Middle Tennessee State University
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Examining the Relationships Among Teacher Mindset, Knowledge of Text Complexity, and Text Selection
No full textThe Common Core State Standards have driven an awareness for college and career readiness in schools today. This effort has brought to light the role text complexity plays in the classroom and the importance of students being exposed to complex text. Educators' understanding of complex text and their expectations when choosing text is inconsistent, affecting student’s capacity to learn and understand complex text. One goal of this research is to obtain new insight related to how and why text is chosen for instruction among educators teaching in elementary grades. This study will investigate the relationship of teachers’ mindset on their choice and knowledge of complex text using regression to examine these relationships. There were no significant relationships found. Implications for the educational field include advancements in professional development that specifically address the importance of text complexity decisions about text choice in the classroom.Ph.D
Fieldwork and Public Interpretation in an Ethnic Enclave: The Temple Project in Butte, Montana
No full textButte, Montana was once a bustling city of over 100,000 citizens with people from over nineteen different ethnic backgrounds, now the city is down to a declining population of 34,000. The mark these ethnic communities left on the city still shapes the current landscape and culture of the city. Within Butte, the oldest continuously in-use Jewish reformed Temple in the state of Montana has shifted from existing as solely a place of worship and is transitioning into an ethnic heritage center to highlight the history, impact, and stories of all the different groups that made Butte, Montana the thriving mining city it once was. The B’nai Israel Temple will become a space in Butte to give a large voice to the stories that are underrepresented within the public interpretation in Butte. There is a preconceived notion in Butte that the harshness of the frontier and mining culture level the playing field for those of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds for those who moved to the city, but while true for groups such as the Jewish who were treated with less antisemitism then elsewhere in the world, the same cannot be said universally for all whom lived in the city. The African American, Indigenous, and Chinese populations all still faced heavy persecution and mistreatment within the city like they were elsewhere across the country.M.A
Groundwater Drought Assessment of Major U.S. Aquifers Using Grace Measurements
No full textPrecipitation is a major source of groundwater recharge, and when drought occurs knowing the timing of recharge is crucial. This project seeks to quantify the lag-time between the end of meteorological drought and groundwater drought using the Standardized Precipitation and Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) derived groundwater storage for major aquifer systems across the U.S. Timeseries were created for both the derived groundwater storage and SPEI for the period of April 2002 to June 2021. Each aquifer system had a meteorological drought occur at least three times during the study period, with higher rates of occurring in the western U.S. The lag time between the start of the two types of droughts for these aquifer systems is between zero and one months, while the lag time between the end of these types of droughts is more widely varied, between zero and eight months.M.S
Don’t Lose Your Good Thing: The Preservation, Interpretation, and Community Engagement of Historic Recorded Music Spaces
No full textRecorded music transcends being more than mere entertainment and the places of its creation are historically significant deserving of preservation attention and interpretation. While there are federal and well-funded efforts to preserve the sound recordings, no such effort exists for the places of its production. As a result, many sites have been demolished, left to deteriorate, or repurposed into something that does not respect its historic significance and integrity.
While recorded music historical sites serve to preserve and interpret the history of American popular culture, within its four walls lies a deeper history that weaves into the fabric of American social, racial, political, and economic past. Additionally, these sites present an opportunity to engage its community and to serve as a place to both educate and inspire the populace of today and tomorrow.
I will explore the preservation history of some of these sites, particularly in the American South and Midwest, and detail the history of the successes and failures to preserve them. Four sites, Starr-Gennett (Richmond, Indiana), the Birthplace of Country Music Museum (Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia), the Stax Museum of American Soul (Memphis, Tennessee), and King Records (Cincinnati, Ohio) serve as case studies not only of how to preserve and interpret these sites, but also how to engage the local community in arts and historical education.Ph.D
Situational Leadership Theory: Do Followers Have a Preference?
