Digital Commons Network^™

Understanding Federal Funding Of Appalachian Nonprofit Organizations Through Characteristic Analysis, Jordan C. Stewart

Online Theses and Dissertations

How nonprofit organizations function and their relationship with federal funding is a topic that has been scrutinized in analytical literature. Appalachian nonprofit organizations and their unique attributes has also been a topic of interest. However, there is little in the current literature on the intersection between Appalachian nonprofit organizations and federal funding. This study expands on the topic by examining characteristics present in Appalachian nonprofit organizations and how they relate to the likelihood of receiving federal funding. Forty-nine Appalachian nonprofit organizations that were recipients of federal funding in the fiscal year of 2021 were chosen, and using information found on …

Gender, Sexuality, And Lgbtq+ Identities In General Education Literature Courses: Three Major Conceptual Frameworks, Josiah Coleman

Online Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how three major conceptual frameworks can allow instructors of literature courses to explore, define, and utilize their understanding of queerness. For instructors who possess little experience in queer discourse, the three major conceptual frameworks – LGBTQ+ identities, gender critical paradigms, and the sexual episteme – are outlined, with major subfields, lenses, and authors detailed for further research. To demonstrate the veracity of utilizing these three major conceptual frameworks in the existing pedagogical praxis of instructors, a study was conducted. The study was a survey of six instructors who taught general education literature courses in the past five …

Grief Narratology In The Digital Age: Writing The Self In Academic Spaces, Sarah Weddle South

Online Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines some of the prescriptive writing practices associated with both grief narratives and academic writing and how those constraints work to constrain and contain stories and writing genres that run counter to dominant, heteronormative paradigms. This process of exclusion and transgression is interpreted through the critical lens of Foucault’s heterotopias. The advent of digital spaces has led to a proliferation of modes for the delivery of content, which has precipitated a questioning of traditional academic writing. Self-writing genres, such as memoirs or autobiographies, which are not historically associated with academic discourse, are transgressing discourse boundaries through hybridized forms, …

Mitochondrial Dysfunction: At The Nexus Between Alcohol-Associated Immunometabolic Dysregulation And Tissue Injury, Robert W. Siggins, Patrick M. Mcternan, Liz Simon, Flavia M. Souza-Smith, Patricia E. Molina

School of Medicine Faculty Publications

Alcohol misuse, directly or indirectly as a result of its metabolism, negatively impacts most tissues, including four with critical roles in energy metabolism regulation: the liver, pancreas, adipose, and skeletal muscle. Mitochondria have long been studied for their biosynthetic roles, such as ATP synthesis and initiation of apoptosis. However, current research has provided evidence that mitochondria participate in myriad cellular processes, including immune activation, nutrient sensing in pancreatic β-cells, and skeletal muscle stem and progenitor cell differentiation. The literature indicates that alcohol impairs mitochondrial respiratory capacity, promoting reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation and disrupting mitochondrial dynamics, leading to dysfunctional mitochondria …

Fantastic Four, Jaden Zumbahlen, Andrea Palmer

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Clinical Issue
Heart failure claims one in four lives of those diagnosed each year. The term Guideline Directed Medication Therapy (GDMT) represents optimal medication therapy as defined by the American College of Cardiology Foundation and American Heart Association. Appropriate quadruple therapy results in an estimated 73% relative reduction in mortality over a two-year time span (Greene & Khan, 2021). However, there is a gap in proper GDMT stemming from suboptimal initiation and/or titration in the outpatient setting.

Project Implementation
Nursing staff in a rural midwestern cardiology clinic were provided with an in-service presentation discussing current guidelines and recommendations of GDMT …

Dual Identification: Trajectories To English Proficiency For English Learners With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Fernanda A. Castellón, Alexandra Sturm, Connie Kasari Kasari

Psychological Science Faculty Works

Background

There are an increasing number of English Learners (EL) served in schools, including children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, little is known about students who receive school-based services as EL and under autism eligibility.

Purpose & Methods

The present study aimed to examine the sociodemographic characteristics, time to English Language Proficient status by survival analysis, and predictors of English fluency utilizing a logistic regression for dually identified EL and autism eligible students in a large urban school district during the 2011–2019 academic school years.

