Flexible or asphalt pavements constitute nearly 94% of the 2.7 million miles of existing roadways in the United States. In a typical rehabilitation project, the existing asphalt pavement is milled up to a prescribed depth for removing the near surface distresses such as excessive cracking and rutting, and a new overlay is placed. The average time between resurfacing projects varies depending on the level of pavement deterioration which is significantly accelerated when poor subgrade conditions are encountered. The use of geosynthetic reinforcement within the new asphalt overlay is often perceived as a mitigation strategy that can delay the onset and propagation of reflection cracking, and also control the rutting and differential settlement. However, some mixed reviews about the performance of the geosynthetic reinforced overlays have been reported in the literature. In Phase I of this study, a laboratory investigation was conducted for evaluating the flexural fatigue behavior, permanent deformation response, and fracture characteristics of geogrid reinforced asphalt beam specimens made from a typical overlay material. The laboratory specimens included geogrid as a single-layer inclusion either at the bottom third depth or at the mid height, and as double-layer inclusion, with geogrid placed both at the bottom third and at the middle of the beam. In Phase II, a case study involving geogrid reinforced overlay constructed over a deteriorated pavement underlain by soft subgrade in southeastern Florida was numerically simulated. It was found that the geogrid reinforcement significantly improved the fatigue and fracture properties of the asphalt beams compared to unreinforced specimens. Results from numerical simulation demonstrated that the double reinforced overlay resulted in the minimum tensile stress at the bottom of the asphalt layer (reducing the cracking potential) and minimum vertical strain on the top of the subgrade (reducing the rutting potential), compared to unreinforced or bottom-third reinforced overlays. Accordingly, it is concluded that the double layer reinforcement of asphalt overlays with an appropriate geosynthetic product can be beneficial for the performance and long term preservation of the pavement system when soft soils are encountered. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The purpose of this phenomenological multi-case study and three-person interview, was to discover what select prominent African-American scientists perceived were obstacles to overcome to be successful leaders in their professional lives, and the opportunities that aided in their professional growth. Through the addition of the threeperson interview, the researcher discovered commonalities between the perceived obstacles and opportunities of current science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) professionals and the perceptions of selected historically prominent scientists. This study examined documents of the period and relics of prominent African- Americans who were in STEM fields and lived from 1860 to 1968. A description of the setting that influenced how the scientists perceived the phenomenon was written with the approach being anchored in the social constructivist tradition. Commonalities emerged through coding experiences of the individuals, which yielded patterns to help explain the phenomenon. By investigating their perceptions, insight was gained into understanding the attributes, tools and skills, and tailored experiences that encouraged Thomas Burton, Kelly Miller, George Carver, Daniel Williams, Matthew Henson, Ernest Just, Charles Drew, Percy Julian, William Cobb, and Benjamin Peery to achieve success in STEM fields between 1860 and 1968. The significance of the study is multifaceted: understanding the obstacles that African-American scientists had to overcome in their professional lives can result in the development of science educators who are better informed regarding the appropriate types of assistance that can be provided to aid their students in overcoming obstacles. This can hopefully increase their opportunities to succeed within the science field. This study can result in the development of science educators who are more sensitive in addressing the needs of the developing minority student, and can encourage, educate, and enlist more individuals to enter into the dialogue regarding the disparity of minority representation in STEM fields. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (2016) contends meeting the challenge to transform care will require the successful leadership development, preparation, and role support of the next generation of nurse leaders. Despite the urgency to transform care, meeting the challenge to lead this charge cannot be accomplished without the successful recruitment and retention of Millennial nurses to leadership positions. Identifying the leadership role expectations and support variables that are important to these young managers and creating the milieus that support these views serve to address many pressing succession planning needs. This study explored the experience of being a Millennial nurse manager, seeking to understand how these young nurse managers make meaning of their lived experience. This was a qualitative interpretative phenomenological research study. Three theoretical perspectives contributed ideologies that framed this inquiry: Ray’s (1989) theory of bureaucratic caring, generational cohort theory (Strauss & Howe, 1991), and authentic leadership theory (Avolio & Gardner, 2005). A purposeful targeted national sample of 25 Millennial nurse managers with a minimum of one year of nurse manager experience in the role participated in audio-recorded telephone interviews. Content analysis identified seven themes: Coming into the Role, Learning as I Go, Having the Support of My Director, Making an Impact, Helping Staff Succeed, Managing Change, and Trying to Stay Balanced. Findings from this study suggest Millennial nurse managers gauge role success and satisfaction in relation to their perceived levels of support and development and their ability to master role expectations. Additional findings suggest adequate succession planning for the nurse manager role remains challenged by the lack of formal mandated requisites for the role. The nurse manager role as it stands varies significantly among organizational settings regarding responsibilities, mechanisms of support, number of direct reports, and span of control. Recommendations included the need to address the nurse manager role, academic requisites, and developmental variances in practice. Additionally, re-evaluating the organizational responsibility to the leadership development of these young nurse leaders is recommended to ensure their retention and success in the role. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of motivational interviewing (MI) counselor training in a public vocational rehabilitation (VR) setting. Data were collected from a total of 347 participants (67 counselors and 280 clients) in the experimental and comparison groups, during the pre-and-posttests. The counselors in the experimental group received a 4-hour standardized MI training and a 4-week follow up coaching sessions. Results of this study indicated that counselors in the experimental group demonstrated significant gains in their MI competence scores compared to the comparison group. The clients of the experimental group’s counselors significantly improved their engagement in VR services and working alliance with their counselors. Also, counselors’ education level and CRC status showed strong correlation with the posttest MI competence total scores. Finally, working alliance was found to be a significant predictor of client engagement. This study established the preparatory knowledge for the relationship between MI counselor training, client engagement, and counselor-client working alliance in a public rehabilitation setting. The results of this study contribute to the rehabilitation literature by providing evidence-based knowledge and tools designed to improve the quality of VR service outcomes, such as employment, for people with disabilities. With the findings of this research, there is evidence available to provide rehabilitation administrators to justify investing time and other resources into training rehabilitation counselors on the use of MI intervention. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Considerable research has been carried out to establish a rodent model for the study of human memory, yet functional similarities between the species remain up for debate. The hippocampus, a region deep within the medial temporal lobe of the mammalian CNS, is critical for long-term episodic memory. Projections from the medial entorhinal cortex convey spatial/contextual information, while projections from the lateral entorhinal cortex convey item/object information to the hippocampus. The functional significance of these parallel projections to the rodent hippocampus has been suggested to support spatial processing, while the same projections to the human hippocampus support spatial and non-spatial memory. Discharging in a location-specific manner, hippocampal place cells contribute to spatial memory; however, evidence for neuronal correlates of non-spatial object memory has not been fully defined. The current experiments were designed to address the following questions, while utilizing electrophysiology, functional inactivation during a novel behavioral task, and immunohistochemistry. Is the memory for objects hippocampal-dependent, solely due to the location of the object, or are objects represented within hippocampal activity independent of location? To tease apart spatial and non-spatial processing by the hippocampus, the spatial aspects of 3D objects were enhanced by utilizing movement. A novel discriminatory avoidance task, Knowing Your Enemy, was adapted from an Enemy Avoidance task to test true object memory in mice. Current findings support the notion that object-associations acquisition depends upon a specific context. Retrieval of such object-associations is not context-dependent, yet remains sensitive to temporary inactivation of the CA1 region of the dorsal hippocampus. The avoidance impairments observed following hippocampal inactivation were shown to not be a result of reduced anxiety. Immunohistochemical marker expression suggests that the CA1 region was highly active during object exposures, yet the hippocampal system responded differentially to moving and to stationary objects. Recordings of CA1 neurons yielded non-bursting object-related activity during object exploration, and place cell activity remained unaffected in the presence of moving objects; supporting independent, yet simultaneous processing of spatial and non-spatial information within the hippocampus. Together, the current findings support the notion that the CA1 region of the rodent hippocampus processes object-related information, independent of spatial information. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Writing Fellows Programs (WFP) are in effect among college campuses across the country, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Nova Southeastern University; however, Florida Atlantic University has yet to establish a peer tutoring program that is tied to writing-intensive courses that would enable disciplines across campus to share the responsibility of improving student writing instead of delegating the task to the English Department or college writing center. There is also an apparent disconnect between the writing skills being taught within the non-English Department courses and the work being done within the University Center for Excellence in Writing (UCEW) to teach the effectiveness of strong, academic writing to students. This disconnect can be eliminated with the help of peer tutors acting as the bridge connecting the faculty across the disciplines to the UCEW. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the difference in pro-social behavior, self-regulation, overall reading performance, Lexile levels, and teachers’ perception of classroom climate of kindergarten students who received the Ready to Learn (RTL; Brigman, Lane, & Lane, 2008) classroom guidance program (treatment group: n = 173) and kindergarten students who did not receive the intervention (comparison group: n = 124). The study followed a quasi-experimental, comparison group design in which teachers completed the Child Behavior Rating Scale (CBRS) and Teacher My Class Inventory-Short Form (TMCI-SF) measures as well as collected reading data from individual students. Descriptive statistics for each of the measures, the findings from the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) on the CBRS and TMCI-SF data, along with the multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) using the i-Ready data, and partial eta squared (ηp2) effect sizes were calculated. The ANCOVA was conducted to determine if differences existed on the participants’ pro-social behavior and self-regulation by condition. The findings revealed a statistically significant difference on the pro-social skills but did not show a statistically significant difference in self-regulation. The MANCOVA revealed statistically significant differences in overall reading performance between the treatment and comparison group; however, did not reveal statistically significant differences on the Lexile levels for the students who participated in the intervention. Finally, the ANCOVA reported a statistically significant difference in the perceived impact of the school counselor by the treatment group kindergarten as compared to the teachers in the comparison group; however, no other differences were found on the TMCI-SF scales. With these results, there is a need for further empirical research to determine the impact of the RTL program on students’ academic and SEL development. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Coral reefs on Florida’s Reef Tract (FRT) are susceptible to many anthropogenic influences including controlled freshwater discharges and agricultural runoff as well as high natural environmental variability from seasonal rainfall, runoff and upwelling. To better understand coral population structure and responses to sublethal stressors, populations of the scleractinian coral Montastraea cavernosa in the northern FRT were examined using a combination of genomic and transcriptomic techniques. Microsatellite genetic markers identified high local retention among sites and a slight southward gene flow. An in-situ temporal gene expression analysis utilizing a tag-based sequencing transcriptomic approach was used to analyze baseline coral health at St. Lucie Reef (SLR), off Stuart, FL. Temporal variation had the greatest influence of differential gene expression among M. cavernosa at SLR. Results will be shared with local resource managers and coupled with a complementary ex-situ experimental trial. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Workplace mistreatment (bullying, horizontal violence, and incivility) has been shown to impact nurses’ work satisfaction, job turnover, and physical and mental health. However, there are limited studies that examine its effect on patient outcomes. A correlational descriptive study of 79 acute care nurses was used to test a social justice model for examining the relationship between workplace mistreatment, quantified as threats to dimensions of nurses’ well-being (health, personal security, reasoning, respect, attachment, and self-determination), and nurses’ ability to provide quality patient care. In addition, this study considered the moderating effect of caring work environment among co-workers on nurses’ ability to provide quality patient care in the face of workplace mistreatment. Stories of workplace mistreatment were collected anonymously and analyzed for alignment with threats to six dimensions of well-being. Ability to provide patient care was measured using the Healthcare Productivity Survey and a caring work environment was measured via the Culture of Companionate Love scale. The results demonstrated that threats to all six dimensions of well-being described by Powers and Faden (2006) were expressed in nurses’ stories of workplace mistreatment. Furthermore, 87% reported a decrease in ability to provide patient care after an incident of workplace mistreatment. Yet frequency of threatened dimensions did not have a significant relationship with ability to provide patient care. Moreover, there was a significant moderator effect of the caring work environment on the relationship between number of threatened dimensions of well-being and ability to provide quality patient care. Nurses in high caring environments loss less ability to provide care than nurses in low caring environments when one to three dimensions of well-being were threatened. However, this relationship reversed when four or more dimensions were threatened. Implications include further research on the relationship between workplace mistreatment and nurse well-being and changing practice to include fostering a caring work environment in healthcare facilities. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

In wireless communications systems, it is well known that the instantaneous received signal is a random variable that follows a given distribution. The randomness mainly stems from e ects such as multipath fading, shadowing, and interference. The received signal is a relevant metric, such that several distributions have been used in the literature to characterize it. However, as new radio technologies emerge, the known distributions are deemed insu cient to t simulated and measure data. Subsequently, as the wireless industry moves onto the fth generation (5G), newer distributions are proposed to well represent the received signal for new wireless technologies, including those operating in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band. These are mainly application speci c and may not be adequate to model complex 5G devices performance. Therefore, there is a need to unify and generalize the received signal distributions used for performance analysis of wireless systems. Secondly, an explosion of new radio technologies and devices operating in the same limited radio spectrum to collect and share data at alarming rates is expected. Such an explosion coupled with the 5G promise of ubiquitous connectivity and network densi cation, will thrust interference modeling in dense networks to the fore-front. Thus, interference characterization is essential when analyzing such wireless networks. Thirdly, the classical distributions used to model the received signal do not account for the inherent mobility feature for emerging radio technologies, such as avionics systems (e.g. drones), which may make the distributions inadequate as mobility e ects can no longer be ignored. Consequently, in this dissertation, we propose the use of a unifying distribution, the Fox's H-function distribution, with subsume ability to represent several traditional and future distributions, as a statistical tool to evaluate the performance of wireless communications systems. Additionally, two interference models, one with a xed number and the other with a random number of interferers, are considered to derive interference statistics, and further utilize the results to analyze system performance under the e ect of interference. Finally, we extend the classical distributions to include the mobility regime for several wireless network topologies, and perform network analysis. The analytical results are validated using computer Monte Carlo simulations. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection