The National University System Repository exists to increase public access to research and other materials created by students and faculty of the affiliate institutions of National University System. Most items in the repository are open access, freely available to everyone.
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Item Teachers’ Perceptions of the Effectiveness of Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS) for Title 1 Schools: A Qualitative Phenomenological Study(2026-01)The disproportionate use of exclusionary discipline practices against African American students contributes significantly to the preschool-to-prison pipeline, highlighting the need for equitable alternatives. Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) has been promoted as a framework for reducing exclusionary practices by emphasizing prevention, consistency, and equity. This qualitative phenomenological study explored teachers’ perceptions of PBIS implementation, its effectiveness in addressing disproportionate discipline, and the challenges that limit its fidelity. Semi-structured interviews with 8 preschool teachers from Title 1 schools were analyzed thematically using MAXQDA software and implementation science as a guiding framework. Findings revealed that teachers valued PBIS interventions and incentives as tools for prevention but noted inconsistent implementation across classrooms, insufficient resources and staffing, and a lack of culturally responsive professional development. Teachers also emphasized the ongoing disproportionate impact of exclusionary discipline on students of color, describing their roles as navigating bias, advocating for fairness and collaborating with colleagues to strengthen equity through PBIS. Implications for practice include the need for ongoing professional learning centered on equity, and collaborative engagement among educators. The study contributes to the literature by elevating teacher voices in understanding the complexities of PBIS implementation and by highlighting the conditions necessary for PBIS to fulfill its potential as a tool for equity in discipline and as a means of disrupting the preschool-to-prison pipeline.Item Exploring Perceptions and Experiences of Blockchain Implementation in Auditing: A Multiple Case Study(2025-10)Blockchain technologies are poised to reshape financial statement audits, yet authoritative guidance remains limited. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to examine perceptions and experiences with established accounting standards regarding blockchain implementation in practice in the United States. Accounting theory and the extended technology acceptance model guided the study. Data were collected from 14 semi-structured interviews, an open-ended survey, and organizational documents from auditing firms. Reflexive thematic analysis and triangulation produced seven themes across three domains. Auditors reported limited real-world exposure, heavy reliance on legacy professional guidance, and implementation hurdles, including client education, tool limitations, and regulatory ambiguity. Participants anticipated efficiency gains from immutable, real-time ledgers, such as faster confirmations and more reliable provenance, and emphasized that transparent, codified standards are a prerequisite for mainstream adoption. Alignment with existing theoretical frameworks was uneven, often recognized conceptually but seldom operationalized, and current regulatory materials were viewed as helpful for framing risk but incomplete for method design. The study contributes practitioner-grounded evidence on blockchain’s auditability, highlighting immediate needs for targeted standards, competence development, and carefully scoped pilots on permissioned networks. These findings inform standard setters, firms, and educators seeking to integrate distributed-ledger evidence without compromising assurance quality.Item Balancing Data Accessibility and Privacy: Machine Learning Approach to PII Detection in Electronic Health Records(2026-01)This constructive research study examined the development of a scalable, context-aware machine learning (ML) framework for detecting personally identifiable information (PII) in unstructured electronic health records (EHRs). The research problem addressed the absence of reproducible, data-driven methods capable of balancing privacy preservation and data accessibility while maintaining compliance with legal frameworks such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The study focused on healthcare organizations and researchers who face challenges protecting sensitive health data while facilitating secure data sharing for clinical and analytical purposes. The study's purpose was to construct, implement, and evaluate a privacy-preserving artifact guided by the Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) framework. The research design integrated natural language processing (NLP) with unsupervised and hybrid ML algorithms, including term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) vectorization, singular value decomposition (SVD), and density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN). A transformer-based named entity recognition (NER) module utilizing Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to validate clustering outputs. The research data were obtained from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III) database, a publicly available and de-identified