Digital Commons Network^™

Probing Representational Emergence In Large Language Models, Shawn Ismail

Master's Theses

This thesis investigates whether abrupt behavioral gains in large language models under scaling are accompanied by systematic changes in internal representations. It combines a behavioral screen of 65 tasks per family with targeted layerwise probing across eight decoder-only, open-weight model families. Behavioral emergence is defined for each family-task trajectory using an empirical jump detector, with segmented regression retained only as a diagnostic. The representational follow-up analyzes 27 selected MMLU subtasks shared across all families, spanning 37 checkpoints and 216 family-task units.

For each follow-up checkpoint, frozen linear probes are trained on every layer's hidden states to measure how much task-relevant …

Preserving Cherokee Culture Through Literacy And Literature: A Study Of Gendered Literacy, Rhetoric, And Cultural Continuity In The Cherokee Nation, Diana W. Baber

Master's Theses

Early explorers to what is now America, beginning with Hernando DeSoto in 1530, stole the dignity and the lands of the Indigenous peoples of America, of whom the Cherokees are only one nation. Two of the things that could not be taken was the Cherokees’ rich cultural tradition and oral histories. Stories passed orally from generation to generation to ensure that histories were preserved. They were largely preserved by the women of the tribe.

After the American Revolution, there was pressure from the new government to force the Cherokees to assimilate to the new American culture—to speak English, dress and …

‘Enemy Communist Cocksuckers’: Conceptualizing Patriotic Masculinity In Threats To Election Officials, Alma Harrison

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research on political violence demonstrates how certain aspects of masculinity are linked to asserting ideological authority and reinforcing exclusionary social identities through physical aggression, such as assaults, homicides, and gender-based violence. However, little research analyzes the use of violent threats as masculinity performances to achieve these same ends. To address this gap, this study analyzes messages from qualitative interviews with 26 election officials who experienced violent threats, examining performances of a distinct form of masculinity – patriotic masculinity – which fuses hegemonic masculine norms with patriotic values. Findings reveal ways in which actors construct and perform patriotic masculinity to frame …

Navigating Mixedness As A Multiracial Teacher, Casey S. Kraichoke

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological study utilized Critical Multiracial Theory (MultiCrit) to construct a counternarrative that amplifies the voices of Multiracial teachers, focusing on the development of personal and teacher identity. Specifically, the study critically examines the trajectory of Multiethnic-Racial (ME-R) identity transformation following experiences teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in participants’ heritage Asian countries. Data were collected through one-time semi-structured virtual interviews with fifteen purposefully selected Asian-White Multiracial EFL teachers who had completed a one-year Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) within the past decade. Each participant also provided a written artifact to support the analysis. Participants reflected on …

Genre Prediction Using Rnns And Llm-Enhanced Video Game Review Data, Gabriel Young

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

LLMs (Large Language Models) are powerful tools for engaging with textual data, carrying many advantages over classical NLP (Natural Language Processing) and ML (Machine Learning) approaches. However, a classical ML model can still be faster, more efficient to run, and accessible than an LLM. We seek to gain the benefits of LLM text comprehension and preserve them in a classical ML model, a hybrid approach. The LLM operates on text to surface relevant information and associations in our problem space, then the ML model trains on the LLM output. The model may learn from the LLM and provide a more …

Analyzing Educators’ Roles In Preparing Students For Civic Engagement In Arkansas Communities, Mia L. Hastings

Curriculum and Instruction Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study identifies practical strategies educators can implement in their instruction to strengthen students’ political efficacy and civic engagement in Arkansas communities. This qualitative research study sought to answer the question, “How do educators prepare students for civic engagement in Arkansas?” The research was conducted within the framework of a practice-based experience with the Arkansas Collegiate Civic Leadership Academy (ACCLA), a seven-month program hosted by the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute. I participated in five seminars on topics such as public service, journalism, and local governance, to analyze how engagement with these experiences can inform educators’ roles in promoting civic engagement. After …

We Are Still Lipan: Identity Erasure, Settler Colonialism, Historical Memory And The Persistence Of The Non-Reservation Lipan Apache, Freddy Cabral

