cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-206127
title: Learning 21st century skills: implementation of programs and practices

description: The purpose of this study was to examine the programs, practices, and culture of a school that claims to be meeting the demands of globalization. A qualitative case study of an elementary school was used to extract a comprehensive description of the instructional practice, professional life, and perceived impact on the culture of a school that has embraced 21st century skills. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills framework was used as a descriptor of those skills that show promise for preparing today’s students for the flexible and global demands of the future job market. ❧ Findings related to the instructional practice included a global focused curriculum, inquiry-based instruction, students meeting academic standards, and wide use of technology.  Findings related to professional life included a clearly articulated vision with leadership and collaboration around curricular development.  Findings related to perceived impact of 21st century skills on the school’s culture included student behavior that models that which will be necessary for success in the 21st century, teacher learning and collaboration around curriculum development, and significant parent support aligned with the vision of the school. The composite of these findings suggested five themes that shed light on best practice for implementing 21st century learning at a school: (1) a clearly articulated vision for global learning and 21st century skills, (2) fidelity of vision with school practice and community support, (3) internal capacity for developing curriculum, (4) school culture that is centered on both student and adult learning, (5) a dual focus on core academic achievement and to 21st century skills.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-227760
title: A study of Chinese-Malaysian students' choices to attend a private college, American university transfer program

description: 1999
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-177101
title: Page 106
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-210532
title: Development of organic-inorganic optical microcavities for studying polymer thin films

description: The optical characterization of polymeric materials to understand their fundamental behavior is important to study their materials' properties and to utilize them in numerous applications. Therefore, this thesis mainly investigates the possibilities for the development of hybrid organic-inorganic optical resonators for studying polymer thin films based on whispering-gallery mode (WGM) optical resonators. The long-period light confinement in WGM optical resonators with low loss materials, such as silica, ensures high sensitivity or high quality (Q) factor by scanning optical resonators numerous times, hence extracting the change of information caused in the system during the scan. Such detection mechanisms can be the change of quality factor, resonant shift or transmission change. ❧ In this thesis, it is first demonstrated that the loss mechanism for hybrid optical resonators are material-limited with quality factor over than 10^7, meaning that other loss mechanisms such as scattering, radiation, contamination and coupling losses are minimized with optimized device performance, device fabrication and optical characterization set-up. The change of optical field characterization is also investigated with different polymers, film thickness and operating wavelengths by Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations for the hybrid structure.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-141480
title: Page 213
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-176817
title: Page 35
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-177076
title: Page 81
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-170661
title: Page 151
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160575
title: Page 57
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160597
title: Page 79
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-177079
title: Page 84
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-177110
title: Page 115
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-249739
title: Improving student achievement at a restructured high school academy of health sciences using an innovation gap analysis approach

description: This case study used the Gap Analysis (Clark & Estes, 2008) framework, a six-step problem solving approach to identify goals, determine performance gaps, diagnose causes, recommend research-based solutions, and evaluate the results to examine student achievement of a Restructured Health Sciences High School Academy’s Expected Student Learning Results/21st Century outcomes.  The purpose of this study was to (a) identify the underlying skills required in order for students to achieve the outcomes, (b) determine the degree to which these skills are being taught in the Friday Project Period, (c) identify appropriate assessments to measure student achievement of these skills, and (d) determine the degree to which students are achieving these skills.  In this qualitative case study, document analysis, classroom observations, and interviews were conducted to collect data from six high school Project Period teachers.  Findings from this study indicate that teachers like teaching the Project Period, but lack knowledge and skills about expected student learning outcomes and how to transition their roles from lecturer to facilitator.  This study also found that teachers lack value and structured time to plan for the Project Period.  This study recommends solutions, drawn from the literature, to help the stakeholders within the organization to address these challenges.  This case study demonstrates how the Gap Analysis framework is used to identify performance gaps, evaluate current practices, and address performance issues when implementing the Project Period.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160557
title: Page 39
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160571
title: Page 53
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-176805
title: Page 23
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-176823
title: Page 41
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-177098
title: Page 103
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-202555
title: Sensing race against representation in the experimental writings of Gertrude Stein: 1910–1940

