The purpose of this study was to examine the following: (a) What is the nature of Kindergarten and First grade teachers’ beliefs and self-reported practices regarding early literacy learning and teaching?; (b) What is the relationship between Kindergarten and First grade teachers’ beliefs and self-reported early literacy teaching practices?; and (c) How do teachers’ educational backgrounds and professional development experiences explain the relationship between their beliefs and practices in early literacy learning and teaching? Three instruments were administered to the participants in this study. The Theoretical Orientation to Reading Profile (Deford, 1979), hereafter known as the TORP, was used to measure teachers’ pedagogical beliefs about the teaching and learning of reading. The Preschool Literacy Practices Checklist (Burgess, Lundgren, Lloyd, & Pianta, 2001), hereafter known as the PLPC, was used to measure teachers’ self-reported literacy instructional practices. A survey questionnaire I designed was used to obtain descriptive information about the participants in this study. Data were collected from forty-seven in-service Kindergarten and First grade teachers. The results of the TORP data from this study indicated that 6% of the participants represented the decoding perspective, 92% represented the skills perspective and 2% represented the wholistic perspective. Correlation scores from the PLPC regarding teachers’ beliefs and practices show there was no significant correlation between teachers’ beliefs and self-reported practices in the classroom. Additionally, the findings showed there is a relationship between teachers’ educational backgrounds and the reading literacy practices teachers view as important or essential in the early grades such as understanding the meaning of words, recognizing basic sight words, understanding concepts of print, and identifying the elements of a story.

Children placed in foster care are the most at-risk youth group in the U.S., often experiencing negative events and outcomes before, during, and after foster care. Despite the availability of statistical data centered on (former) foster children, little is known about how these individuals make sense of their often negative and rupture-laden experiences. One way that individuals make sense of rupture in life is through narratives. Narratives are important to examine because they allow for better understanding of the experience(s) and what experiences mean to those who have lived through them. Specifically, narratives might also illuminate differences in (former) foster children's emergence from foster care as resilient, or with wellbeing intact. Thus, this study aimed to explore adult, former foster children's narrative sensemaking and whether types of stories told correlate with narrator participants' (self-reported) resilience scores. Using mixed methods, I employed narrative thematic analysis to qualitatively analyze narrative interviews, looking at how participants made sense of rupture experiences. Independent coders conducted a content analysis, coding each story as one of the four emergent types, to allow for quantitative comparisons. A Kruskal-Wallis test revealed that resilience scores differed significantly among story types. Follow-up tests determined that narrators of Thriving after Rupture, in which narrators achieved personally because of foster care-related experiences, and Transformation for Self and Others, in which narrators both achieved personally and assisted others because of past rupture experiences, displayed significantly higher resilience than did narrators of Ongoing Rupture, which framed narrators as stuck in rupture and sensemaking cycles. Narrators of Helping Others and Giving Back, who talked about assisting others in the foster care system because of their own experiences, also trended toward displaying greater resilience than Ongoing Rupture. These results indicate that framing might be as important to wellbeing as lived experiences. Thus, it is important to continue to explore narrative therapy as a means to bolster (former) foster children's resilience.

Healthcare associated infections are a considerable burden to the health care system. The affected patients have their prognosis worsened and demand more resources from hospitals. Furthermore, the bacteria causing these infections are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics while also becoming more deadly and contagious. Contributing with knowledge for stopping these infections is, therefore, important. This thesis reports on two projects centered on data collected at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics. The first project consisted in analyzing data collected by sensors that reported the location and hand washing behavior of health care workers. After extracting meaning from these radio signals, I studied two socially and epidemiologically relevant tasks: the inference of contact networks, which can be used to study the spread of infections in the hospital, and the study of associations between social pressure and hand washing, learning that effectively workers in proximity to others wash their hands more, but also that not all workers are as influential. In the second project, I developed a data mining method for analyzing medical records aimed at tackling the problems of class imbalance and high dimensionality, and applied it to predicting Clostridium Difficile infection. The learnt models performed better than the state of the art and even improved prediction as the onset of symptoms approached. The main contribution, however, was in the information discovered: certain events in certain orders increased the risk of developing the infection, suggesting that reversing these orders could improve prognosis.

