Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

More Than Just Plain Old Technology Adoption: Understanding Variations In Teachers' Use Of An Online Planning Tool, Heather Leary, Victor R. Lee, Mimi Recker

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

This paper examines variability in teachers’ usage patterns as they interacted with an online teacher support tool, the Curriculum Customization Service (CCS), as part of their professional work. The CCS is a web application that supports teachers in planning, adapting, sequencing, and enacting differentiated instruction in Earth science education. By mining the usage log files of over 40 teachers who used the CCS over a yearlong period, we analyzed for variability using a framework developed in marketing research to characterize appropriation of technology. This analysis helped reveal different kinds of teachers’ patterns along two dimensions: frequency and variability of use. …

Becoming Reflective: Designing For Reflection On Physical Performances, Tom Moher, Cynthia Carter Ching, Sara Schaefer, Victor R. Lee, Noel Enyedy, Joshua Danish, Paulo Guerra, Alessandro Gnoli, Priscilla Jimenez, Brenda Lopez-Silva, Leilah Lyons, Anthony Perritano, Brian Slattery, Mike Tissenbaum, James Slotta, Rebecca Cober, Cresencia Fong

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Learners’ physical performances can serve as focal objects for reflection and insight across a variety of contexts and content areas. This session brings together a set of projects that leverage the physical performances of learners, construct concrete and abstract representations of those performances, and investigate how learners reflect on and understand the relationships between their performances and target content—physics, health and fitness, data literacy and navigation, animal foraging, and climate change. The session will share findings and design principles from each of the studies around constructing technological scaffolds for physical performance reflections. The symposium highlights the various ways performance can …

What's Happening In The "Quantified Self" Movement?, Victor R. Lee

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Rapid adoption of wearable tracking devices and motion sensitive apps has led to the development of the “Quantified Self” movement (QS). Some in the learning sciences community have begun to take notice and incorporate ideas from QS into the research and design of new learning environments. Yet the QS movement is still new enough that very little is known about it, and there are many open questions about how QS might be of value to the learning sciences. This paper provides some history of the movement and through a qualitative analysis of a public video corpus of QS presentations, identifies …

Keeping Up: Shifting Access To Gateway Resources In A Cycling Community Of Practice, Joel Drake, Victor R. Lee

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

While learning involves changes in one’s participation within a community of practice, changes in participants can also change access to resources key to newcomer participation. This poster presents a case study of a recreational cycling community illustrating how community changes diminished newcomers’ access to resources for drafting.

Examining How Students Make Sense Of Slow-Motion Video, Min Yuan, Nam Ju Kim, Joel Drake, Scott Smith, Victor R. Lee

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Slow-motion video is starting to appear in science classrooms as a source of data for students to examine. However, seeing important features in such video requires a particular kind of student engagement and supported acts of noticing. This poster reports on an exploratory study of what students noticed and talked about when viewing slow-motion video during a classroom design experiment focused on bodily activity as it relates to motion and animation.

The Nsf/Nih Effect: Surveying The Effect Of Data Management Requirements On Faculty, Sponsored Programs, And Institutional Repositories, Cheryl D. Walters, Anne R. Diekema, Andrew Wesolek

Library Faculty & Staff Publications

The scholarly communication landscape is rapidly changing and nowhere is this more evident than in the field of data management. Mandates by major funding agencies, further expanded by executive order and pending legislation in 2013, require many research grant applicants to provide data management plans for preserving and making their research data openly available. However, do faculty researchers have the requisite skill sets and are their institutions providing the necessary infrastructure to comply with these mandates? To answer these questions, three groups were surveyed in 2012: research and teaching faculty, sponsored programs office staff, and institutional repository librarians. Survey results …

Great Indexing News For Psi Chi Journal, Melanie M. Domenech-Rodriguez

Psychology Faculty Publications

The success of scientific journals is measured by many markers, among them, whether or not they are indexed in well-known databases. Our Journal was already indexed in EBSCO Academic Search Complete, which has over 13,690 journals and content dating to 1887 (EBSCO, 2014). Now, I am excited to say that Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research is also listed in PsycINFO, which has nearly 2,500 journals and coverage dating back to 1597 (APA, 2014). The process of being considered for indexing in PsycINFO included a careful review of a year's worth of issues for high-quality content considered of interest to …

