Digital Commons Network^™

An Analysis Of The Influence Of Project-Based Assessments In Middle School Mathematics, Andrea Fettkether

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

In today’s diverse classrooms, teachers face the challenge of educating students with varied academic abilities, including those with disabilities, gifted learners, and students at grade level. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) ensures inclusive access to core curriculum, but educators must differentiate instruction to meet all learners’ needs. Traditional assessments focus on rote memorization, often failing to reflect deeper understanding or real-world problem-solving.

In middle school math, standard curricula often lack project-based assessments, despite research supporting their effectiveness in improving academic achievement and student engagement. Students benefit from working in collaborative environments where they can discuss mathematical ideas, receive …

Transforming The Chemistry Classroom: Flipped Learning As A Scaffold For Inquiry, Hannah Alicia Nash

Graduate Research Papers

No abstract provided.

The Shared Superintendent In Iowa: Benefits, Challenges, And Lessons Learned Over The Last Thirty Years, Amanda Schmidt

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This study examined the benefits, challenges, and leadership qualities associated with the shared superintendent model, and compared them with lessons learned over the last thirty years. Understanding how this model impacts dynamics within schools and the community is crucial to identifying strategies that support effective governance and enhance educational outcomes for all involved. A qualitative, phenomenological study approach was used to research the role of the shared superintendent in rural Iowa. Participants were those who served as a shared superintendent between a minimum of two school districts within the state of Iowa and have held this position for at least …

Improving Efficiency In Noma Schemes Having Inter-User Interference Using Mechanism Design, Zory Marantz

Publications and Research

Modern wireless systems utilize non-orthogonal multiple access to increase their rate capacities; however, the efficiency of the individual utility defined in bits per Joule has yet to be considered. Multiple variations of non-orthogonal multiple access have the interference of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio as a function of the received power from multiple other users due to code implementations that are non-orthogonal or non-ideal cancellation in successive-interference-cancellation methods. Game theoretic concepts are used to improve user bits-per-Joule performance. Previous solutions increment transmit power and are not based on closed form systematic methods. The mechanism design presented here led to a non-cooperative Nash …

Shaping Ai With Purpose: Priming, Pre-Prompting And Iterative Questioning To Improve Ai Responses, Carrie Fry

Copley Library: Faculty Scholarship

Presentation/Workshop for the MLGSCA & NCNMLG Joint Meeting, January 17-18, 2026.

Abstract: Librarians and library staff are increasingly called on to support faculty, clinicians, and students in navigating large-language-model generative AI tools (e.g. Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT). Yet many of these systems default to generic, bland, and even hallucinated responses that overlook the nuance of clinical inquiry, the expertise of the user, or the tone appropriate for academic and healthcare settings.

This session introduces three strategies—priming, pre-prompting, and iterative questioning—to allow users to guide AI tools toward more useful, context-aware output. Through hands-on work and guided exercises, attendees will shape AI …

Gibson Point Aerial, Chatham County Geographic Survey Department (Savannah, Ga)

Defending Savannah: History and Archaeology of the Gibson's Point Battery

An aerial photo of Gibson Point Battery with 1 foot contour lines, published by the Chatham County Geographic Information Systems Department in 2026.

Chatham County Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Department. 2026. Topographic Contour Map Overlay of Whitemarsh Island Battery Site (Battery Circle/Battery Way). Savannah, GA: Chatham County GIS

Broken Lands And Trusts: The Omnipresence Of The Natives’ Land Act Of 1913 And The Persistence Of Its Inequity, Emily Venkatesan

Emory International Law Review

The hallmark of all colonial and ex-colonial states is the preservation of racial hierarchy where a minority of white colonizers reserve complete control over the political, social, and economic landscape of a colonized nation. One of the most powerful exercises of this colonial oversight is the use of western property law to strip native landowners of their property interests and redistribute that land to white colonizer for economic and social power. Access and ownership of land is crucial for maintaining the colonial state. Land provides social and economic leverage in the hands of the indigenous nation, but strengthens the colonial …

Construyendo Comunidades Inclusivas: Estrategias Para Fomentar La Unidad En Iglesias Progresistas Diversas, Andi C. Villar Arroyo

Apuntes: Reflexiones teológicas desde el margen hispano

This article explores the challenges and opportunities faced by progressive churches in balancing their cultural identity with inclusive principles. It argues that inclusive language, intercultural communication, and diverse leadership are key strategies for fostering cohesive and equitable faith communities. Drawing from biblical teachings and Wesleyan theology, the article emphasizes that embracing diversity strengthens the church’s mission of unity, justice, and spiritual growth. By implementing these practices, congregations can create a welcoming environment where all members feel valued, respected, and actively engaged in the life of the church.

