Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons^™

Active Learning With Cybersecurity, Carole Shook

TFSC Publications and Presentations

A global campus grant was obtained in Spring 2020 to develop modules for Cybersecurity. This presentation encompasses the use of Cyberciege and case studies that require active learning of students.

The Demotechnic Index Of Nations, 1980-2018, Camden Rainwater

Geosciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Demotechnic Index (DI) is a non-dimensional metric that is the scalar multiple of energy consumption over and above that required for mere subsistence of a national population. Thus, the DI is a measure of energy efficiency that scales a country’s industrial energy consumption (called the total technological energy) and the energy required to meet the metabolic demand of the population (called the total metabolic energy). The DI was created by scientist John Vallentyne in 1982, refined in 1994, but never gained popularity or wide use as a sustainability metric. The objective of this thesis was to re-evaluate the DI …

A Spatiotemporal Analysis Of Food Pantry Accessibility In Washington County, Arkansas, Coleman Warren

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Food pantries are an essential resource for impoverished and food insecure communities. Washington County, Arkansas has a food insecurity rate of 14.3% as compared to the national average of 10.9% (Feeding America, 2019). The Northwest Arkansas Food Bank has a robust pantry network in Washington County to support families and individuals who struggle with food insecurity.

We conducted a spatiotemporal analysis of food pantry accessibility in Washington County, Arkansas to evaluate the effectiveness of the food pantry network in Washington County at supporting communities with the most need. This analysis was conducted using the Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) method …

Effects Of Recess On Educational Outcomes In Elementary School Children, Katelyn Whitham

Health, Human Performance and Recreation Undergraduate Honors Theses

Introduction: Because physical activity is beneficial for physical and mental health, the declining opportunities to implement adequate recesses in schools are devastating for children. If educational outcomes are positively affected by increased recess time or quality, schools are more likely to receive funding for programs and resources that support this renovation to recesses, providing research in lacking topics. Purpose: The purpose of this systematic review is to find related, academic articles for cross examination of data collected on the effects that recess has on educational outcomes so that schools may use this as a resource to receive funding to increase …

Impacts Of Post-Incarceration Programming For Women's Lives And Local Communities, Megan Greenslade

Sociology and Criminology Undergraduate Honors Theses

Previous research on reentry programming has focused mostly on male inmates and less attention is given to female inmates. In Arkansas, where female reentry rates have recently increased, research is needed to add to the conversation surrounding effective programming for previously justice-involved women, its impact on their lives and behaviors, and how this can influence the likelihood of recidivism. This qualitative study also aims to discover whether reentry programming can have a positive impact on the local community. Residents and staff at a local Northwest Arkansas transitional housing facility for previously justice-involved women were interviewed to analyze the effects of …

Plantain Cultivation In Puerto Rico: Its Inclusion In The National Crop Table Of The United States Department Of Agriculture’S Farm Service Agency, And Its Loss Compensation In Disaster Programs, Javier A. Rivera-Aquino

Journal of Food Law & Policy

If justice is to provide each person what they deserve, it seems plantain producers in Puerto Rico did not relish a just compensation for their farm losses after Hurricane Maria in 2017. The main culprit? Stale data. Farm Service Agency’s (FSA) Wildfire and Hurricanes Indemnity Program (WHIP) utilized plantain production data under the National Crop Table (NCT) 2017, which seemingly did not reflect up-to-date yield averages of Puerto Rico’s plantain farmers at the time of Hurricane Maria.

Altering Overdraft Fee Policies To Promote Consumer Financial Health, Nadia Barbarawi

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

The objective of this study is to describe the traditional overdraft practices, explain the reaction of the banking industry from the pressure coming from consumers, regulators, and innovative companies to reduce or eliminate overdraft fees to promote consumer financial health.