Cultural Influences On Women In Leadership: An Extension Of The Hofstede And Globe Dimensions, Andrea Rae Barlow

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Technology has forever changed the face of business. Although in the past business markets have been limited to local geographic areas, the concept of outsourcing has opened a diverse spectrum of international markets. An increase in supplies and consumers can improve business effectiveness and efficiency, but entering international markets can be detrimental if the business is unaware of the subtle differences the new market has in regard to leadership styles and cultural values. Hofstede's cultural dimension analysis has been the primary research study for many industry and academic professionals (Bond 2002; Hofstede 1997). However, many scholars are questioning whether Hofstede …

Truman, Kennedy, And Reagan: Assessing The Impact Of Assassination Attempts On The Organizational Culture Of The U.S. Secret Service, Briana D. Bowen

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The U.S. Secret Service (USSS), one of the most elite security agencies in the world, is charged with protecting the President of the United States at any cost. Three American presidents fell to assassins' bullets before the USSS was assigned the role of presidential protection; one more would later be slain despite USSS protection. This study examines the organizational culture of the USSS, employing the methodology of cultural topography (CTOPS) to identify the agency's norms, values, identity, and perceptual lens. We review three of the most impactful twentieth-century assassination attempts-two failed, one successful-and their formative effect on USSS organizational culture. …

A Visually Determined Deutschland: Visual Rhetoric Analysis Of German Culture, Taylor Halversen

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Within the field of Communication Studies, researchers attempt to define culture and often explain it as shared meanings and values among a group of people. Another subsection of Communication Studies includes the study of how images communicate: the field of visual rhetoric. This paper combines concepts from intercultural communication and visual rhetoric in order to better understand German culture. By examining two culturally significant eras of German artwork through the lens of visual rhetoric analysis, this study seeks to better understand German culture and its values. By analyzing the visual communication of historically significant photographs, one can find common meanings …

Justice And Immigrant Latino Recreation Geography In Cache Valley, Utah, Jodie Madsen, Claudia Radel, Joanna Endter-Wada

Environment and Society Faculty Publications

Latinos are the largest U.S. non-mainstreamed ethnic group, and social and environmental justice considerations dictate recreation professionals and researchers meet their recreation needs. This study reconceptualizes this diverse group’s recreation patterns, looking at where immigrant Latino individuals in Cache Valley, Utah do recreate rather than where they do not. Through qualitative interviews and interactive mapping, thirty participants discussed what recreation means to them and explained their recreation site choices. Findings suggest that recreation as an activity done outside the home, for fun with others, leads participants to seek spaces with certain characteristics. Reconceiving recreation more broadly and framing it from …

Creating The Dublin Core Record, Liz Woolcott

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Metadata, Liz Woolcott

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

No abstract provided.

Examining Written And Spoken Fast-Mapping Abilities In Children With And Without Language Impairment: A Feasibility Study, Brooke Rice

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Linguistic skills foundational to literacy success are skills such as phonology, morphology, and orthographic knowledge. Phonological awareness, the awareness of specific units of sounds within words, and morphological awareness, the meaningful units which make up words, have been studied in depth and received recent attention in research. Phonological awareness has been attributed to increased literacy abilities of written word decoding, syllable analysis, and word recognition (Stackhouse, 1997). Additionally, morphological awareness has been attributed to increased literacy abilities of sight word reading, decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling (Carlisle, 1995, 2000; Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993; Wolter, Wood, & D’zatko, 2009). Orthographic awareness, …

Evaluating The Smart Steps For Stepfamilies: Embrace The Journey Program, A Hierarchical Examination, Katie L. Reck

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Over the past decade, relationship education has grown as a means of enhancing couple relations. This study examines the experiences of 2,828 ethnically diverse and low-income adults who participated in the Smart Steps for Stepfamilies: Embrace the Journey program, a 12-hour stepfamily education program. Self-report measures of relationship quality, couple commitment, and relationship instability were gathered prior to and immediately after the Smart Steps intervention as well as six weeks, six months, and one year post-program. Results suggest that stepfamily participants experienced increases in relationship quality; however, these increases reduced to near pre-program levels one year after the programs completion. …

Agco Corporation Valuation, Sean Michael Miller

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This paper will discuss the excellent growth potential that AGCO Corporation faces and the reason that this company's stock is rated as a hold position. AGCO has seen tremendous progress and is in an industry that shows that a growing world population will continue to need food and more efficient ways to create food. However, based on sensitivities of assumptions in the models presented herein and on a current share price that is already close to my assumed fair value I do not issue a buy recommendation.

