Digital Commons Network^™

Racial Discrimination From A Self-Determination Lens, Lindsey Shamp

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite significant advances toward equality, racism and discrimination have been a central feature of America’s culture. This inequality has been presented from the history of slavery to the present-day violence against unarmed Black men. Oppression and inequalities have led calls to action from the African American community and activist groups including the Black Lives Matter Movement. Many White individuals are unaware of the existing benefits of their Whiteness and are simultaneously unaware of the significant psychological, emotional, physical, and social consequences for African American individuals. While there are several established theories to address the psychological and social aspects of how …

What Do Facial Products Have To Do With A Waterfall? The Role Of Remoteness, Social Comparison, And Envy In The Purchasing Effectiveness Of Sponsored Product Social Media Content, Louis J. Zmich

Doctoral Dissertations

Advertising has gone from magazines, to television, and now social media. However, unlike the robust advertisement literature, the influencer marketing literature has not caught up to explain how social media sponsored content can perform its best. While companies rely on follower count and interaction (i.e., likes) to determine who to partner with, the need for clarity on how to best predict digital advertisement success is needed. This study brings the literature of advertising and cognitive psychology, and applies the associative memory, visual persuasion, and remote conveyor theories into the influencer marketing context. This study specifically looks at how creativity through …

Antifragility: Disorder As The Wind That Energizes The Fire Within Us, Abdulah Bajaba

Doctoral Dissertations

Today’s business world is more complex and uncertain than ever due to the unpredictable interdependencies caused by factors such as technology and globalization; accordingly, stress-inducing job demands have never been more prevalent. In order to cope with such demands, employees need to go beyond resilience and embrace disorder as a tool for growth. In this dissertation, I introduce the concept of antifragility to the workplace as a psychological resource that utilizes disorder to its advantage. In order to efficiently coincide with today’s complexity and uncertainty, an employee has to gain more than lose from disorder, simply put, s/he has to …

Novice Teachers’ Perceptions Of The Most Effective Instructional Leadership Practices, Schbrett Lewis Myers

Doctoral Dissertations

This quantitative study examined novice teachers’ perceptions of their principals’ most effective instructional leadership practices to ensure a positive school climate. Principals’ perceptions were examined to assess their understandings of novice teachers’ needs and whether principals have the knowledge to support novice teachers’ pedagogical needs. Novice teacher experts (n=11) and principals (n=8) participated in a modified Delphi study of three rounds. A three-part instrument, comprised of a survey, Likert scale (Compass Louisiana Leader Performance Evaluation Rubric), and suggestions were used to assess principals’ and novice teachers’ perceptions. Lawshe’s Content Validity Ratio (CVR) measured validity. Novice teacher experts and principals validated …

Effective Lifestyle Modifications Pro Football Players Utilize To Prevent Future Complications Of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, Matthew Nicolas

Nursing | Senior Theses

The National Football League (NFL) is a billion-dollar entertainment industry that values itself on the physical and gritty sport of football. Even though these athletes are revered for their physical prowess and durability, at some point in their professional football careers these players are likely to sustain some variation of head injury—if not multiple. Each of the 22 players on the gridiron must physically wear out their matchup with tackles, stiff arms, bullrushes, rip moves, and any illegal hits the referee may not be able to see. The repeated blows these players sustain over the course of their career often …

An Exploration Of Covid-19 Impact On Healthcare Workers’ Mental Health In China, Jenny Yang

Nursing | Senior Theses

Background

In December 2019, the first confirmed human case of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) or COVID-19 occurred in Wuhan, China. By March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) had classified the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic due to the rapid spread of the virus to other countries. Many people have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in various aspects, especially front-line healthcare workers. Hospital working conditions are constantly changing to cope with the problems that arise from the pandemic. These problems can result in an unsafe patient-to-nurse ratio, understaffed healthcare workers in hospitals, equipment shortage, and increased …

Nlr Eats: A Nonprofit To Feed Hungry Kids, Sydney Eagan

Accounting Undergraduate Honors Theses

Organization Description: Dog-Town Eats is a not-for-profit organization set up in North Little Rock, Arkansas, for the purpose of providing nutritious meals to underprivileged children on the weekends. The organization will also strive to provide meals when children are not in school over the summer months.

Specific Concept: Dog-Town Eats would like to purchase a food truck as well as supplies to offer meals. The organization will progressively expand to the areas surrounding North Little Rock and then eventually the entire state of Arkansas.