Determinants Of Public Corruption In Arkansas And The Nation, Jason Neeley

Political Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through reviewing the existing scholarly literature on corruption, factors that seem to increase the likelihood or contribute to rising numbers in reported cases of corruption will be used to determine which factors are most highly correlated with the amount of reported public corruption in a state’s government. With this, one will gain knowledge on which states have the highest levels of reported corruption and what factors are present in the state that can help explain the high levels of corruption. This combination of relationships will answer the question as to what a state should look for to address issues related …

Improving Gifted And Talented Education In Arkansas: Identification, Academic Benefits, And Local Norms, Bich Thi Ngoc Tran

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the United States, education policies differ from state to state. Local research, therefore, is important to inform educators, policymakers, and researchers on the ground. This dissertation leverages ten years of administrative data to study three questions about gifted and talented (G/T) identification and education in Arkansas: does the current system identify the right students? Are gifted and talented programs beneficial for students? And, how can we improve diversity in gifted and talented education? Leveraging logistic regression, mixed-effects models, and descriptive statistics, I sought to provide answers to these three questions. First, are academically ready students from low-income families being …

Effectiveness Of Affective Based Intervention Depending On Personal Relevance To A Conspiracy Belief, Mallory Macdonald

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

With the increase in conspiracy theory beliefs, there is a need for intervention techniques. Do some intervention techniques work better when taking into account the personal relevance a person has towards a topic? One hundred and sixty undergraduate students first read an article that introduced the conspiracy theory and established personal relevance. To manipulate personal relevance, participants were told that a new vaccine mandate would be put into place either July 2023 or July 2031. Then, they considered an article that worked to intervene the conspiracy belief. Participants either read an article that was focused on affective or cognitive intervention …

Moral Distress, Burnout, And Moral Injury In Healthcare Professionals, Sophia Gibson

Anthropology Undergraduate Honors Theses

For doctors and other health care professionals, experiences of care too often involve burnout and moral distress. Making both visible to begin addressing them takes up the main concern of my thesis. Burnout and moral distress swallow a life. Suddenly you aren’t going on that shopping trip with friends, you can forget about going to that movie or play. You are too tired to drag yourself out of bed, instead getting caught in a cycle of sleep and work with no time for a break or even to process what happened last shift. Who’s going to have a nice relaxing …

The Hard Work Is Worth It: Overcoming Unfavorable Determinants To Pass Pro-Immigrant Education Policy In A Conservative State Legislature, Megan Cardwell Godfrey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Immigrants, English learners (ELs), and culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD)students often lag behind their White, monolingual peers in academic achievement and English language proficiency. While there are policy solutions to improve academic and linguistic opportunities and outcomes for immigrant/EL/CLD students, such as implementing bilingual instructional models and increasing teacher diversity, these pro-immigrant policies can be hard to come by in some legislative contexts due to unfavorable economic, social, or political determinants. This qualitative case study analyzed the multifaceted political work that contributed to the passage of two pro-immigrant education policies in the Arkansas 93rd General Assembly: a bill for bilingual …

Law Enforcement Policy And Personnel Responses To Terrorism: Do Prior Attacks Predict Current Preparedness?, Bryce Kirk

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Terrorism has been on the mind of the American people and politicians alike since the 9/11 attacks over two decades ago. In the years since, there has been a massive shift in law enforcement priorities from community-oriented policing (COP) to homeland security-oriented policing. This was especially evident in the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, which was established to aid law enforcement entities with terrorism preparedness. While prior literature has addressed a variety of factors that have contributed to terrorism preparedness, very little research has …

Economic Experiments On Group Identity And Bias, Nathaniel Christopher Burke

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Experiments in economics have been a valuable tool to understand the behavioral implications of incentives on the decision-making process. Particularly, aspects of decision making that cannot be observed in empirical data can be better isolated in an experimental setting such as bias and identity impacts. This dissertation uses three distinct experiments to further the understanding of individual biases, perceptions, and identity and how they impact the way people defer to these internal traits under incentives. This dissertation looks at how well individuals can make inferences about polling data that was collected from individuals susceptible to socially desirable responding. It also …

An Analysis Of The Relationship Between Covid Policies And Student Growth In The Nine Largest Arkansas Public School Districts During The 2020-2021 Academic Year, Jack Switzer

Political Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

My honors thesis is a comprehensive overview of the relationship between the COVID19 response of Arkansas’ nine largest school districts on high school students’ Value-Added Growth Scores (VAS). I wrote my thesis on the intersection between districts’ COVID-19 response and the academic success of their students because the COVID-19 pandemic caused a historically significant change in education. The effects of switching from in-person, mask-free learning to virtual, semi-virtual and socially distanced learning certainly affected students’ ability to learn from the educational environment pre-COVID. I chose to utilize the VAS as the metric for student success because it measures how students …

Kaboom, Karstin Margaret Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This document is a collection of original poems written between Fall 2018 and Spring 2022.