No full textSituational Leadership Theory (SLT) is an intuitive leadership model widely used in organizations; however, it suffers from a lack of empirical support. Researchers have attempted many creative ways to test the theory, but none to date have found strong support. This study discusses several possibilities for the lack of support, including the multiple revisions of the theory, confusion within the literature, and the operationalization of follower readiness at the job level versus the task level. This study takes a fresh perspective by considering the follower’s task readiness level and its relationship to the follower’s preference for leadership styles as conceptualized by SLT. Participants (N=253) were placed into one of the four SLT follower readiness conditions (i.e., R1 as the least ready to R4 as the readiest), responded to an open-ended prompt about personal experience with a task reflecting their assigned condition, followed by a survey measuring their preference for leadership as well as several personality characteristics. Hypotheses stated that followers should prefer the leadership style that matches their level of task readiness. Taken together, results indicate that only followers with an R4 readiness level recognize and prefer the appropriate leadership style (i.e., delegating) as recommended by SLT. Three potential personality characteristics were also tested as covariates but were not found to have strong moderating effects. Limitations and future recommendations are discussed.M.A
Forgotten "Brothers" in Arms: Bringing Female Soldiers Out of the Discourse of Myth
No full textIn 2016, the Pentagon officially sanctioned women being on the front lines of combat for the United States. Although this was certainly a progressive moment to celebrate, it was by no means a phenomenon, as women had already been on the front lines of combat at the beginning of U.S. history, but this was especially the case for women soldiers of the U.S. Civil War. One large contributing factor for forgetting (and excluding) the military service of Civil War women was in the popular use of the rhetorical device mythos, or myth, in mid nineteenth-century America all the way to the present, which served as a means to foster a narrative of women only existing, and being capable, as warriors within myth. My dissertation focuses on how the myth of the woman warrior (such as the Amazons, Mulan, the Valkyrie, the goddess Sekhmet, etc.) has had an impact on the discourse pertaining to actual women who were in combat, particularly concerning what is archived.
My main argument is that while this myth, perpetuated by men’s influence on the conventions of culture, makes godlike women suitable for the battlefield, it serves to keep the living, breathing women of reality outside of combat and in the domestic sphere. I combine the methodological approaches of Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch with Susan Jarratt’s concept of examining content from a Sophistic perspective through the dualistic relationship of mythos and logos, and what occurs between that relationship, nomos. To see the different ways the myth of the woman warrior took shape and how certain women interacted with, and were affected by, its discourse, I dedicate individual chapters to analyzing the memoirs, or archival artifacts, of three different women, Confederate soldier Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Union soldier Sarah Emma Edmonds, and Buffalo soldier Cathay Williams, in the form of case studies. My findings show that myth of the woman warrior served to reinforce the institutions of power that reified the space of the military as strictly masculine, but it coalesced for each woman differently and had varied and particular layers according to the intersections of her identity.Ph.D
Examining the effect of emotions on forecasting extensiveness during idea evaluation
No full textPrevious research has shown emotion to be an antecedent to creativity. Research has also illustrated that emotion affects non-creative decision making. The focus of this study was an examination of the relationship between emotion and performance in forecasting during idea evaluation, which is a decision about the viability of creative ideas. Incidental emotions were induced for social service workers, then they were presented with a social innovation problem along with three previously generated ideas for solutions. Participants were then asked to forecast the positive and negative consequences along with obstacles that may arise during the implementation of each solution. The results indicate that emotion does not impact forecasting performance during idea evaluation. However, individual difference measures included in this study, namely creative fluency and domain expertise, were found to be significant contributors to performance in forecasting. While future research is needed to confirm these findings, these results reveal that organizations may be best served to increase accuracy in decisions regarding the viability of creative ideas through increasing the creative fluency or expertise of their employees rather than attending to the emotional influences of the decision maker.M.A
