cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-338366
title: Examining teachers' referral considerations in a response to intervention model serving diverse learners

description: The disproportionate rate of cultural and linguistic minorities in special education is indicative of broader inequities impacting diverse learners throughout educational institutions. Response to Intervention (RtI) has been presented as a more equitable approach to the identification of students for special education evaluation, yet few empirical studies have explored RtI implementation in schools serving diverse learners. In a series of three, empirical dissertation papers, Cultural-Historical Activity Theory is used to examine how RtI mediates teachers’ meaning-making surrounding: (1) referral; (2) intervention; and (3) collaboration between general and special education teachers at a public elementary school serving diverse learners.  Findings in the first paper indicate that RtI prompted teachers to examine their preliminary ideas about which students would likely qualify as referral candidates by: (1) offering teachers guidelines for unpacking their assertions that students were not “responding” to intervention; and (2) accounting for—though not eliminating—teacher bias through data-driven prerequisites for referral. At the same time, standardized RtI measures reinforced dominant, skills-based approaches to assessment. Findings in the second paper shows that teachers struggled to develop differentiated, culturally responsive approaches to academic intervention. Lastly, findings in the third paper reveal that collaboration between general and special educators took place primarily at the referral stage, where the perspectives of two special education teachers helped determine whether or not students were candidates for special education evaluation. The results hold implications for future approaches to RtI implementation and teacher preparation.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-355656
title: Engaging military veterans in synchronous online learning

description: The purpose of my qualitative study was to gain a deeper understanding of how United States military veterans perceive the influence of military culture on their engagement in a synchronous virtual higher education learning environment. In this study I analyzed how the military veteran students perceived engagement in the synchronous virtual classroom on three dimensions: behavioral, emotional, and cognitive, considering four contextual factors of engagement: classroom structure, faculty/staff relationships, peer interactions, and classroom tasks. I conducted interviews and observations using a phenomenological approach to study sixteen military veterans who were enrolled in a virtual Master’s Degree Program in an institution of higher education. Through thematic analysis I found that the military veteran students perceived their military experience to influence their perception of all four of the contextual factors of engagement that were evaluated in this study resulting in the following identified themes. The military veterans expected to be in a virtual classroom: where there was order to what was happening and leadership being displayed by the person in charge, where they would engage in a professional discussion with their faculty, where they engaged with their peers as a part of a team, and they entered the virtual classroom committed to completing classroom tasks. Further findings in my study indicate that the military veteran students perceived each of the four contextual factors of engagement that were evaluated in this study to influence how they perceived their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement in a synchronous virtual classroom.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-651902
title: Investigation of risk and resiliency factors for stress-related drinking among adults: the moderating roles of early life stressors and alcohol-related cognitions

description: Excessive alcohol consumption is the third leading cause of preventable death in the United States (Mokdad et al., 2004), resulting in functional disability and severe health problems. Stressful life events (SLEs) have long been considered a proximal trigger of heavy alcohol consumption, and many theories of alcoholism are based on the hypothesis that individuals consume alcohol in order to manage the physiological and psychological effects of stress. Emprical findings generally support this intuitive hypothesis; however, the association between SLEs and drinking behaviors is small and there are large individual differences in risk for stress-related drinking (Greenley & Oei, 1999; Keyes et al., 2011; Pohorecky, 1991). As of yet, the specific circumstances under which SLEs influence drinking behaviors are relatively uncertain, leaving many questions about stress-related drinking remained unanswered. For example, although risk factors such as early life adversity, early use of alcohol, and alcohol-related cognitions are broadly associated with heavy drinking in adulthood, much less is known about how these factors impact risk for drinking in response to stressors.  ❧ The following series of three studies attempts to address these gaps in the literature using data from the Virginia Adult Twin Study of Psychiatric and Substance Use Disorders (VATSPSUD), a population-based study of twins designed to investigate risk and protective factors for psychopathology in adults. More specifically, we examine the following four questions: 1) do people who report using alcohol to cope with negative mood actually consume more alcohol in association with stressful life events? 2) Is risk for stress-related drinking higher among individuals who use alcohol to cope with negative mood and report an early onset of alcohol consumption? 3) Does childhood maltreatment exert a direct influence on risk for alcohol use disorders in adulthood? 4) Are the effects of recent stressful life events altered by exposure to childhood maltreatment? ❧ The availability of a large population-based sample with detailed measures of past-year stressful life events represents a unique opportunity to examine how these risk factors combine and interact to predict alcohol consumption. Moreover, this study improves on prior life event research by differentiating between stressful life events that are rated as independent versus dependent on participants’ behavior and by examining more than one risk factor at a time. The results contribute to knowledge about individual differences in stress-related drinking, potentially guiding the structure of alcohol prevention programs.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-662537
title: Anxiety in the second half of life: exploring trajectories and their interrelations with physical illness and stressful life events in a population-based twin sample

