The UN doctrine for Peacekeeping operations is based on three fundamental principles for obtaining legitimacy for military operations. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the change in the UN Security Council's view of legitimacy and the use of force in the context of the UN Peacekeeping Operation in Mali between 2013 -2016, and how this has been demonstrated in the robust mandate authorized by the UN Security Council. Using Fairclough´s Critical Discourse Analysis Model, together with the resolutions and debates from the Security Council that constitutes the MINUSMA mandate and is the basis for this analysis. The analytical results identify two significant changes in the Security Council's view regarding legitimacy and methods, including the use of force applied in the field to defend the integrity of the mandate. Firstly, the view of legitimacy changes from extending support to host-nation authorities, to instead supporting the implementation of the peace agreements. Secondly, the Security Council's view on the use of legitimate force switches from defensive operations to preventive measures. This study fills a research gap on robust mandates, and how the UN's highest decision-making body is evolving its view on legitimacy in peacekeeping operations.

Due to lack of motivation, education, and free time, the Burns Recreation Center sees only 20% of LMU undergraduate students daily during academic terms. It’s no secret that gym attendance is beneficial for your health. Getting enough physical activity is important for quality of life. The problem we’re seeing is not enough gym attendance by LMU undergraduate students. The school gym sees only 20% of undergraduate students daily and 40% of undergraduate students never visit the school gym! The proposed solution to address this problem is a community specific mobile app that is designed to motivate, educate, and inspire students to visit the gym.

Background. Today’s baccalaureate nursing students need to be prepared to care for patients in an ever-changing, high acuity environment. Many programs offer a capstone immersive clinical experience. However, the benefits of this experience have not been fully explored, and the effect on patient care is unknown. Purpose. The purpose of the study was to determine if there was a change in levels of Emotional Intelligence (EI) and empathy in senior students who completed a capstone immersive clinical experience in the final semester of a baccalaureate nursing program. Theoretical Framework. The theoretical framework for this study was the Mayer and Salovey’s (1997) four-branch model of EI which evaluated EI and empathy of the senior nursing student. Methods. This quasi-experimental study was conducted at a baccalaureate degree program in the Mid-South. A convenience sample was utilized to examine the means of EI and empathy before and after a capstone immersive clinical experience. Results. Significance was found in students’ EI levels after the immersive experience. No significance was found in students’ empathy levels. Significance was not found in students’ EI or empathy with regards to gender and prior health care experience. In students with prior health care experience, empathy declined with increased exposure to clinical experience. Conclusions. EI and empathy along with caring and compassion need to be recognized as important concepts in nursing education. Implementation of EI and empathy in educational activities and evaluation of their effectiveness in nursing curricula will improve students’ preparedness as they complete their education and enter practice.

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The gap between software engineering education and the software engineering industry is a prevalent factor for both the students and the companies recruiting them. The gap is specified as the lack of knowledge software engineering students obtain relative to what the industry requires. This gap increases the difficulty for the students whenmoving from education to industry. This thesis aims to provide insight for what role the capstone project played for the graduate students’ transition to industry by looking at it from a CDIO perspective. The subjects for this research were graduate students who now work in the software engineering industry and who realised their studies up to three years earlier. A total of 38 people took part in this research by answering a questionnaire. They provided their opinions on how they experienced their capstone project and how they now experience their work assignments. This research used metadata to categorically separate the respondents into groups to find outliers. The results show that 94% of the respondents got to perform three or more CDIO criteria in their capstone projects. The respondents also recognize that they are able to perform their industry assignments in terms of the CDIO criteria.

Faculty expressed a need to improve knowledge and skills related to leading Doctor of Nursing Practice projects. A mentoring program was designed to provide faculty the skills to increase confidence when leading Doctor of Nursing Practice projects. The program included an assessment of confidence of six key skills. The intervention included didactic and individual experiential learning that coincided with student progression through project courses. Participants' self-identified areas of need included understanding application of translation science, methods, statistical choices, and all phases of analysis. Four of the six elements were improved from baseline, with two statistically significant, Project Analysis (M = 2.05, SD =0.88, p < .041) and Project Dissemination (M = 2.25, SD = 0.89, p < .046). The pilot project was a first step in assessing strategies for educating and mentoring faculty leading Doctor of Nursing Practice projects.

Background/Introduction: A mentoring program was designed to provide faculty the skills to increase confidence when leading Doctor of Nursing Practice projects. The program included an assessment of confidence of six key skills. The intervention included didactic and individual experiential learning that coincided with student progression through project courses.Purpose: The purpose of this project was to provide an intervention to promote faculty confidence when leading DNP projects. The objectives were to: assess faculty participants' self-perceived confidence regarding needed leading DNP projects, create and implement a faculty development program based on the responses, and evaluate the faculty perception of confidence post-intervention. Methods OR Process/Procedures: Participants completed a questionnaire to evaluate perception of confidence regarding leading student DNP projects. The intervention included didactic and individual mentoring, synchronous educational and guidance sessions, along with individual mentoring sessions. The sessions were provided at intervals over 10 months. Mentoring corresponded to DNP course progression. Key skills included project identification, evidence evaluation, frameworks, evidence critiques, methods, implementation, data analysis, and dissemination. Three to four months after the mentoring ended, participants were asked to rate their confidence on the same questionnaire.Results: Participants' self-identified areas of need included understanding application of translation science, methods, statistical choices, and all phases of analysis. Four of the six elements were improved from baseline, with two statistically significant, Project Analysis and Project Dissemination.Limitations: Limitations included, small sample size, questionnaire only tested for face validity, and drop-out rate over time.Conclusions: Mentoring while actively working with student projects is vital to apply concepts in real-time. Pairing junior faculty with senior faculty enhances experiential learning needed to effectively lead DNP projects. Sharing real-time feedback for each component of students' proposals and manuscripts allowed participants to observe mentors providing student guidance.

