Digital Commons Network^™

Enhancing Emotional Support For Advanced Placement Students, Laine Mckay Nesbitt

Theses and Dissertations

Although they may struggle with their emotional well-being, academically accelerated students are underrepresented in the research literature. Teachers are in a position to influence students' emotional well-being. Minimal qualitative research with student voices has been conducted. This study highlights the perspectives of students who have participated in an academically accelerated program. Students were interviewed about what their teachers do to help or hinder their emotional well-being and what they wish that teachers could do to support their emotional well-being. A total of 14 high school students were interviewed using the critical incident technique (CIT). The participants emphasized the importance of …

Maternal Perspectives On Support Needs: Insights From The Fonofale Model, Sara Lani Ditto

Theses and Dissertations

This interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) explored the lived experiences of parents raising children with disabilities in American Samoa. Five participants across two focus groups shared their perspectives on navigating educational, healthcare, and community systems while supporting their children with disabilities. Using the fonofale model as a cultural framework, the study incorporated culturally responsive methodology including card sort activities to facilitate dialogue on potentially sensitive topics. Analysis followed the Nizza et al. (2021) IPA approach, progressing from exploratory notes to experiential statements, clustered themes, and finally overarching themes. Findings revealed four major themes: systemic burden on parents, structural and service gaps, …

Practical Implementation Of Ethnomathematics To Increase The Engagement, Math Self-Efficacy, And Hawaiian Cultural Identity Of HawaiʻI Algebra 2 Students, Kamalani George Mamatuki Kaluhiokalani

Theses and Dissertations

The underrepresentation of Hawaiian cultural practices in mathematics education has contributed to a disconnect between students' cultural identities and their academic experiences, resulting in diminished engagement among Native Hawaiian learners. This design-based research examines the integration of ethnomathematics into high school mathematics curricula, with a focus on Hawaiian cultural practices as frameworks for teaching mathematical concepts. Participants include approximately 100 students in Hawaiʻi from a public school and a private school, as well as two mathematics teachers with varying degrees of experience in culturally responsive pedagogy and ethnomathematics. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study collects data through classroom observations, teacher …

Influence Of Timed Repeated Readings On Grade 2 French Immersion Students' Reading Fluency And Comprehension, Kathryn Rosie Baldwin

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the effects of Timed Repeated Reading (TRR) on reading fluency, comprehension, and reading attitudes among second grade students in a French Dual Language Immersion (DLI) program in Utah. Forty-one students from two pre-existing classroom groups participated over 11 weeks, with one class receiving TRR and the other serving as a control. Fluency was measured in correct words per minute (CWPM), comprehension through cloze tests, and attitudes using a seven-item affective survey with a four-point visual scale. A mixed between-within subjects ANOVA analysed pre- and post-test data across four intervals. Results showed significant fluency gains over time for …

Beyond The Bell Curve: Understanding Native American Academic Placements, Sarah-Margaret Clark

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined biases regarding the referrals that teachers make regarding student placement recommendations for Native American students. Special education teachers (n = 97) from around the United States completed a digital card sort task involving 24 fictitious student record cards. The student record cards contained subtle information about the ethnicity of the student, as indicated through the use of racial identification (Native American, Asian, or White) on the student records and the use of student names that may be associated with these three categories. Academic information was equal among each of these three groups. Each group contained identical male …

Urban Indian Parents' Occupational Perceptions Of Play And Governance Of Children's Excessive Screen Time Preferences And Behaviours In This Digital Era, Joanna Priyadarshini Udaykumar, Tony Sam George

International Journal of Playwork Practice

Abstract

Children’s innate urge to engage in joyous, self-directed, meaningful, iterative activities embodies their unique play experiences and facilitates their holistic development. However, the exponential growth of digital technology in an urbanized world has transformed their social landscape by offering them a plethora of novel play opportunities that ‘pushes children away from the outdoors and pulls them indoors’. Moreover, the radical transition from nature-based recreation to media-centric activity insinuates the surge of a global pandemic characterized by low physical activity, sleep deprivation and sedentary, lifestyle diseases. This emerging trend reflects children’s predilection for videophilia over biophilia due to the dominance …

Fragile Hope And The Cultural Life Of Law, Shefali Jain

Socio-Legal Review

This review of Sandhya Fuchs’ Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India (Stanford University Press 2024) highlights that the book makes a genuinely original ethnographic and conceptual contribution to caste studies and hate crime scholarship. At the same time, the essay argues that there are three limitations to its framework that require greater engagement: the book’s failure to engage with the legal consciousness tradition in socio-legal scholarship, an underdeveloped account of “legal meliorism,” and an unresolved tension between the book’s stated commitment to victim-centred analysis and its ethnographic evidence that frequently discusses movement-level aspirations.

Artificial Intelligence For Deep Earth Science: Key Challenges, Major Application Scenarios And Development Pathways, Qingyun Di, Liang Zhao, Yikang Zheng, Zhi Geng, Zhichao Yu, Xiaocai Shan, Chao Li, Zhiyao Xu, Pengfei Lv

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

Deep Earth science is central to understanding Earth’s internal architecture and the coupled evolution of its major spheres, while also underpinning energy security, the supply of critical mineral resources, and resilience to major geohazards. Nevertheless, the advancement of deep Earth science is currently hindered by insufficient in situ observations under extreme conditions, the difficulty of integrating multi-source heterogeneous data, and the limited capability to model complex multiphysics coupling processes. Recent advances in artificial intelligence offer a potential route beyond these limitations. By integrating data-driven learning with physical and geological understanding, AI is reshaping deep Earth science from empirical interpretation to …

Effects Of A Peer Mentoring Program For Adolescent Newcomers On Feelings Of Peer Connectedness And School Belonging, Eden Elizabeth Moon Barnhill

Theses and Dissertations

There is a significant lack of empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of peer mentoring to support newcomer students, particularly for refugee populations. This study evaluated the effects of a peer mentor program for newcomer students on their feelings of peer connectedness and school belonging in a high school setting. Participants were made up of 15 newcomer student mentees across three high schools. Measures were administered pre- and post-intervention, and participants were also interviewed about their experience. Results indicated no quantitative findings of significance but did yield a small positive effect size for peer connectedness. According to qualitative data, many participants …

Teaching Intercultural Communicative Competence (Icc) At The Afl Novice Level: Teachers’ Practices And Constraints, Nancy Fahmy

Theses and Dissertations

Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) is widely recognized as a core objective in language education; however, its implementation in novice-level Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) classroom remains insufficiently examined. This study explores what strategies do AFL teachers use to integrate ICC principles at the beginner level (A1–A2), the constraints that shape classroom practice, teachers’ assessment approaches, and perceived professional development needs.

Using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, quantitative data were collected through a bilingual (Arabic–English) online survey completed by 54 AFL teachers working across instructional contexts in Egypt, Jordan, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Qualitative data were subsequently gathered …

From Unfinished Sentences To Unfinished Degrees: A Reflection On Students’ Struggles With Academic Writing In The Context Of Retention In Higher Institutes Of Education, Irina Ruppo

Irish Journal of Academic Practice

This article explores the experiences and beliefs of students whose struggles with academic writing had led to contemplation of withdrawal from the university. It proposes that the absence of writing as a separate factor in existing retention models obscures the importance of writing issues to students’ persistence with their chosen course of study. Through a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with undergraduate students, the article suggests that students’ struggles with writing may be distinct from their overall difficulties with the workload. Four beliefs about academic writing are identified as potentially contributing to the students’ malintegrative experience within the institution. Seeing …

Ucedd Innovations Lead To Idd Networks’ Driving Change: Envision, Empower, Employ, Suzzanne Freeze, Jean Winsor, Brittany M. Powers, Amy Huppi

Developmental Disabilities Network Journal

State systems responsible for administering employment services and supports to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) must acclimate to changing demands, address new regulations, and continue to meet needs in an era of high workforce turnover and uncertain funding. While improvements have been made across the U.S., there are still far too many individuals seeking meaningful employment and contributory roles in the community who are not supported to achieve those goals. A key success factor is providing publicly funded state systems with the information needed to strategically pivot toward priorities and ensure smooth transitions of organizational change. Our country’s …

The Efficacy Of Open Educational Resources On Achievement Outcomes In Higher Education Institutions, Charles Trevor Alder

Theses and Dissertations

Achievement gaps remain a concern in higher education, reflected in differences in academic performance, retention, and persistence. These gaps often affect students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and underserved populations. Open educational resources (OER) have been suggested to reduce financial barriers and support student success. This study examined whether student-level and institutional-level factors predict academic performance in a business management course using OER. Average quiz scores were collected from students across 12 higher education institutions and analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling. Colleges were included in the analysis to determine whether outcomes differed based on the proportion of minority and Pell-eligible students. …

Urban Teachers’ Perceptions Of The Influence Of Their Alternate Route Certification Programs On Their Retention, Jenifer Phillips

Student Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative case study explored how secondary teachers in one urban public school system described their experiences in alternate-route certification programs and how those experiences shaped their decisions to stay in the classroom. As districts continue relying on alternate-route teachers to address ongoing shortages, it is important to understand how teachers interpret their preparation, coaching, and early classroom experiences through the lens of adult learning, or andragogy, and what supports they believe actually helped them succeed with students, particularly in areas such as phonological awareness, classroom management, and foundational instructional practices. A total of 196 teachers met the study’s criteria …

Exploring Teachers' Perceptions Of The Influence Of Social Emotional Competencies On Virtual Students' Academic Success, Melanie Cheyanne Spence

