Digital Commons Network^™

Exploring Cognitive Load Theory In The Post-Secondary Engineering Classroom, Gabriel Q. Van Dyke

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Engineering programs often emphasize subject-matter expertise over pedagogical training, which can leave students struggling with course demands and contribute to retention challenges. This study applied Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) to examine how undergraduate engineering students experience the cognitive demands of their coursework compared to non-engineering classes. Using a sequential explanatory mixed methods design, cognitive load surveys were followed by interviews to address two research questions: (1) What are the differences in intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load levels between engineering courses and non-engineering courses taken concurrently by undergraduate engineering students? (2) How do engineering students perceive the unique challenges or benefits …

The Rodent Electronic Nicotine Delivery System (Rends): Effects Of Age On Self-Administration Of Inhaled Nicotine In Female Rats, Daniel Santos Da Silva

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Smoking tobacco is the leading avoidable cause of death and drives many health problems. Nicotine, the main chemical in tobacco products, keeps people using it. This study used the Rat Electronic Nicotine Delivery System (RENDS), an inexpensive and freely shared, to examine e-cigarette use in adolescent and adult female rats by exploring four phases of nicotine delivered and not delivered to understand use patterns among ages. Our study found that both adolescent and adult female rats chose to inhale nicotine when given the opportunity, showing drug-seeking behavior. Overall, nicotine use was similar between ages. These results could help inform therapies, …

Enhancing Evidence-Based Practice Decision-Making Among Practitioners In Adult Disability Service Settings, Aubrey Vance

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBA®s) working in adult disability services often face challenges such as high caseloads, limited oversight, and restricted resources, which can make it difficult to use individualized, research-supported interventions. Although evidence-based practice (EBP) is central to applied behavior analysis, many practitioners receive little training on how to integrate research evidence, client values, and clinical judgment into their decision-making. This study examined whether BCBAs could be effectively trained to use a structured decision-making framework based on the EBP model by Slocum et al. (2014). Using a multiple baseline design, we evaluated the effects of Behavioral Skills Training (BST) …

Visualizing Probabilistic Model Checking: An Interactive Framework For Exploring Ctmc Models, Ishara Mawelle Kankanamge

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Probabilistic model checking is a critical method for analyzing systems characterized by uncertainty, such as communication protocols, randomized algorithms, and biochemical networks. While formal verification tools provide precise numerical data about these systems, interpreting these results is often limited by large state space, high-dimensional state space and time dependent evolution. Current tools typically output raw numerical data, offering limited support for intuitively understanding the time-dependent behavior of a model. This research presents an interactive visualization framework designed to bridge the gap between complex numerical analysis and human intuition. The framework integrates coordinated visual interfaces, including lower-dimensional state-space projections and synchronized …

Production Of Hydrolyzed Lactose Syrup From The Acid Whey, Aubrey Jean Arbon

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Acid whey has gained significant attention within the dairy industry due to its complex matrix and the processing challenges. This by-product contains lactose that can be isolated, hydrolyzed, and further processed to produce hydrolyzed syrup. To optimize lactose utilization, it is essential to fine-tune the kinetics of the β-galactosidase enzymes used for lactose hydrolysis. To analyze sugars in acid whey, and LC-MS-based chromatographic method was developed. Once the method was developed, the kinetics of β-galactosidase were optimized with respect to enzyme concentration, pH, and temperature. The goal was to achieve the highest possible lactose hydrolysis. The hydrolyzed acid whey was …

Assessing Geomorphic Change From Large Wood Additions In An Intensively Monitored Watershed, Alexander Walt

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Rivers across the American West are under stress. Over time, human activities have decreased riparian vegetation and removed naturally occurring large wood from fallen trees and beaver dams. Overgrazing, wetland drainage, and artificial barriers like levees and berms have further changed these ecosystems, leaving behind simple channels that lack varied habitat for aquatic species.

Efforts to restore rivers have made some progress, but many projects are small in scale and focus more on reshaping the river rather than restoring the natural processes that keep it healthy. This study evaluates a different approach—Low-Tech Process-Based Restoration (LTPBR)—which works with nature to rebuild …

An Alternative Representation For Temporal Json, Bishal Sarkar

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a common format for representing and exchanging data on the web. Most systems only keep the current version of a JSON document, even though, in many situations, it is also important to know how that document changed over time. For example, an application might need to answer questions such as “What did this record look like last week?” or “How has this list grown over the past year?” A simple way to keep this history is to store a full copy of the document every time it changes, but this quickly becomes wasteful, most of …

