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Access status: Open Access ,
Interdisciplinary Instruction in Practice: Examining Music and Literacy Integration in K-8 Watauga County Schools
(2026-07) Coco, Brittany M.
Interdisciplinary instruction provides opportunities for students to make meaningful connections across subject areas; however, traditional school structures continue to reinforce separations between the arts and core academic disciplines. The purpose of this study was to examine how K–8 educators in Watauga County Schools integrate music and literacy instruction while identifying the supports and barriers that influence interdisciplinary teaching. The study was guided by three research questions examining (a) how educators currently integrate music and literacy instruction, (b) what supports are currently in place, and (c) what barriers educators experience when implementing interdisciplinary music and literacy activities. A researcher-designed questionnaire consisting of 14 questions was administered through Qualtrics to K–8 educators in Watauga County Schools. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods, the survey examined (a) instructional practices, (b) perceived benefits, (c) supports, (d) barriers, and (e) demographic information of the respondents. Twenty-three participant surveys (N = 23) were included in the final analysis. Overall, participants expressed strong agreement regarding the value of interdisciplinary music and literacy instruction. Increased student engagement and enhanced retention and recall ii of content were the most cited benefits. Respondents also reported implementing a variety of instructional strategies that incorporated music into literacy instruction. However, participants consistently identified limited planning time, inadequate professional development, and a lack of formal curriculum guidance as barriers to implementation. The findings suggest that music and literacy integration is often driven by individual teacher initiative rather than implemented district wide. Strengthening opportunities for collaboration, professional learning, and curriculum development may help educators implement interdisciplinary instruction more consistently and effectively.
Access status: Open Access ,
Neuro Investigation of Stressors on Engineering Students of Differing Academic Levels Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and the Trier Social Stress Test
(2026-07) Rumble, Leah
Stress and stress responses amongst engineering students have been shown to have a large impact on student success, retention, and mental health. Studies measuring engineering student stress, however, lack both neuroimaging mapping and comparisons between academic groups specifically. While studies have covered the occurrence of stress within these populations, few studies have investigated the neurological mechanisms behind the occurrence of engineering stress. Studies in engineering academic communities also lack specific comparisons between academic levels, which could reflect on both the impacts and benefits of engineering education on student stress rates. A study was designed to measure academic level differences in engineering students based on the stress induction methods of the Trier Social Stress Test. Neurological data was measured in the prefrontal cortex using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. Heart Rate (HR) Monitoring and the Spielberg State Trait Anxiety Scale (STAI) were used as secondary validation for the occurrence of stress. 10 Senior and 5 Sophomore students participated in the study for a total of 15 participants. Participants featured 5 Females and 10 Males, with an age range of 18-25. Results indicate increased stress from the protocol, as measured by STAI and HR evaluations. However, the Standard Deviations of the HR indicate a potential lack of change. Prefrontal Cortex regions were found to exhibit significant change during the Anticipatory and Mathematics phases of the Trier Social Stress Test, with decreases and increases in hbO, respectively. Left and right brain activations are also observed to vary between the segmented stress inductions. Based on the results, no definitive conclusion concerning academic groups could be reached due to population constraints; however, general trends seem to indicate that Senior students have a lessened stress response compared to Sophomore students.
Access status: Open Access ,
INFORMATION-GEOMETRIC LATENT ENCODING FOR 3D GAUSSIAN SPLATTING
(2026-07) Ostadi, Lee Daghlar
3D Gaussian splatting represents a scene as an unordered set of anisotropic Gaussian primitives whose centers, covariances, colors, and opacities jointly determine rendered appearance. This thesis develops the Geometric Latent Encoding Autoencoder (GLEA), a class-agnostic model that maps a variable-cardinality splat set to a 512-dimensional code and reconstructs up to 3,200 Gaussian primitives without encoder skip connections. The central design question is whether primitive comparison should use covariance information directly rather than relying only on learned content features or center proximity. GLEA addresses that question with a gated attention branch derived from the Bhattacharyya coefficient, a closed-form measure of overlap between probability distributions. The coefficient is a positive-semidefinite kernel under the square-root density embedding, and its associated distance agrees locally, to second order, with Fisher–Rao geometry for nearby distributions. The implemented system combines PCA pose alignment, cuboid normalization, multi- resolution hash features, learned grouping, gated geometric and content attention, a hierar- chical intermediate representation, a deterministic latent-only decoder, sparse Bhattacharyya– Chamfer reconstruction, multi-view rendering supervision, and conditional flow matching. On a disjoint ShapeSplat split, evaluation over 128 held-out objects yields mean center Chamfer distance of 1.54 ×10−3, PSNR of 25.57 ±2.64 dB, SSIM of 0.956 ±0.016, and LPIPS of 0.124 ±0.032. Under a matched four-epoch, single-seed ablation budget, removing Bhattacharyya attention lowers mean held-out PSNR by 1.20 dB and worsens every reported external reconstruction metric; removing PCA alignment lowers PSNR by 0.67 dB. These results support covariance-aware attention under the evaluated configuration. A controlled analytic battery independently verifies that the underlying kernel is covariance-sensitive in exactly the way a center-only score is not, matching its closed form to a relative error of 10−12 . Separately, relaxing the strict 512-dimensional bottleneck to decode from the full hierarchical latent raises reconstruction fidelity at the cost of the compact, analyzable code, making the fidelity–interpretability tradeoff explicit. They do not yet establish category-level transfer, unconditional generation, global preservation of Fisher–Rao distances in the learned code, or comparative state-of-the-art performance. Multi-seed replication and matched external baselines remain necessary.