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation challenges the long-standing historical narrative that the Lipan Apache disappeared in the late nineteenth century. Instead, it argues that the non-reservation Lipan Apache survived through strategic adaptation, mobility, kinship networks, and cultural continuity across the United States-Mexico borderlands. By examining the Lipan experience under Spanish colonial rule, Mexican governance, the Republic of Texas, and the State of Texas, this study demonstrates that shifting political regimes consistently pursued Indigenous land, labor, and subordination through structures of settler colonialism and racial hierarchy. Using the frameworks of settler colonialism, white supremacy, genocide studies, oral history, and autoethnography, this dissertation shows how …

Dungeons And Dragons As Game-Based Learning, Moses Allen

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

This phenomenological qualitative study explored the use of the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) Role-Playing Game as a Game-Based Learning (GBL) model, measuring middle school student perceptions of engagement, motivation, and skill development through interactive storytelling. The study used a Practitioner Research theoretical framework and Thematic Analysis to identify emergent themes from the collected data. The study included gameplay of D&D after school with a small group of participants grades 6-8. Results indicated that participants reported consistently high levels of motivation and engagement. Participants perceived that D&D gameplay promoted the development of 21st Century Skills and middle school curricula skills, specifically …

Performing (For The) Guru: A Performance Studies Approach To The Study Of Cults, Todd M. Brown

Dissertations

This project approaches a long-term experience of living in a cult through a performance studies lens. Utilizing autoethnographic methods, it explores personal insights and observations from years within the inner-circle of a coercive religious environment under tyrannical leadership. A variety of systems and relationships are narrated and analyzed according to three categories: ritualization, deployability, and occupation. Ritualization explains how a body becomes imbued with the rhythms and mantras of a cultic milieu. Deployability describes how this body is put into action at the service of the leadership. Occupation, as a metaphor, illuminates how a cultic subject becomes filled with the …

Sevoauth: Secure Voiceprint Authentication With Hash-Based Feature Transformation, Rui Zhang, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While voiceprint authentication offers convenient user authentication and access control through voice feature recognition, a critical research gap remains: existing voiceprint authentication systems fail to simultaneously achieve sound security against replay, spoofing, and adversarial attacks, preserve voice privacy leakage, and satisfy usability demand. Previous efforts have struggled to balance these issues comprehensively. To bridge this gap, we present SeVoAuth, a cloud-based Voiceprint Authentication as a Service (VAaaS) system designed to provide privacy preservation, robust security, and enhanced usability. SeVoAuth stores a synthesized voiceprint of a user in the cloud during user registration, thereby safeguarding the privacy of the real voiceprint …

Synthesis And Evaluation Of Long-Term History-Aware Medical Dialogue, Hebin Hu, Renke Dai, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yilin Kang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An effective healthcare agent must be able to recall and reason over a patient’s longitudinal medical history. However, the absence of datasets with realistic long-term dialogue timelines limits systematic evaluation. Real clinical text is constrained by privacy and ethics, while existing benchmarks focus on isolated interactions, failing to capture cross-session reasoning. We introduce a framework for synthesizing high-quality, long-term medical dialogues with LLMs. Our approach entails a knowledge-guided decomposition into three stages: constructing synthetic patient profiles with diverse disease and complication trajectories, generating multiturn dialogues per encounter, and integrating them into a coherent longitudinal history dataset, MediLongChat. We establish three …

Digital Scholarly Ecosystems: Challenges In Manuscript Preparation And Evaluation, Hrudayananda Padhan

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Scholarly communication in the digital era is becoming influenced by the problems of manuscript preparation, journal choice, and peer review in spite of the blistering technological progress and open-access publication development. Researchers frequently encounter difficulties with academic standards in writing, professional ethics of publication, engaging in the search of reliable journals, navigating complex editorial and peer review procedures, which are all the factors affecting the quality, credibility, and visibility of the research products. It follows a narrative literature review methodology to examine academic publications between 2015 and 2025, which will help to determine the main trends, organizational issues, and new …

