Many college students have reported struggling with mental health problems while dealing with challenging demands of college. The initial theoretical framework for this research was Pearlin's stress process model (SPM). Building on the SPM, the three additional mediating variables of perceived control, meaninglessness, and financial worries were added to create a composite model for the research. Mental health outcomes in the model were measured by a comprehensive range of factors, which included: psychological distress, suicide, substance abuse, and anger. Data were collected from a non-probability convenience sample of 463 undergraduate students attending a large state supported university in the southwestern region of the United States. Among the social status variables measured, being married, female, and white were significant predictors of poor mental health in the sampled college students. Poor self-image, feeling of meaninglessness, and worrying about current and future finances were significant mediating variables. Poor mental health could make individuals overwhelmed and discouraged. This is a formula for failure in college. The results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the correlates of mental health problems among college students. A greater understanding means that families and college administrations will have better ideas about how to intervene to reduce …

This study aimed to address consumers' stereotypical categorizations in the form of essentialist views about foreign cultures and their effect on individual consumers, including their negative or aroused emotions and subsequent retail patronage behaviors. The research mission was to empirically assess the salient dimensions of consumers' states of mind (positive and negative affect, psychological essentialism, epistemic curiosity), states of being (store atmospherics), and states of action (retail patronage behaviors) in a cultural context based on Mehrabian-Russell theory of environmental psychology. Specifically, the retail patronage setting was selected as foreign-based fast-food franchises because it represents both a relevant and timely situational context for consumer behavior. This dissertation makes several contributions to international retail patronage literature. First, it frames curiosity as an aroused emotional state and finds support for the relationship between consumer epistemic curiosity and retail patronage. Second, it provides support for the linkage between consumer affect and retail patronage in an international retail setting. Third, it reveals that affect has a greater impact on retail patronage than epistemic curiosity. The overarching finding of this study is an inability to tie the cultural elements in retail atmospherics, including signs, symbols, and artifacts, to consumer emotions. In addition, we were unable to …

The University Interscholastic League (UIL) One-Act Play Contest is a competition where similarly sized Texas schools present an 18-40 minute play usually adjudicated by a single judge. At each level of competition the judge awards individual acting awards as well as selecting two productions to advance to the next level of competition. After the awards are announced the judge gives an oral critique to each of the schools. Because of the wide participation and diversity of plays produced, certain rules and guidelines have been adopted to ensure safety, allow for equity, satisfy legal standards, and make the running of the contest practical. These rules can be modified to achieve positive outcomes and improved educational results. Changes in the rules of a UIL contest are in accordance with stated educational objectives of the UIL. Occasionally, however, modifications in procedures raise questions. The problem of this study was to determine, from the perceptions of administrators and teachers, whether significant modifications in the rules and policies for the UIL One-Act Play Contest over a time span of 20 years have had impacts on the goals and procedures of the contest. The study utilized a qualitative approach through historical analysis and a survey to …

Self-concept, discussed as a scholarly topic since the time of Socrates and Plato, is an important theoretical construct in education because self-concept is considered to be a desirable trait and a facilitator of positive future behavior. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the characteristics of students enrolled in career and technical education (CTE) programs and students' self-concept scores as measured by specific subscales from the Self-Description Questionnaire (SDQ). A total of 196 male and 89 female secondary students (Grades 9-12) enrolled in arts, audio/video technology and communications cluster courses in North Central Texas school districts participated in the study. Student characteristic variables of interest were age, gender, CTE program enrollment, and participation in CTE. The self-concept subscales analyzed were General, Academic, Verbal, Math, and Problem Solving. A canonical correlation analysis was conducted using the four student characteristic variables as predictors of the five self-concept variables to evaluate the multivariate shared relationship between the two variable sets. The full model across all functions explained about 23% of the variance between the variable sets. Function 1 explained 15% of the shared variance and Function 2 explained 7% of the variance that remained. This study detected a relationship …

The purpose of this study was to investigate high school policies and procedures that address educator sexual misconduct. High school principals completed an online questionnaire which addressed administrator knowledge of state and federal laws and regulations; knowledge of district policies and procedures; experience with educator sexual misconduct; training and communication available in their schools and school districts for staff, parents, and students; the policies and procedures in place in secondary schools to prevent educator sexual misconduct; and related problems that are reported to school administrators. Responses were compared by school size, community type, and Title I eligibility. The findings of the study revealed that principals feel they have knowledge of the federal and state laws and regulations, as well as the district policies and procedures. However, principals reported a lack of specific policies addressing sexual harassment and discrimination of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender students; training for students and teachers in recognizing and responding to sexual misconduct; and sexual misconduct related to students with disabilities. In addition, most principals stated that their schools have not surveyed students to determine the extent of sexual harassment on the campus. Principals of the largest schools and the urban and suburban schools were more …

Many students currently entering college are able to solve mathematical problems but often do not understand the chemistry concepts underlying their calculations. High school chemistry teachers from Texas and the United States (US) were surveyed as to what topics they teach in their chemistry classes. A subset of Texas teachers was also interviewed about their instruction. The survey indicated that less-experienced Texas teachers are omitting a number of topics from their chemistry instruction, as compared to more experienced teachers. No differences were seen for those topics among US teachers. Chemistry textbooks from 1930 to the current 2002 Texas state adoptions were analyzed for inclusion of these topics. The only textbooks that were missing topics were from the 1930s. All others contained the topics. In general, textbooks have been increasing numbers of questions and problems for each topic, with the number of quantitative problems increasing at a greater rate than qualitative problems. Analysis of interview transcripts revealed that the main reason for omission of topics by less-experienced Texas chemistry teachers is that these topics are not assessed on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills science exam. Omitted topics were both qualitative and quantitative; the common factor is that they are …

One can argue that embracing technological models may produce students who are illiterate in the "proper" methods of communication. With rapid technological change, some fear traditions in their "original" form may be lost. Practices such as trying to recapture the artist's intent should be abandoned as a way of opening up literacy discourse to multiple narratives. Failing to critically explore the possibilities of emerging models of thinking, teaching, and learning in a technological culture can produce a loss equal to the loss of tradition. An a/r/tographer works toward a fluid practice between the domains of artist, researcher, and teacher in order to negotiate emerging forms of visual/tactile/auditory communication which include the body as a networked organism situated recursively within the larger structure of society. This study occurred during two separate semesters of an art education course for pre-service elementary teachers. Through interaction with hypermedia, social networking, installation art, and mash-ups, the teacher and students became artists, researchers, and teachers in a community of practice. A new form of teaching practice was envisioned that opens the possibility for both collective and individual understandings in the formation of curricula. A set of guiding principles was invented through practice as a way of …

College students participating in dyads played a game designed as an analog of early hunters whose survival, as a dyad and ultimately individually, depend on rabbits they hunt. Dyadic fitness was defined as both participants being able to hunt and it was measured by the proportion of trials in a condition that both participants hunted. The effects of scarcity (alternating rich and poor conditions) on dyadic fitness were examined in two experiments. First experiment results did not show a difference in dyadic fitness as a function of the independent variable. The second experiment increased the number of hunting seasons and also the discrepancy between scarcity in rich and poor seasons. Second experiment results show that dyads start fit in rich seasons and become increasingly fit in poor seasons. External variables could not be ruled out; therefore, additional experiments still need to be carried out to clarify results.

This qualitative research, specifically a content analysis of 31 tribal colleges' mission statements and curricula, examined how the colleges' curricula aligned with the five educational concepts suggested in the colleges' mission statements. Cajete's (1994) seven foundations to indigenous thinking proved to be a major theoretical framework which provided a worldview for tribal learning. The study concluded that whereas the five educational concepts aligned between mission statements and curricula, the curricula emphasized culture, tribal community, and academic success at a greater level than mission statements indicated. Further, tribal colleges' curricula did not emphasize economic concepts as the mission statements indicated. A particular finding suggests that tribal colleges' are investing in environmental studies programs, thus increasing their intellectual capacity to protect their environmental interests while promoting indigenous thinking and community learning across all academic disciplines. Considerable implications include that an increase of American Indian environmental studies graduates may have a positive impact on environmental justice matters as well as the ability to promote new agricultural technologies. Additional implications include how mainstream universities will adapt to an increase of native students studying the sciences rather than liberal arts.

This thesis imparts the outcomes of a seven-week long quasi-experimental study that explored whether or not L2 learners who received intensive and highly focused indirect feedback on one type of treatable error - either the third person singular -s, plural endings -s, or definite article the - eventually become more accurate in the post-test as compared to a control group that did not. The paired-samples t-test comparing the pre-test and post-test scores of both groups demonstrates that the experimental group did no better than the control group after they received indirect corrective feedback. The independent samples t-test measuring the experimental and control group's accuracy shows no significant difference between the two groups. Effect sizes calculated, however, do indicate that, had the sample sizes been bigger, both groups would have eventually become more accurate in the errors targeted, although this would not have been because of the indirect feedback.

The purpose of this study was to provide a historical overview of the development of the College of the Bahamas, and to examine the development of the College of the Bahamas in light of the College of the Bahamas Act of 1974 and the subsequent Act of 1995. The research was qualitative in nature using historical analysis. The primary means of investigation were analyses of both primary and secondary documents and interviews with key individuals who were important to the development of the College of the Bahamas since the 1960s. The methods of triangulation of data and findings were complemented by member checks to affirm the basic findings of the study. The study was limited in scope to the College of the Bahamas to the exclusion of other tertiary institutions within the country. The College of the Bahamas has advanced greatly and has largely fulfilled the directives and goals of the Act of 1974 and is currently engaged in efforts to meet the goals of the Act of 1995.

This thesis describes the development of psychological operations capabilities, introduction of forces, and the employment in Vietnam during the period 1960-1965. The complex interplay of these activities is addressed, as well as the development of PSYOP doctrine and training in the period prior to the introduction of ground combat forces in 1965. The American PSYOP advisory effort supported the South Vietnamese at all levels, providing access to training, material support, and critical advice. In these areas the American effort was largely successful. Yet, instability in the wake of President Ngo Dinh Diem's overthrow created an impediment to the ability of psychological operations to change behaviors and positively affect the outcome.

This descriptive study uses a qualitative, content analysis to examine the middle school visual arts and core Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) to determine the potential common learning activities that can be aligned between the two. By performing an alignment of the potential common learning activities present in the middle school visual art TEKS and the middle school core TEKS, I demonstrate that there is a foundation for curriculum integration in the Texas middle school visual arts classroom.

The preface, "Against Buses: Charles Baxter and the Contemporary Epiphany" deals with the epiphany as a potential ending to short stories. Baxter holds that epiphanies are trite and without purpose in today's fiction. I argue that Baxter's view, while not without merit, is limiting. Beginning with James Joyce and Katherine Anne Porter and moving to my own work, I discuss how some epiphanies, particularly false ones, can enhance rather than detract from excellent fiction. Five short stories make up the remainder of this thesis: "Dedication," "Taking it with You," "Transition to Flowers," "Profile in Courage," and "Henderson Street Bazaar."

This qualitative naturalistic descriptive case study provides an understanding of the characteristics of a community of practice within a National Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute. This study utilized naturalistic, descriptive case study methodology to answer the research question: What characteristics of a community of practice are revealed by the perceptions and experiences of the fellows of a National Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute? Data were gathered in the form of interviews, focus group, observations, field notes, and participant reflective pieces. Peer debriefing, triangulation, thick rich description, as well as member checking served to establish credibility and trustworthiness in the study. Bracketing, a phenomenological process of reflecting on one's own experiences of the phenomenon under investigation was utilized as well. The findings of this study point to five analytic themes. These themes, ownership and autonomy, asset-based environment, relationships, socially constructed knowledge and practices, and experiential learning, intertwine to illuminate the three essential components which must be present for a community of practice to exist: joint enterprise, mutual engagement, and shared repertoire. Participants' portraits provide a description of their unique experiences as they moved fluidly between the periphery and core of the community of practice.

Many researchers of gender studies and colonial history ignore the lives of European women in the British West Indies. The scarcity of written information combined with preconceived notions about the character of the women inhabiting the islands make this the "final frontier" in colonial studies on women. Over the long eighteenth century, travel literature by men reduced creole white women to a stereotype that endured in literature and visual representations. The writings of female authors, who also visited the plantation islands, display their opinions on the creole white women through their letters, diaries and journals. Male authors were preoccupied with the sexual morality of the women, whereas the female authors focus on the temperate lifestyles of the local females. The popular perceptions of the creole white women seen in periodicals, literature, and caricatures in Britain seem to follow this trend, taking for their sources the travel histories.

In a small room in Austin, Texas, a group of 15 people are single-handedly deciding what is taught to the next generation of American children. The highly politicized 15 member Texas Board of Education is currently going through the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting the teaching and textbook standards for its nearly 5 million schoolchildren. Texas is also unbelievably influential on the standards that textbook publishers use as a basis for their textbooks nationwide. Over the last 10 years, the textbooks adopted by this board found their way in upwards of 65% of American classrooms. My goal is to shed light on this important issue and the key players in this process - I explain their goals, explore the scope of their influence, and delve into the personal motivations behind their actions, which will affect public education throughout the country.

This thesis examines the life of James Wesley Silver, a professor of history at the University of Mississippi for twenty-six years and author of Mississippi: The Closed Society, a scathing attack on the Magnolia State's history of racial oppression. In 1962, Silver witnessed the campus riot resulting from James Meredith's enrollment as the first black student at the state's hallowed public university and claims this was the catalyst for writing his book. However, by examining James Silver's personal and professional activities and comparing them with the political, cultural, and social events taking place concurrently, this paper demonstrates that his entire life, the gamut of his experiences, culminated in the creation of his own rebel yell, Mississippi: The Closed Society. Chapter 1 establishes Silver's environment by exploring the history and sociology of the South during the years of his residency. Chapter 2 discusses Silver's background and early years, culminating with his appointment as a faculty member of the University of Mississippi in 1936. Chapter 3 reveals Silver's personal and professional life during the 1940s, as well as the era's notable historical events. The decade of the 1950s is discussed in chapter 4, particularly the civil rights movement, Silver's response to these …

Behavior analysts who study verbal behavior theorize that people derive relationships between stimuli - forming stimulus classes such that psychological functions transfer among stimuli and therefore affect behavior. Verbal processes are thought to play a role in cancer patients' behavioral flexibility. The current study examined if an analogue intervention produced changes in relations between health-relevant stimuli from pre- to post-test in patient and student samples. A matching-to-sample (MTS) task required participants to form three 4-member classes that included health, treatment, or neutral terms. Participants next listened to either an acceptance-based or a control-based rationale and therapy exercise, or a distracter task. Then, they were re-exposed to the MTS task. Latencies and accuracies for learning each class as well as between condition differences were examined. Finally, changes in ratings of stimuli from pre to post analogues were measured. Differences in stimuli ratings were seen in the student sample, reflecting transfer of function and some reduction in responsiveness to stimuli following intervention, but overall no learning performances are found. Discussion explores the consistency of the findings with acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) theory in light of the seemingly lack of findings.

In this project a theory of adaptive differential insurgency growth by the mechanism of repression driven contagion is put forth to explain variation in the membership and spatial expansion of insurgencies from 1981 to 1999. As an alternative to the dominant structural approaches in the civil war literature, Part 1 of the study proposes an interactive model of insurgency growth based on Most and Starr's opportunity and willingness framework. The findings suggest that state capacity, via its impact on state repressive behavior, plays an important gatekeeping function in selecting which minor insurgencies can grow into civil war, but contributes little to insurgency growth directly. In Part 2 of the study, I directly examine variation in insurgency membership and geographical expansion as a function of repression driven contagion. I find that repression increases the overall magnitude of insurgency activity within states, while at the same time reducing the density of insurgency activity in any one place. Despite an abundance of low intensity armed struggles against a highly diverse group of regimes around the world, I find an extremely strong and robust regularity: where repression is low - insurgencies don't grow.

The study seeks to find a baseline of Twitter usage of traditional media. Findings suggest that traditional media are using Twitter (a non-traditional medium) in a traditional way. The study explores why a tool like Twitter needs to be approached by journalists in ways to which they may not be accustomed. The study additionally finds that newsrooms are underutilizing Twitter's potential for audience interactivity and have not established guidelines for journalists in the use of Twitter for work purposes. Conclusions include the need for more understanding of Twitter on the part of managers, a usage of Twitter that fits the medium, rather than traditional journalism models and more study in the future so that the journalism business can stay ahead of the curve when new communication technologies are introduced.

This quasi-experimental study investigates neuropsychological functioning differences between 63 active duty soldiers who were placed into three groups (MTBI, PTSD, control) to provide better information for differentiating PTSD and MTBI. The ANAM and MicroCog were utilized to measure psychomotor speed, memory, and attention. Participants with PTSD performed worse on most measures of psychomotor speed and attention, and endorsed more symptoms of depression and anxiety when compared to MTBI and control participants. Further, attention appears to be the best cognitive domain for differentiating PTSD from MTBI, whereas memory variables did not differentiate these groups. Clinical and research implications of these findings are discussed.

Male or female, young or old, the characters of this collection inhabit a liminal space of trauma and social dislocation in which elements of the real and fabulous coexist in equal measure. The ghosts that populate the stories are as much the ghosts of the living, as they are the ghosts of the dead. They represent individual conscience and an inescapable connection to the past.

The purposes of this dissertation were to determine the constitutional rights of parents to shield their children from exposure to parts of the public school curriculum that the parents find objectionable on religious, moral, or other grounds and to determine the statutory rights of parents to remove, or opt-out, their children from objectionable parts or all of the public school curriculum as set forth in the statutes of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Many pivotal federal court cases dealing with parent rights and curricular issues, including Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education (1987), Vandiver v. Hardin County Board of Education (1987), Brown v. Hot, Sexy, & Safer Productions, Inc. (1995), Leebaert v. Harrington (2003), and Parker v. Hurley (2008) were surveyed using legal research methods. Specific types of curriculum opt-outs (e.g., sex education, comprehensive health programs, HIV/AIDS instruction) granted by each state were ascertained. States' statutes and regulations were categorized as non-existent, restrictive, or permissive based on the scope and breadth of each state's curriculum opt-out statute or regulation. A long list of federal court rulings have provided public schools the right to teach what school boards and administrators determine is appropriate. Parents did not have …