OSU Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collection

https://openresearch.okstate.edu/handle/20.500.14446/10462

Now showing 1 - 5 of 11365

Exploring value creation in ECHO Education Nigeria social learning space: A qualitative case study
(2023-12) Egure, Dominic Siami
This study utilized a qualitative case study design to explore participants' perspectives regarding the value of ECHO Education Nigeria (EEN) program. EEN is a social Learning Space created for educators in Nigeria in 2021. A survey on value creation was disseminated to all participants of EEN, and subsequent interviews were carried out with a subset of participants who achieved high scores on the survey. The data analysis process followed a constant comparative method, wherein gathering and analysis of data took place simultaneously. Data were coded; codes were consolidated into categories and subsequently themes emerged. Findings indicated that EEN had a noteworthy influence on the participants' professional development, career progression, and overall satisfaction with their jobs. The perception of value creation within the social learning space of EEN was derived from active engagement, the dissemination of knowledge to a broader audience, alignment of objectives and aspirations, and the fostering of empowerment and agency. Participants underscored the significance of collaboration, peer learning, and practical application of knowledge. This study makes a valuable contribution to the existing body of literature on effective professional development programs, highlighting the significance of customizing these programs to align with educators' specific needs and interests. Findings from this study have significant implications for further research, theoretical frameworks, and practical applications. These findings emphasize the importance of implementing professional development programs tailored to specific contexts. Nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge that this study specifically concentrated on early impacts of EEN. Consequently, additional research is warranted to investigate the enduring transformative impacts of EEN.
Understanding the impacts of stereotypes and/or labels on the academic self-efficacy of students who choose to attend HBCUs
(2023-12) Eugene Cross, Kenyotta
The aim of this qualitative study is to examine the perceived impacts that negative stereotypes and/or labels have on the self-efficacy of students who choose to attend historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). This research will give insight into students’ perceptions of negative stereotypes and the influences that these perceptions have on their college experiences. The findings included six themes that were identified across all three focus groups: (a) tradition/culture, (b) family atmosphere, (c) scholarship/resources, (d) challenges/barriers, (e) cultural setbacks, and (f) people who look like me. Additionally, each individual focus group session yielded between 1-2 themes, which were unique to the attributes of its participants. Several limitations were identified as part of this study, which related to the approach in which the focus groups were facilitated, the limited number of follow-up interviews, and use of purposive sampling for data collection. Although this technique is widely used in qualitative research, it has been noted that the range of variation that this sampling method yields in the beginning of the data gathering process is strikingly unclear. The implications of this research take into account Bandura’s (1993) proposition that self-beliefs of efficacy are a significant contributor to the ways that persons motivate themselves and plan courses of actions based on these beliefs. As such, the current study found that the participants were motivated to make an ardent decision to attend an HBCU, and that their specific self-beliefs of efficacy were fostered throughout the time of their attendance.
Student mental health crisis: Perceptions of collegiate flight students
(2023-12) Clarke, Morgan Hunter
Student mental health is worsening. On top of the mental health stressors that come with being a college student, collegiate flight students are introduced to an entirely different set of situations that can trigger mental health disorders. Because of these added stressors, poor mental health and suicide rates among flight students are becoming a more prominent issue today. The fear of being grounded by the FAA or having a medical certificate revoked contributes to the withholding of mental health symptoms of pilots. Therefore, many pilots feel as though they are unable to report their anxiety or depression and seek help without consequences that will ultimately threaten their career. Not only does this create a concern for suicide and self-harm, but it creates a safety concern regarding a pilot’s decision-making skills, putting themselves and others at risk. This study highlights collegiate flight students’ perceptions associated with mental health. Results of this survey are examined in the context of three research questions, which guided the researcher’s conclusions regarding collegiate flight student mental health. These conclusions focus on whether mental health is a prominent issue among flight students, which added stressors of flight training are a main source of poor mental health in collegiate flight students, and whether collegiate flight students find underreporting of mental health concerns to be more beneficial to their career than seeking treatment.
FgFHBe is a sporulation protein that interacts with TaHRC1s, resulting in susceptibility in wheat
(2023-12) Zhai, Wenxuan
Fusarium graminearum is a fungal pathogen that causes Fusarium Head Blight (FHB), a cancer-like disease in wheat. The international wheat community has made significant efforts to map and clone resistance genes in the past three decades, and the gene TaHRC1 was cloned from a locus on the short arm of chromosome 3BS in common wheat. However, there were two contrasting mechanisms of the same TaHRC1 gene, conferring wheat resistance or susceptibility to F. graminearum. Here, we report the fungal effector FgFHBe, a previously uncharacterized protein in the fungal kingdom, which targeted TaHRC1s protein to promote FHB disease. Mutation of the FgFHBe gene through clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated nuclease 9 (Cas9)-mediated genome editing resulted in the fungal strains incapable of producing asexual spores and spreading hyphal growth on wheat spikes, indicating that FgFHBe was required for sporulation and virulence of F. graminearum. We designed three wheat anti-TaHRC1 antibodies and revealed the actual start codon for translation of the TaHRC1s protein and the naturally mutated amino acids that caused a loss of its ability to interact with FgFHBe, solving the two contradictory mechanisms of TaHRC1 proteins conferring susceptibility and resistance to F. graminearum. The previously characterized allele in ‘Sumai3’ should not be resistant but non-susceptible to F. graminearum, and this allele is thus referred to as TaHRC1ns This study provides insights into precisely editing TaHRC1s to create mutants that FgFHBe cannot target and developing new fungicides to target FgFHBe to protect cereal crops from FHB.
Toward autonomous mobile Mocap: Motion enhancement and robotic computing
(2023-12) Zhou, Le
Human motion capture (Mocap) has a variety of applications ranging from animation creation to entertainment, from biomechanical studies to clinical applications. There are three major Mocap technologies: marker-based optical systems, IMU-based sensors, and markerless vision-based ones. Especially the most recent depth sensor-based mocap (D-Mocap) has attracted tremendous attention due to its affordability and flexibility, as well as its potential to bring a practical mocap tool to a clinical or home setting. However, D-mocap data often suffers significant errors due to random noise, self-occlusion, and other algorithmic limitations, hindering its wider applications. In addition, most markerless mocap systems, including D-mocap, have a limited capture volume, which makes it hard to capture long-range motion, such as in clinical gait analysis where multiple walking cycles are necessary. In this dissertation, we are focused on two major research topics that will lead to the development of an innovative autonomous mobile mocap platform which supports robust and accurate multi-view motion capture “on-the-go” for clinical applications. The first is the computational approach to enhance the motion quality of D-Mocap data to be clinically and medically relevant, and the second is an omni-wheeled robotic platform and a virtual simulation tool that are to be used to study and develop multi-view and human-centric motion capture solutions. In the first study, we propose several novel motion enhancement methods to refine D-Mocap data: (1) We apply the Tobit model to model D-Mocap data at the joint level, and then we introduce a novel Tobit Particle Filter (TPF) to enhance the accuracy and robustness of joint-level position and angle estimation; (2) We apply the differential evolutionary algorithm (DE) to improve the stability and consistency of the skeleton structure from sequential D-Mocap data along the time; (3) We synergistically integrate joint-level TPF filtering with skeleton-level DE optimization to improve motion trajectories of body joints to be more kinematically admissible and the skeleton-level structure more anthropometrically stable. In the second study, we develop a new autonomous mocap platform that integrates a mecanum-wheeled robot, a mini-PC, an LCD display as well as 3D-printed shell. In addition, we develop a ROS-based mecanum-wheeled robot simulator environment that can be used to study multi-view human tracking and following along with optimized long-range mocap performance. These two hardware and software solutions pave the path for the future investigation and development of a low-cost autonomous mobile mocap system that has great potential to be used in many clinical and homecare applications.

Recent Submissions