Market Description: Children who do not have the means of finding and or providing themselves …

Effective Leadership Of Institutional Effectiveness Accreditation Initiaties: A Qualitative Case Study, Mallory Marie Herlevic

Doctoral Dissertations

A qualitative case study of a two-year institution of higher education which had recently completed a successful institutional effectiveness initiative explored the factors that faculty and administrators believe encourage the support of institutional effectiveness initiatives and how certain factors encourage faculty and administrative support for institutional effectiveness activities that lead to their success. Participants included faculty and administrators at institutions of higher education and experts in the field of institutional effectiveness. There were four basic findings of the study. First, leaders of institutional effectiveness initiatives should ensure that the motivation of the topic of a project is perceived to be …

A Qualitative Study Identifying A School Leadership Model Promoting And Fostering Technology-Enhanced Teaching And Learning, Lisa Flanders-Dick

Doctoral Dissertations

Technology-enhanced teaching and learning (TETL) is the integration of technology into teaching and learning practices to improve the quality of learning outcomes. This is an essential strategy for improving educational quality. School leaders significantly affect the integration of effective TETL in the classroom. The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) provides Standards for Leaders that serve as a framework for innovation in education. Situational Leadership Theory contends that one leadership style cannot be applied to all leadership tasks. This study expands upon the current use of SLT to help derive characteristics needed to develop a school leadership model that …

A Qualitative Analysis Of Distributed Leadership In An Elementary School Setting, Kristel Webb

Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative case study investigated the processes by which an elementary school principal uses Distributed Leadership to accomplish leadership tasks and progress toward organizational goals. It aimed to provide a thick description of the practices, behaviors, perspectives, and experiences of the participants of Distributed Leadership. The research participants included one principal and eight teacher leaders in a prekindergarten through second grade school in the southeastern part of the United States, having been identified as having Distributed Leadership. The study used observations, interviews, and document analysis to collect qualitative data. The study's finding revealed four themes: leaders’ abilities to pinpoint other …

Surveillance Of Teleworkers: A Grounded Theory Approach, William Grant Clary

Doctoral Dissertations

In March of 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The pandemic mandated teleworking across the world as many organizations tried to social distance. Two years into the pandemic, we have seen quite the increase in telework. Thus, with the benefits being realized, it is reasonable to expect a continuance in telework after the pandemic is over. When forced to work from home, many variables with the work process must be changed, including how managers surveil their employees. My work is an early, exploratory effort to understand how teleworkers are surveilled and how they feel about being surveilled at home. …

Summary Report: Essential Programs And Services Career And Technical Education Component Review, James E. Sloan, Amy F. Johnson, Sharon Gerrish

School Funding - Essential Programs and Services (EPS)

Background

The Career and Technical Education (CTE) funding model was implemented in FY2019 after a lengthy period of development. The component was scheduled for a review in FY2020 and FY2021 as part of the ongoing cycle of analysis of all major components of Maine’s Essential Programs and Services (EPS) education cost model. Due to the breadth and complexity of the CTE funding model, and the fact that this is the first time it has been reviewed to see how it is being implemented in actual practice, the findings have been broken into several sections. Appendix A provides the overall plan …

Reducing Medication Non-Adherence With Improved Health Literacy Interventions: An Evidence-Based Practice Quality Improvement Project, Unity Wiles

DNP Projects

Introduction

Health literacy is the ability to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate healthcare decisions and follow instructions for treatment. Patients with low health literacy have been predicted to have poor health outcomes. The inclusion of the single-item literacy tool into the admission process of this project involved the patient-centered-care characteristics of improved patient experience, lower health cost, improved clinical experience, and better outcomes.

Purpose

The National Action Plan to improve Health Literacy seeks to engage organizations, professionals, policymakers, communities, individuals, and families in a linked multi-sector effort to improve health literacy. Low …

Application Of Continuous Positive Airway Pressure For Thoracic Respiratory Motion Management: An Assessment In A Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Guided Radiation Therapy Environment, Evan Liang, Jennifer L. Dolan, Eric D. Morris, Jonathan Vono, Luisa F. Bazan, Mei Lu, Carri K. Glide-Hurst

Radiation Oncology Articles

PURPOSE: Patient tolerability of magnetic resonance (MR)-guided radiation treatment delivery is limited by the need for repeated deep inspiratory breath holds (DIBHs). This volunteer study assessed the feasibility of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) with and without DIBH for respiratory motion management during radiation treatment with an MR-linear accelerator (MR-linac).

