The purpose of this study was to describe 3rd through 5th-grade mathematics teachers’ demographic information and investigate their perceptions regarding effective instructional practices and their abilities to use technology as an instructional tool in the mathematics classroom. This information will give administrators a more detailed interpretation of what teaching strategies work best for engaging students in successfully learning mathematics. Additionally, the researcher investigated if there was a statistically significant difference in teachers’ perceptions of select demographic variables and high-performance elementary schools and low-performance elementary schools. To accomplish the purpose of this study, an online survey developed by the researcher was used to obtain information from participants via SurveyMonkey. The participants consisted of 135 3rd through 5th-grade mathematics teachers. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-tests, and ANOVA. The findings in the study revealed third through fifth-grade mathematics teachers had positive perceptions about effective instructional practices and their abilities to use technology as an instructional tool in the mathematics classroom. Additionally, there were statistically significant differences found among demographic variables based on the teachers’ responses to certain statements from the online survey. Statistically significant differences were found in the demographic variables of educational background, teaching experience, and years of experience with using various forms of technology in the classroom regarding teachers’ perceptions of effective instructional practices. Also, there were statistically significant differences found in the demographic variables of age range and educational background regarding teachers’ perceptions of using technology as an instructional tool in the mathematics classroom. The conclusions and recommendations based on the findings in this study provided information for administrators in one central Mississippi school district to increase student engagement and improve statewide test scores in mathematics. It was recommended that comparative studies be conducted to further investigate if these findings are consistent with the perceptions of the remaining population of teachers whose students are mandated to take statewide exams about mathematics.

This thesis applies interdisciplinary approaches to explore interactions between two forms of community governance in Acholiland from 1898 to 2010, locating itself within Peace Studies. One form, kaka, was “traditional”, featuring varied forms of “facultative mutualisms” among two or more gangi agnates – with one gang as dominant in the realm. Gangi were kinship-based polities. Like kaka, gangi manifested autopoietic attributes and strong internal “fiduciary cultures”. Then in the 1900s, kaka as governing systems were reshuffled under colonialism and a tribal unit, the Acholi Local Government was created and was subordinated to the Uganda state. Unlike kaka, Acholi Local Government was hierarchal and has consistently been redesigned by various postcolonial governments in their attempts to renegotiate, reshape and control the Acholi people. The study advances a concept of community governance as “socialpolitical” and moral, and counters that kaka was about brotherhoods - not rulersubject relationships. It further distinguishes what was “traditional” from “customary” systems, and demonstrates how colonialism in Acholiland, and a crisis of legitimacy manifested in a trifurcation of authorities, with: i) the despotic civil service - the “customary system”, fusing modernity and the African tradition, ii) a reshuffled kaka system as traditional, and, iii) the cross-modern, manifested as kinematic lugwok paco, linking ethno-governance with the nascent national and global arenas. The study concludes that both colonialism and “coloniality” have reshuffled the mores of kaka along an African neo-patrimonial legitimacy. Conversely, Acholiland is a “limited statehood” – manifesting a higher order of societal entropy - where the “rule by law and customs” dovetail with violence and poverty, demonstrating a genre of exceptionalism.

