6834 research outputs found
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Sacred schools and saving souls : a history of Protestant week-day church schools.
No full textThis dissertation examines Week-Day Church Schools, especially released time, from the turn of the 1900s to the 1980s. I argue that at their inception Protestant Week-Day Church Schools endeavored to partner with public schools to create moral citizens, however after Protestantism lost cultural influence and religious disestablishment happened, Week-Day Church Schools slowly shifted their aim towards converting students. To tell its chronological story, this dissertation adopts a case study approach with each chapter highlighting a region of the United States to tell a particular period of Week-Day Church School history. It begins with establishment Protestants in Chicago and Boston at the turn of the twentieth century who felt Sunday School to be deficient and created Week-Day Church Schools to address the issue. They believed public and religious education could cooperate to form moral citizens and built up institutions to spread their ideas. By the 1920s, those institutions helped bring Week-Day Church Schools to the South where they adapted to a more religiously conservative, segregated, and rural context. This move started Week-Day Church Schools' shift to a conversion-oriented purpose. While still enjoying consensus among Protestants, legal challenges from the Mid-Atlantic in the 1940s–1960s, started fraying the Week-Day Church School movement. Week-Day Church School proponents also began to question their relationship with public education. The 1960s–1980s saw mainline Protestantism step away from released time, while activist evangelicals embraced the program as a way to save public school students. Many of these advocates lived in California and helped to re-nationalize released time organizations, as well as tie the program into a broader conservative agenda to undercut public education. Studying Week-Day Church Schools shows changes in Protestantism's conceptions of church/state, its relationship to public education, and offers an explanation for why the program is now embraced as part of a conservative religious and political educational agenda. Finally, Week-Day Church School and released time's presence in communities across the United States make it an important program for understanding religion's relationship to public education
Leveraging large language models for legal document understanding and software system analysis : addressing key challenges.
No full textIn the rapidly advancing field of software development, ensuring compliance with legal regulations and policies has become increasingly critical. The intricate separation between legal expertise and software engineering creates challenges that demand robust, automatic compliance and auditing methods. Thesis focuses on leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to bridge this gap, particularly in two key areas: legal document question answering and classification and understanding complex software systems based on microservices architectures. By evaluating the capabilities of LLMs in these domains, this dissertation contributes essential insights into their potential role as auditors of legal compliance in software systems. Although this work covers only a portion of the broader vision of LLMs in full-spectrum compliance auditing, it lays the groundwork for a comprehensive approach by addressing the applications of LLMs in understanding legal documents and software systems. However, a crucial challenge in deploying LLMs for legal compliance lies in their tendency to hallucinate. This limitation affects their application in legal document analysis, software understanding, and the broader goal of ensuring automatic compliance with legal regulations, where accuracy and reliability are essential, and errors can have significant consequences. Given that hallucinations in LLMs are a significant barrier to achieving automatic legal compliance in software, this thesis also addresses the hallucination problem in LLMs, ultimately contributing to the development of more reliable LLM-based tools not only for the main goal of this thesis but also for any domain where LLMs are utilized
Noise-aware generalization bound for quantum variational circuits.
No full textQuantum machine learning has emerged as a promising field with the potential to revolutionize complex data analysis, particularly for tasks involving high-dimensional data or intricate patterns. Generalization bounds offer crucial theoretical guarantees on a quantum machine learning model’s performance on previously unseen data. However, the practical implementation of quantum machine learning models in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era faces significant challenges due to the inherent noise and limitations of current quantum devices. This dissertation investigates the impact of noise on the generalization ability of parameterized quantum machine learning models, with a focus on developing data-dependent generalization bounds for supervised learning tasks. The dissertation begins by examining the influence of noise on quantum computing and the specific components of quantum machine learning models, such as feature maps and variational quantum circuits, using established benchmark datasets like Iris and literature standard synthetic datasets. The dissertation presents a modified depolarization channel representation that helps mitigate noise while reducing computational overhead, offering an efficient approach to simulating single-qubit noisy depolarization channels in quantum systems. The dissertation emphasizes the importance of considering the geometry of quantum states, using the quantum Fisher information matrix to quantify the sensitivity of parameters and an effective dimension for complexity analysis, which in turn informs the development of data-dependent generalization bound. This research rigorously derives the dependence of generalization bound on factors such as dataset size, parameter-space local geometry, feature space dimension, and noise-specific parameters. The research presented in this dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and opportunities associated with developing robust and reliable quantum machine learning models in the NISQ era
Living in two worlds : a single case study exploring the role of cultural identity for American Indians who have earned bachelor's degrees.
