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“The smallest acts go a long way”: understanding students’ perceptions of citizenship and civic identity
No full textThis phenomenological study examined how eighth grade students in a privileged suburban community and school district understood their civic identities and saw their roles and responsibilities as citizens. Through analyzing artifacts the student participants generated in their eighth grade civics social studies class and conducting semi-structured one-on-one interviews and focus groups, I was able to understand, from the students’ perspectives, how they saw their own community, what they felt it meant to be a good citizen, and what they saw as the most significant issues of social justice facing society. Drawing on a critical sociocultural approach (Rubin, 2016), Norm Theory (Kahneman & Miller, 1986) and Westheimer and Kahne’s three types of citizen (2004), among other key literature in the field, this study examined the experiences and opinions that shaped the participating adolescents’ civic identities, including race and socioeconomic status. The findings suggest that adolescents in this privileged context understood good citizenship as the personally responsible (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004), moral behavior of doing good deeds, contributing to causes and pitching in when possible. Their concept of social justice issues mirrored this individualistic approach, as they identified individual decision making as both the cause and possible solution to problems such as poverty and hunger, as well as racism and discrimination. They felt the government was responsible for confronting society’s greatest ills, and that individual citizens could participate in separate, more localized acts such as contributing to charity or volunteering their time. These findings have significant implications for curriculum, especially in spaces of relative racial and socioeconomic privilege. Given that the New Jersey Department of Education has mandated middle school civics as a required course for all public schools in the state, school districts curriculum writers and teachers, with these findings in mind, should create experiences for students to understand the systemic and institutional histories of issues like racism, and integrate models of past and present day collective efforts for change rather than seeing the role of institutions and individuals as separate.Ed.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Enhancing teacher diversity in New Jersey: investigating the career decision-making and experiences of teachers of color in alternative route to certification
No full textIn the United States, there exists a significant disparity between the racial demographics of teachers and students, with a majority of educators being white. This mismatch underscores the critical shortage of teachers of color (TOC). While race does not determine teacher quality, a teacher’s race, ethnicity, and language do shape the experiences they bring into their classroom. As a result, a teacher's identity impacts the academic, emotional, and social support they offer students. Diversifying the teaching force to better reflect the student population is imperative. Understanding how individuals enter the teaching workforce is an important part of this endeavor, with pathways including traditional teacher preparation programs and alternative certification or alternate route (AR) educator preparation programs.This study focuses on investigating the career decision-making and experiences of TOC in AR certification to enhance teacher diversity in New Jersey. Conducted at Rutgers University, a large public institution in New Jersey offering both traditional and AR teacher certification programs, the study employs an explanatory sequential mixed methodology. The first phase collected quantitative data through a survey to provide a general understanding of what personal and contextual factors contribute to one’s interest in teaching, the choice to complete AR, and ultimately success in the program. The second phase was qualitative one-on-one interviews and document reviews, providing deeper insights into the factors affecting participants' AR experience.
The findings of this study offer a deeper understanding of the career-decision making and experience of TOC that chose the AR. When developing an interest in a career in teaching, family, financial considerations, and perceptions of the teaching field emerged as the most influential factors. When choosing the AR as their certification pathway, timing, experiences, and relationships were revealed to be dominant factors in decision-making. Reflecting on their AR experience, participants highlight the significance of peer and professional support networks, while also navigating challenges posed by state certification requirements and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. These insights can inform recruitment, support, and retention strategies within AR programs aimed at attracting and retaining TOC to diversify the teaching workforce.Ed.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Pre-college preparedness: first-generation students and stem focused pre-college programs
