Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe U.S. finishes in the bottom fifth of industrialized nations in math achievement, based on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) classifies almost 10% of U.S. students as low achieving, and students with disabilities score particularly poorly on such assessments. Experts describe U.S. students as lacking conceptual understanding and requiring remedial instruction in math. When implemented across multiple grade and ability levels, math instruction incorporating a concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) sequence has increased math achievement. Writing To Learn Math (WTLM) is a strategy proven through research to improve students’ conceptual understanding through writing. CRA and WTLM have similar cognitive foundations, yet no studies have evaluated a combination of CRA and WTLM. Combining CRA and WTLM has the potential to address the challenges of adjusting to the national Common Core standards and assessments, which include improving conceptual understanding and writing across all content areas. This unique combination of interventions could offer promising results for effective curriculum development and remedial instruction. This study included three ninth-grade students from a suburban school who are below state proficiency levels in math, and employed a single-subject across-participants design to investigate the following research questions: (1) What is the effect of implementing a concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) instructional sequence incorporating writing to learn math strategies on students with disabilities’ proficiency in solving rate of change problems, and (2) Do students with disabilities find WTLM math and a CRA instructional sequence to be socially acceptable? Results indicated that the CRA + Writing intervention may be effective in improving students’ with disabilities understanding of rate of change. All 3 students improved their scores on the math items of the rate of change probes, and maintained these improvements on maintenance assessments administered between 1 and 7 weeks following the completion of the intervention. Two of the 3 students also displayed moderate improvements in their scores on the writing items of the rate of change probes. The findings of this study provide multiple implications for both research and practice, as well as several directions for future research

Run 2 Upgrades to the CMS Level-1 Calorimeter Trigger

The CMS Level-1 calorimeter trigger is being upgraded in two stages to maintain performance as the LHC increases pile-up and instantaneous luminosity in its second run. In the first stage, improved algorithms including event-by-event pile-up corrections are used. New algorithms for heavy ion running have also been developed. In the second stage, higher granularity inputs and a time-multiplexed approach allow for improved position and energy resolution. Data processing in both stages of the upgrade is performed with new, Xilinx Virtex-7 based AMC cards.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Outgroup Bias and the Unacceptability of Tax Fraud

In countries with well-developed welfare state systems, it is often claimed that racial or ethnic minorities impose a heavy burden on social assistance programs without contributing to public goods. In this study, we consider the attitudinal effects of anecdotal reports of tax cheating by minorities. We conduct survey experiments in France and the United States to assess if people react more harshly to tax fraud perpetrated by members of a minority rather than the majority group. We find no evidence that minority status affects judgments and perceptions about tax fraud, including among those on the right end of the political spectrum. Tax fraud is considered unacceptable regardless of the culprit's origin

Triggering on electrons, jets and tau leptons with the CMS upgraded calorimeter trigger for the LHC RUN II

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment has implemented a sophisticated two-level online selection system that achieves a rejection factor of nearly 10e5. During Run II, the LHC will increase its centre-of-mass energy up to 13 TeV and progressively reach an instantaneous luminosity of 2e34cm-2s-1. In order to guarantee a successful and ambitious physics programme under this intense environment, the CMS Trigger and Data acquisition (DAQ) system has been upgraded. A novel concept for the L1 calorimeter trigger is introduced the Time Multiplexed Trigger (TMT). In this design, nine main receive each all of the calorimeter data from an entire event provided by 18 preprocessors. This design is not different from that of the CMS DAQ and HLT systems. The advantage of the TMT architecture is that a global view and full granularity of the calorimeters can be exploited by sophisticated algortihms. The goal is to maintain the current thresholds for calorimeter objects and improve the performance for their selection. The performance of these algorithms will be demonstrated, both in terms of efficiency and rate reduction. The callenging aspects of the pile-up mitigation and firmware design will be presented

Search for squarks and gluinos in events with isolated leptons, jets and missing transverse momentum at s√=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

The results of a search for supersymmetry in final states containing at least one isolated lepton (electron or muon), jets and large missing transverse momentum with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider are reported. The search is based on proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy s√=8 TeV collected in 2012, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20 fb−1. No significant excess above the Standard Model expectation is observed. Limits are set on supersymmetric particle masses for various supersymmetric models. Depending on the model, the search excludes gluino masses up to 1.32 TeV and squark masses up to 840 GeV. Limits are also set on the parameters of a minimal universal extra dimension model, excluding a compactification radius of 1/R c = 950 GeV for a cut-off scale times radius (ΛR c) of approximately 30

Evidence for the Higgs-boson Yukawa coupling to tau leptons with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for H → τ τ decays are presented, based on the full set of proton-proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC during 2011 and 2012. The data correspond to integrated luminosities of 4.5 fb−1 and 20.3 fb−1 at centre-of-mass energies of √s = 7 TeV and √s = 8 TeV respectively. All combinations of leptonic (τ → `νν¯ with ` = e, µ) and hadronic (τ → hadrons ν) tau decays are considered. An excess of events over the expected background from other Standard Model processes is found with an observed (expected) significance of 4.5 (3.4) standard deviations. This excess provides evidence for the direct coupling of the recently discovered Higgs boson to fermions. The measured signal strength, normalised to the Standard Model expectation, of µ = 1.43 +0.43 −0.37 is consistent with the predicted Yukawa coupling strength in the Standard Model

Constraints on the χ_(c1) versus χ_(c2) polarizations in proton-proton collisions at √s = 8 TeV

The polarizations of promptly produced χ_(c1) and χ_(c2) mesons are studied using data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC, in proton-proton collisions at √s=8  TeV. The χ_c states are reconstructed via their radiative decays χ_c → J/ψγ, with the photons being measured through conversions to e⁺e⁻, which allows the two states to be well resolved. The polarizations are measured in the helicity frame, through the analysis of the χ_(c2) to χ_(c1) yield ratio as a function of the polar or azimuthal angle of the positive muon emitted in the J/ψ → μ⁺μ⁻ decay, in three bins of J/ψ transverse momentum. While no differences are seen between the two states in terms of azimuthal decay angle distributions, they are observed to have significantly different polar anisotropies. The measurement favors a scenario where at least one of the two states is strongly polarized along the helicity quantization axis, in agreement with nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics predictions. This is the first measurement of significantly polarized quarkonia produced at high transverse momentum