Mease: Multi-Agent Episodic Action Sequence Explanation, Phyo Wai Khaing, Minghong Geng, Shubham Pateria, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) achieves remarkable performance in complex coordination tasks, yet interpreting the emergent behaviors of trained agents remains a fundamental challenge. Most current explainability methods focus on individual agent decisions, overlooking the critical interplay of joint strategiesand temporal coordination patterns that define successful multi-agent policies. We present MEASE (Multi-agent Episodic Action Sequence Explanation), a novel explainable MARL (XMARL) framework that explains trained MARL policies as human-interpretable emergent cooperative joint behaviors. MEASE employs a cognition-inspired episodic memory model to learn spatio-temporal multi-agent interaction patterns, coupled with abstraction algorithms that identify significant cooperative agent behaviors. We evaluate MEASE on diverse …

Quantitative Bounds On Resource Usage Of Probabilistic Programs, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amir Kafshdar Goharshady, Tobias Meggendorfer, Dorde Zikelic

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cost analysis, also known as resource usage analysis, is the task of finding bounds on the total cost of a program and is a well-studied problem in static analysis. In this work, we consider two classical quantitative problems in cost analysis for probabilistic programs. The first problem is to find a bound on the expected total cost of the program. This is a natural measure for the resource usage of the program and can also be directly applied to average-case runtime analysis. The second problem asks for a tail bound, i.e. ‍given a threshold t the goal is to find …

Market Reactions To Deceptive Language In Fake News: Implications From Language Expectancy Theory And Transfer Learning, Ka Chung Ng, Ping Fan Ke, Ping Fan, Mike So, Tam, Kar Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has heightened the proliferation of fake news. A key challenge is the limited real-world data to investigate the societal impact of fake news produced by generative AI. In this paper, we examine stock market reactions to financial news articles that exhibit stylometric similarity to human-crafted and AI-crafted fake financial news. Grounded in language expectancy theory, we employ a style-based transfer learning model, pre-trained to recognizing deceptive language employed in various types of fake news intricacies. We then apply this model to a comprehensive dataset of financial news, assigning a “veracity style score” to …

Open Source Software Development Tool Installation: Challenges And Strategies For Novice Developers, Larissa Salerno, Christoph Treude, Patanamon Thongtanunam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the world of technology advances, so do the tools that software developers use to create new programs. In recent years, software development tools have become more popular, allowing developers to work more efficiently and produce higher-quality software. Still, installing such tools can be challenging for novice developers at the early stage of their careers, as they may face issues such as compatibility problems (e.g., with operating systems) and unclear instructions. Therefore, this work aims to investigate the challenges novice developers face when installing software development tools and the strategies they employ to overcome them. To investigate these, we conducted …

Natural Adversaries: Fuzzing Autonomous Vehicles With Realistic Roadside Object Placements, Yang Sun, Haoyu Wang, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The emergence of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) has spurred research into testing the resilience of their perception systems, i.e., ensuring that they are not susceptible to critical misjudgements. It is important that these systems are tested not only with respect to other vehicles on the road, but also with respect to objects placed on the roadside. Trash bins, billboards, and greenery are examples of such objects, typically positioned according to guidelines developed for the human visual system, which may not align perfectly with the needs of AVs. Existing tests, however, usually focus on adversarial objects with conspicuous shapes or patches, which …

Fighting Against Recruitment Scams: Theory-Driven Supervised Learning And Empirical Analysis For Digital Fraudulent Recruitment Posting Behavior, Tom (Tianteng) Wang, David (Jingjun) Xu, Keng Siau, Zhongju (John) Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The number of recruitment postings on digital recruitment hiring platforms has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the weak surveillance and operations of these platforms, combined with the fact that most job seekers have relatively low vigilance and a strong desire for recruitment offers, enable scammers to easily deceive job seekers for their money and confidential information. In this work, we combine prevailing text mining techniques (i.e., ChatGPT with prompting engineering and supervised machine learning) with interpersonal deception theory (IDT) from social science to design an interpretable IT system to predict fraudulent recruitment postings on digital recruitment-hiring platforms. We compare …

Enhancing Action And Ingredient Modeling For Semantically Grounded Recipe Generation, Guoshan Liu, Bin Zhu, Yian Li, Jingjing Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLMMs) have enabled recipe generation from food images, yet outputs often contain semantically incorrect actions or ingredients despite high lexical scores (e.g., BLEU, ROUGE). To address this gap, we propose a semantically grounded framework that predicts and validates actions and ingredients as internal context for instruction generation. Our two-stage pipeline combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT): SFT builds foundational accuracy using an Action-Reasoning dataset and ingredient corpus, while RFT employs frequency-aware rewards to improve long-tail action prediction and ingredient generalization. A Semantic Confidence Scoring and Rectification (SCSR) module further filters and …

Optimization Of The Baffle Geometry Of A Circular Culvert Outlet Structure To Maximize Energy Dissipation, Kiarash Shirmahi

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

High-velocity flow at culvert outlets can lead to significant soil erosion and damage to downstream infrastructure, particularly in agricultural regions where land protection is critical. Circular culverts, commonly used in transportation systems, are especially susceptible to this issue due to flow acceleration caused by geometric constraints and installation angles. Despite extensive research on energy dissipation in rectangular culverts, limited attention has been given to circular configurations. This study addresses this gap by evaluating the hydraulic performance of baffle systems designed to reduce outlet energy in circular culverts.