No full textAmerican Indian college enrollment and attainment of bachelor’s degrees has declined, leading to persistent underrepresentation in higher education. If this trend continues, American Indians face financial instability, poverty, and further marginalization. This qualitative single case study explored the lived experiences of American Indian college graduates to understand the role of cultural identity in their decision to pursue and attain higher education. This study highlights the personal journeys of four American Indians who have earned bachelor’s degrees, shedding light on supportive practices and challenges related to cultural, educational, and social injustices.
This qualitative single case study enabled participants to express their perspectives and lived experiences throughout their higher educational journey. The two-eyed seeing theory was the theoretical framework used for this study. I gathered data through semi-structured interviews and an open-ended questionnaire. Four American Indians who attained their bachelor’s degrees participated in the study, offering personal journeys through higher education. I analyzed the data to unveil how American Indians nurtured their cultural identity in relation to Indigenous ways of knowing, Western ways of knowing and two-eyed seeing during their higher education journeys to degree attainment while acknowledging successes and any challenges faced.
I identified four themes. First, participants in this study highlighted that cultural identity is rooted in family and community values and is foundational for American Indian students. Second, American Indian graduates experienced a loss of connection to Indigenous values within Western educational environments. The third theme, the participants emphasized the need for cultural support and expressed a desire for Western education to include Indigenous viewpoints during their higher education journey.
Finally, these findings uncovered that American Indian graduates felt the need to accommodate both Indigenous and Western viewpoints and shared a common goal of supporting one another, balancing the use of two viewpoint during their higher education pursuits. The findings of this study revealed implications for higher education practices to support American Indian students further. These insights contribute to the ongoing push for increased cultural support and connection in higher education for American Indians and the broadening of knowledge systems to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into the Western
Unravel the strengthening and toughening mechanisms of coconut endocarp by multiscale modeling.
No full textOver the last decade, substantial research efforts have been dedicated to developing sustainable, environment-friendly biomaterials. Good examples of natural biomaterials include bones, nacre, spider silk, beak, as well as the coconut endocarp. The naturally available biomaterials exhibit a unique combination of mechanical and structural properties, including low density, high strength, attractive hardness, and great toughness. These properties are usually mutually exclusive, which cannot be achieved in synthesized composites. Endocarp is the inner hard and tough shell of coconut. As in most biomaterials, endocarp exhibits a complex hierarchical structure, which basically can be divided into four structural organizations on different length scales: tissues, cells, subcellular, and nanofibrils. To the best of my knowledge, a quantitative understanding of the mechanisms by which coconut endocarp accomplishes its extraordinary mechanical function, particularly the information at nanoscale, remains largely unexplored. Therefore, the key objective of this dissertation is to establish a fundamental understanding of how the hierarchical architecture of coconut endocarp governs its extraordinary strength, toughness, hardness, and stiffness by means of multi-scale computational modeling. Here, we investigated the nanoscale strengthening and toughening mechanisms of coconut endocarp through all-atomistic and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. The study reveals fundamental mechanisms that contribute to the endocarp's exceptional mechanical properties, including its high strength, high stiffness and toughness. By examining cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin interactions, and incorporating external factors such as metal ions and water, the research offers insights into the material's mechanical behavior and potential for biomimetic applications. All-atomistic simulations show that cellulose-hemicellulose interactions are the strongest, with cellulose-lignin interactions being weaker due to hydrogen bond variations. Metal ions like copper and aluminum enhance mechanical performance by increasing rigidity and stiffness, while water absorption leads to reduced stiffness and material degradation. Coarse-grained modeling further supports these findings by accurately replicating atomistic simulation data and predicting mechanical properties. The study demonstrates that longer cellulose bundles and staggered configurations improve material performance and proposes a large-scale coarse-grained model for designing coconut endocarp composites with tailored mechanical characteristics. These insights have implications for developing lightweight, strong, and eco-friendly materials in materials science and sustainable design
Why special educators stay : a single case study in North Carolina.