“Implacement”: The Importance Of Place And Community In Schooling, Emily Coady

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters exploring my overarching research question: How does sense of place shape a teacher’s orientation to their profession? My first chapter empirically answers the question: Is there a relationship between place attachment and measured aspects of teacher quality? In an attempt to qualify the strength of bond between a teacher and his or her community, I adapted a place attachment instrument developed by Raymond, Brown, and Weber (2010). Each teacher is given a place attachment score informed by their responses on the 21-item survey. Next, I correlated these scores to other aspects of teacher quality …

On The Same Page: Student Government And The University Administrative Agenda Alignment, James Michael Diloreto-Hill

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Within institutions of higher education, shared governance is an essential component to a healthy functionality. Among the many stakeholders at these institutions, students are the largest in number and hold primacy. Participation in student governance establishes a sense of shared ownership over their communities while also providing a unique avenue for students to gain wisdom and develop critical skill sets. Senior administrators at these institutions have many inherent challenges due to an organization that is largely decentralized and autonomous (Duderstadt, 2007). Regarding agenda setting, the Garbage Can Model (Cohen et al., 1972) was utilized as a theoretical framework. The purpose …

Decision Making Under Uncertainty Among Agricultural Commodity Traders, Marei Undine Houpert

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Understanding how humans behave has received increased attention in research in the most recent decades. While insights into human behavior are essential for the functioning of markets, these insights are also crucial for the guidance of policymaking and public spending decisions to ensure that markets are fair and accessible for all. This research has the unique opportunity to use a dataset of commercial grain trader transactions to study the decision-making and behavior of commercial traders in agricultural commodity markets rather than institutional investors or speculators.

Paper one focuses on the performance of commercial grain traders and their ability to perform …

Post-Obergefell V. Hodges: How Lgbt Contact Can Alter Public Lgbt Policy Positions In The U.S. And Arkansas, Briana Huett

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Contact Theory (CT) of attitudinal change has utilized to understand perceptions of minority-group members and the policies that surround them since the 1950s. It has further been used to specifically examine how we form our opinions of LGBT-identifying individuals, the LGBT community, and LGBT policies more generally. However, further evidence is still needed from the CT literature surrounding how this form of contact interacts with individuals’ social identities to determine and alter their LGBT policy positions, how the level of contact with LGBT persons might have differing effects on these positions, and whether LGBT contact holds the same effects …

The Covid-19 Pandemic And The Implementation Of The Americans With Disabilities Act Amendments Act In Higher Education: Discretionary Practices Of Disability Services Professionals, Crystal Denise Hill

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly transformed the landscape of higher education. The urgent nature of procedural changes in academic and administrative higher education services did not exempt leadership, faculty, or staff from their legally mandated responsibility to provide equal access to the educational environment for students with disabilities as outlined within title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA). The purpose of this study was to explore the strategies used by disability services professionals to implement the ADAAAA during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sources and preferred formats of policy guidance were explored. The priorities of department, division, and institution-level …

An Examination Of School Transition On Value-Added Growth In Arkansas, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Josh B. Mcgee, Kathryn Barnes, Charlene A. Reid

Policy Briefs

In this brief, we examine grade-level value-added growth scores during the years that students transition upward to a new building. We used five years of publicly available growth data to compare and make predictions about a grade’s value-added growth for mathematics and ELA during a transition year. We find that transitioning schools in 6th and 7th grade continually has an impact on value-added growth scores.