A series of laboratory experiments was conducted using a scaled physical model of …

Leveraging Code Embeddings To Identify And Address Blind Spots In Benchmark Creation, Charles Moloney

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Formal software verification remains critical for early vulnerability detection, yet benchmarking these tools is costly and often reliant on centralized datasets such as SV-COMP. While such repositories enable standardized evaluation, they introduce risks of overfitting and bias, particularly due to first-party benchmark contributions. To address these limitations, we extend ARG-V, our tool for generating SV-COMP-compatible benchmarks from real-world Java code, with a novel approach of using code embedding techniques to selectively sample from mined code. By leveraging Nomic Embed Code and a cosine-based Minimum Hyperspherical Energy (MHE) objective, we systematically select and transform benchmarks from scraped GitHub code that …

Application Of Maritime Non-Line-Of-Sight Relay Attack On Wireless Digital Communication, Nathan Meyer

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As wireless communication becomes increasingly prevalent, securing information over wireless channels is an ongoing challenge, especially in maritime environments where communication depends on radio links. While higher layer wireless attacks have been widely studied, lower level physical-layer relay attacks in maritime settings have received less attention. This thesis presents a simulation of a maritime relay attack in a beyond line-of-sight wireless environment for study. A three antenna communication model is developed where a legitimate transmitter sends a digital wireless signal, an attacking antenna intercepts, modifies, and retransmits the signal, and a final receiver observes both the direct and relay transmission. …

Narrating Experience: How Undergraduate Social Work Students See Themselves In The Social Justice Curriculum, Emily C. Soener

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Social justice is widely recognized as a foundational value of the social work profession, yet research indicates inconsistencies in how social justice is defined, taught, and experienced within social work education. This study examines how undergraduate social work students make meaning of social justice learning in relation to their own lived experiences. Using a critical narrative inquiry approach grounded in constructivist qualitative methodology, this study explores how students narrate their experiences of social justice education and how those narratives reveal tensions between professional ideals and classroom realities. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with eleven undergraduate social work students enrolled …

Longlines, Morgan Tharp '26

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

Morgan Tharp is a Senior English-Writing and Political Science double major. In her free time, she enjoys running for DePauw's cross country and track teams and reading.

Developing A Decision-Making Tool For Breast-Feeding Mothers Whose Babies Have A Cow's Milk Protein Allergy, Rachel M. Griffith

Human Nutrition and Hospitality Management Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cow’s milk protein allergy (CMPA) is one of the most common food allergies in infancy, affecting an estimated 2–3% of infants, including those who are breastfed. Many symptoms of CMPA overlap with gastrointestinal disorders and lactose intolerance, leading to frequent misdiagnosis and unnecessary maternal dietary restriction. Breastfeeding mothers who eliminate dairy to manage suspected CMPA often face nutritional deficiencies, emotional strain, and financial burden, while infants risk poor growth if symptoms are not properly addressed. Breastfeeding is viewed as the optimal source of nutrition for infants providing many cognitive benefits and positive maternal effects like decreased stress and risks of …

Faculty And Academic Advisor Perspectives On Embedded Certifications Supporting Neurodivergent Learners, Katherine B. Watkins

Human Nutrition and Hospitality Management Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study explores the experiences, strengths, and challenges of neurodivergent individuals within educational and social environments, with a focus on promoting inclusivity and understanding. Neurodivergence, encompassing conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other cognitive variations, is increasingly recognized not as a deficit but as a natural form of human diversity. The research examines how traditional systems often fail to accommodate diverse cognitive styles, leading to barriers in learning, communication, and self-expression. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines quantitative survey data with qualitative interviews to capture both broad trends and personal narratives. Participants reported that rigid structures, sensory overload, …

Enhancing Food Security In Stann Creek. Belize Using Meat Rabbits, Lindsey Garretson

Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

In recent years, food insecurity and the prevalence of hunger have rapidly grown throughout the world, but especially within Latin America and the Caribbean. Along with growing rates of food insecurity and hunger there are increases in medical conditions including negative impacts the functioning of every major organ system, increased rates of mental illness, both overweight and underweight children, wasting in both children and adults, and anemia. Availability and access to healthy, nutritional food options can help lower the risk of these conditions. With these considerations, the goal of this project was to create an all-encompassing manual and construction guide …

Multinational Investment Activity Under Policy Uncertainty In Host And Competing Countries, Daisoon Kim, Sunhyung Lee