Analyzing Professional Development To Foster Agency And Professional Growth Among Educators, Kameron Kimbrough

Dissertations

This study explores how professional development (PD) and leadership systems influence teacher agency and instructional coherence at a high-poverty, predominantly Black K–8 school in Chicago. Midwest Elementary Academy has faced persistent achievement gaps and systemic instability that hinder collaboration and teacher growth. Guided by three research questions, this exploratory case study used a mixed-methods design to examine educator perceptions of PD quality, instructional autonomy, and leadership structures. Data were collected through anonymous surveys, semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and document reviews with four educator participants. Qualitative data were coded using open and in vivo methods, and survey responses were analyzed descriptively …

Unpacking American Reception Of Glocalized Non-English Content In The Netflix Era, Sur Govindarajan

Dissertations

The swift growth of streaming services has revolutionized the worldwide distribution of media, making it possible for non-English and non-English-adjacent content to reach American consumers on a never-before-seen scale, which is sometimes perceived as an indication of increasing cultural tolerance. However, while a lot is known about what audiences see, far less is known about how they really understand and assess these stories. There is a fundamental vacuum in our understanding of audience reception as a lived, meaning-making process because previous research has mostly focused on consumption patterns. In order to close that gap, this study examines how American audiences …

Voices Of A New Era: A Discursive Psychology Study Of Influencer-Follower Discourse On Tiktok, Andrea Guerrero Hernandez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study researched and investigated the discourse of five mega fashion influencers on TikTok, as well as the discourse of 15 followers engaging with fashion influencer content on the same platform. The theory used to guide this study was discursive psychology theory, which provided the groundwork for understanding how both influencers and followers position their identities, justify their actions and decisions, and construct their reality. The primary aim of this research is to deepen understanding of how influencer discourse shapes follower discourse, identifying recurring patterns, contradictions, and the ways in which tensions are negotiated. The findings reveal a range …

Recruiting And Retaining Teachers In A Rural School District: A Case Study, Gerald J. Bavero

Dissertations

         This exploratory case study aimed to understand the specific strategies that rural school leaders employ to address the challenges associated with recruiting and retaining teachers in rural schools.  It sought to understand the effectiveness of these strategies within the unique economic and cultural landscape of South West County and to identify practices that could inform broader educational policy and practice in this and similar rural settings.  A qualitative case study approach utilizing semi-structured interview questions was conducted to discover what teacher recruitment and retention strategies school leaders implement and how teachers perceive these strategies.  Findings indicate both formal and informal …

Restorying The Reader: Adolescent Narratives Of Identity, Context, And Motivation, Jennifer R. Gardner

Dissertations

This present study examined how adolescents narrate their reading experiences and what those narratives reveal about reading identity, motivation, and engagement. This study responds to a persistent problem in literacy education: adolescent reading is often framed through disengagement or reduced to isolated constructs, while students’ lived reading experiences across school, home, digital, linguistic, and social contexts remain underexamined. Guided by Self-Determination Theory, Intersectionality, and Reader Response Theory, this study centers on adolescent voices and treats these participants’ stories as the primary avenue of understanding how they experience and interpret their reading lives and selves. Data were collected through narrative interviews, …

Science For All: Utilizing Native And Everyday Language To Increase Academic Performance And Student Engagement For High School English Language Learners, Lashanda K. Whitworth

Dissertations

In public high schools across the U.S. high stakes assessments are seen as a lever to facilitate high-quality education and to gauge student learning. English Language Learners are mainstreamed into content classes and despite having low English proficiency scores are expected to perform as well as English first students and are required to take district and state mandated biology assessments. At the research site, ELLs comprise 25% of students and consistently score below the other subgroups in biology. This quasi-experimental study tested whether using disaggregate instructional strategies—incorporating ELLs’ native and everyday language—increases learning gains, academic growth, and engagement in a …