Successful project management requires continuous communication aligning the expectations between project stakeholders and the project team. Expectations include both product expectations (how the product will look, feel, and perform) and programmatic expectations (timelines, deliverables, expenditure of project resources). In order to make the most effective use of project resources throughout the life of the project, a process or tool for quickly aligning expectations as closely as possible should be employed early on in the project. Project management literature is lacking in tools for aligning expectations, and solutions and best practices need to be determined since the current best option is hiring experienced project managers and hoping they can communicate successfully. This paper lays out the quantitative statistical methods that are needed to evaluate the effectiveness of potential expectations alignment tools in order to determine best practices. Engineering capstone students lack the industry experience aligning programmatic expectations that a good project manager would have. Curriculum may not be addressing the alignment of programmatic expectations, leaving students with blind spots that can lead even the brightest of student teams to fail. Failure to properly align expectations and achieve project goals can then lead to ruined relationships and damage a program's reputation. Using the methodology we propose, we determined that students at Brigham Young University and the United States Air Force Academy have a statistically significant misalignment regarding two major programmatic expectations: design deliverables to be created as part of the project, and the desired technology readiness level the project needed to achieve. It was also determined that these students have a statistically significant bias towards overestimating the importance their sponsors put on creating prototypes. The alignment tool we tested and the alignment measurement methodology we propose provide a groundwork for future development and testing of tools and best practices for quickly aligning design teams' expectations with their stakeholders.

This dissertation entitled, Exploring Design Thinking for Instructional Practice, is situated in the cognitive rigor of design thinking instructional practice and engineering design-based capstone courses. The content of the instructional practice connects with educators employing a wide range of intellectual activities or cognitive tasks in formulating their curriculum. Key attributes of design thinking were identified through a focused literature review with an emphasis on theoretical propositions applicable to instructional practice. This dissertation contains two manuscripts: (a) an exploration of the theoretical literature related to design thinking explicating implications for instructional practice, and (b) a case study involving a small, purposive, sample of undergraduate faculty members teaching engineering design-based courses with findings broadly applicable to design processes in college curricula. The faculty participants in the case study were educators at a large, public, research-intensive university in the southeastern region of the United States. The data analyses involved triangulation of semi-structured interviews conducted with faculty participants and their design-based course materials, including syllabi and lesson plan materials. The study's thematic findings were not tied to engineering but rather course design, design process, and course management. The findings show the utility of artifact creation for learning with understanding for everyone, not just engineers and other traditional designers. Overall, the dissertation contributes to pedagogy that promotes student-centered engagement for learning with understanding. It recommends design thinking instructional practice for inclusion in designing and making artifacts of constructed knowledge for learning with understanding engagements across the academy. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation entitled, Exploring Design Thinking for Instructional Practice, integrates a wide range of intellectual activities also referred to as cognitive tasks of student-centered design thinking activities. In this dissertation, these tasks are useful for tackling problems that are not well-defined, such as, open-ended, real-world problems. Examples of this pedagogy are useful for educators considering and/or implementing design thinking in their curricula. This dissertation contains two manuscripts: (a) an exploration of the theoretical literature related to design thinking from theory to artifact making, and (b) a case study involving undergraduate faculty members teaching design thinking in design-based courses. The study's faculty participants were educators teaching engineering capstone courses at a large, public, research university in the southeastern region of the United States. Their students design and make solutions for open-ended, real-world problems that are not in textbooks and do not have "right" answers. The study's data collection phase involved interviews with the faculty participants and course materials (syllabi, lesson plan materials, handouts, and course websites). Data analysis produced three robust themes: course design, design process, and course management. These themes suggest that a design thinking instructional practice belies perceptions that design thinking is tied exclusively to engineering and other traditional design disciplines. The findings suggest that design thinking pedagogy engages students in creation of artifacts, learning with understanding, hands-on experiential learning in iterations, use of productivity tools, teamwork, and new starting points when outcomes do not meet expectations. Overall, the findings suggest design thinking pedagogy promotes student-centered design thinking activities.

Leadership is an area of increasing interest for the engineering profession. Strategic documents assert the need for engineers to take more prominent leadership roles to better inform complex policy decisions. Engineering leadership scholars assert, however that adequate models of how engineers lead do not exist and that traditional leadership models are contrary to the collaborative norms of engineering practice. To address this gap in engineering leadership literature, this dissertation develops a model of how engineering students lead in team-based design project environments, an example of the collaborative environment that is commonplace in engineering practice. This quantitative study used a combination of round-robin (360-degree) survey data and course grades to examine the Full Range of Leadership within mechanical engineering-centric capstone design teams. Using a combination of cluster analyses, social network analyses, and regression analyses in a three manuscript approach, this dissertation 1) validated a Mechanical Engineering capstone version of the Full Range of Leadership, 2) determined the degree of shared leadership within the teams and how to classify teams based on their degree of shared leadership, and 3) related shared leadership to both team effectiveness and team attributes. The study resulted in a shared leadership model for engineering design teams. The model represents leadership as a three-form, shared phenomenon within teams. The amount of leadership within the team relates positively to both the group process and satisfaction measures of team effectiveness, but not to task performance. This relationship is moderated by the distribution of leadership, indicating that a limited amount of shared leadership may be more effective. Selected team attributes are related to the degree of shared leadership within the teams. The results broaden our conceptualization of leadership beyond an individual phenomenon, making it a shared phenomenon that is an integral component of design teamwork as it relates to design team effectiveness. / Ph. D.