ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- All Subjects: pedagogy
- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
This qualitative, action research study examines how teacher-writers' identities are constructed through the practice of revision in an extra-curriculum writing group. The writing group was designed to support the teacher-writers as they revised classroom research projects for submission for a scholarly journal. Using discourse analysis, the researcher explores how the teacher-writers' identities are constructed in the contested spaces of revision. This exploration focuses on contested issues that invariably emerge in a dynamic binary of reader/writer, issues of authority, ownership, and unstable reader and writer identities. By negotiating these contested spaces--these contact zones--the teacher-writers construct opportunities to flex their rhetorical agency. Through rhetorical agency, the teacher-writers shift their discoursal identities by discarding and acquiring a variety of discourses. As a result, the practice of revision constructs the teacher-writers identities as hybrid, as consisting of self and other.
ContributorsClark-Oates, Angela (Author) / Smith, Karen (Thesis advisor) / Roen, Duane (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Early, Jessica (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
A simple passion for reading compels many to enter the university literature classroom. What happens once they arrive may fuel that passion, or possibly destroy it. A romanticized relationship with literature proves to be an obstacle that hinders a deeper and richer engagement with texts. Primary research consisting of personal interviews, observations, and surveys, form the source of data for this dissertation project which was designed to examine how literature teachers engage their students with texts, discussion, and assignments in the university setting. Traditionally text centered and resolute, literature courses will need refashioning if they are to advance beyond erstwhile conventions. The goal of this study is to create space for a dialogue about the need for a pedagogy of literature.
ContributorsSanchez, Shillana (Author) / Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Tobin, Beth (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Background: Evidence about the purported hypoglycemic and hypolipidemic effects of nopales (prickly pear cactus pads) is limited. Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of nopales for improving cardiometabolic risk factors and oxidative stress, compared to control, in adults with hypercholesterolemia. Design: In a randomized crossover trial, participants were assigned to a 2-wk intervention with 2 cups/day of nopales or cucumbers (control), with a 2 to 3-wk washout period. The study included 16 adults (5 male; 46±14 y; BMI = 31.4±5.7 kg/m2) with moderate hypercholesterolemia (low density lipoprotein cholesterol [LDL-c] = 137±21 mg/dL), but otherwise healthy. Main outcomes measured included: dietary intake (energy, macronutrients and micronutrients), cardiometabolic risk markers (total cholesterol, LDL-c, high density lipoprotein cholesterol [HDL-c], triglycerides, cholesterol distribution in LDL and HDL subfractions, glucose, insulin, homeostasis model assessment, and C-reactive protein), and oxidative stress markers (vitamin C, total antioxidant capacity, oxidized LDL, and LDL susceptibility to oxidation). Effects of treatment, time, or interactions were assessed using repeated measures ANOVA. Results: There was no significant treatment-by-time effect for any dietary composition data, lipid profile, cardiometabolic outcomes, or oxidative stress markers. A significant time effect was observed for energy, which was decreased in both treatments (cucumber, -8.3%; nopales, -10.1%; pTime=0.026) mostly due to lower mono and polyunsaturated fatty acids intake (pTime=0.023 and pTime=0.003, respectively). Both treatments significantly increased triglyceride concentrations (cucumber, 14.8%; nopales, 15.2%; pTime=0.020). Despite the lack of significant treatment-by-time effects, great individual response variability was observed for all outcomes. After the cucumber and nopales phases, a decrease in LDL-c was observed in 44% and 63% of the participants respectively. On average LDL-c was decreased by 2.0 mg/dL (-1.4%) after the cucumber phase and 3.9 mg/dL (-2.9%) after the nopales phase (pTime=0.176). Pro-atherogenic changes in HDL subfractions were observed in both interventions over time, by decreasing the proportion of HDL-c in large HDL (cucumber, -5.1%; nopales, -5.9%; pTime=0.021) and increasing the proportion in small HDL (cucumber, 4.1%; nopales, 7.9%; pTime=0.002). Conclusions: These data do not support the purported benefits of nopales at doses of 2 cups/day for 2-wk on markers of lipoprotein profile, cardiometabolic risk, and oxidative stress in hypercholesterolemic adults.
ContributorsPereira Pignotti, Giselle Adriana (Author) / Vega-Lopez, Sonia (Thesis advisor) / Gaesser, Glenn (Committee member) / Keller, Colleen (Committee member) / Shaibi, Gabriel (Committee member) / Sweazea, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In October, 2009, participants of the Arizona Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) began receiving monthly Cash Value Vouchers (CVV) worth between six and 10 dollars towards the purchase of fresh fruits and vegetables. Data from the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) showed CVV redemption rates in the first two years of the program were lower than the national average of 77% redemption. In response, the ADHS WIC Food List was expanded to also include canned and frozen fruits and vegetables. More recent data from ADHS suggest that redemption rates are improving, but variably exist among different WIC sub-populations. The purpose of this project was to identify themes related to the ease or difficulty of WIC CVV use amongst different categories of low-redeeming WIC participants. A total of 8 focus groups were conducted, four at a clinic in each of two Valley cities: Surprise and Mesa. Each of the four focus groups comprised one of four targeted WIC participant categories: pregnant, postpartum, breastfeeding, and children with participation ranging from 3-9 participants per group. Using the general inductive approach, recordings of the focus groups were transcribed, hand-coded and uploaded into qualitative analysis software resulting in four emergent themes including: interactions and shopping strategies, maximizing WIC value, redemption issues, and effect of rule change. Researchers identified twelve different subthemes related to the emergent theme of interactions and strategies to improve their experience, including economic considerations during redemption. Barriers related to interactions existed that made their purchase difficult, most notably anger from the cashier and other shoppers. However, participants made use of a number of strategies to facilitate WIC purchases or extract more value out of WIC benefits, such as pooling their CVV. Finally, it appears that the fruit and vegetable rule change was well received by those who were aware of the change. These data suggest a number of important avenues for future research, including verifying these themes are important within a larger, representative sample of Arizona WIC participants, and exploring strategies to minimize barriers identified by participants, such as use of electronic benefits transfer-style cards (EBT).
ContributorsBertmann, Farryl M. W (Author) / Wharton, Christopher (Christopher Mack), 1977- (Thesis advisor) / Ohri-Vachaspati, Punam (Committee member) / Johnston, Carol (Committee member) / Hampl, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Dixit-Joshi, Sujata (Committee member) / Barroso, Cristina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This study compares some sites, structures, theories and praxis of transnational feminisms in India and the U.S., simultaneously guided by and interrogating contemporary academic feminist theoretical and methodological trends. The goal is twofold: to understand similarities and differences in feminist praxis of two geo-epistemological spaces; and to interrogate the notion and currency of the "transnational" within feminist knowledge-creation. The phenomenon of transnational feminist knowledge-making is interrogated from a philosophical/theoretical and phenomenological/experiential standpoint. The philosophical inquiry is concentrated on the theoretical texts produced on transnational/global/postcolonial feminisms. This inquiry also focuses on some unpublished, uncirculated archival materials that trace the history of academic feminisms and their transnationalization. The phenomenological side focuses on interview and survey data on transnational feminism, gathered from feminist practitioners working in the U.S. and India, as well as being "transmigrant," or "traveling scholars." Digital/institutional ethnography is used to ground the findings in operational spaces of knowledge-making, including cyberspace. This research shows that the global logic of circulation and visibility organize the flow of knowledge as data, narratives and reports from the global south, which are analyzed, clarified and theorized in the global north. Perhaps responding to many critiques on "speaking of" and "speaking for" the "other," the trend to represent third world women as perpetual victims has given way to newer representations and accounts of resistance, collaboration, and activism. However, this creates a fresh "theory-here-activism-there" model of transnational feminism that preserves unequal feminist division of labor. This comparative and critical study focuses not just on feminist discourses in two countries but also their relationships, suggests some viable models of transnational feminism that can preserve epistemic justice, and aims to contribute to the theoretical corpus of transnational feminism.
