Actors often use their life experiences to evoke emotions and give a compelling performance. Connecting with personal experiences for a role, however, can manifest traumatic experiences. Trauma in the acting process can trigger difficult memories and emotions, which affects the actor's well-being. In graduate school, I discovered that trauma was a detriment to my artistic freedom in the acting process. Without the appropriate tools to address trauma, it affected my well-being and caused me to burnout. Furthermore, trauma was ignored by those involved in the creative process and there was an expectation to mask emotions for the sake of the process. In this thesis, I will examine my acting process for The Mountaintop and the practical techniques that I used for the role of Camae. This thesis will share my story, define trauma (from a character, personal, and familial perspective), examine how the implementation of practical techniques empowered me in the acting process, and envision my post graduate endeavors as an artist. I argue that acting and voice techniques can play an important role in addressing trauma and empower an actor in their creative process.

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This dissertation research uses the No Child Left Behind Act to assess two essential performance measure issues, measure development and the use of performance measures to enhance effectiveness. The study specifically explores what impact political party unity, the percentage of certified teachers, the percentage of state NEA members, past performance, per capita income, the percentage of minority students, and spending per pupil have on the level of challenge associated with performance measure development as well as the change in outcome. The level of challenge associated with performance measures is captured in a 6 point performance index. The change in outcome is defined as the change in 8th grade NAEP math and reading results during the life span of the act. The results reveal that the level of difficulty associated with performance measures was significantly related to variables in the model. The change in outcome was also influenced by strength of state performance measures as well as other variables included in the model.

In the current literature and practice, no systematic and user-oriented performance measures are available to evaluate intermodal transportation and facilitate mode-choice decision-making. Most existing transportation measures are defined for one specific mode and are not consistent with each other. This research establishes a systematic and user-oriented performance measurement system for intermodal transportation. Five major categories of performance measures are identified: mobility and reliability, safety, environmental impact, long term transportation cost efficiency, and economic impact. For each category, several quantitative measures are given to capture the features of the system and evaluate how well transportation systems can meet the needs of their users, who are investors (including government agents and stakeholders), individuals, industries, and the society (or the public). The proposed measures are scalable so that they can be used to compare systems with different sizes. Since none of them is mode specific, no matter how many modes and what kinds of modes are involved, a transportation system can be evaluated by the measure set. This research tries to avoid any overlap or omission among the measures and distinguish performance measures from factors. A transportation system can be improved through changing some factors, like capacity, but project priority should be decided based on measures rather than factors. The proposed measures are also verified by a survey conducted by this research and some industrial practices. In the thesis, a case study on the State of Mississippi is conducted based on the identified performance measures. The measures with the case study can help to promote transportation intermodalism in the U.S. and quantitatively demonstrate the benefits of intermodal transportation. The proposed measures differ in many aspects from traditional measures. The proposed set of performance measurement system can have a significant impact on development of U.S. transportation system.

Since few studies exist that examine the relationships between adolescent obesity and academic performance, the purpose of this study was to examine the impact of obesity on high school students’ academic performance in a low socioeconomic school district. The topics addressed in this study included prevalence of overweight and obesity in high school students and the impact of overweight and obesity on student academic performance. The potential population of this study consisted of 236 high school students aged 14 to 19 years old enrolled in a rural Mississippi school district in grades 9 -12. However, only 35 students had usable data in all of the categories that were examined, and, therefore, were used as the population for the final analysis. The participants studied in this study consisted of all students assigned to one physical education teacher. Each student was administered the Project Health Student Measurement Chart which was developed by Project Health, a research entity of the Institute of Epidemiology, Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi. The Project Health Student Measurement Chart was utilized to enable the participating students to be examined on characteristics that included Body Mass Index (BMI), blood pressure and pulse rate. Student information collected on their obesity status based on BMI level was also collected in this study. In addition, the students’ performances on subject area tests and/or end-of-course assessments in the academic areas of Algebra I, English II, Biology I, and U.S. History from 1877 were accessed from the school’s records. Based on the results of this study, 48.60% of the students in the Canton Public School District are overweight/obese. However, the findings of this study revealed that there was no significant difference between overweight/obese and non-obese students’ academic performance on subject area tests and/or end-of-course test by age, gender and grade, and no significant relationships in the academic performance of overweight/obese and non-obese students on end-of-course test scores for 10th – 12th grades, as measured by Algebra I, English II, Biology I, and US History from 1877.

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