In 1881 an assassin's bullet changes the course of American history. Could it be that Julia Sand was the only one to foresee the destiny of the country? Familiar with now President Arthur's exclusionary politics, Julia writes and urges the President to reform his ways and unite the Republican Party. Great Emergencies is a stage play about the lavish dangers of The Gilded Age, but ultimately a cautionary tale about those of us whose voices are doomed to be forgotten because of the ephemeral and apathetic nature of human history.

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Sola Fides Sufficit is a 20-minute concerto for solo violin and ensemble. The 16-member ensemble consists of flute (doubling piccolo), oboe, clarinet in Bb (doubling bass clarinet), bassoon, horn in F, trumpet in C, trombone, tuba, percussion I (bass drum, brake drum, chimes, glockenspiel, two woodblocks), percussion II (snare drum, suspended cymbal, two toms, triangle, vibraphone), piano, two violins, viola, cello, and contrabass. Sola Fides Sufficit is based on my previous solo violin composition Et si sensus deficit… written for violinist Emily Rolka in 2010. Sola Fides Sufficit is an expansion, orchestration, and ultimately a recomposition of Et si sensus deficit… The melodic, harmonic, and formal material in Sola Fides Sufficit is largely based on my detailed musical analysis of the Pange Lingua, an unaccompanied 13th century plainchant written by St. Thomas Aquinas. The six-phrase melody is well-known in the Roman Catholic tradition for its performance at the end of Holy Thursday Mass. My analysis drove my compositional choices regarding two distinct objectives: One, to reflect the chant material in overt ways (e.g., use of neighbor figures) and two, to intentionally diverge from the original chant material, at times exploiting or exaggerating elements purposefully avoided in the chant (e.g., the tritone). I utilized both ways of decision-making to create drama, contrast, tension, and resolution in the piece. My large-scale formal goal was to create a cohesive composition utilizing particular surface and structural aspects of the Pange Lingua melody, while withholding presentation of the melody in its entirety until the climax (conclusion) of the work. Fragments from the chant were selected and employed in varying contexts depending on the formal goals of each section. Some fragments were presented with few changes, while others were transformed and developed through tonality, registration, timbre, and rhythm. My structural design was shaped by four words of character the composer Witold Lutoslawski perceived as essential in the creation of his large-scale works: Introduction, Narrative, Transitional and Concluding. Influenced by Lutoslawski’s psychological approach to listener perception as a compositional and analytical tool, Sola Fides Sufficit unfolds in four unbroken parts, each portraying primarily one of these four formal characters. Within each movement, these formal characters also occur on a smaller scale and give shape to each section. Only during the Narrative portions is the content the most important aspect perceived. During the Introductory, Transitional, and Concluding music, however, the role of the given section in the form is more important than the content.

This dissertation provides a history of Mexicana/os' participation in three modes of education: formal, non-formal, and informal, in the midwestern states of Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, and Missouri, from 1910 to 1955. Informed by Critical Race Theory and LatCrit Theory, the study addresses the social constructions of race, gender, and class as it analyzes how these ongoing and complex constructions influenced not only how dominant society structured and practiced education offered to Mexicana/os but also how Mexicana/os participated in education and made education work for them in parochial and public schools, in settlement houses, in churches and missions, and in familial and community settings.

This dissertation study was motivated by an interest in the process of acquisition of Russian vocabulary by a previously unstudied group of learners, American university students. The study identified the vocabulary learning strategies and beliefs about vocabulary learning of 97 university students beginning to study Russian. It also examined relationships between reported beliefs and strategies and their stability over the period of one semester of studying Russian. The data were collected with a self-report online questionnaire administered at the beginning and at the end of the Fall 2014 semester, as well as with interviews with the participants. Descriptive analysis of students’ beliefs indicated that the participants highly valued the role of vocabulary in studying a foreign language, understood the complexity of the process of vocabulary acquisition, and believed that words and phrases should be carefully studied and then practiced in context. The participants reported high motivation and high expectations of their success as learners of Russian. Descriptive analysis of vocabulary learning strategies demonstrated that besides active use of a dictionary, guessing, and note-taking strategies, virtually all participants reported frequent use of rehearsal strategies, especially repetition. These findings contradict the view that, in contrast to Asian learners of English, who are believed to value memorization and repetition, Western learners tend to downplay the role of repetition in the process of vocabulary learning. Analysis of the responses to open-ended questions and interview prompts confirmed that the participants frequently used repetition and rehearsal strategies and considered them most effective for establishing form–meaning connections for new words. The respondents also reported frequent use of contextual encoding, activation, and affective strategies. Comparison of the results of the two questionnaires revealed several vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies that underwent changes as a result of one semester of studying Russian. At the end of the semester students reported even more agreement with value of repetition, practice, good memory, and cultural knowledge for learning vocabulary. In contrast, they expressed significantly less agreement that it is easier to learn new words when they are presented in context. Besides, participants reported that while learning vocabulary they less frequently tried to recall sentences in which new words were used. Interviewed students explained this shift by noting the difficulty of Russian vocabulary and cognitive overload while trying to acquire new words in context. These findings once again argue against the claim that contextual acquisition of foreign language vocabulary is always effective in instructed foreign language learning. Using correlational and cluster analyses, the study identified multiple relationships between groups of vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies, as well as between individual beliefs and strategies. Motivational beliefs were correlated with most groups of vocabulary learning strategies, and memory strategies were correlated with most groups of beliefs.

This thesis focuses on understanding implications of nanomaterial quality control and mass transport through internally etched silica coated nanoparticles for direct and quantitative molecular detection using surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Prior to use, bare nanoparticles (partially or uncoated with silica) are removal using column chromatography to improve the quality of these nanomaterials and their SERS reproducibility. Separation of silica coated nanoparticles with two different diameters is achieved using Surfactant-free size exclusion chromatography with modest fractionation. Next, selective molecular transport is modeled and monitored using SERS and evaluated as a function of solution ionic strength, pH, and polarity. Molecular detection is achieved when the analytes first partition through the silica membrane then interact with the metal surface at short distances (i.e., less than 2 nm). The SERS intensities of unique molecular vibrational modes for a given molecule increases as the number of molecules that bind to the metal surface increases and are enhanced via both chemical and electromagnetic enhancement mechanisms as long as the vibrational mode has a component of polarizability tensor along the surface normal. SERS signals increase linearly with molecular concentration until the three-dimensional SERS-active volume is saturated with molecules. Implications of molecular orientation as well as surface selection rules on SERS intensities of molecular vibrational modes are studied to improve quantitative and reproducible SERS detection using internally etched Ag@Au@SiO2 nanoparticles. Using the unique vibrational modes, SERS intensities for p-aminothiophenol as a function of metal core compositions and plasmonics are studied. By understanding molecular transport mechanisms through internally etched silica matrices coated on metal nanoparticles, important experimental and materials design parameters are learned, which can be subsequently applied to the direct and quantifiable detection of small molecules in real samples without the need for lengthy separations and assays.

In this study, I aimed to build on a line of research focused on using technology-based, self-management interventions for students experiencing behavioral difficulties in a classroom setting. I analyzed the effects of an iPad application (app) called SCORE IT (Bruhn, Goin, &Hasselbring, 2014) on the behavior of three 5th grade students with, or at risk of an emotional and behavioral disorder (EBD) who were exhibiting low rates of academic engagement in a general education environment. I also aspired to gain an in-depth understanding of a teacher’s perceptions of the feasibility and value of the intervention, SCORE IT. This study was conducted using an embedded, experimental mixed methods design. Quantitative data using direct observation of student behavior was graphed and analyzed to determine if a functional relation existed between SCORE IT and student behavior (academic engagement). Qualitative data, consisting of teacher interviews and electronic journal entries, were merged with quantitative data from the Intervention Rating Profile 15 (IRP-15) and analyzed to assess the extent to which the teacher perceived the intervention to be practical and valuable. Overall, the SCORE IT intervention resulted in significant improvements in academic engagement and teacher perceptions of the feasibility and worth of the intervention were reported as highly favorable. Study limitations and future directions for research are discussed.