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to investigate the perceptions of classroom-level educators regarding the application of trauma-informed instructional practices. This was achieved by evaluating educators' understanding of the influence of trauma on students, their level of familiarity with trauma-informed instructional practices, and their assessments of the effectiveness of these practices. Trauma refers to an individual's response to a single traumatic incident, a succession of traumatic events, or extended exposure to a traumatic event (SAMHSA, 2014). As awareness of the prevalence of childhood trauma has increased, it is acknowledged as a serious public health issue (Lang et al., 2015). Trauma-informed care is a strengths-based, victim-centered framework under which organizations recognize trauma, understand, and limit the potential long-term repercussions of exposure to traumatic experiences, even if an individual does not perceive trauma as influencing their behavior (Kubiak et al., 2017; Office for Victims of Crime, n.d.). Educators have a distinct advantage in identifying students' traumatic stress symptoms, which can directly affect social-emotional growth and academic achievement (Conley et al., 2014; Donisch et al., 2022). Schools play a crucial role in establishing settings that safeguard students against adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), cultivate resilience, and nurture a sense of belongingness (Conley et al., 2014; Hertz, 2020). Eight educators from one northeast Tennessee school district who provided general and special education instruction to students in PreK-12th grade participated in the study. Data collection consisted of one-on-one video conferencing interviews. The data were coded and analyzed to identify emerging themes, synthesized, and summarized (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). The following themes emerged: (a) increased awareness of trauma and ACEs, (b) desire for additional training, (c) diversity of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and trauma exposures, (d) perceived negative behaviors resulting from or masking trauma, (e) the significance of procedures and structure, (f) the need for supplementary resources, (g) the importance of relationship building, (h) importance of opportunities for success, (i) facilitation of individualized instruction, (j) increased empathy, (k) increased patience and self-awareness, and (l) emotional, physical, and mental stress.

This dissertation examines the lives of Latin American immigrants in two enforcement landscapes of the US South, revealing the entanglement of religion with everyday social experiences and their geographies. It supposes that local places and their politics have the potential to structure action, but that these realities do not go uncontested by strategic actors. As federal-local enforcement agreements proliferate, local neighborhoods are increasingly perceived and mapped by immigrants in relation to insecurity and risks they pose. I find that Latinos strategically resist precarity and the local immigration conditions by engaging both communal and individual forms of religion in their neighborhood spaces. They make spaces safe through the enactment of religion where danger is perceived and redefine local geographies that threaten their existence through practical decisions with their religious networks. The research employs ethnographic, visual, and spatial methods, including in-depth interviews with 60 participants. Situated in a practice approach, the research follows these religious actors from their institutional spaces of religion into the multiple and varied locations of their lives. It interrogates the practices in institutions and spaces of the neighborhood, including the immigrant religious congregations that remain a focal point in Latino lives. By attending to the micro interactions and practices that occur in these geographies, the dissertation uncovers how spaces within places are battlegrounds of power where hiddenness and visibility are situationally and strategically employed. The research findings are developed in three empirical chapters, as I map the role of religion in these negative policy contexts. In the first, I consider the place of Latino congregations in relation to the US religious landscape and the logics of congregational geography. Then, I investigate the communal practices of religion at these Latino churches given the everyday experiences of immigrants, documenting the practical ways immigrant congregations assisted members with the local conditions of enforcement. Last, I turn to locate religion in the broader spaces of social life. Participants’ stories reveal that religion is transportable to all kinds of spaces, and they creatively invoke their traditions to claim space and redefine themselves around the neighborhood. Not every practice in everyday life should be counted as religious, but this dissertation reveals that religion remains entangled in the local immigration experience. / 2029-02-28T00:00:00Z

This study aims to define workforce agility via a literature review and a conducted research survey of the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Engineering workforce. The survey results will help us determine the workforce agility of the KSC engineering team and understand what has allowed them to transition from the Space Shuttle Program to the new Exploration Ground System (EGS) program. Structural Equation Modeling was used to develop a model of relationships to test the hypotheses. The results show that organizational practices and psychological empowerment significantly support workforce agility. The implications of this study for understanding the characteristics of workforce agility are also discussed.

