UNT Theses and Dissertations - 2,485 Matching Results

Search Results

Results: 1 - 24 next
open access

"Among Waitresses": Stories and Essays

Description: The following collection represents the critical and creative work produced during my doctoral program in English. The dissertation consists of Part I, a critical preface, and Part II, a collection of seven short stories and two nonfiction essays. Part I, which contains the critical preface entitled "What to Say and How to Say It," examines the role of voice in discussions of contemporary literature. The critical preface presents a definition of voice and identifies examples of voice-driven … more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Hobbs, Jessica
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Analysis of Graduation Rates for Four-year Colleges: A Model of Institutional Performance Using IPEDS

Description: Under the George W. Bush U.S. presidential administration, the federal government pushed for greater accountability among institutions of higher education for educational outcomes. Graduation rate is a key performance indicator of institutional accountability. Previous researchers of student attrition focused primarily on the effects of student level factors on student persistence/withdrawal behavior. Recently, researchers put more focus on the effects of institutional characteristics on gradua… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Fung, Terence Yip-hung
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

An Analysis of Performance Differences Between Self-Directed and Teacher-Directed Alternative Education Campuses in Texas

Description: This study was conducted to analyze the performance differences between alternative education campuses in Texas that used teacher-directed strategies and those that used self-directed strategies. The study was also conducted to inform educators of the results these two strategies had achieved with at-risk students during the three years of 2006-2008. The study used the results from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test as reported in the AEIS annual reports from the Texas Education … more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Wimberley, Alan
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Music for Saxophone by Charles Ruggiero with an Analysis of Interplay for Soprano Saxophone and Piano

Description: Ruggiero's contributions to contemporary music are noteworthy. They include 27 works written for solo instruments, voice, as well as chamber groups and large ensembles. This study serves as an annotated bibliography of selected works written for saxophone by Charles Ruggiero. They include a piece for large chamber ensemble, Dig: From Tunes My Grandmother Heard (2009), a trio for flute, clarinet, and alto saxophone titled Echoes of "Piano Red" (2006), two saxophone quartets, Dig: JSB 1 (2003), a… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Bradfield, Ann
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

An Assessment of Consumers' Willingness to Patronize Foreign-Based Business Format Franchises: An Investigation in the Fast-Food Sector

Description: This study aimed to address consumers' stereotypical categorizations in the form of essentialist views about foreign cultures and their effect on individual consumers, including their negative or aroused emotions and subsequent retail patronage behaviors. The research mission was to empirically assess the salient dimensions of consumers' states of mind (positive and negative affect, psychological essentialism, epistemic curiosity), states of being (store atmospherics), and states of action (ret… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Ertekin, Selcuk
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

An Assessment of Undergraduate Course Syllabi in the Departments of English at Universities in Taiwan

Description: This exploratory, qualitative research explored the extent that course syllabi in the Departments of English in 13 public and 9 private universities in Taiwan reflect the inclusion of syllabus components to promote learning as recommended in the literature in the United States. Research questions included: what components can be inferred from the literature in the U.S. for the recommended components of a course syllabus, for the components for a learning-centered syllabus, and for a model to an… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Lin, Baysan
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Can These Bones Live? A Collection of Stories

Description: The collection concerns itself with race, gender, masculinity, marginalization, the act of violence as a means of self expression, identity and the performance of identity, love, and loss. The collection also uses historical events-more specifically, events that are central to black culture in Northeast, Ohio- to situate the characters and witness their response to these historical events. I strive to illustrate blackness as both political and fragmented with the characters in my collection. M… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Hoey, Danny M., Jr.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Case Study of Undergraduate Course Syllabi in Taiwan

Description: Higher education in Taiwan has been influenced by U.S. and Western practices, and syllabi represent one means to verify this. However, limited research exists in Taiwan on course syllabi and on similarities of syllabi with practices in other countries. In the U.S. as the paradigm shifted from teaching to learning and to the learning-centered context, scholars argued that syllabi should be learning-centered. Given the assumption that higher education in Taiwan is similar to U.S. higher education… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Tung, Yao-Tsu
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Characteristics of a Community of Practice in a National Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute

Description: This qualitative naturalistic descriptive case study provides an understanding of the characteristics of a community of practice within a National Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute. This study utilized naturalistic, descriptive case study methodology to answer the research question: What characteristics of a community of practice are revealed by the perceptions and experiences of the fellows of a National Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute? Data were gathered in the form… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Pearce, Terisa Ronette
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Characterizing Noise and Harmonicity: The Structural Function of Contrasting Sonic Components in Electronic Composition

Description: This dissertation examines the role of noise in shaping the form of several recent musical compositions. This study demonstrates how the contrast of noisy sounds and harmonic sounds can impact the structure of compositions. Depending on context, however, the specific use and function of noise can vary substantially from one work to the next. The first portion of this paper describes methods for quantifying noise content using FFT analysis procedures. A number of tests on instrumental and synthe… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Dribus, John Alexander
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) with Adoptive Families: Effects on Child Behavior, Parent-Child Relationship Stress, and Parental Empathy

Description: This randomized controlled study is a preliminary investigation on the effects of Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) with 61 adoptive parents. The participants in this study identified themselves as the following: 54 European American, 3 Black American, 3 Hispanic/Latino, and 1 individual who chose not to indicate ethnicity. The study included 23 couples and 15 individual mothers. The CPRT is a structured, time limited approach that trains caregivers to be an active participant as a the… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Carnes-Holt, Kara
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Comparative Analysis of the 1915 and 1919 Versions of Symphony No. 5 in E-flat Major, op. 82 by Jean Sibelius

Description: The initial composition of the Fifth Symphony in E-flat Major, Op. 82 was undertaken as a commission to celebrate the composer's fiftieth birthday. Unhappy with the initial efforts, two revisions were then performed; the first was in 1916 and the final revision in 1919. Despite the larger form of the work seeming to have been changed between the 1915 and 1919 versions, the smaller gestures of thematic expression in both versions remained similar. On the surface, it had appeared that the compose… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Norine, John Richard, Jr.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Comparing the Effects of Home Versus Clinic-Based Parent Training for Children with Autism

Description: Research with parents on managing child problem behavior typically measures either child or parent behavior. This study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of training parents to implement a function-based behavior intervention plan (BIP) in a non-trained natural environment utilizing a Multiple Probe Design across Participants. Participants included four parent-child dyads. Measurement variables included parents' use of effective and ineffective strategies and child problem behavior. In… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Crone, Regina M.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Comparing the Readability of Text Displays on Paper, E-Book Readers, and Small Screen Devices

Description: Science fiction has long promised the digitalization of books. Characters in films and television routinely check their palm-sized (or smaller) electronic displays for fast-scrolling information. However, this very technology, increasingly prevalent in today's world, has not been embraced universally. While the convenience of pocket-sized information pieces has the techno-savvy entranced, the general public still greets the advent of the e-book with a curious reluctance. This lack of enthusiasm… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Baker, Rebecca Dawn
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Computational Study of Small Molecule Activation via Low-Coordinate Late First-Row Transition Metal Complexes

Description: Methane and dinitrogen are abundant precursors to numerous valuable chemicals such as methanol and ammonia, respectively. However, given the robustness of these substrates, catalytically circumventing the high temperatures and pressures required for such transformations has been a challenging task for chemists. In this work, computational studies of various transition metal catalysts for methane C-H activation and N2 activation have been carried out. For methane C-H activation, catalysts of th… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Pierpont, Aaron
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Counterinsurgency Dilemma: The Causes and Consequences of State Repression of Human Rights in Civil Wars

Description: In this project a theory of adaptive differential insurgency growth by the mechanism of repression driven contagion is put forth to explain variation in the membership and spatial expansion of insurgencies from 1981 to 1999. As an alternative to the dominant structural approaches in the civil war literature, Part 1 of the study proposes an interactive model of insurgency growth based on Most and Starr's opportunity and willingness framework. The findings suggest that state capacity, via its imp… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Quinn, Jason Michael
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Creative Process in Cross-Influential Composition