Department of Economics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper examines how economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in host and competing countries reshapes U.S. multinationals’ greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI). Using firm–destination level data from 2003 to 2021, we show that while host-country EPU deters investment, EPU in competing destinations attracts it through a spillover effect. We document a structural shift around 2015: as global EPU rose unevenly, the spillover effect from competitors became the dominant driver of investment decisions, supplanting the direct effect of host-country policy instability. Our findings indicate that in an era of heightened global uncertainty and risk, FDI allocation is governed by relative, not just …

Prospective Memory Skills Of College Students With And Without Adhd, Nicole Llamas-Carrillo

Theses & ETDs

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is associated with impairments in executive functioning (EF), working memory, and time related processing. These deficits create challenges in prospective memory (PM) which is the ability to remember a future task. PM is essential for everyday functioning, and prior research has shown that adults with ADHD already experience PM difficulties, and expands on the difficulties ADHD individuals have with planning. It has been suggested that temporal myopia (TM), a cognitive bias prioritizing immediate goals rather than future goals, is expanding on explaining why individuals with ADHD are vulnerable to PM difficulties. The higher the TM (also …

Keeping It Conservative (Under The Sheets): Conservative Political Ideology And Its Impact On Intimate Relationships, Amirah Harris

Theses & ETDs

This study examined the relationship between conservative political ideology and key aspects of romantic relationships, including gender role attitudes, expressions of intimacy and affection, communication styles, and partner preferences. Based on prior research suggesting that conservatism is associated with traditional social values and relationship behaviors, four hypotheses were proposed predicting significant associations between political conservatism and these variables. A sample of 334 adults in the United States completed an online survey consisting of the Attitudes Toward Women Scale, Index of Sexual Satisfaction, Affectionate Communication Index, Communications Patterns Questionnaire, and the Ideal Partner and Ideal Relationship Scale. ANOVA analyses were conducted …

The Proximal Effects Of Blood Flow Restriction On The Infraspinatus Muscle Cross-Sectional Area And External Rotation Strength, Adam James Zavalney, Noah Matthew Gaffy, Tyler Grensteiner

Physical Therapy Scholarly Projects

Purpose/Hypothesis: Blood flow restriction (BFR) is a method of training that utilizes a tourniquet style cuff to limit the amount of blood flow to a working muscle during exercise. This method of training allows an individual to train at lower intensities while still gaining similar results to more traditional types of training. It has been shown in research that low intensity BFR has several benefits to structures distal to the level of the tourniquet, but minimal research has been conducted to investigate the benefits to proximal structures. This study is aimed at examining the proximal effects of BFR training on …

Notes For The Stalled, V18n08, May 2026, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

Rod Library newsletter: Notes for the Stalled

Contents:

--- Extended Hours
--- Duck Hunt
--- DeStress Days
--- Congratulations!
--- Upcoming Events

Kapwa Across Contexts: Acculturation And Enculturation In Filipino American Identity At Home And In School, Jared Jamias

Education (PhD) Dissertations

Kapwa Across Contexts: Acculturation and Enculturation in Filipino American Identity at Home and in School examines how Filipino American identity is shaped across two primary sites: K–12 schooling and the Filipino American home in Southern California. Centering first-generation Filipino immigrant parents and their U.S.-born second-generation children, this qualitative study is guided by AsianCrit, Culturally Responsive Methodologies (CRM), and Nadal’s Filipino American Identity Model. Using narrative inquiry, six Filipino American family units (6 children; 8 parents) participated in individual and joint dyad interviews and Culturally Responsive Musical Inquiry (CRMI), in which families co-composed an original song. Findings indicate that K–12 schooling …

The Legitimacy Of International Law: A Kantian-Rawlsian Account, Taeyang Lee

Philosophy

This paper aims to answer the question of whether international law has legitimacy and value despite the absence of global centralized coercive enforcement and whether the concept of legitimacy developed in domestic law theory can be applied to international law. By avoiding the two extremes that claim that international law is nothing more than a non-binding agreement, or that it requires the centralized enforcement of a world government, I will defend a middle position that explains the moral binding force of international law when it satisfies conditions of legitimacy. Drawing on Kant's Universal Principle of Right and Ripstein's three defects …

Improving Outreach To Residents Through Semi-Structured Interviews, Emmett Booth, Mlis, Ahip, Gary Kaplan, Mlis, Ahip, Abby Adamczyk, Mlis, Ahip, John Caruso, Md

Academic Commons and Scott Memorial Library Staff Papers and Presentations

Objectives

Our academic medical center has a large number of residents and fellows across programs based out of multiple hospitals, five of which receive direct support from the libraries. Two librarians supporting the scholarly activities of residents and fellows were hired by the university in the last six years. As these positions evolve, we seek to understand if outreach is working, whether support is effective, and whether scholarly support needs are changing. Building on survey results from last year,1 the team is conducting interviews with residents and program directors to better understand their perceptions of library support and services.