dataset licensed through PhysioNet (Johnson et al., 2016).The experimental code and replication scripts are available at: https://github.com/NU-Academics/PII-Detection or Bert & Regular_Expression PII Detection - Colab. The model was trained and evaluated in Google Colab using BigQuery integration to ensure compliance with PhysioNet's data-use requirements. Empirical results showed that at a sample size of 5,000 records, the model achieved a precision of 0.955 and a recall of 0.466. When scaled to 10,000 records, precision remained high at 0.854, while recall improved to 0.580. Clustering validity indices confirmed coherent separation between PII-dense and non-PII clusters (silhouette coefficient ≈ 0.38–0.45; Davies–Bouldin Index ≈ 0.95–0.99). Approximately 61 percent of the records were labeled as noise, indicating that the model effectively isolated high-risk text regions while minimizing false positives. The study concluded that unsupervised NLP methods can reliably identify latent PII patterns within de-identified clinical narratives, achieving performance comparable to that of supervised models with lower computational costs. These findings demonstrate that scalable ML frameworks can reconcile the privacy–utility balance in EHR analytics. The research recommends incorporating hybrid explainable AI components, such as SHAP and LIME, to improve interpretability and extend future validation to institutionally governed datasets containing unredacted identifiers under Institutional Review Board (IRB) oversight.Item Identifying Novel Critical Success Factors that Ensure Adoption of Medical Equipment: A Quantitative Multivariate Analysis Study(2026-02)Healthcare organizations often experience challenges implementing complex medical technology due to end-user reluctance and limited adoption of full device capabilities. These challenges are frequently associated with insufficient prioritization of critical success factors that support effective clinical implementation. The purpose of this quantitative study was to identify and prioritize critical success factors influencing successful medical device adoption and to determine whether perceptions differed across professional roles within a healthcare vendor organization. A nonexperimental quantitative design was employed using survey data collected from 102 participants representing multiple professional roles within a hospital patient monitoring division of a medical device vendor in the United States. Twenty-seven critical success factors were categorized into technological, organizational, and environmental domains. One-way multivariate analyses of variance were conducted to assess differences in perceptions across roles, and descriptive analyses were used to rank factor importance. Results indicated no statistically significant differences across roles, suggesting strong organizational alignment. The highest-ranked factors were organizational and included project communication, adequate resources, project planning, project mission clarity, and leadership competence. These findings support the integration of organizational-focused strategies to improve medical device adoption. Recommendations for future research include validating the framework across additional healthcare settings and research designs.Item A Qualitative Phenomenological Study on the Lived Experiences of Secondary Teachers Who Support Latino Newcomer Immigrant Youth in Their First Year of U.S. Schools(2025-12)The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of secondary public school teachers who have or currently support Latino newcomer immigrant youth in their first year of U.S. schools, with a specific focus on identifying effective instructional strategies and support systems that promote both academic achievement and socioemotional well-being. The problem addressed in this study was that secondary teachers often lack adequate preparation and knowledge of effective instructional strategies and support systems that promote both academic achievement and socioemotional well-being among Latino newcomer immigrant youth in grades 7-12 during their first year of school. This population often develops acculturative stress due to migration-related trauma, which adversely affects their academic and socioemotional well-being (Conway & Lewin, 2022). A purposive sample of 12 participants from two school districts provided insight into how they addressed the academic and socioemotional needs of Latino newcomer immigrant youth. The findings revealed that participants implemented a wide range of instructional strategies they deemed effective and provided socioemotional support at varying degrees, depending on their comfort levels and knowledge. However, they reported that their teacher preparation program and their workplace did not adequately prepare them for working with this population. A lack of trauma-informed teaching and culturally relevant curricula were also reported. The results suggest that school districts and other stakeholders should provide increased professional development on the socioemotional needs of this population, with a primary focus on trauma-informed teaching and the adoption of more culturally relevant curricula. This would better equip educators in reducing the acculturative stress levels of Latino newcomer immigrant youth by providing more equitable opportunities for academic growth and improved socioemotional well-being.
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