693 research outputs found

    A Phenomenological Study of the Lived Experiences of Mainstream Classroom Teachers and Overly Active, Distracted Students

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    The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to explore those lived experiences that predispose some mainstream elementary teachers to initially modify in-classroom instruction to meet the needs of their overly active, distracted students before referring them for an ADHD evaluation. Bandura’s (1977) social learning theory was the lens through which this study was examined. In essence, social learning theory suggests that individuals learn what they know and how they should act through formal and informal interactions with others. The central research question around which this study revolved was: What are the lived experiences of mainstream classroom teachers who prefer to first initiate in-classroom instructional modifications to meet the needs of their overly active, distracted students before referring them for testing? Using a qualitative research method, guided by Moustakas (1994), data collected consisted of lived experiences shared by participants. To collect this data, the online study was structured to include a semi-formal individual interview, four written reflective prompts, and one focus group. Triangulation among the data collection methods contributed to validity. The ten teacher participants were current or former mainstream classroom teachers, who had taught for a minimum of four years, at any combination of grades K-6, who preferred to initially modify instruction for overly active, distracted students before referring them for a formal ADHD assessment. Saldana (2021) informed data collection, analysis, and eclectic coding and synthesis. The central research question and three sub-questions were all successfully answered using different combinations of the three emergent themes: Self-agency, School Leadership, and Parents

    Exploiting Process Algebras and BPM Techniques for Guaranteeing Success of Distributed Activities

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    The communications and collaborations among activities, pro- cesses, or systems, in general, are the base of complex sys- tems defined as distributed systems. Given the increasing complexity of their structure, interactions, and functionali- ties, many research areas are interested in providing mod- elling techniques and verification capabilities to guarantee their correctness and satisfaction of properties. In particular, the formal methods community provides robust verification techniques to prove system properties. However, most ap- proaches rely on manually designed formal models, making the analysis process challenging because it requires an expert in the field. On the other hand, the BPM community pro- vides a widely used graphical notation (i.e., BPMN) to design internal behaviour and interactions of complex distributed systems that can be enhanced with additional features (e.g., privacy technologies). Furthermore, BPM uses process min- ing techniques to automatically discover these models from events observation. However, verifying properties and ex- pected behaviour, especially in collaborations, still needs a solid methodology. This thesis aims at exploiting the features of the formal meth- ods and BPM communities to provide approaches that en- able formal verification over distributed systems. In this con- text, we propose two approaches. The modelling-based ap- proach starts from BPMN models and produces process al- gebra specifications to enable formal verification of system properties, including privacy-related ones. The process mining- based approach starts from logs observations to automati- xv cally generate process algebra specifications to enable veri- fication capabilities