description: There is limited research on late life anxiety despite the higher prevalence of anxiety disorders relative to affective disorders in older adults. This study addresses gaps in the literature by examining: (1) the longitudinal course of anxiety symptoms in older age, and (2) the interrelations of anxiety with physical illness and stressful life events (SLE) in the second half of life.  We investigated these associations at both phenotypic and biometric levels. ❧ This study is based on data from the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging collected over 6 occasions between 1984 and 1993. Using multilevel regression, biometric latent curve analyses, and latent change score analyses, we analyzed data from 1,576 twins who were at least 50 years old at study inclusion.  Anxiety was measured using the State Trait Personality Inventory – State Anxiety subscale.  A composite SLE score was created from the Social Readjustment Rating Scale.  Physical illness was represented by a SUMILL variable that expressed the number of organ systems affected by reported physical illnesses. ❧ In the sample overall, anxiety followed a U-shaped trajectory over age and was characterized by significant individual differences in trajectories. Individual differences in trajectories of anxiety were nearly equally attributable to genetic and unique environmental factors.  The amount of variance of anxiety followed a convex trajectory in later life, with greater variance in the middle of the age range than at either end.  SLE and physical illness appeared to mediate the U-shaped trajectory of anxiety in later life, such that after adjusting for these covariates there were no clear age-related trends that were common to all participants, but significant individual variation in trajectories.  We also found significant between-person differences in the degree of association between anxiety and SLE.  There was no evidence of SLE or physical illness acting as a leading indicator of anxiety increases, although there was evidence for correlated trajectories and within-time correlations of anxiety with both SLE and illness.  The association of anxiety with SLE was primarily mediated by individual-specific environmental factors, with a small contribution from additive genetic factors.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-671625
title: Regional localization and regulation of hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow stem cell niche

description: Adult HSCs reside in the BM in a microenvironment known as the stem cell niche. Many studies have identified key components of the niche required to maintain the HSCs in their primitive state. However, other cellular components and the exact location of the HSC niche are yet to be clearly identified. My studies have demonstrated that the coordinated interaction between the osteoblasts and the osteoclasts is required for maintaining HSCs in their BM niche. This also highlighted a structural organization of the localization of primitive hematopoietic cell subsets in distinct regions of the BM. We further examined this spatial regulation of HSCs in two anatomically distinct sites, flat bone and long bones. Our data shows that while HSCs isolated from these two different bones have identical potential, their maintenance may be regulated by different mechanisms. These data further demonstrate that although flat bones are desirable sites for visualizing HSC in their niche, the data derived from imaging HSCs in these bones may not necessarily correlate with functional analysis data that is mainly derived from cells of the long bones. Therefore, we developed an imaging modality based on SHG nanoporbes that can potentially capture the exact localization of HSCs in their niche and their dynamic nature at single cell resolution within all bones. Understanding all of the interactions between the stem cells and their niche may yield both practical methods for manipulating stem cells to achieve therapeutic outcomes and also define a model for the impact of the microenvironment on stem cell biology.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-674491
title: Multiple nominative construction in Korean and its second language acquisition by adult English speakers

