Dissertation of the Year Honors Awarded

Prescott Valley, AZ – June 12, 2008 — Northcentral University (www.ncu.edu), an innovator in online higher education, this week announced honors awarded for Dissertation of the Year. Each of the three academic divisions—School of Business & Technology Management, School of Education, and School of Psychology—conducted its own search for outstanding scholarly work and awarded separate honors. This is the first year NCU has held the competition.

“We are pleased to honor the outstanding work of these scholars,” said Dr. Clinton Gardner, NCU President. “Our doctoral candidates devote countless hours to literature surveys, to designing studies, analyzing results, and finally writing up the work in a manner that presents their scholarship in a lucid and useful fashion to make a substantive contribution to their fields.”

“NCU is proud of its students and proud to acknowledge and recognize specifically the achievements of the University’s inaugural Dissertation of the Year competition winners,” Gardner added. “We view the 2008 awards as the founding of a tradition and look forward to lively and elevated competitive scholarship in the years to come.”

Northcentral University Dissertation 2008 Winners, by school

School of Business & Technology Management
Co-Winners (tie)
Lt Col Robert P. Herz, PhD
Assessing the Influence of Human Factors and Experience on Predator Mishaps
David Smartt, PhD
Assessing the Viability of Outsourcing Religious Services on an Army Installation

Honorable Mention
Krista Pixley Few, PhD
Examining Factors that Influence Civilians to deploy to High-risk Theaters of Operation

School of Education
Louis L. Fletcher, PhD
Volunteer Youth Sport Coaches: A Study of Motivation, Satisfaction, and Efficacy

School of Psychology
Diane Blazejewski Martin, PhD
The Effect of Warning and Instruction on the Suppression of False Memories in Normal Aging, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type

Michelle Maloney, PhD
Mortality Salience and the Implicit God Concept: Examining Religious Cognition Using the Emotional Stroop and Free Recall Tasks
James McGinley, PhD
Expatriate adjustment: Resources, responses, and outcomes

Awards Determination Process
The process for determining Dissertation of the Year varied slightly among the three schools. In each case, however, some form of blind review system was employed.

In the School of Business, participants were self-selected, with everyone invited to submit their dissertation abstracts for consideration. Submissions were screened by a panel of business faculty and those remaining in consideration were forwarded to a second panel, outside the department, which chose the actual winners.

The process in the School of Education began with dissertation chairs submitting what they believed to be the most outstanding scholarly work to a panel of eight faculty members, which in turn forwarded the dissertations they adjudged most worthy to a final panel of three.

The School of Psychology used a mixed process where doctoral candidates self-submitted and Mentors sponsored nominees. The submissions were then blind-read separately by a panel of department heads and full-time faculty to choose the best work.