    Anpassen verteilter eingebetteter Anwendungen im laufenden Betrieb

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    The availability of third-party apps is among the key success factors for software ecosystems: The users benefit from more features and innovation speed, while third-party solution vendors can leverage the platform to create successful offerings. However, this requires a certain decoupling of engineering activities of the different parties not achieved for distributed control systems, yet. While late and dynamic integration of third-party components would be required, resulting control systems must provide high reliability regarding real-time requirements, which leads to integration complexity. Closing this gap would particularly contribute to the vision of software-defined manufacturing, where an ecosystem of modern IT-based control system components could lead to faster innovations due to their higher abstraction and availability of various frameworks. Therefore, this thesis addresses the research question: How we can use modern IT technologies and enable independent evolution and easy third-party integration of software components in distributed control systems, where deterministic end-to-end reactivity is required, and especially, how can we apply distributed changes to such systems consistently and reactively during operation? This thesis describes the challenges and related approaches in detail and points out that existing approaches do not fully address our research question. To tackle this gap, a formal specification of a runtime platform concept is presented in conjunction with a model-based engineering approach. The engineering approach decouples the engineering steps of component definition, integration, and deployment. The runtime platform supports this approach by isolating the components, while still offering predictable end-to-end real-time behavior. Independent evolution of software components is supported through a concept for synchronous reconfiguration during full operation, i.e., dynamic orchestration of components. Time-critical state transfer is supported, too, and can lead to bounded quality degradation, at most. The reconfiguration planning is supported by analysis concepts, including simulation of a formally specified system and reconfiguration, and analyzing potential quality degradation with the evolving dataflow graph (EDFG) method. A platform-specific realization of the concepts, the real-time container architecture, is described as a reference implementation. The model and the prototype are evaluated regarding their feasibility and applicability of the concepts by two case studies. The first case study is a minimalistic distributed control system used in different setups with different component variants and reconfiguration plans to compare the model and the prototype and to gather runtime statistics. The second case study is a smart factory showcase system with more challenging application components and interface technologies. The conclusion is that the concepts are feasible and applicable, even though the concepts and the prototype still need to be worked on in future -- for example, to reach shorter cycle times.Eine große Auswahl von Drittanbieter-Lösungen ist einer der Schlüsselfaktoren für Software Ecosystems: Nutzer profitieren vom breiten Angebot und schnellen Innovationen, während Drittanbieter über die Plattform erfolgreiche Lösungen anbieten können. Das jedoch setzt eine gewisse Entkopplung von Entwicklungsschritten der Beteiligten voraus, welche für verteilte Steuerungssysteme noch nicht erreicht wurde. Während Drittanbieter-Komponenten möglichst spät -- sogar Laufzeit -- integriert werden müssten, müssen Steuerungssysteme jedoch eine hohe Zuverlässigkeit gegenüber Echtzeitanforderungen aufweisen, was zu Integrationskomplexität führt. Dies zu lösen würde insbesondere zur Vision von Software-definierter Produktion beitragen, da ein Ecosystem für moderne IT-basierte Steuerungskomponenten wegen deren höherem Abstraktionsgrad und der Vielzahl verfügbarer Frameworks zu schnellerer Innovation führen würde. Daher behandelt diese Dissertation folgende Forschungsfrage: Wie können wir moderne IT-Technologien verwenden und unabhängige Entwicklung und einfache Integration von Software-Komponenten in verteilten Steuerungssystemen ermöglichen, wo Ende-zu-Ende-Echtzeitverhalten gefordert ist, und wie können wir insbesondere verteilte Änderungen an solchen Systemen konsistent und im Vollbetrieb vornehmen? Diese Dissertation beschreibt Herausforderungen und verwandte Ansätze im Detail und zeigt auf, dass existierende Ansätze diese Frage nicht vollständig behandeln. Um diese Lücke zu schließen, beschreiben wir eine formale Spezifikation einer Laufzeit-Plattform und einen zugehörigen Modell-basierten Engineering-Ansatz. Dieser Ansatz entkoppelt die Design-Schritte der Entwicklung, Integration und des Deployments von Komponenten. Die Laufzeit-Plattform unterstützt den Ansatz durch Isolation von Komponenten und zugleich Zeit-deterministischem Ende-zu-Ende-Verhalten. Unabhängige Entwicklung und Integration werden durch Konzepte für synchrone Rekonfiguration im Vollbetrieb unterstützt, also durch dynamische Orchestrierung. Dies beinhaltet auch Zeit-kritische Zustands-Transfers mit höchstens begrenzter Qualitätsminderung, wenn überhaupt. Rekonfigurationsplanung wird durch Analysekonzepte unterstützt, einschließlich der Simulation formal spezifizierter Systeme und Rekonfigurationen und der Analyse der etwaigen Qualitätsminderung mit dem Evolving Dataflow Graph (EDFG). Die Real-Time Container Architecture wird als Referenzimplementierung und Evaluationsplattform beschrieben. Zwei Fallstudien untersuchen Machbarkeit und Nützlichkeit der Konzepte. Die erste verwendet verschiedene Varianten und Rekonfigurationen eines minimalistischen verteilten Steuerungssystems, um Modell und Prototyp zu vergleichen sowie Laufzeitstatistiken zu erheben. Die zweite Fallstudie ist ein Smart-Factory-Demonstrator, welcher herausforderndere Applikationskomponenten und Schnittstellentechnologien verwendet. Die Konzepte sind den Studien nach machbar und nützlich, auch wenn sowohl die Konzepte als auch der Prototyp noch weitere Arbeit benötigen -- zum Beispiel, um kürzere Zyklen zu erreichen

    Off-time Illness: When Young Adults get Illnesses Associated with Old Age

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    This dissertation explores the lived experiences of young adults with cancer through qualitative methods, including 40 in-depth interviews and participant observation. This dissertation extends sociological inquiry to an under examined population, young adults with cancer. This dissertation focuses on how age and life course state shape illness experience, with attentiveness to variations based on race, class, and gender. Young adulthood is socially constructed as a period of health, and cancer as a disease of old age. Such assumptions shape age-specific social support systems, medical practices, and perceptions of young adult bodies, impacting young adult experiences of illness. This manuscript analyzes themes of young adults’ experience of diagnosis. Young adults experience diagnosis as a multi-sited process encompassing self-diagnosis and professional diagnosis. A central theme in these accounts was the difficulty navigating the age-specific construction of young adulthood as a period of health and cancer as a disease of old age. Second, this project explores the experience of the body for young adults with cancer, focusing on the experience of aberration or out of placeness. Shaped by the institutional environment, aberration represents both the embodied experience of the young adult patient and the positionality of a young adult patient in medical knowledge. This aberration resulted in a loss of agency, especially regarding reproductive autonomy. A third research aim explores the impact of a cancer diagnosis on education, occupation, family formation, and the role of institutions in supporting or exacerbating this disruption. My findings demonstrate universal disruptions in education, occupation, and family formations. The timing of this disruption during the transitional period of young adulthood resulted in potentially long-term, cascading impacts. Finally, this project explores life after a cancer diagnosis. Young adults expressed uncertainty and a recognition of mortality independent of their health status. In response, young adults employ strategies informed by common sense narratives and ideologies, including bodily labor, family work, and support work

    The In/visible Stockade: Sex Offender Management, Governmentality, and the Search for Normal Life