¿El Futuro Es Latino En La Iglesia Metodista Unida De Arkansas? Un Análisis Pastoral-Teológico Desde La Práctica, Lupita Chavarria-Garcia

Apuntes: Reflexiones teológicas desde el margen hispano

This article offers a pastoral-theological analysis of the near absence of intentional ministry with the growing Latino community within the Arkansas Conference of the United Methodist Church. Drawing on demographic data, denominational documents and the author’s 23 years of experience in Arkansas—first as a Roman Catholic layperson and now as the only Latina United Methodist pastor in the state—the essay situates Latino families’ profound spiritual hunger within a context marked by economic, spiritual and sexual abuse in some independent and evangelical churches. It contrasts this vulnerability with the structural responses of the Catholic Church in Arkansas (such as Spanish-language liturgies …

Privacy’S Autonomy Thicket: Disentangling Choice, Consent And Control, Jordan Francis, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards

Faculty Scholarship

When it comes to talking about autonomy, privacy law could use a little clarity. Its discourse uses terms like “choice,” “consent,” and “control” to evoke autonomy, but these terms are too rarely defined and too often used interchangeably, even though they can mean very different things. The three terms have become entangled in a way that has become confusing and counterproductive. We call this problem “privacy’s autonomy thicket,” and it matters because it encourages talking past each other in policy debates, enabling the redefinition of these terms in misleading ways that produce weak and disempowering “notice and choice” regimes.

In …

Universities, Capital, And Democratic Vulnerability, Steven Dean, Dana Brakman Reiser

Faculty Scholarship

For many, the university serves as a crucial guardian of democracy. Still, the capitulation of leading American private universities to authoritarian pressure from the Trump Administration should not be terribly surprising. This Essay offers one reason why. It does so by focusing on the law governing private nonprofit universities. It examines both the origins and the impact of a fundamental tension between their charitable missions and their need for capital. It shows how the legal framework designed to protect these nonprofit universities from market pressures can actually intensify their vulnerability.

The so-called “nondistribution constraint” stands at the core of U.S. …

Romanist-Bourgeois Property And The Development Of The Modern Capitalist World System, Anna Di Robilant

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the role of Romanist-bourgeois property law in the development of the modern capitalist world system, focusing on how nineteenth-century jurists deliberately crafted and adapted Roman law-based property doctrines to address the evolving social relations of production in both Europe and its peripheries. Rather than viewing legal concepts as merely reflective of broader economic transformations, the author highlights the active role played by a professional class of jurists in shaping property law to legitimize and structure emergent capitalist class dynamics. The article critically engages with competing scholarly perspectives that either privilege market expansion or downplay class relations, arguing …

The Anti-Federalism Of Hr1, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The budget reconciliation bill signed on July 4, 2025 (“HR1”) weakened the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its core goal of near-universal health insurance coverage. To maintain 2017 tax cuts, Congress curtailed the ACA’s Medicaid eligibility expansion; simultaneously, HR1 limited the kinds of options states have been able to exercise within Medicaid while pushing the costs of deep cuts down to states. This essay argues that HR1 embodies an anti-federalism approach, and that anti-federalism is not the same as federalizing health reforms. In the past, Congress sometimes federalized health care or public health reforms to respond to …

Keeping Evidence Real, Anya Bernstein, Julia Simon-Kerr

Faculty Scholarship

Commentators largely agree that the Federal Rules of Evidence have problems. Expert testimony standards admit junk science. Impeachment rules chill defendant testimony. The hearsay regime defies consistent application and obstructs self-representation. The list goes on: Many rules fail to assist, or affirmatively thwart, jurors trying to make good decisions. Such shortcomings disproportionately harm those with the least power in the system, raising profound questions about whether the evidence code serves its statutory mandate—to promote truth and justice in court proceedings. In the face of widely recognized problems, the government body charged with managing the evidence code—the Advisory Committee on Evidence …

The Hypocrisy Of Data Governance, Zubair Shafiq, Olivia Figueira, Athina Markopoulou, Woodrow Hartzog, Michael Lavine

Faculty Scholarship

“Data governance” is an empty term, like a Rorschach inkblot just waiting to be filled with meaning. Tech companies take advantage of this ambiguity to craft narratives about their data-governance capabilities to fit their audience and purpose. On one hand, tech companies brag about their data-governance capabilities when it fits their business model (for example, to advertisers) and public image (for example, to their customers). On the other hand, tech companies claim that meaningful data governance is challenging or impossible when accountability is demanded.