No full textFirst-generation students identify from unique familial upbringings and disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and are not afforded the same educational opportunities as their non-first generation counterparts as a result. The disparities first-generation students experience throughout education contributes to their educational access, attainment, projected career outcomes, and projected economic mobility. This qualitative case study aims to examine the experiences of first-generation students upon completion of the federally funded Upward Bound Math-Science pre-college program. This study will implement the framework of community cultural wealth to illuminate the voices of first-generation students in pre-college programs, which are all too often overlooked. The research suggests that there is an emphasis on the removal of barriers but there is not a focus on the development of skills and advocacy necessary to process experiences and challenges that first-generation students inevitably encounter throughout the system of higher education. This study seeks to better inform educational preparation and transition leading up to STEM focused higher education. The findings from this study will help to inform why first-generation students continue to struggle in STEM focused higher education despite extensive pre-college preparation and provide insights on how to better prepare first-generation students for success in STEM.Ed.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Antibiotic stewardship in the surgical patient: implementing an evidence-based algorithm to decrease administration of broad-spectrum antibiotics in patients with a documented beta-lactam allergy - a program evaluation
No full textPurpose of Project: In 2022 an antibiotic stewardship initiative was implemented at a tertiary care medical center in New Jersey to promote the utilization of the validated PEN-FAST tool as a means to evaluate the risk of administering a cephalosporin to a patient reporting a Penicillin allergy. This quality improvement project demonstrated a significant increase in cephalosporin administration over broad spectrum antibiotics after implementation. Upon request of key stakeholders and in congruence with recommendations from the CDC, a program evaluation was performed to assess the long-term impact and sustainability of the initial antibiotic stewardship initiative. Methods:The process evaluation was performed as a retrospective chart review beginning after the completion of the original quality improvement projects data collection and continuing through the following seven months. Data was collected from electronic health records, synthesized, and analyzed to determine the PEN-FAST tool’s long-term use and any areas for improvement. Results:Upon completion of the data analysis, it was determined that utilization of the PEN-FAST tool had gone from near 100% administration to 0% administration after the medical center transitioned to a new electronic health record. Due to the lack of application of the PEN-FAST tool with the new EHR no further data was able to be collected regarding the PEN-FAST tool’s use. Implications:While the initial quality improvement project demonstrated a high compliance with the PEN-FAST tool administration and subsequent administration of cephalosporins to patients with a low risk for cross-sensitivity reaction with their reported Penicillin allergy, the facility was unable to sustain the program following the conversion to a new electronic health record. Unfortunately, with the complete cessation of administering the PEN-FAST tool this process evaluation was unable to determine other areas of possible improvement or delinquency in the initial antibiotic stewardship program. These findings were presented to the key stakeholders at the medical center along with recommendations on ways to reinstitute, improve and sustain an antibiotic stewardship initiative. Key words: PEN-FAST, Antibiotic stewardship, program evaluation, process evaluation, penicillin allergy, beta-lactam allergyD.N.P.Includes bibliographical reference
Improving intravenous access: pairing procedure requirements to catheter size and location
No full textPurpose of Project: The aim of the project was to improve the quality of IV access for patients entering the OR via the Same Day Surgery (SDS) Unit scheduled for elective robotic procedures to decrease total peri-operative time and resource utilization, as well as increase patient satisfaction.
Methodology: Patients admitted into the SDS unit scheduled for elective robotic surgery. Inclusion criteria: patients between ages 18-65 and scheduled for an elective robotic procedure. Exclusion criteria: inpatients, current pregnancy, patients undergoing hemodialysis, and patients with mediport access. The study was a quality improvement project using convenience sampling and collecting data via chart review from 50 patients.
Results: Before implementation, 4 out of 50 (8%) received a 22g in the ac with 2 of the 4 (50%) not receiving a second IV. After implementation, 6 out of 50 (12%) received a 22g in the ac with all patients (100%) receiving a second IV.