The general topic of this Ph.D. thesis regards "Questionable Research Practices" (QRPs) and their effect on the replicability crisis in psychology and social sciences. QRPs are a set of bad research practices carried out to increase the likelihood of obtaining a significant result by providing some sort of manipulation of collected data. QRPs are related to the so-called replicability crisis, defined as the inability to replicate the results of an increasing number of studies. The proposed dissertation focuses on a specific form of QRPs named "Questionable Interim Analysis" (QIA). QIA implies that the data collection stopping rule depends on the previous interim analysis result. While the effect of this practice on the growth of false positive results is well known, its impact on the replicability of studies is still unclear. Furthermore, an objective tool to assess the incidence of this practice in a single study is, to our knowledge, still missing. In this project, we tried to overcome these limitations by evaluating the effects of QRPs on replication success and by proposing a formal tool to resize and control the QIA effects on statistical results. This document begins with a brief overview on the replicability crisis, QRPs, and the methods for identifying these practices in the literature (Chapter 1). Chapter 2 introduces a methodology to clarify the effect of some QRPs (cherry picking, questionable interim analyses, questionable inclusion of covariates, and questionable subgroup analyses) on replicability and determinates which replication success metric performs better in presence of these practices. The results show that the metric based on the golden sceptical p-value maintains low values of false positive replication success when QRPs are assumed. Chapter 3 presents a new probabilistic model to identify the incidence of QIA practice in the literature. It provides information about the larger or lower probability of this practice by estimating the ratio between the probability that a published result was obtained on the basis of a QIA practice or, alternatively, by a standard data collection approach. In Chapter 4, we show an application of the probabilistic models in the context of simulation studies. In particular, we illustrate how the new proposal improves some widely used simulation approaches to assess the false positive results in the context of QIA practices. Finally, in Chapter 5 the proposed models are discussed in terms of their utilities, limitations, and possible future extensions.

Purification, which involves ceremonial acts or customs employed to gain purity in order td create sacred spaces, represents a vital aspect of religious practice both historically and cross-culturally (Cunningham 2003.(1988]:48). Preparations for passing into sacred spaces of worship are important elements of ritual life for nearly all faith communities. Mt thesis has two important research goals: (1) to examine the purification practices of contemporary Paganism; and, (2) analyze the degree to which contemporary Pagans have adapted a syncretic approach to these cleansing rituals. With regards to the former goal, I address the following three questions: what is the significance of religious purification rituals historically and cross-culturally?; why is purification especially important to contemporary Pagans?; and how have different forms of Paganism varied in their purifying methods? With regards to the latter research goal, I critically review diverse cultural traditions and belief systems variously integrated into contemporary Pagan practices of purification. The influence of Native American, European, and other Old and New World traditions and techniques are all considered in the context of this thesis. Taken as a whole, this type of overview is significant as the scholarly literature on contemporary Paganism and Pagan purification rituals remains sketchy and incomplete at this stage.

With a majority of land in the United States being utilized for agricultural production, water resource conservation has become a significant topic of interest for natural resource agencies. In partnership with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and Natural Resources Conservation Service, Mississippi State University conducted a stream restoration project within its agricultural research properties in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi. Water sampling during storm-runoff events was conducted to assess changes in microbial, nutrient, and sediment concentrations and loads pre- and post-restoration. In addition to these water monitoring activities, a regional survey of Cooperative Extension Service agents with agriculture and natural resource responsibilities was conducted to assess the need for in-service training on water resource conservation topics. Water quality monitoring and agent survey data were used to evaluate the restoration project’s environmental impact and potential as a demonstration site for future agent training initiatives for water resource conservation.

In this qualitative study, I explored teacher beliefs and practices about struggling adolescent readers. I chose to study 3 middle school 7th- and 8th-grade English teachers based on purposeful and convenience sampling through principal recommendation. My data consisted of interviews, observations, and documents to understand what teachers believe about struggling adolescent readers and what teachers of struggling middle school students do during instruction. I created the interviews and observation protocols and analyzed the data using the How People Learn Framework (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005; National Research Council, 2000). Findings suggest (1) negative extrinsic motivation was used to boost student assessment performance, (2) the lack of foundational reading skills can cause problems through adolescence, (3) discussion strategies were used to assist struggling adolescent readers, (4) teachers had strong opinions about data walls, and (5) positive relationships with and between students were beneficial. These findings suggest implications for teachers and school leaders.

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