Gordon

All Faculty Publications

Forensic firearms comparison evidence is routinely admitted in Canadian criminal trials and is often presented as a reliable means of identifying whether fired ammunition components originated from a particular firearm. For nearly 100 years, Canadian courts have admitted this evidence based largely on examiner claims about the reliability of the technique without subjecting those claims to meaningful scrutiny or limiting examiner conclusions to those that are empirically supported. Drawing on recent scientific literature, however, this article demonstrates that existing studies of forensic firearms analysis suffer from significant methodological flaws that may systematically underestimate error rates and do not establish the …

Hepatitis C Among Persons Who Inject Drugs In New York State: Progress Towards Elimination, Meredith A. Barranco

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Background: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is one of the leading causes of liver disease in the United States (US) and worldwide. In the United States today, HCV is transmitted primarily through injection drug use (IDU) and therefore disproportionately impacts persons who inject drugs (PWID), a population with a range of complex social and health needs. HCV is not vaccine-preventable but can be cured in over 90% of cases with an 8–12-week course of daily direct-acting antiviral (DAA) medication. Since approval of curative medications in 2014, various jurisdictions have developed plans to eliminate HCV. In 2021, the New York State …

The Effects Of Vitamin K On Neuronal Ferroptosis, Chelsey P. Eighmey

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Dementia is a crippling illness affecting millions worldwide causing significant public health burdens with long-term care. The lack of treatment options results in many years of suffering for affected individuals and their loved ones who often become primary caretakers. Decades of study have focused on treating dementia with little-to-no success, so an emphasis is needed on attempting to prevent disease progression altogether. This research explored vitamin K as a potential strategy for prevention of dementia onset or progression through the mechanism of suppressing ferroptosis. Ferroptosis is a type of cell death suggested to contribute to the hallmark traits of Alzheimer’s …

Using Eye Tracking To Explore How Auditory-Visual Chunking Modulates Visual Search Strategies In Expert Musicians In The Presence Of Auditory Interference, Nicole Arco

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Experts show performance advantages during visual search due to their extensive experience with domain-specific stimuli. Experts form memory representations for meaningful visual patterns, called chunks, that group together multiple domain-specific features into larger patterns. The ability of experts to form chunks could allow them to more precisely encode a search template, which could facilitate visual search performance. In the domain of music reading, expert musicians might form chunks that are multimodal (i.e., using visual and auditory modalities). The current studies addressed the possibility that chunks are multimodal by extending a previous cross-modal visual search task to manipulate the presence of …

The Relationship Between Interoceptive Awareness And Eating Disorder Symptomatology, Madelyn G. Johnson

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Interoceptive awareness (IA; e.g., the ability to perceive and interpret internal bodily sensations) is increasingly recognized as central to eating disorder (ED) psychopathology, yet findings remain mixed regarding whether heightened IA is protective or maladaptive. Across two studies using a sample of 654 college students (Mage = 18.74, SD = 1.56; 46% White; 58% female) from a large northeastern U.S. university, we examined (1) how specific IA facets relate to ED symptom severity, and (2) whether anxiety sensitivity (AS) helps explain these associations. In Study 1, linear regressions predicting Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire–7 (EDE-Q7) scores showed that nearly all MAIA-2 …

Population Genomics And Evolution Of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa, Samara T. Choudhury

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a Gram-negative bacterium ubiquitous in diverse environments and an opportunistic pathogen in humans. It is a leading cause of chronic lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients and of hospital-acquired pneumonia and sepsis. With a large flexible genome and abundant mobile genetic elements, P. aeruginosa exhibits high levels of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), making it a significant public health threat. Evolutionary processes such as homologous recombination, and horizontal gene transfer generate extensive genomic diversity in this species and facilitate the spread of resistance genes. In this dissertation, I investigate the genetic and evolutionary factors shaping P. aeruginosa population structure …

Structural Inequities, Environmental Toxicants, And Cardiometabolic Pathways In Cardiovascular Disease: Evidence From A Nationally Representative U.S. Population, Ese F. Oghaghare

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States and continues to disproportionately burden racial/ethnic minorities and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations. Traditional risk factors and behavioral explanations fail to fully account for these persistent disparities, motivating increased attention to intermediate biological pathways and environmental toxicant exposures through which structural inequities may become biologically embedded. This dissertation investigates how cardiometabolic biomarkers, diet quality, and exposure to persistent organic pollutants jointly contribute to cardiovascular disease risk in a nationally representative U.S. population.

Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), three complementary studies were …

Perceived Autonomy To Exercise Rights: Race And Ethnicity And Citizenship In Consent Searches, Srishti Katuri

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Consent searches—police searches conducted with an individual’s permission—constitute the majority of warrantless searches in the United States. Although these encounters are legally described as voluntary, scholars have long questioned whether civilians truly feel free to refuse an officer’s request to conduct a search. The present study examined how race and ethnicity and citizenship status influence civilians’ consent decisions and perceived freedom to deny consent in a hypothetical police encounter. A community sample of 191 adults from New York State read a vignette in which a police officer requested to search their backpack. Then, participants reported their ideal and anticipated consent …

School-Based Antecedent Interventions Derived From Structural Analyses: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis, Georgia M. Gaertner

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Disruptive behaviors in the classroom setting present immediate challenges for both students and teachers and are associated with a host of negative, long-term outcomes. Antecedent interventions are a group of behavior management strategies that can be used to target disruptive behaviors before they occur. This study consisted of a systematic review and meta-analysis of school-based antecedent interventions that were derived from a structural analysis. The results indicated that structural analytic research on school-based antecedent interventions has been conducted with students across diverse educational settings and with students with a variety of disabilities and conditions. Elementary school students and male students …

A Cross-Species Meta-Analysis Of Environmental Enrichment Effects On Cognition, Greg S. Fitzgerald

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Environmental enrichment --providing animals or people with stimulating, complex surroundings --consistently improves cognitive performance in laboratory rodents. But when similar interventions are tested in humans, the benefits are much smaller. Understanding why matters: if researchers overestimate how well rodent findings will translate, it can mislead expectations for human cognitive interventions.

This dissertation presents the first cross-species meta-analysis comparing environmental enrichment effects on cognition between rodent and human studies. Drawing on 121 studies (71 rodent, 50 human) contributing 478 effect sizes, the analysis used multilevel models with variance correction to account for the statistical dependence created when studies report multiple outcomes. …

Advancing Periodic Time Series Analysis: Application, Bias Assessment, And Optimal Window Selection In The Variable Bandpass Periodic Block Bootstrap Method, Yanan Sun

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Time series analysis is essential for understanding long-term patterns, periodic behavior, and underlying correlations in complex datasets. The periodically correlated (PC) time series is a type of time series where the correlation structure repeats over fixed intervals. The Variable Bandpass Periodic Block Bootstrap (VBPBB) has recently been proposed as a resampling method that preserves PC structures through the use of periodogram, bandpass filters, and block bootstrap resampling. Although promising, VBPBB remains underutilized, and its limitations have not been fully examined. This dissertation advances both the application and methodological development of the VBPBB.

The first project applies the VBPBB to a …

Improving Clinical Decision-Making: Reducing The Affect Heuristic In Substance Use Treatment, Corey M. Monley

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Therapists are at risk for engaging in the affect heuristic, which occurs when automatic emotional reactions influence clinical decision-making more than objective data about clients. Emotional reactions are common when treating clients using substances (CUS), but the influence of the affect heuristic on therapists’ clinical decision-making with CUS has yet to be quantified. This study investigated (1) the extent to which therapist trainees engage in the affect heuristic with CUS and (2) whether it can be reduced through brief cognitive science training. Graduate-level therapists (n = 130) were randomized to one of two conditions: brief online training involving …

School-Based Interventions With Youth Engaging In Bullying Behaviors: Effective Strategies From The Perspective Of School Social Workers, Elizabeth A. Crowe

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Bullying is a nationally recognized social problem associated with harmful consequences for all youth involved. Despite their crucial role in bullying interventions and student success, the practices and perspectives of school social workers are notably absent from academic literature. This survey research study sought to identify strategies that school social workers use with youth engaging in bullying behavior; distinguish which strategies are the most and least effective from the perspective of school social workers; and recognize the supports and barriers school social workers face when implementing bullying interventions.

Survey data from a sample of school social workers answered these questions. …

Applications Of Machine Learning For Evaluating Downward-Coupled Stratosphere-Troposphere Interactions And Subseasonal Forecasts Of Opportunity, Elena M. Fernandez

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Wintertime stratospheric dynamics provide key information for understanding atmospheric teleconnections and improving subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) predictions on timescales of two weeks to two months. Periods of enhanced predictability, often referred to as forecasts of opportunity, arise from large-scale teleconnected variability, within which the stratosphere serves as an important precursor for tropospheric states, such as near-surface temperatures. While traditional diagnostics of downward coupled stratosphere-troposphere interactions typically rely on zonal-mean representations of wind and geopotential height, this dissertation presents an alternative vortex-centric framework through metrics that capture the daily geometric and dynamical evolution of the stratospheric polar vortex. The proposed stratospheric …

Paying The Price: How Financial And Health Stress Can Impact Incidental Memory In The Survival Processing Paradigm, Bailey C. Hall