description: This dissertation undertakes to read, hear, and feel the openly unsaid and concretely sounded, spelled, and sewn manifestations of race and racial anxiety in the writing of Gertrude Stein after 1910.  It explores race as the irresistible, elusive, ever-irruptive trace of difference that resists reference and abstractive representational logic while inflecting and shaping the meaning of the ordinary everywhere.  In this project I read the frequent explicit references to the racial throughout Stein’s corpus as pivotal, loosely fastening (and fattening) buttons that connect and charge Stein’s recurring vocabularies of the body and domestic space with racial significance.  I begin by reviewing the critical climate of discussions of race in Stein’s writing and outlining some of the theoretical work that is instrumental in thinking, locating, and articulating race in relation to Stein and other representation-resistant forms.  After some discussion of the historical contexts in which we find race pervasively saturating, infusing, and structuring Stein’s world of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century life in the U.S. and France, I consider the ways in which race weaves together and sounds through Stein’s oblique plays on the ordinary, her handling of “little” everyday words and her challenges to the limits of representation.  In reading a broad span of Stein’s writings over many years, I look into the intensely intertextually connective and re-sounded, proliferative and profound dynamics of the non-negligible, structuring trace and tracks of race imprinted in and sounded through the familial-ly and materially associative potential of words as relationally suggestive rather than abstractly substitutional, as part of the embodied substance of the Real that constitutes everything though it always exceeds and evades communicative translation and pressures toward graspable, master-able clarity.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-203243
title: The parenting needs of parents of typical children, ages 6-10

description: Programs and resources are available to parents to inform and improve their parenting skills. Despite these resources, the need for parent education continues to increase as parents find existing networks unsatisfactory or inaccessible. Parenting programs have produced inconsistent results in meeting the needs of parents. This study identifies the informational needs of parents of typical children, ages 6 to 10, who are not identified as gifted or requiring special education services. Thirty-seven participants completed a demographic questionnaire and an open-ended parent needs survey in English or Spanish. Survey topics consisted of academic achievement, risky behaviors, social development, communication, emotional development, family dynamics, moral development, discipline, and culture. Data were collected from the urban community of the Los Angeles Unified School District. ❧ Parents ranked academic progress, parent-child communication, and discipline as the most important parenting class topics. Additional findings indicated parent needs differed among demographic groups, and the alignment between existing programs and parent needs varied depending on the subject matter. Future implications suggest that parenting programs need to consider several key components prior to the development of new parenting programs, such as assessing the needs of parents and providing diverse program models that reflect the population served, so parents can assist their children more effectively.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-215990
title: Scalable object classification using range images

description: Object classification using depth images has been actively studied in robotics and computer vision fields to autonomously recognize 3D objects in the scene even under no or bad illumination based on surface geometry. The traditional protocol of object classification is to manually collect and annotate training image examples and then learn models to explain the annotated examples. However, when a large number of images are given (e.g. content based image retrieval) and/or a system has to learn a sequence of new images into the existing model on the fly (e.g. autonomous robotic exploration), this approach requires a huge amount of human effort in image annotation. ❧ In this thesis, I present an automatic and scalable framework for object classification using range images, which has been rarely discussed before. The proposed system is designed to 1) build a hierarchical structured database from a collection of unlabeled range images, 2) classify a new image, i.e. the partial surface of an 3D object, into one of existing classes or a new class using the hierarchical model of object classes and 3) automatically update the existing model of object classes to insert the new object when its surface characteristic is not well trained in the current model. Each path in the tree corresponds to a group of range images with similar surface characteristics. The class inference and online learning processes can be performed efficiently due to the tree structure of the model. ❧ Another contribution of my research is to utilize two crucial context cues, 1) 3D spatial constraints between objects and large structures and 2) the visibility context, for perception of of 3D objects. The proposed framework has been extensively validated on a large synthetic range image dataset and real depth images acquired from real-time range sensors. ❧ In this thesis, I also present two methods to tackle the problem of object segmentation in range images. The first method segments the partial surface of each object from 3D aerial scans of a vast urban area captured from LIDAR sensors. It enforces the spatial context between large structures and objects. The second work employs prior information of objects in order to deal with cluttered environments. This thesis finally delineates a method of 3D object recognition and pose estimation using the visibility context and demonstrates that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-141455
title: Page 188
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2292899
title: Appearances of Erkki Kurenniemi's electronic musical instruments