No full textThe void left by the special education teacher shortage harms educational outcomes for many of the roughly 7.5 million special education students in the United States. Without these trained teachers, special education students may not have access to specially designed instruction to meet their educational needs. Previous research has mostly focused on why teachers leave; therefore, less is known about why some special education teachers remain dedicated to their careers. This qualitative single case study included a questionnaire and interview with each of the five participants from suburban public schools in North Carolina. The four women and one man who participated in the study have been in special education for over 20 years and were all still teaching at the time of the study.
The research questions, developed around the person-environment fit theory (Jansen & Kristof-Brown, 2006), focused on the individual and environmental differences that the participants believed supported their retention in special education classrooms for over 20 years. Person-environment fit theory suggests that individuals and environments interact to influence outcomes like job satisfaction and intent to stay. Person-vocation, person-job, person-person, person-group, and person-organization fit are multidimensional factors that were considered in this study.
The special education teachers in this study highlighted individual differences (e.g., person-vocation, person-job) that supported their retention. Participants discussed their sustained enjoyment and talent for working with special education students, but also emphasized the importance of prioritizing regular self-care due to the extra work outside of their contract hours. The special education teachers in this study averaged 10 additional hours per week outside of their contract hours.
Participants also described environmental differences (e.g., person-person, person-group, person-organization). The participants described differences that included early mentoring experiences, supportive administration, positive school culture, and collaborative collegial relationships, as factors that supported their dedication to their roles as special education teachers. These findings could be helpful to school and county leaders who continue to face teacher attrition issues in K-12 educational environments. Researchers can use the findings of this study to plan further studies to understand the complicated processes related to special education teacher retention
For heaven’s sake : a project exploring correlations between perceptions of heaven and evangelistic engagement at First Baptist Church of Crawford, Texas.
No full textContemporary Christians have been caught in the current of the immanent frame, as Charles Taylor calls it. They have a limited view of heaven, and that view is often equally or more informed by cultural assumptions than Scripture. In turn, contemporary Christians exhibit and offer little palpable hope to their non-Christian neighbors. More specifically, Christians today do not evangelize. This project attempted to edify attenders of the First Baptist Church of Crawford, Texas by revising their perception of heaven to be more biblically sound. The primary intervention was a series of sermons on John 14, 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 4-5, Romans 8, and Revelation 20-22. Church attenders were encouraged to participate anonymously in a survey before and after the intervention to gauge changes in their perception of their own understanding of heaven. Six attenders with varying levels of involvement and faith tenure were also interviewed prior to and following the intervention to explore their specific confidence and practices in evangelism. The project explores what impact, if any, the attempted edification had on personal evangelism of church attenders and explores other insights gained
Simulation of micro-void development within large scale additively manufactured polymer composite deposition beads.