In this Article, we argue that tech companies systematically misrepresent or selectively ignore their data-governance capabilities. …

Third-Party Funding: Balancing Transparency, National Security, And Access To Justice, Victoria Sahani

Faculty Scholarship

Many lawmakers who have recently become aware of the multi-billion-dollar global third-party funding industry are raising new national security concerns that further complicate preexisting, longstanding debates about transparency, disclosure, access to justice, and the best way to regulate third-party funding. In response, this Article briefly asserts three main points relating to the question of how best to regulate third-party funding. First, this Article explains the third-party funding industry, including its global regulatory landscape and how it serves three distinct populations: consumers, businesses, and law firms. Second, this Article explains that third-party funding is one tool that can help expand access …

Memory Warriors, Pluralists, And Abnegators In Constitutional Interpretation: An Essay On Jack Balkin's Pluralist Originalism In Memory And Authority, Jed Handelsman Shugerman, Zachary Shugerman Handelsman

Faculty Scholarship

Jack Balkin’s Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation brings into conversation the scholarly insights of constitutional theory, history, and the growing field of “the politics of memory,” especially the concept of the “memory entrepreneur.”

Balkin appropriately connects the memory wars in American constitutional law back to Eastern

European memory wars during the World Wars and their aftermath. Prompted by Balkin, we turn to Jan Kubik and Michael Bernhard edited volume Twenty Years After Communism (2014), which has become even more widely influential after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and a new round of Eastern European memory wars. …

Hazel A. Oxenford, Ph.D., Nancy Brown-Peterson

Miscellaneous Documents

No abstract provided.

Beyond Digital Pessimism: How A Focus On Trust Can Enhance Eu Digital Law, Neil Richards, Woodrow Hartzog, Claire Boine, Lea Despotis

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers looking to foster technological innovation on the European market are adopting laws they hope will promote consumer trust in digital products. Their strategy can be broken down into three components. First, they aim to empower consumers to choose how much data they want to share with companies through an express consent framework. Second, they seek to avoid harms from digital products through product safety law such as adapting the Product Safety Regulation to digital products or adopting the AI Act. Third, they endeavor to prevent manipulation of consumers through digital means.

In this essay, we argue that while laudable, …

Spending Programs And The New Roberts Court, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court is poised to place new limits on Congress’s spending power at the urging of states vying for regulatory dominance, particularly in health care and public health. This article is the first to highlight and catalog the throughlines of argumentation, which sparked after states successfully challenged the ACA but have grown into opposing more than Medicaid’s cooperative federalism. This means federal and state programs that heavily rely on federal spending power are at risk, so studying this pattern is imperative. The article begins with a descriptive account of increasing spending power challenges, which make use of converging factors …

Uncorrected, Janet Freilich, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Faculty Scholarship

In addition to making rules and deciding outcomes, the legal system generates, curates and shares information. When the system gets rules and outcomes wrong, it is obviously a problem, and much effort (and scholarly attention) goes into identifying those mistakes and fixing them. But the system also gets information wrong; a problem mostly overlooked by policymakers and scholars. Those information mistakes matter too: they are prevalent and harmful. We show here that even when the mistakes are widely known and the errors broadly acknowledged, the information very often goes uncorrected. As a result, people make decisions based on bad information …

The Unitary Theorists' Appointments Clause Problems, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The unitary executive theorists’ recent retreat to the Appointments Clause as a basis for unconditional presidential removal power is contradicted by the text and by overwhelming originalist evidence.

It is a surprising argument for a power of presidential removal, because the text of the Appointments Clause plainly requires both the President and Senate to appoint. The noncommon sense reading, that the president alone appoints, and thus the president can remove, was not in any of the Trump Administration’s briefs, but it was in a single amicus brief, and it was picked up in oral argument and the mainstream media.