Results

Overall, dually identified students (N = 849) educated in segregated settings (N = …

21st Century Political Agronomy: Between Collapse And Apocalypse In The Capitalist World System, Harrison Raskin

Honors Scholar Theses

Examinations of the causal chain between ecological impacts and food shortages reveal significant impending global disturbances. This paper draws a causal link between ecological impacts and low food productivity which will lead to food insecurity and economic crises in the near term. Further, this paper argues that food insecurity may lead to the collapse of the capitalist world system. This threat is contrasted with “business as usual” climate models which, rather than depicting the collapse of the capitalist world system, depict its persistence throughout the collapse of the world ecology.

Ethical Considerations Of Clinical Research In Emergency Care Settings: A Review, Adith Velavan

Honors Scholar Theses

Emergency and acute care settings are some of the most volatile and high intensity areas of any healthcare operation. Better understanding of systems and treatments in these spaces are critical to improving outcomes for the high risk patients that are treated there. Clinical research serves as a cornerstone of modern medical research, and is critical to the further improvement of clinical care in these settings. This thesis serves to explore the ethicality of such research given the constraints of emergency medicine settings. Not only does this thesis provide a strong foundation regarding the history and current practices of clinical research, …

Evaluating Equity: Examining Inclusionary Practices From Educational Organizations To Improve The Education Experience Of Lgbtqia+ Students, Jillian G. Torrento

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This qualitative study explored the ways in which education policy and practices within public schools are addressing the needs of minoritized populations with a particular focus on LGBTQIA+ students. This study first employed a document analysis to investigate the federal, state, and district-level equity practices that are mandated or elective in addressing the needs of marginalized populations and LGBTQIA+ students. Secondly, a critical discourse analysis was conducted to examine the specific language, word choices, and symbols found within the public documents that signify equitable practices pertaining to minoritized student populations and the LGBTQIA+ community. Ultimately, the goal of this study …

Marxist Analysis Of Social And Economic Narratives In Childrens' Cartoons, Shane Mcgregor

Theses and Dissertations

Using a Marxist framework with a grounding in critical literacy, this study employs a content analysis methodology to analyze 25 episodes of five of the most popular children’s television cartoons in order to understand how these cartoons portray economic and social systems, as well as how the messages these cartoons express would tend to support these systems. In so doing, this research hopes to provide a conceptual framework that educators and parents can use as a guide for demonstration of a critical approach to understanding the curriculum of children’s media inside or outside of the classroom. Educators can modify this …

All Memories Fade, Lynn Bierbaum

Theses

All Memories Fade is an installation and sculptural exhibition examining familial connection through my developed fear of forgetting. These works comprise many materials, including glass, resin, silk fabric, wet plate collodion images, and chemigrams. This installation uses light and optical variants to communicate the fear of losing one’s most cherished memories in life. All Memories Fade draws inspiration from my family farm in Minnesota that had been sold when I was young. The encapsulated sculptures and installation produce a distorted perception of home through material memory, utilizing light and shadow to highlight those distortions and abstractions that checker one’s past. …

What The Wildflowers Tell Us, Madelyn Lohman

Theses

When good pictures come to us, we hope they tell a truth we can relate to. Truths about love, beauty, and death. What The Wildflowers Tell Us is a photographic series that conjures up intimate memories of my life during the past twenty years. Photography is an endless source of memory. These exhibition images open doors to the past and into the future. We catch a glimpse of the beauty and the dark side of things; the forest, the wilted peony, and the ashes. Beauty somehow tinges itself with sadness. Why do we need to hold what we love close …

Medicaid Transition (Unwind): Return To Regular Eligibility Operations, Lucy Hodder, Deborah H. Fournier

All Materials

No abstract provided.

Design Of University Small-Scale Dairy Processing Facility, Philip J. Hildebrand, Joshua Arejola, Alicia Andersen, Terry Howell Jr, Tami M. Brown-Brandl

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

This project was assigned to research the feasibility and value of implementing a dairy processing facility on the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The facility would process milk produced from cows under the same roof and will serve as an educational experience for Nebraska dairy farmers, UNL students, and K-12 students in the Lincoln-Lancaster County area. If the project is successful and replicated across the state, this facility could have a significant impact on the reduction of milk transportation costs in the Nebraska dairy industry.