No full textA significant knowledge gap remains in fully understanding the process-structure-property relationship involved in extrusion-deposition additive manufacturing (EDAM) technology. Modeling the polymer melt flow extrusion-deposition process is crucial in understanding the development of the inherent bead microstructure. The current research presents a computational-based approach for investigating process-induced micro-voids and their impact on print properties. We develop a Generalized Newtonian Fluid (GNF) multiscale Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulation tool to predict global and local flow fields during the polymer processing to investigate underlying mechanisms that may promote the micro-void development within the bead microstructure specifically the occurrence of low-pressure regions at sites of stress concentration such as at the tips of suspended fibers and at locations with abrupt changes in flow direction like the die-swell region just after the nozzle exit. We also investigate potential factors that may influence the development of these micro-voids, such as the particle interactions, the rheology of the suspension, the flow type, the size and geometry of the suspended particles, etc., which reveals new response behavior of suspended particles within the polymer melt. Additionally, we develop a novel technique to account for inter-fiber interactions by correlating the fiber-fiber coefficient of interaction with the effective fluid domain size that yields the same suspension steady-state fiber orientation. A novel means for determining the steady-state fiber orientation was also developed based on a Newton-Raphson approach using exact Jacobians. Furthermore, we present a method for quantifying and characterizing micro-voids within EDAM printed beads using X-ray micro-computed tomography imaging technique, which revealed a dominant heterogeneous mode of large-sized and irregular-shaped micro-void formation, especially at the fiber terminations, where the hydrostatic pressure drops significantly. The impact of micro-voids on effective material properties was also assessed based on a numerical homogenization scheme using realistic periodic representative volume elements (RVEs), which resulted in significant property losses. Overall, the research reveals a new mechanism of micro-void formation and potential ways of mitigating their formation. The direct implication of reduced bead porosity levels is the development of high-quality components for specialized applications, such as lightweight and high-strength integrity composites widely used in a variety of industries
Supporting adolescents holistically : a multiple case study on the integration of CASEL’s social and emotional learning competencies into independent schools.
No full textAdolescence is a pivotal and dynamic stage in a student’s life that requires intentional support. However, schools tend to place a disproportionate emphasis on cognitive development of students during adolescence, frequently overlooking their social and emotional development. By not adequately supporting the social and emotional developmental needs of students, educators are limiting students from opportunities to grow into healthy, well-adjusted adults. To this end, the environment in which students learn influences their development. Most of the research on social and emotional learning (SEL) has been conducted in public school settings. There is a lack of research in how to deliver SEL within the environment of independent schools. This gap in research stands out due to the environment of independent schools seeming to be well-suited to support the holistic development of students.
This multiple case study explored the perspectives from upper school teachers at three high-achieving college preparatory, independent schools in the southeast United States on how they implement CASEL competencies in their school environments. This qualitative study involved three independent schools and nine upper school teachers who participated in semi-structured interviews and completed follow-up questionnaires to provide insight into the strategies, practices, and approaches they use to support their students’ social and emotional development.
This research explored how teachers integrated CASEL competencies into their classrooms and highlighted characteristics of independent schools that make them ideal for supporting and delivering SEL. The participants noted reflective exercises, guided questions, and supportive interventions as ways to promote self-awareness and self-management. When teachers cultivated nurturing environments in their classrooms and engaged students in empathetic conversations, they addressed social awareness and relationship skills. Teachers supported responsible decision-making through behavior-specific conversations with students and providing structured interventions to help students make more thoughtful choices. Additionally, the smaller student populations, the implementation of supplemental programming, and strong administrative support for SEL were all characteristics of the independent school environment that contributed to students’ social and emotional development. These findings guide school leaders and teachers in independent schools as they work to create learning environments that support the holistic development of their students
Bodies of feminist resistance : performance activism and digital networks in Chile and Spain.
No full textThis thesis examines the revitalization of feminist activism through performance art, focusing on two key works addressing gender and sexual violence: “Un violador en tu camino” by LasTesis Colectivo in Chile and Jauría by Jordi Casanovas in Spain. Chapter One introduces the intersection of feminist performance and social media activism, framing the study within relevant theoretical frameworks. Chapter Two analyzes “Un violador en tu camino,” exploring the use of street performance to challenge rape culture. Chapter Three examines Jauría, a play based on the La Manada rape case, and its critique of Spain’s societal responses to sexual violence. Chapter Four investigates the global reach of these performances through digital analysis of associated hashtags, highlighting their role in fostering worldwide activism on gender-based violence. This thesis demonstrates the power of performance activism, amplified by social media, to foster transnational feminist protest against sexual and gender-based violence