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Cognitive psychologists have examined how evolutionary pressures can shape memory systems and how survival-relevant information is processed. Nairne et al. (2007) established the survival processing paradigm and showed that processing information within a survival context reliably enhances later recall. Previous research has identified academic pressure and financial stress as the most influential stressors for undergraduate students (Patel & Lewis, 2023). Financial stress is widespread and influences multiple domains of life, including health behaviors and psychological well-being (Northern et al., 2010). In this study, two scenarios were created to explore financial and health stress compared to the original grassland survival scenario. …

Time Series Decomposition And Forecasting Of Alzheimer’S Disease Mortality Using A Kolmogorov-Zurbenko Filter, Jack D. Farrell

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Alzheimer’s disease mortality has substantially risen in recent history, placing a significant burden on public health infrastructure and highlighting the need for improved analytical methods to better understand mortality data patterns and offer reliable predictions. Time series methods often struggle to balance both accuracy and interpretability, which hinders the ability to gather meaningful insights from time series data. To address these limitations, this study applies the Kolmogorov-Zurbenko (KZ) filter to monthly U.S. Alzheimer’s mortality data spanning from 1999 to 2023 and decomposes the series into long-term trend, seasonal, and noise components on a logarithmic scale. Long-term trend accounts for 86.49% …

Punishment, Fast And Slow: Five Experiments On Behavioral Economics In The Mass Incarceration Context, Nathaniel M. Schutten

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

As many jurisdictions across the United States seek to reduce their prison populations, a pressing question is whether the public will support the reforms necessary to do so. Public openness to reform likely varies across policy areas, with the path of least public resistance occurring where attitudes are the most malleable and loosely held. A major challenge, however, is that traditional methods for measuring public opinion are poorly suited to identifying which policy areas are characterized by such weakly held views.

This dissertation develops a novel behavioral economics framework for identifying these areas. I theorize that when public opinion is …

Models Of Emulation: Representations Of Foreign, Indigenous, And Accented Speech In Early American Literature, Elaina A. Frulla

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

“Models of Emulation: Representations of Foreign, Indigenous, and Accented Speech in Early American Literature” explores how American writers used depictions of “nonstandard” English and accented English language speech, traditionally described as “literary dialect,” as a way to negotiate identity, power, and political belonging in the formative years of nation building after the American Revolution. Beginning with Noah Webster’s mission to establish a standardized pronunciation of the English language that would simplify and purify spoken American-English and definitively differentiate it from what he saw as the corrupted, cosmopolitan British-English model, each of the three chapters examines literary representations of nonstandard emulated …

Neural Network Transceiver For Ltv Mimo Channels, Iresha Amarasekara

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Eigenfunctions are commonly employed to characterize kernels in various data-driven analyses. In machine learning, eigenfunction decomposition typically relies on Mercer's theorem, which assumes kernel symmetry. However, this condition is often unmet in communication systems, where channel kernels are asymmetric due to differences in downlink and uplink propagation environments. The High-Order Generalized Mercer's Theorem (HOGMT) provides a systematic approach for decomposing multidimensional asymmetric kernels into eigenfunctions. To address the complexity of eigen-decomposition, this work introduces a baseline neural network (NN) framework HNET. The HNET framework is further enhanced by incorporating the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) to explicitly enforce orthogonality constraints. This …

Stem Cell-Derived Developmental Models For Translational Evaluation Of Disease And Therapy, Maria B. Paredes-Espinosa

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Human development as well as congenital and adult diseases emerge from coordinated interactions among multiple cell types, regulatory programs, and tissue compartments that remain largely unresolved. Conventional simple lineage-restricted in vitro systems poorly capture this complexity. My dissertation uses human stem cell-derived developmental models to study human cardiac morphogenesis and heart diseases and application of a networked neuron platform to explore senescence-associated neurodegeneration impact on Alzheimer’s neurons.

Elongating multi-lineage organized cardiac (EMLOC) gastruloids are a synthetic embryology model that co-generates contractile cardiomyocyte populations alongside mesenchymal, endothelial, epicardial-like, neural crest-associated, and neuronal cells within a shared in vitro developmental environment. Single-cell …

New Game Start: Playing With Power, Community And Change In Video Gaming Culture, Jonathan D. Muller

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Video gaming culture has long been a site associated with norms and values of whiteness, masculinity, and neoliberalism, with games, players, and developers all reinforcing these. Recently though, gaming culture has been directly involved with social movements and forms of resistance that are contrary to these norms and values. The typical gamer is no longer a white man, and gaming culture is now acknowledged to include race and gender dynamics that are close to that of the broader population. These communal shifts have both challenged and reinforced existing power structures. This research addresses these shifts and struggles by analyzing how …