description: The excel spreadsheet includes notes about the appearances of the electronic musical instruments designed by the Finnish electroacoustic music pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi. The spreadsheet will be updated regularly when new information is found and checked.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-159262
title: The effects of firm-regulator affiliation ties on initial public offerings outcomes

description: In this dissertation, I examine how scientific advisory networks that link life science firms with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) might affect initial public offering (IPO) outcomes. Specifically, I examine two types of affiliations as predictors of IPO outcomes. The first type of affiliation is a direct tie wherein the science advisor serves both the life science firm and the FDA. The second type of affiliation is an indirect tie wherein a science advisor serving the life science firm shares a common university affiliation with a FDA advisory committee member. ❧ By asking how direct and indirect ties are interpreted in the life sciences, this research fills a gap in the network literature. In network research, there is broad agreement among scholars that the value of social networks is contingent on the task requirements and/or the situation the actor is embedded.  But scholars have not explored the contingent value of ties in terms of how ties are perceived. While it is well-known that how ties are perceived could have an effect on organizational outcomes, less is known about how the perception of ties depend on the institutional context the actor is in. I propose to fill this research gap by examining, in the context of scientific advisory networks connecting life science firms and the FDA , how perceived advantages associated with ties to power actors might be affected by the institutional rules for interpreting these ties. ❧ I begin the dissertation with a discussion of what scientific advisory boards are. This is followed by two empirical studies, which focused on how the scientific advisory networks help and hurt life science firms in their efforts to raise capital. In these studies, I show that the scientific advisory networks have an effect on underpricing. I further argued that this effect should be stronger when the firm’s top managers know enough about the life sciences to explain why and how the science advisors contribute to the firm’s research and clinical programs. ❧ Conflicts of interests (COI) rules shape how actors interpret what direct and indirect ties mean. Sense-making and sense-giving also affect how the ties are interpreted.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160535
title: Page 17
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160545
title: Page 27
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160548
title: Page 30
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160579
title: Page 61
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160588
title: Page 70
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-175580
title: Computational and economic aspects of procurement and sale

description: Theoretical computer science has introduced new paradigms to game theory and mechanism design. First, it has motivated the design of mechanisms in information-poor environments (prior-free settings) and hence optimization for worst-case scenarios. Second, it has prompted us to consider the computational aspects and aim for polynomial-time mechanisms. In this thesis, we present advances in both procurement and sale problems within computer science paradigms. ❧ For procurement, we establish a framework to design truthful and frugal auctions, i.e.,~truthful auctions that minimize the total payment. The framework is based on reducing different problems to the problem of procuring a vertex cover in a graph, and then running the auction for vertex covers. We show that our framework leads to frugal mechanisms for various applications including flows and cuts via spectral techniques. ❧ For sale, we study a simple model of externalities, wherein users of a resource drop their value as the resource gets used by a large number of users. We consider various settings and achieve exact and approximate results for both optimizing the revenue and social welfare.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-170665
title: Page 155
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-206976
title: Software risk management: an exploration of software life cycle methodologies, best practices and tools for their application to medical device software risk management

description: Medical devices today rely extensively on software for a wide variety of functions.  Device manufacturers must be equipped with software-focused risk management approaches, because software integration brings unique challenges in safety-critical medical applications.  This study explores various approaches to foster the development of a software risk management (SRM) model throughout the software lifecycle (SLC).  A combination of interviews and other exploratory methods including the inspection of documents and other artifacts were carried out to characterize activities in three areas: software development methodologies; risk management best practices throughout SLC, and software development and lifecycle management tools.  The research identified that the two most common software development methodologies used in the medical device industry today are the traditional Waterfall and the more recent Agile method, whose customizations are discussed.  Best practices identified as important for risk activities included the use of IEC-62304 standard for risk-based software development, Human Factors Engineering (HFE) methods, assurance cases and FMEA tool.  With this knowledge, a SRM framework was developed in which certain risk management practices were implemented into the modified Agile/Scrum software development methodology.  Then, tools for software development such as requirements, configuration, build, test and defect management, and those for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), were explored to suggest ways in which to automate the SRM framework.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-209826
title: Urban teacher persistence: self-efficacy, affect, and values