Experimental Composition of Two Systems: Ring Resonator Structures and Y-Shaped Demultiplexer
No full textIn this work, we experimentally investigated two acoustic systems: the Yshaped demultiplexer and the acoustic ring resonator. The first experiment was a demultiplexer which separates and transmits specific frequencies from a broadband
input signal. The acoustic demultiplexer investigated here is based on resonances created by side-attached waveguide stubs. The Y-shaped waveguide sent broad bandwidth sound along an input line. Two output lines with a stub filter arrangement transmitted narrow bands of two different frequencies separated from the broadband input. The second set of experiments concerned ring resonators which are widely used in optics as filters and switches. Here we investigated the acoustic analog to the optical ring resonator. Three specific ring resonators systems are demonstrated: a simple single ring structure that acts as a comb filter, a single ring between two parallel waveguides that acts as an add-drop filter, and a sequential array of equally spaced rings that creates acoustic band gaps. The acoustic ring resonators consist of a circular waveguide attached tangential to a straight waveguide. The ring waveguide has resonances whenever the path around the ring equals an odd half-integer multiple of the wavelength. We showed that this phenomenon can be used to create notch filters, adddrop filters, and broad acoustic bandgap reflectors. The experiments are conducted in linear waveguides using an impulse response method. The ring resonators were created via 3D printing. Finite-element numerical simulations were conducted using COMSOL Multiphysics software. The experimental results were in good agreement with numerical models rendered in python and finite-element simulations. KEYWORDS: Experimental Composition of Two Systems: Ring Resonator Structures and Y-shaped Demultiplexe
Evolution of Cranial Morphology and the Functional Consequences of Echolocation in Bats
No full textChiroptera (bats) is the second most species-rich mammalian order and has extraordinary diversity in cranial shape and function. This diversity includes three echolocation modalities and numerous dietary specializations, which have been linked to ecological, behavioral, and sensory adaptations. Previous analyses have suggested that the positioning of the rostrum relative to the basicranium (upturned or downturned snout) is linked to the evolution of echolocation modes. I tested this hypothesis directly by quantifying rostral flexion via 3D geometric morphometrics and using phylogenetic comparative methods to detect macroevolutionary patterns across 235 species of bats. I found that >30% of variation in skull shape is linked to rostral flexion. Disparity though time analysis indicates that the rostral angle of modern lineages was established early in the evolution of most clades, and that echolocator modes have different adaptive optima. Finally, I analyzed biomechanical consequences associated with extreme upturned rostra. I found that unilateral bites have an increase of stress associated with a decrease in rostral flexion (upturned snout) then an increase in flexion (downturned rostrum). This provides evidence for variation in dietary opportunity between different echolocating groups. Overall, I find that rostral flexion is a key element of cranial diversity of bats that played a strong role early in the adaptation of this trait and has broad ranging consequences for the biomechanical properties of the skull. Evolution to different echolocation modes likely significantly constrained subsequent diversification of the skull, helping to explain part of the overall diversity of skull form in this remarkable clade.M.S
Neural Networks for Higher-Order Reinforcement Learning and Multi-Perspective Generative Modeling
No full textWhat does it mean for a system or machine to exhibit intelligence? In machine learning, a system is said to exhibit artificial intelligence provided that it improves its performance with experience on a given task. However, some tasks require more cognitive load than others, and higher-order cognitive processes are needed to solve some tasks effectively. We developed a framework inspired by how the human brain utilizes working memory to solve complex tasks, and constructed a model with the ability to solve tasks with multiple context layers. Our results show that working memory plays a vital role in solving cognitive context processing tasks. Furthermore, we extended our model to utilize the generalization benefits of output gating within a working memory system. This modification resulted in successfully transferring knowledge across a temporally extended, partially observable grid-world maze task that required the agent to learn three tasks throughout the training period. Finally, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be viewed as using higher-order cognitive processes to perform image-to-image translation. More specifically, we are concerned with generating video frames from a missing camera feed, where each feed is viewing the same area from different positions and angles. Results show that our model can produce realistic video frames that resemble the missing video source.Ph.D