description: The thesis deals with the problem of ultimate attainment in second language acquisition research. In other words, it is about whether second language learners can achieve native-like linguistic competence of their target language. Particularly, it investigates to what extent second language learners reach a steady state in their acquisition, and whether the steady state of native speakers qualitatively differs. The research presented in the thesis supports the idea that the ultimate attainment of a second language is partially achievable, which has been dubbed as 'Interface Hypothesis. The hypothesis insists that interfaces between linguistic modules, such as syntax-morphology interface and syntax-pragmatics interface, present difficulty in second language acquisition up to and including ultimate attainment, while pure syntax can be acquired successfully according to the increased general proficiency of adult second language speakers. ❧ For this purpose, the multiple nominative construction in Korean was taken as a testing ground in the thesis. The construction refers to the situation where, unlike English, more than one nominative phrase is permitted in a single clause. This construction is ideal to test if ultimate attainment is partially attainable and what area is vulnerable, since the two different types of construction, Nominative Object Construction (NOC) and Multiple Subject Construction (MSC), manifest different grammatical modules they implicate. NOC is not related to any interface and is simply licensed by a pure syntactic operation. On the other hand, MSC requires correct functioning of the syntax-pragmatics interface. Because of this difference in grammatical modules required, it is predicted that the acquisition of the latter (MSC) is more constrained than the former (NOC). The results of the experiments conducted in the thesis confirm this prediction. For NOC, beginning and intermediate learners evidence their incompleteness in its acquisition. However, once complete restructuring of interlanguage grammars is achieved with respect to proper Korean syntactic case mechanisms, the results of the experiments show that these errors are overcome. In contrast, such improvement is not evident with respect to MSC, which requires syntax-pragmatic licensing, indicating greater difficulty with acquisition of the syntax-pragmatics interface. The research in the thesis concomitantly provides quantitative L2 acquisition data for the still-controversial issue concerning the distinction between NOCs and MSCs in Korean.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-104575
title: Getting to know some interracial families
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-105483
title: A comparative study of the perceptions of a selected sample of Chicano public and private high school graduates of 1968 on the relevancy of education in the East Los Angeles Barrio
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-118416
title: The organization and structure of work in social service organizations and its effect upon worker expectations and job satisfaction
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-134599
title: An exploratory study of the impact of aging on the Japanese-American family
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-139690
title: Patients and their families assessment of short term hospitalization
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-141202
title: Gender related differences in social work and other helping professions
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-327022
title: Twenty-first century leadership: a case study of a high performing TK-12 district's commitment to the implementation of 21st century skills

description: The purpose of the study was to understand how a high-performing California TK-12 unified school district demonstrated a commitment to implementation of 21st century skills. By understanding how a school district with high levels of student achievement on the SBAC implements 21st century skills, current and aspiring district and site leaders can develop a framework for future student success. Using Wagner’s (2008) theoretical framework of 21st century skills and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ (2007) theoretical framework of 21st century support systems, this study examined how the school district defined 21st century skills and expected learning outcomes. Specifically, the study set out to examine (1) How has a high performing school district defined 21st century skills, learning goals, and outcomes? (2) How has a high performing school district implemented the development of 21st century skill? (3) What district organizational systems and structures were used to support professional learning of 21st century skills? (4) How has district leadership demonstrated commitment to the fidelity of a 21st century implementation plan? This case study and comparative analysis utilized semi-structured interviews with eight educational leaders and document review to identify how the district leadership demonstrated a commitment to the implementation of 21st century skills districtwide. The study’s finding indicated that professional learning communities from the P21 (2007) professional development domain were the linchpin for success. This case study concluded that districts’ collective clarity of purpose in combination with the founding principles of decentralized leadership, empowered accountability, and continuous improvement pervaded the district and site leaderships’ commitment to creating the professional learning systems and structures necessary to prepare students for the rapidly changing world of the 21st century.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-345567
title: Community college succession program: cultivating the next generation of community college leaders