description: The problem of teacher attrition was reviewed and a mixed-method study of motivational characteristics for years of persistence in a teaching career was conducted.  Ninety-two second, third, or fourth grade urban public school teachers who taught for five years or more were surveyed in order to gather quantitative data on the five motivational characteristics of self-efficacy, positive and negative affect, and importance and interest values for teaching as a career.  Significant and positive correlations were found between positive affect and each of the factors of self-efficacy, importance, and interest.  Importance and interest for teaching as a career were highly correlated.  No statistical significance was found for a multiple regression analysis for variance in teaching years for the five motivational characteristics.  No statistical significance was found for ANOVAs for teachers who taught from 5-15 years compared to 16-41 years.  There was a significant difference for positive affect between 2nd and 4th grade teachers.  Six teachers from the sample were interviewed in the qualitative portion of the study and four themes emerged from the interview data: 1) the persistence of second career teachers, 2) persistence despite challenges, 3) the influence of mentors, and 4) the use of self-reflection.  This study has implications for administrators at the district and school level, and for teacher training programs, which would potentially reduce teacher recruitment costs and maintain continuity of educational programs for students, in an effort to contribute to the retention of teachers in the profession.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-141479
title: Page 212
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160574
title: Page 56
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-177109
title: Page 114
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-217447
title: Understanding differences in perceptions of effective urban elementary school principals among various educational stakeholders

description: Principals are being asked to lead students to unprecedented levels of academic success, but with increasingly less power or resources to their avail. Moreover, principals must interact with countless stakeholders in education. While much research has studied the general characteristics of what many believe constitute an effective principal, little has been done to research job-specific characteristics, or the similarities and differences that might exist in the perceptions of these characteristics between the various educational stakeholders who principals interact with. ❧ This study consisted of three research questions looking to study the similarities and differences in the perceptions of job-specific skills related to being an effective elementary school principal in an urban setting. This study utilized a mixed-methods approach to research, with four instruments used to collect data from 51 superintendents, 114 principals, and 101 teachers. ❧ This study resulted in numerous key findings. While similarities were discovered in a few of the 10 domains of job-specific characteristics, there were far more differences. Many of these differences occurred between stakeholder groups. More importantly, however, several key differences were found within the same stakeholder groups, and within the same characteristic domains. This suggests that educators were not able to keep a consistent opinion towards the same characteristic across multiple instruments.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160567
title: Page 49
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-141461
title: Page 194
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-141483
title: Page 216
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160559
title: Page 41
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-170657
title: Page 147
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-176806
title: Page 24
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-177087
title: Page 92
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-160594
title: Page 76
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-217819
title: Strategies/behaviors that successful superintendents use to build strong relationships and trust during their entry period

description: The purpose of the study was to identify strategies/behaviors that successful superintendents used to build strong relationships and trust with their school boards within their entry period. The following research questions guided the study: ❧ 1. What strategies/behaviors are successful superintendents using to build strong relationships and trust with the board during their entry period? ❧ 2. How do superintendents implement these strategies and evaluate their success? ❧ 3. What formal/informal leadership preparation assists superintendents for entry into the superintendency? ❧ The study used a qualitative approach to collecting and analyzing data through the use of a survey and interviews.  The survey responses revealed that 90% of the partici-pating superintendents had either a formal or informal entry plan. Included in those entry plans were strategies/behaviors that helped the superintendents to build strong relation-ships and trust during their entry period: being personable, establishing credibility, lis-tening and examining, celebrating early wins, and communicating often with all stake-holders, especially school board members. ❧ Successful superintendents, upon being hired, began to implement their entry plan items by frequently communicating with stakeholders (especially school board members), taking team retreats, and frequently reviewing their entry period progress with school board members. ❧ Nearly all (98.4%) of the participating superintendents reported that their most effective training had been from either a formal or an informal source, such as a govern-ment agency, mentor/partnership, personal research, prior administrative experience, professional associations, and/or university-based programs. The majority (62.5%) stated that their most effective training came from prior administrative experience.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-170643
title: Page 133
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c3-170645
title: Page 135