Access status: Open Access ,
Improving Survival, Enduring Disparities: Infant and Child Mortality in a Small Southern Town, 1915-2015
(2026-07) Whitely, Ciara
Despite substantial improvements in public health and medical care in the United States during the twentieth century, inequalities in health outcomes have persisted across populations. These disparities are shaped by interactions between biological factors and social determinants of health, including race, public policy, and structural inequality. This study examines long-term patterns of infant and child mortality in Ayden, North Carolina, a small rural Southern community, between 1915 and 2015. Data were drawn from the Ayden Mortality Dataset, a demographic database containing vital records for more than 9,000 individuals who lived, died, or were buried in Ayden during the study period. Logistic regression models were used to examine the likelihood of infant death (under age one) and child death (ages 1–17) as a function of race, sex, death year, and historical period (Jim Crow versus post–Jim Crow). Based on previous research, I predicted that mortality would decline over time, males would experience higher mortality risk than females, and racial disparities would decrease following the end of the Jim Crow era while remaining present due to persistent structural inequalities. Results indicate that infant and child mortality declined substantially across the twentieth century, consistent with broader improvements in public health, living conditions, and access to medical care. Contrary to expectations, no significant differences in mortality were observed between males and females. However, persistent racial disparities were evident throughout the study period. Black individuals experienced significantly higher odds of infant and child mortality than White individuals, even as mortality declined for both groups. Among infants, racial disparities widened following the end of Jim Crow because mortality declined more rapidly among White infants than among Black infants. Among children, Black individuals consistently experienced higher mortality risk regardless of historical period. These findings demonstrate that dramatic improvements in population health can coexist with enduring inequalities and highlight the lasting influence of structural factors on survival outcomes across generations.
Access status: Open Access ,
INVESTIGATION OF COFILIN-ACTIN RODS ON CYTOSKELETAL DYNAMICS AND MITOCHONDRIAL APOPTOSIS
(2026-07) Pizani, Bruno
The actin-binding protein cofilin plays a central role in regulating cytoskeletal dynamics through the severing and depolymerization of actin filaments. Dysregulation of cofilin activity has been implicated in neurodegenerative diseases, where stable cofilin–actin rods disrupt normal cellular function. Understanding the molecular determinants that regulate cofilin–actin interactions is therefore important for both normal cytoskeletal remodeling and disease-associated rod formation. This study investigates how mutations at residue 119 of cofilin influence actin dynamics and rod formation, with a focus on the gain-of-function mutant S119W. Using live-cell imaging, biochemical assays, and neuronal morphology analysis, the effects of multiple residue 119 substitutions were characterized. Aromatic substitutions at this position enhanced rod formation, while phosphomimetic substitutions abolished this phenotype, highlighting the importance of residue identity at this site. Biochemical assays further supported that S119W exhibits reduced depolymerization activity while permitting continued filament accumulation. Cells containing large numbers of S119W-induced rods also showed increased resistance to apoptosis, suggesting that rod stabilization can influence cellular stress responses. In neurons, S119W expression altered dendritic spine morphology and cofilin mobility. Together, these findings identify residue 119 as an important regulator of cofilin function and provide insight into how altered cofilin–actin interactions may contribute to cytoskeletal dysfunction in disease.