description: This study applies transformational leadership to understand the impact of a Leadership Academy used at one Southern California community college. The purpose of this study was to examine community college leadership programs that work to develop potential leadership candidates. This study asked three research questions: 1) In what ways does Sunshine Community College, specifically the Leadership Academy, work to build the next generation of leaders? 2) What are the perceptions of participants, graduates, and leaders regarding the influence of those practices? 3) What are the factors that both facilitate and inhibit the development and implementation of strategies designed to build leadership capacity? This research study analyzed eight participants. It used a case study methodology and collected data through in-person interviews, observations, and analysis of artifacts, such as the Leadership Academy participant folder, application, and monthly agendas. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed for themes according to each research question. Findings indicated commitment and vision by senior administrators encouraged employees to participate in the program. Mentoring was found to be a positive attribute. Institutional opportunities developed leadership skills and built leadership from an existing employee base. The one inhibiting factor identified was lack of time to collaborate with others. Participants indicated the Leadership Academy was an effective component for developing future leadership. This study begins to identify ways community colleges can begin to address the shortage of qualified leaders and contributes guidelines that can be applied by other community colleges wanting to develop future leadership from their existing employees.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-359351
title: Studies of methane counterflow flames at low pressures

description: Methane is the smallest hydrocarbon molecule, the fuel most widely studied in fundamental flame structure studies, and a major component of natural gas. Despite many decades of research into the fundamental chemical kinetics involved in methane oxidation, ongoing advancements in research suggest that more progress can be made. Though practical combustors of industrial and commercial significance operate at high pressures and turbulent flow conditions, fundamental understanding of combustion chemistry in flames is more readily obtained for low pressure and laminar flow conditions. ❧ Measurements were performed from 1 to 0.1 atmospheres for premixed methane/air and non-premixed methane-nitrogen/oxygen flames in a counterflow. Comparative modeling with quasi-one-dimensional strained flame codes revealed bias-induced errors in measured velocities up to 8% at 0.1 atmospheres due to tracer particle phase velocity slip in the low density gas reacting flow. To address this, a numerically-assisted correction scheme consisting of direct simulation of the particle phase dynamics in counterflow was implemented. Addition of reactions describing the prompt dissociation of formyl radicals to an otherwise unmodified USC Mech II kinetic model was found to enhance computed flame reactivity and substantially improve the predictive capability of computed results for measurements at the lowest pressures studied. Yet, the same modifications lead to overprediction of flame data at 1 atmosphere where results from the unmodified USC Mech II kinetic mechanism agreed well with ambient pressure flame data. The apparent failure of a single kinetic model to capture pressure dependence in methane flames motivates continued skepticism regarding the current understanding of pressure dependence in kinetic models, even for the simplest fuels.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-416756
title: Access, agency and ascent: a case study of how South Korean students navigate their educational choices for advancing their career development

description: South Korean college students face substantial familial, financial, peer and societal challenges for pursuing their educational pathways and career advancement. Currently, America has venerated the high-stakes, standardized test scores of East Asian students as a panacea for the nation’s public education challenges. The objective of this case study was to more closely examine the undergraduate and career development experiences of South Korean university students. This endeavor was an evaluation model employing Clark and Estes (2008) Knowledge, Motivation and Organization (KMO) gap analysis methodology and utilizing a literature review, a preliminary online survey and one-on-one interviews with South Korean undergraduate students. The object of this case study was to assess the catalysts or obstacles to South Korean student’s educational pathways and career development grounded in the KMO structure. This undertaking uncovers numerous basics relating to undergraduate experiences in all three areas, including expectancy-value theory, goal orientation, and intrinsic motivation and student self- efficacy, and organizational impediments. The study’s discoveries are limited to the undergraduates who agreed to participate in this analysis. Given the small sample size, additional research is suggested, as the outcomes are not generalizable to the entire population of South Korean undergraduate students. Centered on the findings, in conjunction with the review of literature, however, this study suggests active professional development training for faculty and closer collaboration with undergraduate students to breakdown organizational barriers in order to better meet and serve the needs of the primary stakeholders.