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    Over the past thirty-five years, the United States has seen a dramatic expansion of regulatory policy around individuals convicted of sexual offenses. Sex offender management policies include national and state registries, notification laws, treatment mandates, residency restrictions, and numerous exclusions from institutions. A growing body of research from sociologists and criminologists has tracked the effects of this sex offender regime by measuring recidivism and collateral consequences among released offenders. Less attention has been paid to how sex offenders adapt to their regulator context—especially the selective public visibility that the registry generates. Furthermore, sociological scholarship has not yet developed strong theoretical tools with which to make sense of sex offense management. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 106 registered citizens in the state of Nevada, I examine how registered citizens experience their contacts with direct state actors, various types of social relationships, and navigating institutions.I find that registered citizens face ever-present tensions across most social domains that are mitigated by how, when, and what information is released about their criminal history. I argue that a constellation of “information triggers” result in their offense history being revealed at critical junctures that systematically exclude them from a variety of interpersonal relations, group membership, and access to essential institutions like work and community. Direct state actors influence registered citizens by actively triggering the release of information to others in the community or to other sex offenders, isolating them from their communities and each other. In order to form or retain social ties, registered citizens worked to establish counternarratives facilitate disclosure and differentiate themselves from cultural perceptions of sex offenders; however, not all ties were as responsive. Registered citizens struggled to form weak social ties in their community, among their neighbors, and with friends, resulting in a much smaller social network and decreased social capital. Registered citizens faced extensive collateral consequences, including employment rejection, termination, housing rejection, harassment, and an unpredictable legal environment that caused registrants to lose a sense of progress toward normal life. I argue that the components of sex offender experience are best understood through the lens of neoliberal governmentality, a theoretical framework that examines government practice and logics as moving through the state and into the public to generate technologies of the self. The registry depends upon the public to expand the range of enforcement beyond what a democratic state would normally allow, enabling the rejection of the registered from most social domains with minimal action by the state. Approaching sex offense management from this perspective enables scholars to reframe sex offense management as a collaborative process between state actors, legislative processes, and the free actions of the public. Furthermore, it reveals how a contemporary state apparatus can employ the selective disclosure of information as a tool of social control, both for offenders and for the public

    COVID-19 Booster Vaccine Acceptance in Ethnic Minority Individuals in the United Kingdom: a mixed-methods study using Protection Motivation Theory

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    Background: Uptake of the COVID-19 booster vaccine among ethnic minority individuals has been lower than in the general population. However, there is little research examining the psychosocial factors that contribute to COVID-19 booster vaccine hesitancy in this population.Aim: Our study aimed to determine which factors predicted COVID-19 vaccination intention in minority ethnic individuals in Middlesbrough, using Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) and COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, in addition to demographic variables.Method: We used a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative data were collected using an online survey. Qualitative data were collected using semi-structured interviews. 64 minority ethnic individuals (33 females, 31 males; mage = 31.06, SD = 8.36) completed the survey assessing PMT constructs, COVID-19conspiracy beliefs and demographic factors. 42.2% had received the booster vaccine, 57.6% had not. 16 survey respondents were interviewed online to gain further insight into factors affecting booster vaccineacceptance.Results: Multiple regression analysis showed that perceived susceptibility to COVID-19 was a significant predictor of booster vaccination intention, with higher perceived susceptibility being associated with higher intention to get the booster. Additionally, COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs significantly predictedintention to get the booster vaccine, with higher conspiracy beliefs being associated with lower intention to get the booster dose. Thematic analysis of the interview data showed that barriers to COVID-19 booster vaccination included time constraints and a perceived lack of practical support in the event ofexperiencing side effects. Furthermore, there was a lack of confidence in the vaccine, with individuals seeing it as lacking sufficient research. Participants also spoke of medical mistrust due to historical events involving medical experimentation on minority ethnic individuals.Conclusion: PMT and conspiracy beliefs predict COVID-19 booster vaccination in minority ethnic individuals. To help increase vaccine uptake, community leaders need to be involved in addressing people’s concerns, misassumptions, and lack of confidence in COVID-19 vaccination

    Saasaakwe - to shout with joy An investigation into traditional Indigenous learning systems through the lens of Anishinaabekwe (Indigenous women) sharing their stories within the Powwow circle and the settler-colonial world of academic education

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    This research uses interviews and a storytelling approach to explore Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing through exploring Anishinaabekwe experiences within the settlerstream world of academic education and the powwow circle. The researcher interviewed 9 Indigenous women investigating if and how traditional Indigenous ways of life, Minobimaadiziwin (walking a good path) and Kinoo’amaadawaad (Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing) can be interwoven into teacher and learner experiences to enhance opportunities for truth, reconciliation, personal growth and peace. First, this thesis outlines the perspective of the researcher, an Anishinaabekwe (Indigenous woman) jingle dress dancer from the Red Rock Indian Band, Lake Helen and the significance of the researcher’s identity in this project. Next, it reviews literature and information pertaining to the history through to modern day utilization of Indigenous knowledges in the settler-stream academia. The methodology section explains how the research was completed, utilizing the Powwow circle as a framework for research. Through sharing interviewees’ stories, common themes and ideas are highlighted and discussed. Finally, this thesis outlines suggestions and recommendations for others wishing to incorporate Kinoo’amaadawaad, specifically the Powwow, into educator and learner experiences to benefit all
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