ContributorsChakravarty, Debjani (Author) / Kitch, Sally L (Thesis advisor) / Fonow, Mary M (Committee member) / Koblitz, Ann H (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation provides a critical analysis of public administration's understanding of the relationship between rational thought and action in its discourse on ethics. It argues that rationalist ethics assume a particular relationship between thought and action: that good knowledge leads to good, proper action. While there have been many critiques of rationalist administrative ethics, scholars have not examined the way in which rationalism persists in the way in which the teaching of ethics is conducted. The use of the case study figures prominently in this. Thus, the dissertation explores the historical and theoretical intersection of rationalism, ethics, and teaching through the lens of the case study. It begins with a history of the pedagogical use of the case study and the institutional transformations of the university. While conventional accounts of the field locate its founding in the United States in the municipal reform movement, here the founding of the field of public administration is recast through connections to reforms in the university including changes in epistemic assumptions, pedagogical methods, and curricular changes in ethics in which the case study is central and remains so as the field develops. The dissertation then considers scholarship in public administration that raises questions about rationalist ethics. Three critical approaches are explored: recognition of the uncertainty and complexity of administrative practice, critique as unmasking of power relationships, and the shift of ethics from an epistemological to an ontological inquiry. The dissertation builds on the work in this third approach and shows how it attempts to articulate a non-rationalist, or immanent, ethics. This ethics is concerned with exploring the conditions that make possible mutually beneficial relationships and meaningful lives from which categorical norms of the good life could emerge. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, it is argued that the distinction Deleuze and Guattari make between "arborescent" and "rhizomatic" knowledge gets to the root of the tension between thought and action and offers an innovative and useful way to advance an immanent, non-rational ethics. The challenge digital technologies and the information society present to the field is considered to illustrate the need to rethink administrative ethics and also the particular usefulness of Deleuze and Guattari in doing so. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of pedagogical practices and classroom examples that encourage a rhizomatic understanding of the theory and practice of public administration.
ContributorsCallen, Jeffrey Craig (Author) / Catlaw, Thomas J (Thesis advisor) / Corley, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Kim, Yushim (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Food system and health characteristics were evaluated across the last Waorani hunter-gatherer group in Amazonian Ecuador and a remote neighboring Kichwa indigenous subsistence agriculture community. Hunter-gatherer food systems like the Waorani foragers may not only be nutritionally, but also pharmaceutically beneficial because of high dietary intake of varied plant phytochemical compounds. A modern diet that reduces these dietary plant defense phytochemicals below levels typical in human evolutionary history may leave humans vulnerable to diseases that were controlled through a foraging diet. Few studies consider the health impact of the recent drastic reduction of plant phytochemical content in the modern global food system, which has eliminated essential components of food because they are not considered "nutrients". The antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory nature of the food system may not only regulate infectious pathogens and inflammatory disease, but also support beneficial microbes in human hosts, reducing vulnerability to chronic diseases. Waorani foragers seem immune to certain infections with very low rates of chronic disease. Does returning to certain characteristics of a foraging food system begin to restore the human body microbe balance and inflammatory response to evolutionary norms, and if so, what implication does this have for the treatment of disease? Several years of data on dietary and health differences across the foragers and the farmers was gathered. There were major differences in health outcomes across the board. In the Waorani forager group there were no signs of infection in serious wounds such as 3rd degree burns and spear wounds. The foragers had one-degree lower body temperature than the farmers. The Waorani had an absence of signs of chronic diseases including vision and blood pressure that did not change markedly with age while Kichwa farmers suffered from both chronic diseases and physiological indicators of aging. In the Waorani forager population, there was an absence of many common regional infectious diseases, from helminthes to staphylococcus. Study design helped control for confounders (exercise, environment, genetic factors, non-phytochemical dietary intake). This study provides evidence of the major role total phytochemical dietary intake plays in human health, often not considered by policymakers and nutritional and agricultural scientists.
ContributorsLondon, Douglas (Author) / Tsuda, Takeyuki (Thesis advisor) / Beezhold, Bonnie L (Committee member) / Hruschka, Daniel (Committee member) / Eder, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The teaching of singing remained remarkably stable until, at the end of the twentieth century, advances in the understanding of voice science stimulated dramatic changes in approach to vocal pedagogy. Previously, the technology needed to accurately measure physiologic change within the larynx and breath-support musculature during the process of singing simply did not exist. Any prior application of scientific study to the voice was based primarily upon auditory evaluation, rather than objective data accumulation and assessment. After a centuries-long history, within a span of twenty years, vocal pedagogy evolved from an approach solely derived from subjective, auditory evidence to an application grounded in scientific data. By means of analysis of significant publications by Richard Miller, Robert Sataloff, and Ingo Titze, as well as articles from The Journal of Singing and The Journal of Voice, I establish a baseline of scientific knowledge and pedagogic practice ca. 1980. Analysis and comparison of a timeline of advancement in scientific insight and the discussion of science in pedagogical texts, 1980-2000, reveal the extent to which voice teachers have dramatically changed their method of instruction. I posit that voice pedagogy has undergone a fundamental change, from telling the student only what to do, via auditory demonstration and visual imagery, to validating with scientific data how and why students should change their vocal approach. The consequence of this dramatic pedagogic evolution has produced singers who comprehend more fully the science of their art.