METHODS AND MATERIALS: MR imaging safety was first addressed by placing the CPAP device in an MR-safe closet and configuring a tube circuit via waveguide to the magnet bore. Reproducibility and linearity of the final configuration were assessed. Six healthy volunteers underwent thoracic imaging in a 0.35T MR-linac, with one …

University Of South Dakota 2022 Aashe Stars Assessment Report, Holly Black, Jacob Ridgway, Megan Warner, Morgan Hughes, Charles Bean, Meredith King, Kian Rexroat-Potts, Emily Theroux, Zachary Schild, Meghann Elizabeth Jarchow

Sustainability & Environment Projects

Overview

This report provides a brief summary of the University of South Dakota’s STARS Report that was started by the Sustainability Capstone class and is projected to be completed during the summer of 2022. Currently the University of South Dakota has a Bronze rating, which is expected to be set throughout the completion of this report and hopefully increase in the future.

Problem Summary

Throughout the University of South Dakota’s STARS report there were two common problems. The first was a lack of record keeping for information such as emissions and employee satisfaction. The second was that the University did …

Invited Perspective: Eliminating Toxics To Prevent Disease: Asbestos Leads The Way, David Kriebel, Douglas J. Myers

Public and Population Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

Countries that have consumed more asbestos have historically had higher mortality rates from asbestos-related diseases (ARDs) than countries with lower asbestos consumption. A research letter in this issue by Rath et al. provides a 15-y update on evidence for this link and uses this evidence to support calls for a worldwide ban on the use of asbestos. We find their results convincing, and we agree with the urgent need to stop producing and using asbestos. For those who might be skeptical of this conclusion or who are considering how much weight to give this evidence, we offer this perspective as …

Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Via Dual Transformation-Aware Embeddings, Zhipeng Wang, Chunping Hou, Bangbang Ge, Yang Liu, Zhicheng Dong, Zhiqiang Wu

Electrical Engineering Faculty Publications

Unsupervised anomaly detection refers to the discovery of unconventional images that are globally or locally different from the training set. Recently, reconstruction-based anomaly detection methods have made great progress. However, most of the existing methods take reconstructing the original image as the goal of latent feature learning. Due to lack of effective semantic guidance, latent features have intrinsic characteristics which retain redundant details of spatial structure. Such information is too general and cause over-expression problem. To solve this problem, in this paper, dual transformation-aware embeddings are coined which aims to achieve a stable model to learn high-level latent features in …

2022 May, Morehead State University. Office Of Communications & Marketing.

Morehead State Press Release Archive, 1961 to the Present

Press releases for May of 2022.

Fifty-Sixth Commencement, May 14, 2022, Sacred Heart University

Commencement Programs

Program for the Graduate and Undergraduate ceremonies held May 14, 2022.

Commencement Mass 2022, Sacred Heart University

Commencement Programs

Program for the Commencement Mass held May 13, 2022. Presider, Rev. Anthony Ciorra; Concelebrant, Rev. Saji Thengumkudiyil.

Filleted Toe Flap For Closure Of Neuropathic Wound With Osteomyelitis, Robert Boguski, Danniyal Shahid

Posters

No abstract provided.

References To Babe Ruth In Advocacy And Judicial Opinions, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

The common theme of these “Writing It Right” articles is that the courts’ use of well-known cultural references in their opinions invites advocates to enhance their briefs and other submissions with references to similar well-known cultural markers. Advocates’ appropriate references to Babe Ruth, a true cultural icon, fit the bill.

Radiocarbon Dating: Analysis Of The Burns Site, Bethany A. Boylan

Burns Site Reporting and Archiving

This document is a student report containing aims to outline the period of use of the Burns (8BR85) site by the Ais Native Americans and other earlier groups of Paleoindians with radiocarbon dating analysis.

Beyond "Restoration Of Honor": Compensating Veterans For The Psychological Injuries Of The Gay And Transgender Bans, Evan R. Seamone

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Article is titled “Beyond Restoration of Honor” specifically to introduce the policy priority of ensuring that all Sexual and Gender Identity Minority (SGIM) veterans who were harmed by...discriminatory policies [like Don't Ask, Don't Tell] can obtain and use Veterans Affairs (VA) disability benefits for injuries resulting from discrimination while in the military. While this Article highlights the value of codifying a series of specific SGIM stressor markers for PTSD in the VA’s regulations concerning personal assault and creating presumptions of service-connection for specific military experiences, existing laws and regulations permit service-connection for these injuries without further regulatory changes.