Implications for Practice: Although the target population showed interest in implementing the practice change, a change agent likely would have increased adherence to protocol. Since a major EHR change affecting workflow was instituted during implementation, future studies regarding this practice change should be done at a less turbulent time. In addition, financial and workflow efficiency data can be investigated to further determine the benefits of standardizing 20g or higher IV for patients in the SDS unit scheduled for elective surgery. Keywords: intravenous catheter, nursing protocol; perioperative care; fluid therapy; anesthesiaD.N.P.Includes bibliographical reference
Essays on applications of information design in economics
No full textUndoubtedly, information issues play a crucial role in economic models. Understanding the intricacies of information interactions is essential for explaining market behavior and designing effective policies. That is why, information design is drawing much attention in applied models. It examines the strategic structuring and dissemination of information to shape and enrich decision-making processes. In fact, the ideal information interaction is neither simply revealing everything nor completely hiding it. As people communicate in highly complex ways, and as their methods require careful design, it demands extensive and detailed study. This dissertation studies applications of information design to several strategic models. Primarily, it explores the information structure or central signaling system to enhance social outcomes. Manipulating information rather than disclosing the truth is a key strategy for achieving favorable outcomes. It is necessary to induce new beliefs in agents or stir up their mutual beliefs. The research found that when agents have discrepant interests, the system utilizes both revealing and pooling signals with elaborately designed probabilities. Furthermore, it demonstrates a model where fostering discrepant beliefs, particularly higher-order beliefs, is necessary to achieve the goal. These points provide us with interesting insights into the type of socially efficient information system. The dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 explores a conflict model featuring strategic complements and its resolution. Specifically, it considers a repeated Hawk-Dove game in which player 1's type, either "hawkish" (war-seeking) or "dovish" (peace-seeking), is unobservable to player 2. Although their direct communication yields no meaningful messages for peace, a mediator can facilitate a peaceful outcome. By mixing signals regarding player 1's type, the mediator induces an optimistic belief in player 2. Private signals prevent the common belief of the hawkish type, encouraging dynamic cooperation. Notably, even if player 2 privately realizes the hawkish type, she pretends not to know it. The findings imply that constraining the formation of common knowledge can delay conflict and foster a peaceful resolution. Chapter 2 is based on a similar conflict model, but it extends to a problem of organizational structure. It discusses a two-player game where they are uncertain about the payoff structure, whether cooperative or conflictual. A third party planner allocates decision-making and information powers to the players. Then, the player with information power acts as a signal sender, while the one with decision power becomes a signal receiver and decides the outcome. During their communication, the signal sender plans partially informative signaling to conceal the conflictual situation. As a result, the players achieve coordinated outcomes and maximize the sum of the ex-ante expected payoffs. The model suggests that separating the two powers into distinct roles -- one as the sender and the other as the decision-maker -- is an efficient structure. Chapter 3 studies a model of strategic substitutes and continuous payoff. Specifically, it examines an information system designed for the Cournot duopoly under demand uncertainty. An information designer releases different signals to each firm, one indicating the high demand truthfully and the other pooling both high and low demands. When both potential demand levels are not sufficiently high, the informed firm effectively produces the monopoly output for the high demand and produces nothing otherwise. If the two levels are considerably high, firms can, instead, yield total outputs between Nash equilibria and Bayesian Nash equilibrium. This equilibrium signaling also extends to the framework of information discrimination.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Instituting nation and empire in the modern British world
No full textThis dissertation explores the dilemmas British subjects faced in their efforts to universalize “British” institutions across a diverse multinational empire during the long nineteenth century. The United Kingdom’s four constituent nations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, alongside its myriad overseas colonies, represented a political experiment predicated on the foundational fiction that national and imperial interests could be made to serve one another. “Instituting Nation and Empire” analyzes three characteristically British institutions contemporaries imagined would unite Britain’s global populace: universities, local parliaments, and the monarchy. For many, the expectation that these institutions should take on distinctly “national” characters – whether Irish, Welsh, Indian, Jamaican, or Australian – itself became a unifying British ideal. But reconstituting the frequently siloed histories of Four-Nations Britain and its empire reveals how these institutions also became sites of conflict and tension that exacerbated fault lines within and among the Four Nations, between the Four Nations and their empire, and between colonies. Fundamental questions about liberal governance, sovereignty, and identity loomed large over seemingly minute squabbles about who these representative institutions were for.This transnational, polycentric study demonstrates how the British state’s uneven response to these micro-dramas stoked enduring rivalries, worsened fundamental inequities, and established racialized