ContributorsVelarde, Rachel (Author) / Doan, Jerry (Thesis advisor) / Campbell, Andrew (Committee member) / Solis, Theodore (Committee member) / Elgar Kopta, Anne (Committee member) / Britton, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This study examines the multiple and complicated ways that Native American students engage, accept, and/or reject the teachings of a Native American literature course, as they navigate complex cultural landscapes in a state that has banned the teaching of ethnic studies. This is the only classroom of its kind in this major metropolitan area, despite a large Native American population. Like many other marginalized youth, these students move through "borderlands" on a daily basis from reservation to city and back again; from classrooms that validate their knowledges to those that deny, invalidate and silence their knowledges, histories and identities. I am examining how their knowledges are shared or denied in these spaces. Using ethnographic, participatory action and grounded research methods, and drawing from Safety Zone Theory (Lomawaima and McCarty, 2006) and Bakhtin's (1981) dialogism, I focus on students' counter-storytelling to discover how they are generating meanings from a curriculum that focuses on the comprehension of their complicated and often times contradicting realities. This study discusses the need for schools to draw upon students' cultural knowledges and offers implications for developing and implementing a socio-culturally sustaining curriculum.
ContributorsSan Pedro, Timothy Jose (Author) / Paris, Django (Thesis advisor) / Romero-Little, Mary Eunice (Thesis advisor) / Mccarty, Teresa (Committee member) / Ortiz, Simon (Committee member) / Chin, Beverly A (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
It is widely recognized that dietary protein induces greater satiety compared to carbohydrate and fat. Two separate trials were conducted to assess the use of protein as a dietary approach to manage energy intake (EI). The first, crossover trial, examined 24– hour EI after consuming a high protein bar (HP) vs. a high carbohydrate (HC) bar upon awakening on two separate days and a control, no bar day. Of the 54 participants who entered the trial, 37 subjects completed the study in its entirety. Results showed there was no significant difference in mean EI between the intervention days when the bars were consumed and the control day. The subjects consumed 1752±99 kcal on the control day, and 1846±75 and 1891±110 kcal on the days the HP and HC bars were consumed, respectively (P=0.591). However, compared to the control day, snack bar ingestion was significantly related to an increase in EI for the subjects who self-reported high weekly physical activity levels (n=11) (+22%; P=0.038 and +45%; P=0.030, HP and HC bars, respectively). These data suggest that individuals who have moderate to low physical activity levels compensate for the ingestion of energy bars (regardless of protein content) over a 24–hour period. The second parallel-arm, pilot trial examined the effect of 6 g daily gelatin ingestion vs. control on EI and weight change in healthy, overweight and obese women who initiated a walking program. Of the 37 women who entered the trial, 28 completed the six week trial. The results showed activity level (steps/d) increased in both groups (+ 22%, P=0.022). There was a significant group difference in mean EI at week 6 vs. baseline (–174±612 kcal/d and +197±320 kcal/d, P=0.001; gelatin and control groups, respectively). However, there was no significant between group difference for changes in weight, percent body fat and waist circumference. Those subjects having baseline Disinhibition scores of ≥12 gained significantly more weight throughout the study vs. those scoring <12 (P=0.004). These results indicate that daily gelatin ingestion may be a practical strategy for controlling EI among overweight and obese women initiating an exercise program.
ContributorsTrier, Catherine M (Author) / Johnston, Carol S. (Thesis advisor) / Swan, Pamela D. (Committee member) / Mayol-Kreiser, Sandra N. (Committee member) / Appel, Christy L. (Committee member) / Gaesser, Glenn A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012