A Multimedia Intervention To Increase The Likelihood That University Students In Need Will Utilize Counseling Services, Todd W. Lindsley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The primary objective of this study was to create and test an intervention designed to increase students’ positive attitudes toward utilizing mental health services. A review of the literature was conducted to establish the guidelines for creating an intervention that would effectively influence attitudes while being relatively easy to customize and adapt to different settings. The content of the intervention was informed by the literature, reviewed by a panel of experts, and tested with a focus group of students before being finalized. In order to test the effectiveness of the intervention, and experimental study was designed which included an experimental …

Mixing The Emic And Etic Perspectives: A Study Exploring Development Of Fixed-Answer Questions To Measure In-Service Teachers' Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, M. Brooke Robertshaw

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this dissertation study was to develop fixed-answer questions to measure teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge when teaching with online learning resources. Technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) is a framework to describe the kind of knowledge that teachers use when they are teaching with technology. Online learning resources include text, video, images, and interactive websites that teachers can use to help teach subject matter to their students. Fixed-answer questions are the kinds of questions found on standardized tests like the SAT, and tests that K-12 students take as a part of state and national testing. Many measures have …

Cruising The Digital Highway: The Highway 89 Digital Collections Project, Liz Woolcott, Clint Pumphrey, Dustin Olsen, Paula Mitchell

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

No abstract provided.

Benchmarking An Optimal Pattern Of Pollution Trading: The Case Of Cub River, Utah, Arthur Caplan, Yuya Sasaki

Applied Economics Faculty Publications

This paper employs a recently developed, dynamic trading algorithm to establish a benchmark pattern of trade for a potential water quality trading (WQT) market in the Cub River sub-basin of Utah; a market that would ultimately include both point and nonpoint sources. The algorithm accounts for three complications that naturally arise in trading scenarios: (1) combinatorial matching of traders, (2) trader heterogeneity, and (3) discreteness in abatement technology. The algorithm establishes as detailed a reduced-cost benchmark as possible for the sub-basin by distinguishing a specific pattern of trade among would-be market participants. As such, the algorithm provides a benchmark against …

Highway 89 Digital Collections Project, Jim Kichas, Paula Mitchell, Dustin Olsen, Clint Pumphrey, Liz Woolcott

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

No abstract provided.

Antitrust Enforcement In The Obama Adminstration's First Term: A Regulatory Approach, William F. Shughart Ii, Diana W. Thomas

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

During his presidential campaign, Sen. Barack Obama criticized sharply the lax antitrust law enforcement record of the George W. Bush administration. Subsequently, his first assistant attorney general for antitrust even went so far as to suggest that the Great Recession was, at least in part, caused by federal antitrust policy failures during the previous eight years. This paper sets out to investigate how and in what ways antitrust enforcement has changed since President Obama took office in 2009. We review four recent antitrust cases and the behavioral remedies that were imposed on the defendants in those matters in detail. We …

Build It—And Advocate For It—And They Will Come: Lessons From A Collaborative Project In Archives Advocacy And Program Development, Jodi Allison-Bunnell, Linda Morton-Keithley, Elizabeth Knight

Journal of Western Archives

Libraries at small- and mid-sized academic institutions continue to re-define themselves as journal and monograph collections go online, budgets and staffing remain flat or reduced, and value to student learning and the institutional mission needs to be apparent. This all spells opportunity for archival programs which, with a strong focus on advocacy and daylighting formerly hidden collections of unique content, can re-invigorate the library and spotlight the active role today's service- and user-oriented archives can play in supporting student research, fostering ties with constituents, and ensuring the preservation of an institution's stories and history. A recently-completed National Historical Publications and …

Primary Sources On C. E. Kelsey And The Northern California Indian Association, Larisa K. Miller

Journal of Western Archives

This article provides a brief history of and identifies primary sources on C. E. Kelsey and the Northern California Indian Association, which brought federal support to the nonreservation Indians of northern California in the early 1900s. Kelsey is a frequently mentioned but largely unknown figure in the unique history of Indian-white relations in California. As an officer of the Northern California Indian Association (NCIA) and special agent for the Indian Office he altered the landscape for California Indians. Because there is no corpus of Kelsey's personal papers, NCIA records, or government records, he remains largely unknown, to the point that …

Cognitive Task Analysis-Based Training: A Metaanalysisof Studies, Colby Tofel-Grehl, David F. Feldon

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Cognitive task analysis (CTA) is enjoying growing popularity in both research and practice as a foundational element of instructional design. However, there exists relatively little research exploring its value as a foundation for training through controlled studies. Furthermore, highly individualized approaches to conducting CTA do not permit broadly generalizable conclusions to be drawn from the findings of individual studies. Thus, examining the magnitude of observed effects across studies from various domains and CTA practitioners is essential for assessing replicable effects. This study reports the findings from a meta-analysis that examines the overall effectiveness of CTA across practitioners and settings in …

Corporate Lobbying, Political Connections, And The Bailout Of Banks, Diana W. Thomas, Benjamin M. Blau, Tyler Brough

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

Political involvement has long been shown to be a profitable investment for firms that seek favorable regulatory conditions or support in times of economic distress. But how important are different types of political involvement for the timing and magnitude of political support? To answer this question, we take a comprehensive look at the lobbying expenditures and political connections of banks that were recipients of government support under the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). We find that politically engaged firms were not only more likely to receive TARP support, but they also received a greater amount of TARP support and …

Using Field-Level Characteristics As Proxy Measures To Test For The Presence Of Economies Of Scale In Nonpoint Pollution Control, Arthur J. Caplan, John Gilbert, Devalina Chatterjee

Applied Economics Faculty Publications

We use parametric and nonparametric methods to estimate correlations between average control cost and three field-level characteristics—field size and delivered phosphorous per field and per acre—as proxies for economies of scale in controlling nonpoint pollution. We combine load and delivery-ratio estimates for more than 12,000 fields in the Bear River Basin, Utah, with estimates of control costs and effectiveness of management practices from the literature. Results suggest a negative relationship between control cost and delivered phosphorous per field and per acre. Ranking fields by phosphorous load therefore prioritizes management-practice subsidies by economies of scale.

Corporations: Manufacturing Psychopaths?, Dallen Stanley Hansen

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The impact & harms of white-collar offenses (corporate crime) on society are severe, & cost society many times what violent offenses do. I argue the occurrence of corporate crime is a function of corporate culture and environment (Organizational Strain). According to some analyses, there is an increased prevalence of psychopathic personalities in corporate management positions. To study this, I analyzed data collected from 203 managers & executives at seven corporations with employees numbering 150 to 40,000 - using the Psychopathic Personality Inventory Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). I then conducted content analysis on independent biographies of four prominent, criminal CEO's to track the …

The Effects Of Financing Unfunded Social Security With Consumption Taxation When Consumers Are Shortsighted, Michael P. Clagg

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Using a representative-agent life-cycle model with consumer shortsightedness, I study an unfunded social security program financed via consumption taxation. Compared to financing an unfunded program with payroll taxation, I find that there is only a slight increase in well-being across planning horizons that is generated by a program with a consumption tax.

We suggest that both our data and the available time-series evidence are consistent with Milton Friedman's view that people save to smooth consumption over several years but, because of liquidity constraints, caution, or shortsighted-ness do not seek to smooth consumption over longer horizons. . . . Indeed, Milton …

Utilizing Remote Sensing And Geospatial Techniques To Determine Detection Probabilities Of Large Mammals, Patricia A. Terletzky-Gese

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Whether a species is rare and requires protection or is overabundant and needs control, an accurate estimate of population size is essential for the development of conservation plans and management goals. Wildlife science has traditionally relied on human observers in airplanes, helicopter, or ground vehicles to count the number of individuals seen during wildlife surveys. However, these traditional surveys of wildlife require significant resources, are difficult to conduct quickly and safely over remote and/or extensive locations, are disruptive to the studied species, and are prone to significant error due to unobserved or missed animals and multiple counts of single animals. …