Policy And Behavior: Comparisons Between Twitter Discussions About The Us Tobacco 21 Law And Other Age-Related Behaviors, Page D. Dobbs, Jason B. Colditz, Shelby Shields, Anna Meadows, Brian A. Primack

Health, Human Performance and Recreation Faculty Publications and Presentations

To combat the e-cigarette epidemic among young audiences, a federal law was passed in the US that raised the minimum legal sales age of tobacco to 21 years (commonly known as Tobacco 21). Little is known about sentiment toward this law. Thus, the purpose of our study was to systematically explore trends about Tobacco 21 discussions and comparisons to other age-restriction behaviors on Twitter. Twitter data (n = 4628) were collected from September to December of 2019 that were related to Tobacco 21. A random subsample of identified tweets was used to develop a codebook. Two trained coders independently coded …

Examination Of School Value-Added Growth By Student Population, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Josh B. Mcgee, Charlene A. Reid

Policy Briefs

In this brief, we assess the relationship between Arkansas’ school-level value-added content growth scores for student racial and programmatic groups. We find that on average, African American students receive lower growth scores than other student groups, and that African American elementary students demonstrated large drops in growth since COVID

Charter School Funding Inequities: Rochester, New York, Josh B. Mcgee, Patrick J. Wolf, Larry D. Maloney

School Choice Demonstration Project

Public charter schools are increasingly becoming part of both the broader national conversation about education policy as well as the local urban scene in the United States. The latter is certainly true in Rochester, New York, where charter schools serve more than 18 percent of the students who attend school in the city. Given the important role that charter schools play in educating Rochester’s students, we sought to learn if students who attend the city’s charter schools are funded equitably when compared to students in Rochester City School District (RCSD) schools.

Seditious Conspiracy Charges In The American Terrorism Study (Ats), Katie Ratcliff

Research Projects

In January 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Seditious Conspiracy charges against members of the anti-government extremist group Oath Keepers in connection to the January 6th (2021) siege of the U.S. Capitol Building. Several have entered not guilty pleas and a trial is expected in July 2022.

To provide context, this brief offers an overview of 11 Seditious Conspiracy cases included in the American Terrorism Study (ATS) since 1980. In total, these cases involve nine groups (a.k.a."cells" or "plots") and 78 defendants charged with Seditious Conspiracy (18 USC§ 2384), a relatively rare charge that comprises less than one half …

Governance Of Risk Management Programs: Learning From Quebec's Farm Income Stabilization Insurance Program, Frederick Clerson

Public Policy Faculty & Graduate Student Publications and Presentations

Involving stakeholders in program decision-making can support existing programs and reduce tensions against the state. However, to be involved, stake­holders may request specific mechanisms to influ­ence program design or outcomes. This paper ana­lyzes the design of four consultation mechanisms and the resultant stakeholder experiences in a pro­vincial Canadian program called Farm Income Stabilization Insurance (FISI). The program offers a protection against low prices. The findings of this paper are based on 18 semi-structured interviews conducted with current and former participants familiar with the mechanisms. An analysis is accomplished through Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation and Glasser’s choice theory. Results show …

Examining Arkansas' Ninth-Grade Gpas And Long-Term Outcomes, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Josh B. Mcgee, Charlene A. Reid, Sarah R. Morris

Policy Briefs

In this brief, we examine Arkansas’ students’ ninth-grade GPAs and their relationship to high school graduation and college enrollment. We follow seven cohorts of Arkansas first-time freshmen who were still enrolled in twelfth grade four years later. We find ninth-grade GPAs strongly influence future academic successes. We suggest policies to help all freshmen succeed.

Whose Turn Now? The Enactment & Expansion Of Private School Choice Programs Across The Us, Yujie Sude, Patrick Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

Private school choice policies have been enacted and expanded across the United States since the 1990s. By January 2021, 30 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico hosted 67 distinct private school choice policies. Why have some states adopted and expanded this education reform while others have demurred? Which states are more likely to adopt specific types of private school choice initiatives in the coming years? We present the results of an exploratory empirical analysis examining which state-level political, economic, and educational factors predict past policy decisions regarding the enactment and expansion of private school choice in 49 …

Factors Influencing The Usage Of Shared E-Scooters : A Case Study Of Chicago, Farzana Mehzabin Tuli

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rapid popularity growth of shared e-scooters creates the necessity of understanding the determinants of shared e-scooter usage. This thesis estimates the impacts of temporal variables (weather data, weekday/weekend, and gasoline prices) and time-invariant variables (socio-demographic, built environment, and neighborhood characteristics) on the shared e-scooter demand by using four months (June 2019- October 2019) period of data from the shared e-scooter pilot program in Chicago. The study employs a random-effects negative binomial (RENB) model that effectively models shared e-scooter trip origin and destination count data with over-dispersion while capturing serial autocorrelation in the data. Results of temporal variables indicate that …