The project began with researching milk processing methods and steps from production to consumption. …

Provision Of Formal Education To Nursing Staff: Kangaroo Mother Care Within Maternal-Child Units, Jessica Holly

Doctor of Nursing Practice Scholarly Project

Kangaroo mother care (KMC) is an evidence-based intervention that improves neonatal outcomes and reduces mortality in infants. KMC is not fully integrated into local hospital maternal-child departments and nursing professionals do not have a standard education offering concerning KMC. While the use of KMC is not entirely absent, nursing knowledge and understanding of its correct execution leads to lesser occurrences of KMC initiation. This scholarly project addresses nursing knowledge as a practice quality improvement. A literature review was completed, including searches through CINAHL, Merck Manuals, MEDLINE Plus Health Information, ProQuest, and UpToDate. A pretest, educational video, and posttest were then …

Celebrating Native Chemists And Encouraging More Native Talent In Stem, Lisa Villa

Staff publications

This editorial was written to accompany cover art submitted to the American Chemical Society's 2023 ACS Diversity & Inclusion Cover Art Series, and selected as the July cover for Environmental Science & Technology Letters. The artwork design features several prominent chemists who are also strong advocates for increasing the number of Native American/First Nation scientists. They recognize how cultural beliefs may often be in conflict with scientific conversations, but have been working to attract and encourage Native American talent in the STEM fields.

The published cover art is included as a supplemental file.

The Effects Of Verbal Fluency Interventions: Phonemic Versus Semantic Fluency Outcomes In Parkinson's Disease, Brian Connelly

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

Verbal fluency (VF) tasks are well-established and widely used tools in clinical assessment and research settings to evaluate executive functioning skills. They consist of verbally generating as many different items as possible that either begin with a specified letter (i.e., phonemic) or belong to a category (i.e., semantic) within 60 seconds. Due to deficits in executive functioning, individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have increased difficulty with phonemic compared to semantic fluency. Although VF tasks are commonly used as intervention tools within speech-language pathology clinical practice, there is limited research investigating their therapeutic benefit. The purpose of this study was to …

Digital Literacy Curriculum: A Case Study Approach To 21st Century Source Evaluation Skills, Joshua Woodley

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

DIGITAL LITERACY CURRICULUM: A CASE STUDY APPROACH TO 21ST CENTURY SOURCE EVALUATION SKILLS

Joshua B. Woodley

Minnesota State University Moorhead 2023

Dr. Caitlin Johnson, Advisor

This study focuses on the impact that digital literacy curriculum has on online source evaluation skills. The focus is on whether providing modern digital literacy lessons will increase the ability to find bearings online. Research participants were asked to complete asynchronous lessons teaching them modern source evaluation skills. Results of the study used a qualitative approach comparing responses from a pre-test and post-test. The pre-test and post-test are parallel assessments with the same questions. The …

Implications Of Inclusive Postsecondary Education Programs (Ipses) On Quality Of Life For Young Adults With Intellectual Disabilities, Sarah K. Eggleston

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Students with intellectual disability (ID) who are aging out from qualifying for special education services through the public school system often encounter difficulty in the transition to early adulthood. While students with disabilities in Virginia have access to employment and transition services to aid them in seeking job placement, some students with ID still carry aspirations of going to college like many of their peers without disabilities. College is an experience that allows emerging adults to gain independence, social skills, pivotal identity development, and opportunities to explore academic and professional interests, while increasing their qualifications for more competitive employment. In …

Virginia Journal Of Public Health Spring 2023

Virginia Journal of Public Health

No abstract provided.

Bukola Adebayo, Oral History Interview, 2023, You Li

Collective Memory of Women Journalists in COVID-19

Bukola Adebayo is an investigative journalist with over a decade of experience reporting health, science, politics, and education in Africa. She is now the West Africa correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation (Nov. 2022 to now) covering human rights and issues around abuse and exploitation of everyday people in the big economy, environment, and tech space. During COVID, Bukola was the senior producer at the CNN Digital Bureau in Nigeria (Jan 2018- Aug 2021), where she covered many topics, including, human rights, women’s rights, social injustice, political uprisings, and the environment.

In this interview, Adebayo recalled her experience of covering …

Byu Law Review Subscription Information

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Tesla Meets The Fourth Amendment, Adam M. Gershowitz

BYU Law Review

Can police search a smart car’s computer without a warrant? Although the Supreme Court banned warrantless searches of cell phones incident to arrest in Riley v. California, the Court left the door open for warrantless searches under other exceptions to the warrant requirement. This is the first article to argue that the Fourth Amendment’s automobile exception currently permits the police to warrantlessly dig into a vehicle’s computer system and extract vast amounts of cell phone data. Just as the police can rip open seats or slash tires to search for drugs under the automobile exception, the police can warrantlessly extract …

Contracting As A Class, Caleb N. Griffin

BYU Law Review

Contract law is stuck in a loop of path dependency and stale precedent. Its metaphors, like “the meeting of the minds,” are today laughably implausible. Its values, like “consent,” have been stripped of any real meaning. No one reads or understands the overwhelming majority of contracts to which they agree. And no one should. Reading them is meaningless, because it simply does not matter what they say. Individuals must agree to them – indeed, are effectively forced to agree to them – if they wish to participate in the modern world.