Description: This dissertation describes a compositional model rooted in cross-influential methodology between complementary musical compositions that share generative source material. In their simultaneous construction, two composition pairs presented challenges that influenced and mediated the other's development with respect to timbre, transposition, pitch material, effects processing, and form. A working prototype first provides a model that is later developed. The first work Thema is for piano alone, a… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Anderson, Jonathan Douglas
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Design and Implementation of Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks for Environmental Monitoring Applications

Description: Environmental monitoring represents a major application domain for wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, despite significant advances in recent years, there are still many challenging issues to be addressed to exploit the full potential of the emerging WSN technology. In this dissertation, we introduce the design and implementation of low-power wireless sensor networks for long-term, autonomous, and near-real-time environmental monitoring applications. We have developed an out-of-box solutio… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Yang, Jue
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Determinants and Consequences of Empathic Parenting: Testing an Expansion of Belsky's Model of Parenting Using SEM

Description: An understanding of factors that enhance empathic parenting behaviors is of considerable importance to the study of child development and to the development of parenting interventions to promote child adjustment. Moreover, gaining a better understanding of the factors that predict empathic parenting with older children is of interest since most research examining parental empathy focuses on infants. These were the goals of the current study. Guided by Belsky's 1984 process model of the determ… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Morse, Margaret K.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Determination of the Optimal Number of Strata for Bias Reduction in Propensity Score Matching.

Description: Previous research implementing stratification on the propensity score has generally relied on using five strata, based on prior theoretical groundwork and minimal empirical evidence as to the suitability of quintiles to adequately reduce bias in all cases and across all sample sizes. This study investigates bias reduction across varying number of strata and sample sizes via a large-scale simulation to determine the adequacy of quintiles for bias reduction under all conditions. Sample sizes rang… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Akers, Allen
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Determining Factors that Influence High School Principal Turnover Over a Five Year Period

Description: The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of salary, compensation and benefits, accountability, job stress, increased instructional responsibilities, changes in student demographics, lack of support, politics, advancement opportunities and promotion on tenure and turnover among high school principals in the state of Texas. The participants in the study included 60 Texas high school principals who left a high school principalship for a different high school principalship within the … more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Sheppard, Rebecca Replogle
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

EEG, Alpha Waves and Coherence

Description: This thesis addresses some theoretical issues generated by the results of recent analysis of EEG time series proving the brain dynamics are driven by abrupt changes making them depart from the ordinary Poisson condition. These changes are renewal, unpredictable and non-ergodic. We refer to them as crucial events. How is it possible that this form of randomness be compatible with the generation of waves, for instance alpha waves, whose observation seems to suggest the opposite view the brain is … more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Ascolani, Gianluca
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Effects of Tasks on Information-Seeking Behavior in a Police Work Environment in the Context of Criminal Intelligence

Description: Although dominant effects of tasks on individuals' information-seeking behavior is accepted by many scholars, a limited number of studies has been conducted to reveal the nature of the relationship between tasks and information-seeking behavior. In their studies, some earlier researchers categorized tasks according to their complexity while others did the same according to the specifications of tasks. Two of the groundbreaking researchers in this area are Katriina Byström and Kalervo Järvelin w… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Tatil, Serkan
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Enameling Arts in Kuwaiti Pre-service Art Teacher Education

Description: The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to examine the knowledge, skills, and experiences in the enameling arts and the attitudes and perceptions of in-service (n = 12) and pre-service Kuwaiti art teachers (n = 170), art supervisors at the Ministry of Education (MOE) (n = 3) and art education faculty members at the College of Basic Education (CBE) and Kuwait University (KU) (n = 8) about what they believed pre-service art teachers should know and be able to do in order to teach the enameling… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Darweesh, Ali Hussain
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
Back to Top of Screen