This …

The Missing Constitutional Law Of Executive Conditions, Nicole Huberfeld, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Scholarship

This Article contributes to development of the constitutional law of executive conditions. Courts are wrestling with the constitutionality of federal efforts to encourage what the federal government cannot mandate—speech on particular subjects, participation in cooperative federalism programs, and so on—but have failed to appreciate an important distinction. Binding statutory conditions articulated by Congress or an executive branch delegee (statutory conditions) and non-binding executive conditions articulated by executive branch actors engaged in regulation by deal (executive conditions) are different in constitutionally salient ways that can and should inform the development of workable doctrine. Yet courts, advocates, and scholars have only begun …

The Power And Peril Of The Aca's Universality At Fifteen, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

As part of the symposium "15th Anniversary of the ACA: A Health Equity Review," this essay explores the ACA's mix of private law and public law provisions that rendered measurable improvements in health equity and health outcomes, especially for populations that experienced longstanding health disparities before its enactment.  Congress’s central objective was near-universal health insurance coverage, and the ACA employed a variety of mechanisms to reach that goal. The law’s health equity successes grew from establishing a principle of inclusion across federal statutes. This principle, which I have called “universality,” centered a human right to health approach: No longer would …

Obscurity And The Fallacy Of No Privacy In Public Information, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The main thesis of this chapter is that because there are so many different possible interpretations of ‘public information’, the concept cannot be used to justify data practices and surveillance without first articulating a more precise meaning that recognises what is at stake. By disposing of the myth that there is an objective and dispassionate concept of public information, judges and lawmakers can clear the way for information rules based on overt value choices. In short, if the concept of ‘public’ is going to shape people’s social and legal obligations, its meaning and neutrality should not be assumed.

My argument …

The Innocence Trap, Caitlin Glass, Julian Green

Faculty Scholarship

What makes a conviction wrongful? Developments in DNA science have led to a wave of exonerations over the past thirty years, revealing sources of error in the criminal legal process. Innocence organizations proliferated to represent people whose convictions could be overturned by newly discovered evidence. This is vital work for the individuals who are released and for the purpose of systemic change. At the same time, a focus on exonerations constructs a relatively narrow conception of wrongful convictions -- one that is synonymous with factual innocence.

Corporate Childrearing, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

With children influencing a trillion dollars in spending annually, corporations actively seek to shape children's identities in support of consumer culture and profit. Yet there are no scholarly treatments or theories of the legal relationship between children and corporations. Instead, scholars address individual industries such as food, social media, cosmetics, tobacco, or fashion, missing the structural role corporations play in children's identity formation. Family law evaluates child wellbeing interventions using a triangle to map the legal dynamics among child, parent, and state. This article adds corporations as fourth actors, reconceptualizing that triangle as a square. This square provides the first …

The Punishment Paradox, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

What does criminal punishment do? Across centuries of criminal legal thought, a shared answer persists: punishment incapacitates the wrongdoer. And yet punishment sometimes yields its opposite. Paradoxically, punishment sometimes becomes a rallying point-expanding community identification and solidarity around the defendant. This Article shows this punishment paradox using the 2023-24 prosecutions of President Trump and recent and historical case examples-from Luigi Mangione to Karen Read to Rosa Parks. By arguing that criminal law can generate solidarity rather than stigma, the Article both rethinks foundational theories of punishment and reconsiders the role of criminal law in democratic politics. Such an approach transcends …

Negligent Hiring: Recidivism And Employment With A Criminal Record, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

This Article tackles a difficult legal and policy challenge— reducing the impact of criminal records on job applicants’ chances in a manner that does not spur more discrimination—by looking at how another area of law, tort liability, impacts employers’ decision-making. It uses theoretical and empirical methods to study the most common reason employers report being reluctant to hire workers with a criminal record: legal liability generated by the tort of negligent hiring. While the purpose of the tort is ostensibly to protect and make whole those harmed when an employee misbehaves in a foreseeable manner, I show that, in practice, …

The “Multi-Normative” Biological Weapons Convention: A Study Of The 2022 Article V Meeting In Geneva, Robert Lawless

Emory International Law Review

In September 2022, States parties to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) held a Formal Consultative Meeting in Geneva pursuant to Article V of the Convention, following Russia’s allegations that the United States and Ukraine had developed biological weapons in violation of BWC prohibitions. Although largely overlooked in public discourse, the Geneva meeting provides a revealing example of the BWC in practice. This article examines the Geneva meeting to assess the Convention’s normative role in contemporary international relations. It argues that States parties reaffirmed their commitment to the BWC’s core prohibition against the hostile use of biological agents against humans. Moreover, …