Experiences Of Hispanic/Latine Graduate Students In Unco’S Audiology And Speech-Language Pathology Programs Within A Hispanic-Serving Institution Context: Qualitative Thematic Analysis From A Moderated Focus Group, Ashley Fuhrman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Existing literature has examined workforce diversity in healthcare as a factor that may shape patient rapport and the delivery of culturally responsive, patient-centered care. Given the increasing demand for audiologists (AuDs) and speech-language pathologists (SLPs) with diverse and multilingual backgrounds, it is important to understand how graduate programs prepare students to serve linguistically and culturally diverse populations. This qualitative study examines the experiences of Hispanic/Latine graduate students in Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC), a recently designated Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). The study explores students’ perceptions of training, support, and experiences in serving diverse populations. …

Comparative Case Studies Of How General Chemistry Ii Students Explain Entropically-Driven Phenomena, Raymundo Aragonez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Understanding how students conceptualize entropy remains a central challenge in chemistry education. Often referred to as a "driving force" of chemical reactions, the dispersal of energy as a process proceeds is indicative of a process's spontaneity or thermodynamic favorability. Students frequently default to discussing phenomena in deterministic terms, potentially reflecting the language choice and heuristics selected by the instructor such as "disorder". In this study, assessment prompts about entropy from a convenience sample of general chemistry textbooks were characterized as to their potential to elicit three-dimensional learning, and students' responses to assessment prompts from a curriculum aligned with three-dimensional learning …

Language Attitudes In El Paso: Investigating Language Loyalty, Public Perception, And The Impact Of English-Only Policies, Dalton S. Ascone

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Language attitude studies have been a vital aspect of Sociolinguistics research along the U.S.-Mexico border, with significant contributions having been made by Hugo Mejias and his colleagues in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (1986; 2003) and Hidalgo (1986) in Ciudad Juarez. However, there has been a lack of updated language attitude research in the region in recent decades, particularly in the city of El Paso, which, up to now, has not been the subject of a general language attitude survey. The present project seeks to investigate the language attitudes of bilingual Spanish-speakers living in the El Paso region through the …

Health Disparities In El Paso's Low-Income Hispanic Communities: A Mixed-Methods Analysis Of Acculturation, Obesity Metrics, And Socio-Cultural Determinants, Karen Del Rio

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Health disparities among low-income Hispanic immigrants in the United States are shaped by complex interactions between acculturation, structural inequality, and socio-cultural determinants that behavioral and epidemiological models have not fully explained. This dissertation examines the relationship between acculturation and obesity-related outcomes among uninsured and low-income Hispanic adults of Mexican descent in El Paso, Texas, using a three-article, sequential, explanatory, mixed-methods design grounded in Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit).Article 1 presents a systematic review of 20 peer-reviewed studies examining acculturation and obesity among Mexican Americans, finding consistent evidence that longer U.S. residence is associated with increased BMI and obesity prevalence, mediated …

College Administrative Officers' Lived Experiences Navigating Financial Crises At A Research-Intensive Hsi, Brianna Ashley Licerio

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological study examined how College Administrative Officers (CAOs) at a research-intensive Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) on the U.S.-Mexico border make sense of and respond to federally induced financial disruptions. Guided by adaptive leadership and informed by sensemaking, the study explored how CAOs interpret funding instability while working to sustain institutional operations, institutional trust, and commitments to servingness. The central research question was: How do CAOs describe their role in maintaining financial stability during federal funding disruptions at a research-intensive HSI on the U.S.-Mexico border? Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with five CAOs representing academic colleges at …

Human Papillomavirus (Hpv) Vaccine Acceptance: A Mixed-Methods Study And Randomized Controlled Trial Examining Messengers Of Hpv Vaccine Information Among Hispanic Parents, Alyssa Andrea Martinez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Hispanics make up 19.5% of the U.S. population, making them the nation's largest ethnic minority. Hispanics are disproportionately impacted by health outcomes, including many different types of cancers that are caused by the Human Papillomavirus (HPV). An HPV vaccine is available that can prevent 90% of HPV associated cancers. The purpose of this mixed-methods study and randomized experiment is to develop and test data-driven digital health messages to promote the HPV vaccine in Hispanic parents. Four specific aims were conducted among three major studies. Aim 1 (Study 1): A cross-sectional survey was conducted to obtain preliminary evidence on trusted messengers …

The Creature From Space: A Science Fiction Musical, Monroe Nathaniel Oxley

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

My thesis examines how the musical The Creature from Space uses metatheatre, musical form, and science fiction to explore identity, conformity, and social control within a fictional 1950s Texas town. Centered on Lilly, a young woman struggling between loyalty to her hometown and the desire for personal freedom, the musical reimagines conventions of the Golden Age American musical while critiquing the ideological structures embedded within them. Drawing on works such as Oklahoma!, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Schmigadoon!, Little Shop of Horrors, and Ride the Cyclone, the project examines how musical theatre constructs and reinforces social roles through performance. The …

The Moderating Role Of Cannabis Use Motives On The Relationship Between Intragroup Marginalization And Cannabis Use In Hispanic Emerging Adults, Austin Ray Vernon

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Cannabis use has become increasingly normalized among emerging adults, yet associated risks to health remain a growing concern. Cannabis use among Hispanic populations has risen over the past decade, underscoring the need to examine culturally relevant factors that may influence use patterns and related harm. Intragroup marginalization, a culturally specific form of identity-based rejection from one's own ethnic group, may represent one such factor. The present study examined whether intragroup marginalization is associated with cannabis use outcomes and whether cannabis use motives moderate these associations. Participants were 358 Hispanic college students recruited from a U.S.-Mexico border university. Following informed consent, …

"Ostracized As We Are With God": Mina Loy's Anti-Career And The Search For Originality, Peyton L. Phillips

Master's Theses

Among many modernist artists, Mina Loy remains one of the most complex and allusive. Recent posthumous exposure of Loy's life and work adds to this precarity. A significant piece of Loy's life that is especially complex to contemporaries is her time spent writing. By establishing Loy's subjective relationship with her Victorian upbringing, this paper seeks to show examples of its influence on her search for originality. Mainly, the paper examines Loy's concept of originality, where that concept may have come from, and how it is reflected in her literature. The paper analyzes three of Loy's literary works, her poems "Virgins …

Beyond Moving Hands: Narratives Around Deaf Education, Sara Simpson

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative narrative study explored the experiences and perspectives of deaf educators and educational interpreters working in high school settings. Participants shared narratives about their professional experiences, training, and roles in deaf education. By considering their professional histories, backgrounds, and cultural perspectives, this study examined how these experiences shaped participants’ perceptions of the current state of deaf education.

Using a qualitative narrative research design, three participants with experience working in high school deaf education settings were interviewed individually and later participated in a focus group discussion. The interviews and focus group centered on participants’ perspectives regarding key issues in deaf …

Teacher Narratives Of Curriculum Implementation In Bilingual Education: A Vygotskian Analysis, Jose F. Orozco

Theses and Dissertations

This narrative inquiry explores bilingual educators' experiences implementing the Amplify Reading curriculum in a diverse, Title I-funded urban district. As schools adopt standardized curricula, tensions emerge between monolingual standards and the needs of bilingual students. Using a Vygotskian framework with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and Knowledge Structures (KS), the study examines how teachers navigate systemic contradictions and how these tensions influence their professional identities.

Using an interpretivist approach, data were collected via semi-structured interviews, a focus group, and a researcher’s journal from six experienced bilingual educators. Thematic analysis reveals profound structural fractures within the activity system: a primary contradiction between …

Voices From The Classroom: Elementary Teachers’ Perspectives On Teaching And Learning During The Covid-19 Pandemic – A Case Study And Autoethnography, Alicia Lopez-Hernandez

Theses and Dissertations

Guided by constructivist learning theory and sociocultural theory, this qualitative case study and autoethnography examines how bilingual educators constructed knowledge, adapted instructional practices, and utilized mediational tools within face-to-face, online and hybrid learning environments. These frameworks informed the study’s design, data analysis, and interpretation of findings related to pedagogy, technology integration, and student engagement. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews, naturalistic observations, and autoethnographic reflective journaling.