Modern digital contracting is not a collaborative process. Today, …

From Peer Review To Peer Conference: Increasing Collaboration In Asynchronous And Synchronous Computer-Mediated Modes In A Technical And Professional Communication Class, Sofia Tarabrina

English Language and Literature ETDs

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of different modes of peer review on students' interactions through a mixed-methods case study. The researcher recruited six students and conducted three peer review sessions in the asynchronous anonymous, asynchronous identifiable, and synchronous mode. The data sources were student pre- and post-peer review drafts, peer review comments, and the researcher's observations of student interactions. The data analysis included transcribing, coding, enumeration, classification, ethnographic analysis, and comparison.

The data analysis showed that tension in peer review interactions that might have caused dissatisfaction in students could be reduced if students performed more …

The Perceived Impact Of Morning Tubs On Elementary Students' Twenty-First Century Skills, Shelby Phillips

Honors Theses

Increasing demands for creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration to be taught in schools puts pressure on educators to incorporate non-cognitive skills into the already rigid curriculum (Battelle for Kids, 2019). While there is ample research on play in the classroom and the importance of teaching twenty-first century skills to elementary students, there is very limited research on teaching twenty-first century skills via morning tubs. Morning tubs elicit skills such as collaboration, communication, creativity, motivation, critical thinking, and problem-solving in students (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2009). Therefore, this thesis aims to introduce play to educators as a strategy through …

Tribal Statecraft And Freedom Of Expression In Jordan, Taylor Northcutt

Honors Theses

In this research paper, I investigate the connection between the policies regarding freedom of speech and expression promulgated by the government of Jordan in the decade following the Arab Spring and Jordan’s tribal Bedouin heritage, with a focus on how traditional Bedouin values and attitudes regarding the nature and purpose of public spaces influence modern state policies regarding freedom of expression. In the investigation of this subject, I surveyed a diverse catalog of research covering politics and issues of freedom of expression in Jordan in the 2010s as well as the political and social values of tribal Arab culture in …

Imperfect Immunity And The Stability Of A Modified Kermack-Mckendrick Model, Kaylee Sims

Honors Theses

The classic Kermack-McKendrick model of mathematical epidemiology suggests that a population is only in equilibrium when there is no disease present. In the modern era, we have several cyclic infectious diseases that show no signs of eradication, despite global health measures. In this thesis, we introduce a coefficient of waning immunity in order to produce a modified Kermack-McKendrick model and analyze whether the model yields system stability with a certain amount of infection present. Ultimately, the model is incongruent with real-world case data, with its most glaring failure being exponential dampening of the height of each disease case peak due …

Alphabet Books Aren't For Babies: The Use Of The Alphabet Book In The Secondary Classroom, Chloe Skye Crane

Honors Theses

The goal of this thesis is to examine the role of alphabet books within the secondary classroom through the lens of research potential, development of cultural awareness, and the educational benefits for the secondary learner as well as three different types of alphabet books varying from least to most complex. The literature review supporting this thesis is broken into five sections: what are alphabet books, a closer look at three examples, the research potential in alphabet books, developing cultural awareness and empathy, and educational benefits (which includes subsections for skills developed). Following the literature review is the text of an …

Combatting Consolidation In The United States Banking Industry: An Analysis Of Performance And Strategy Of First National Bank Of Clarksdale, Lydia Johnsey

Honors Theses

This thesis is based on a submission with group members in the 2023 Case Study Competition for the Conference of State Bank Supervisors. This thesis includes additional background information not included in the original competition paper in order to clarify the competition standards and goal of the paper. This thesis evaluates First National Bank of Clarksdale with respect to two areas: financial analysis, which evaluates earnings performance, loan portfolio composition, asset growth, capital levels, and liquidity of the bank; and strategy, which includes staffing, succession, training, and technology strategies instituted by bank management. Data from the bank’s Uniform Bank Performance …