governing systems across its realms. White settler Australians got their national university at Sydney in 1850, while Black West Africans’ campaign failed twenty years later. Racialized Irish and Indian populations were coerced into accepting universities which served imperial needs but did not reflect their distinct national characters. Similarly, the imperial parliament granted “responsible government” to white settlers in Canada, Australia, and South Africa, but outright suspended the constitution in majority-Black Jamaica to prevent representative government there. Meanwhile, British Liberals dismantled their own party – which had previously espoused the value of political inclusion – in an attempt to deny Catholic Ireland “home rule.” Even the post-“mutiny” effort to bind Britain and India together by formally adding “Empress of India” to Victoria’s titles disrupted global British racial hierarchies; the change prompted a delegation of Canadians, Australians, and South Africans to demand “the Dominions” also be added, ahead of non-white India in the formal ordering. Juxtaposing these disparate conflicts offers a dynamic history of white settler colonialism by showing how the British state institutionalized a preoccupation with social and racial hierarchy which ultimately divided national and imperial interests. It also provides a genealogy of Britain’s approach to decolonization in the twentieth century, including the unequivocal non-decolonization of its white Dominions.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
The contribution of inherited maternal variation in kinesin genes to egg aneuploidy in fertility patients
No full textThe female reproductive lifespan is highly dependent on egg quality, specifically euploidy, the presence of a normal number of chromosomes in an egg. However, knowledge of the precise genetic landscape that causes egg aneuploidy in women is limited, because phenotypic data on the frequency of human egg aneuploidy is difficult to obtain and therefore unrepresented in large, public genetic datasets. In Chapter 3, we identify novel genetic determinants of reproductive aging via egg aneuploidy in women using a new biobank of individual maternal exomes linked with maternal age and embryonic aneuploidy data. Our initial investigation identified 404 genes bearing variants enriched in individuals with pathological rates of egg aneuploidy. Subsequent analysis of the gene-gene interaction network topology implicated variants in genes encoding the kinesin protein family in egg aneuploidy. We interrogate this causal relationship via deep experimental perturbation. Finally, we validate that a specific patient variant in the kinesin KIF18A accelerates reproductive aging and diminishes fertility using a novel knock-in mouse model. In Chapter 4, we expand upon this work by asking how loss of KIF18A function affects oocyte meiosis and female fertility: using two murine models of KIF18A loss of function, we find that Kif18a is essential for ovarian development and that partial loss of KIF18A function increases egg aneuploidy. Together, these findings described in Chapters 3 and 4 reveal new functional mechanisms of reproductive aging, how genetic variation underlies individual heterogeneity in the female reproductive lifespan, and how genetic variation might be leveraged to predict reproductive longevity.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Reactions of transition metal complexes: 1. effects of polar molecules on co insertion into metal-carbon bonds. 2. synthesis and reactivity of phenyldiimine iridium pincer complexes.
No full textThe dissertation is organized into two main parts: (1) The influence of polar additives on CO insertion into transition-metal-carbon bonds, and (2) Synthesis and reactivity of 2,6-bis(1-((2,6-dimethylphenyl)imino)ethyl)phenyl iridium ((XyPhDI)Ir) pincer complexes.Part 1
The acceleration of CO insertion into transition-metal-carbon bonds by polar additives is well-established. A computational study by Goldman and co-workers (2019) suggested that CO insertion occurs rapidly and unassisted, reversibly, to form an endergonic agostic complex. In this mechanism, the polar additive displaces the agostic interaction via a hydrogen-bonded transition state, providing a lower-energy pathway to the final product. This work seeks to experimentally test this mechanism using CpMo(CO)3(CH3) as the metal carbonyl substrate. Pyridine N-oxide proved to be an effective catalyst for promoting CO insertion. We expanded our study computationally to investigate substituted pyridine N-oxides as catalysts for CO insertion. Additionally, we conducted computational analyses of CO insertion catalyzed by pyridine N-oxide with CpMo(CO)3(CH2Cl), CpMo(CO)3(CH2Ar) and CpFe(CO)2(CH3).
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Part 2
Pincer-ligated metal complexes are extensively utilized in the activation of small molecules thanks, in part at least, to their tunability and thermal stability. However, nitrogen-based pincers, particularly in the context of iridium chemistry, have been less explored compared to their phosphorus-based counterparts. This thesis outlines synthetic routes for a series of (XyPhDI)IrBr2(L) and (XyPhDI)Ir(H)(Br)(L) complexes. A combined experimental and computational approach is employed to investigate the kinetics and thermodynamics of ligand binding to (XyPhDI)IrBr2, (XyPhDI)IrH2, and (XyPhDI)Ir fragments, with computational insights extended to other pincer iridium systems.
We also explored the reactivity of (XyPhDI)Ir towards cleavage of the acetonitrile C-C bond and dehydrogenation of alkanes. In the case of acetonitrile C-C cleavage, one molecule of (XyPhDI)IrH2 acts as a Lewis acid lowering the barrier for oxidative addition of the H3C–CN bond across the iridium center, leading to the formation of a cyano-bridged dimer. Furthermore, we investigated both transfer- and acceptorless-dehydrogenation of cycloalkanes and n-alkanes by (XyPhDI)Ir, identifying (XyPhDI)Ir as the fastest reported catalyst for n-alkane dehydrogenation to date. DFT calculations suggest a novel mechanism through which the acceptorless dehydrogenations operate.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference