This thesis explores issues surrounding the question of using a literature-based assignment to teach composition at the college freshman level. Following a review of the critical debate on the use of literature in the composition classroom, spanning the last five decades, a specific work of literature is used as the basis for a writing assignment to be given to a freshman composition class.

The goal of this online tutoring course project is to institutionalize an online tutoring training course. This instructionally designed model will target College of the Desert students serving as tutors. The students taking this course will generally be freshmen and sophomore students. A questionnaire was used to determine what the needs would be in order to build the online course.

This study investigated social influences believed to have an impact on the development of women's self-efficacy. The independent variables examined included parental expectations, gender role socialization, and mentoring. A questionnaire with both ordinal and nominal questions was administered to 196 female undergraduates attending California State University, San Bernardino and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. The sample was predominantly Caucasian (35,2 percent) and Hispanic (33.7 percent), with a median age of 20. Participants answered 57 questions, consisting of demographic questions, measures of self-efficacy and three independent variables. Pearson r analysis found positive significant correlations between self-efficacy and all three variables. The implications for social work and recommendations for social work policy, practice, and research are discussed.

This study explored how students utilized spirituality as an effective coping mechanism for the stress they faced while in the Master's of Social Work program at California State University, San Bernardino. A stress and spirituality scale was used to measure each student's spirituality and perceived stress. Most students stated that spirituality and religious activity was helpful in coping with the stress of the MSW program. In addition, spirituality was found to have a strong positive impact on a person's abilities to cope with the stress of the program.

A Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. This project created the program, "Wiki-Style Administration of Online Course Content" (WAOCC) which can be used as a teaching assistant board. Students can edit their works online and the instructor can review the work and correct it directly if necessary from the WAOCC.

This project develops a new version of the Wiki style administration of online course content. It will implement a teaching and learning tool that works as a easy and quick communication interface between instructor and student. The second purpose of the project is to design an easily extendable and maintainable architecture, which provides a generic Wiki system that can work for any information technology department and handle sets of courses and insturctors.

This study explores stress levels among a population of Master of Social Work (MSW) students enrolled at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB). It is hypothesized that student stress is related to curriculum, finances, gender, and social roles.

This thesis explores the current theories on the personal narrative (as a tool in teaching freshman composition) and examines the ways that this essay is now being used in first year courses at California State University, San Bernardino.

This project updated the California State University, San Bernardino's Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization's Solicitation Management System (SMS) software, used to facilitate the processing of grant proposal solicitations. The SMS software update improved the interface so that it is more user-friendly, increased the processing speed, and added additional functions necessary to comply with new requirements. The software was rewritten using the Spring and Hibernate frameworks.

Less than 5% of former foster youth in America graduate with a bachelor's degree. The goal of this phenomenological research was to use student voices to identify or better understand promising practices that support the success of former foster youth. Two California State University (CSU) campuses were chosen as research sites because the California Education Code has language indicating CSUs responsibility to recruit, serve, and graduate former foster youth. Through purposeful sampling, eight students who were successfully approaching graduation were selected. The data collected through two interviews, a biographical questionnaire, and a photo review were subject to thematic identification and analysis of the use or lack of use of the types of capital outlined in the community cultural wealth theory. Five themes and the abundant and lacking types of capital were identified. Identified themes were student services and programs, mentorship, financial challenges, family dynamics, and self-determination. The participants were found to have abundant aspirational, navigational, resistance, and certain aspects of familial capital. They were found to be largely lacking in cultural, social, spiritual, linguistic, and other aspects of familial capital. Through the identification of the themes and the evaluation of capital, promising practices and next steps were identified and additional research needs brought to light.