Student Theses and Dissertations

The problem addressed in this study is that the effects of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) competencies on academic achievement for virtual learners in a Grades 5-8 classroom are not well known. The purpose of this qualitative narrative study was to explore teachers’ perceptions of how the practice of SEL competencies by students influence their academic success in a virtual Grades 5-8 classroom. This qualitative narrative inquiry was based around Social Emotional Learning (SEL), a conceptual framework identified by CASEL as including five competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. The target audience was educational stakeholders who are …

The Impact Of Underrepresentation Of Male African American Teachers On African American Students’ (K-12) Classroom Learning, Carenzo George

Student Theses and Dissertations

The persistent underrepresentation of African American male educators in K–12 schools remains a significant concern in the field of education, particularly given the growing diversity of the student population. Despite increasing attention to teacher diversity, African American males continue to represent a small percentage of the teaching workforce. This disparity raises important questions about how representation influences the educational experiences of African American students. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions of African American male teachers and administrators regarding the impact of the underrepresentation of African American male educators on African American students’ classroom experiences. …

Examining The Influence Of Principals’ Transformational Leadership In Promoting Conducive School Culture And Secondary Esl Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs, Chanda Yvonne Williams

Student Theses and Dissertations

Secondary ESL teachers face diverse classrooms and complex instructional demands. As the number of multilingual learners continues to increase in secondary schools, ESL teachers must support students’ language development while also helping them access rigorous academic content across subject areas. This phenomenological study explored how principals’ transformational leadership and school culture influence secondary ESL teachers’ self-efficacy. Drawing on Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory (1997) and Bass’s Transformational Leadership Theory (1985), the study examined how leadership behaviors and school environments shape teachers’ confidence and motivation. Semi-structured interviews with 10 ESL teachers in a southeastern metropolitan district elicited focused accounts of how specific leadership …

Integration Of Culturally Responsive Teaching Strategies In High School Science Classes, Pamela Chanell Williams

Student Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative case study investigated the integration of culturally responsive teaching strategies in high school science classes. The problem addressed in this study is that teachers are underprepared to employ culturally responsive teaching strategies to facilitate academic success in science courses for culturally and linguistically diverse students. By investigating the integration of culturally responsive teaching strategies during instruction, improvements can be made to the effectiveness of professional development centered on culturally responsive teaching strategies found in the Ready for Rigor framework. The conceptual framework that served as the foundation for this study was Hammond’s (2015) Ready for Rigor framework. Questionnaires, …

An Analysis Of How Educators’ Attitudes Toward Individuals With Intellectual Disabilities Impact Assessment Scores Of Students With Learning Disabilities, Felicia Baty Goings

Student Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzed how educators’ attitudes toward individuals with intellectual disabilities impact summative assessment scores of students with learning disabilities. The research problem addressed in this study was the increase in the number of special education students receiving inclusive instruction who scored at Levels 3 or 4 on the Arkansas Teaching and Learning Assessment System (ATLAS) mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) summative assessment. The findings are relevant to educators and education stakeholders wanting to improve inclusion practices. The purpose of this correlational quantitative study was to determine whether there was a significant difference in students’ summative assessment scores and …

Educator Perceptions Of The Impact Of The Avid Program On Minority Students’ School Achievement, Genia Smith

Student Theses and Dissertations

While Hispanic and African American college enrollment rates have increased over the past 20 years, minority students continue to face structural and educational barriers that make it more challenging for them to prepare for and gain entry to college. The Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program is a college preparatory initiative designed to provide additional academic and social support for historically disadvantaged students. Guided by a socio-cultural theoretical framework, this mixed-methods survey-based study explored the perceptions of 10 administrators and 10 teachers in a Southeast region school district regarding the impacts of AVID on minority students’ achievement. The findings revealed …

Through Their Eyes: Understanding And Enhancing Retention Among Special Education Teachers Of Color, Barry L. Fargo

Student Theses and Dissertations

Retaining special education teachers of color within public schools remains an ongoing challenge. Although research on teacher retention has expanded in recent years, less attention has focused on how relational and organizational conditions shape the lived experiences of these teachers. Guided by the Four-Capital Theoretical Model of Teacher Retention, this qualitative phenomenological study explored how social and structural capital shaped the retention experiences of special education teachers of color. Participants included 15 special education teachers of color currently serving in K–12 roles in U.S. public schools with at least two years of special education teaching experience. Data were collected through …

Analysis Of Inclusive Practices Using A Co-Teaching Model On English Learners With Disabilities, Shawna Shields

Student Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of general and special education teachers who implemented co-teaching as a model of inclusive instruction for English Learners (ELs) with disabilities in a suburban middle school district. Grounded in Cook and Friend’s (1995) co-teaching framework and informed by sociocultural theory, the study examined how teachers collaborated, negotiated roles, and balanced language development with disability-related supports. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and a Co-teaching Collaboration Survey administered to 12 educators. Thematic analysis revealed that trust and parity support effective co-teaching partnerships, that language-forward scaffolds and interaction-based strategies promote engagement, and …

American Sign Language Recognition And Analysis Using Deep Learning, Saurabh Kumar Soni

Master’s Dissertations

In this work I build a system that recognizes isolated American Sign Language (ASL) words, and I use it to ask one fairly direct question: when training data is scarce, is it better to look at the video pixels or at the geometry of the signer’s body? To find out, I train two very different models on exactly the same clips. The first is appearance-based. Every frame is run through standard preprocessing and a ResNet50 backbone pre-trained on ImageNet, which turns it into a 2048-dimensional feature vector, and a Bidirectional LSTM then reads that sequence over time. The second model …

Enhanced Embedding For Multimodal Medical Visual Question And Answering, Akash Suna

Master’s Dissertations

Visual Answering of questions in the field of Medical which is called as (VqA) has grown as a dominant area of research that fuse processing of natural language and vision of computer often known as CV or NLP to assist in medical decision-making. However, effective multimodal fusion between medical images and clinical questions remains a significant challenge. This thesis examines the application of the Perceiver IO architecture as an efficient multimodal aggregator for medical VQA. The work has been carried out in multiple directions. First, a classification-based framework is developed by combining Vision Transformer (ViT) and ClinicalBERT alongside a Perceiver …

Bridging Cultural Gaps In Enhancing Mental Health Support For The Bhutanese Community, Subash Chandra Majhi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

The Overdrive Anomaly: A Philosophical And Technical Appeal For Aligned Cognitive Scaffolding In Tomorrow's Stewards, Christopher L. Eckes

Defensive Publications Series

This appeal exposes a critical structural risk in the trajectory of modern global technology: the destabilizing asymmetry between exponential physical infrastructure and linear human cognitive development. By optimizing resources exclusively for external execution milestones—such as aerospace transit, automated manufacturing, and centralized compute networks—modern innovation paradigms treat human agency as a passive, downstream variable.

This paper demonstrates that without the systemic deployment of cryptographically secure, localized cognitive mentorship and sovereign security scaffolding, accelerating technological matrices will induce widespread psychological alienation and cognitive fragmentation. We present a formal, non-negotiable appeal to the global engineering community to reprioritize individual psychological sovereignty as the …

Systemic Integration Of Lifelong Agentic Mentorship, Contextual Scaffolding, And Sovereign Guardian Protocols In K-12 Pedagogy, Christopher L. Eckes

Defensive Publications Series

This specification details the architecture for a non-centralized, lifelong educational operating system that integrates machine learning as an individualized cognitive accelerator, psychometric auditor, and sovereign security layer. This protocol systematically replaces age-segregated, standardized instructional rotations with an immutable Dual-Focus Baseline Matrix paired with a localized Lifelong Cognitive Mentor.

By tracking an individual's development continuously from the primary entry point (K-1) through adulthood, the system implements Probabilistic Scaffolding—balancing automated aptitude mapping with deliberately engineered "negative learning" spaces. Furthermore, it incorporates an active Guardian Sensor Layerutilizing real-time linguistic and behavioral anomaly detection to insulate the child from predatory coercion and manipulative algorithm …

Before And After School: Pragmatic Lessons In Disaster Didactics, Myron Moses Jackson

Dewey Studies

No abstract provided.

Efficient Multimodal Foundation Model Tuning For Hallucination Mitigation, Fei Zhao

ETDs from 2020-2029

Over the past few years, multimodal foundation models have achieved remarkable progress in perception and understanding. However, two challenges limit their reliability: (1) dependence on offline training, which in most real-world settings requires large volumes of labeled data and, as a result, hinders the model’s ability to adapt to new data or domains; (2) weak cross-modal grounding, which often leads to hallucinated content generation, producing descriptions that are linguistically fluent but inconsistent with the input visual evidence. This dissertation frames hallucination mitigation as an outcome of transitioning from fixed learning (static, offline fine-tuning) to adaptive, feedback-driven lifelong learning. By incorporating …

Behind The Screen: Exploring How Undergraduate Students Experience Sense Of Belonging In Online Learning Environments In The United States, Grace Ellen Kiersznowski

ETDs from 2020-2029

Enrollment in online courses in higher education has been rising rapidly over the past couple of decades and has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic. This has made higher learning more accessible for students who would otherwise have difficulty earning a degree. Online education poses many barriers to students’ development of a sense of belonging, something research has been found to be of great importance to student success and well-being. Relatively little was known about students’ sense of belonging in online learning environments prior to the pandemic. Since the pandemic, online education has undergone major changes, changing the landscape in a …