In …

The Typical Toddler: Diet And Approaches To Picky Eating, Carissa Adams

Occupational Therapy Capstone Presentations

To address the contested definition of picky eating, a study was conducted to determine the typical toddler diet, therefore identifying when intervention may be warranted, and further defining picky eating. Out of the 252 responses to a cross-sectional survey, 34.9% of caregivers reported their child was a picky eater, whereas 65.1% were identified as non-picky eaters. The diets and quantity of foods consumed by these groups varied significantly. Picky eaters were less likely to eat foods of potentially polarizing sensory properties or textures that required advanced oral motor skills to consume. Children who were picky eaters consumed only 32 different …

Investigating The Impact Of Parkinson’S Disease On Iadl Performance, Emphasizing The Need For Earlier Diagnosis And The Value Of Timelier Occupational Therapy Intervention, Brittney N. Moser

Occupational Therapy Capstone Presentations

Parkinson’s disease (PD) can cause motor and non-motor difficulties which significantly decrease one’s independence and quality of life. Research has shown the earlier these individuals are diagnosed and subsequently referred for more timely therapeutic intervention, the better their health outcomes. This capstone was designed to develop advanced clinical understanding of the deficits in instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) performance early on in disease progression and the role of occupational therapy in PD care. Further, it was designed for program development to specifically address the need for increased care for those with PD in rural communities. Four weeks of the …

Promoting Occupational Therapy Involvement In End-Of-Life Care Through Advocacy And Education, Macey Genzlinger

Occupational Therapy Capstone Presentations

The end of life is a difficult stage of life to manage, but people who are dying still desire to participate in meaningful occupations. This participation can be negatively affected by the challenges faced at the end of life. Occupational therapy is a profession perfectly fitted to facilitate occupational participation for patients at the end of their lives. However, occupational therapy is underutilized in end-of-life care, and many knowledge gaps exist surrounding its use. Much work needs to be done to solve these problems which this Capstone project begins to address. The theoretical framework underlying this project is the Occupational …

Occupational Therapy Education To Support Families Affected By Huntington's Disease And Their Care Team, Morgan R. Weber

Occupational Therapy Capstone Presentations

Introduction: Huntington’s Disease (HD) is a neurodegenerative disease that presents with motor, cognitive, and psychiatric and behavioral symptoms. This project aimed to understand the benefits of incorporating occupational therapy education within an HD clinic, creating educational material to support the HD care team, and advocating for occupational therapy. Methods: The project was created to gain advanced clinical practice skills to understand occupational therapy’s role on an interdisciplinary HD clinic team and to implement occupational therapy education in an HD clinic to support patient and caregiver care. Additionally, it was designed for education to create educational material based on HD to …

Promoting Inclusive Play And Social Skills Development In Sioux Falls And Harrisburg, South Dakota, Madison C. Snelling

Occupational Therapy Capstone Presentations

A lack of inclusive play opportunities hinders children's development and participation in a meaningful occupation. The purpose of this 14-week capstone experience was to advocate for inclusive playgrounds and play spaces in daycares, community recreation centers, and community playgrounds in addition to gaining further clinical skills in pediatrics providing home-based occupational therapy services and social skills interventions. Methods included caseload management, developing and facilitating social skills groups for children 4-5 years, and completing evaluations of current play spaces in Sioux Falls and Harrisburg, S.D.

Meeting Mental Health Needs Of Parents Caring For Children With Disabilities By Facilitating Occupational Balance And Well-Being, Emily J. Heumiller

Occupational Therapy Capstone Presentations

Parents caring for children with disabilities experience unique challenges which affects their well-being and occupational balance. The affects can contribute to further limitations within their family systems. The purpose of this capstone project is to explore the need and effectiveness of an occupation therapy-based program to address parents’ mental health needs. Needs assessment results and literary evidence supported the need for the proposed program, titled the Well Parent Program. Program development was guided by occupational therapy models and frames of reference. Three assessments were used to evaluate the effect of program interventions on parents’ perceived stress, perceived well-being, and goal …