Dunkirk: The Defeat That Inspired a Nation

300-level Award Recipient for 2016. Paper written for course HIST 302. Supporting faculty: Nina Tumarkin

The relationship between Cognitive Reserve and Math Abilities

Cognitive Reserve is the capital of knowledge and experiences that an individual acquires over their life-span. Cognitive Reserve is strictly related to Brain Reserve, which is the ability of the brain to cope with damage. These two concepts could explain many phenomena such as the modality of onset in dementia or the different degree of impairment in cognitive abilities in aging. The aim of this study is to verify the effect of Cognitive Reserve, as measured by a questionnaire, on a variety of numerical abilities (number comprehension, reading and writing numbers, rules and principles, mental calculations and written calculations), in a group of healthy older people (aged 65-98 years). Sixty older individuals were interviewed with the Cognitive Reserve Index questionnaire (CRIq), and assessed with the Numerical Activities of Daily Living battery (NADL), which included formal tasks on math abilities, an informal test on math, one interview with the participant, and one interview with a relative on the perceived math abilities. We also took into account the years of education, as another proxy for Cognitive Reserve. In the multiple regression analyses on all formal tests, CRIq scores did not significantly predict math performance. Other variables, i.e., years of education and Mini-Mental State Examination score, accounted better for math performance on NADL. Only a subsection of CRIq, CRIq-Working-activity, was found to predict performance on a NADL subtest assessing informal use of math in daily life. These results show that education might better explain abstract math functions in late life than other aspects related to Cognitive Reserve, such as lifestyle or occupational attainment

Embodied Childhoods, an ethnographic study of how children come to know about the body

This focused ethnography considers children’s understandings and experiences of the body, and more specifically asks the question, ‘how do children come to know about the body?’. The study draws heavily upon the methodological ideas of the social studies of childhood, particularly the work of James (1993, 2013), to explore this question with nine and ten year old participants in two primary schools located in a northern English city. Findings highlight the complex interplay between structure and agency in understanding how children come to know about the body. Furthermore, children’s social and cultural locatedness, it is shown, shapes the ways in which they come to know about the body. Yet, the work of individual children in making sense of the body according to their particular experience is also highlighted. Indeed, it is through children’s experiential knowledge of the body that they come to challenge adult knowledge of, and control over, their bodies in school. Wider implications of the findings of this project include a more in-depth understanding of how children learn, which challenges the traditional notion that knowledge is passed down in a linear succession from adults to children. This, it is argued, has particular consequences in relation to understandings of children’s engagement with public health policy and formal learning about the body in school

Diversity in Spatial Language Within Communities: The Interplay of Culture, Language and Landscape in Representations of Space (Short Paper)

Significant diversity exists in the way languages structure spatial reference, and this has been shown to correlate with diversity in non-linguistic spatial behaviour. However, most research in spatial language has focused on diversity between languages: on which spatial referential strategies are represented in the grammar, and to a lesser extent which of these strategies are preferred overall in a given language. However, comparing languages as a whole and treating each language as a single data point provides a very partial picture of linguistic spatial behaviour, failing to recognise the very significant diversity that exists within languages, a largely under-investigated but now emerging field of research. This paper focuses on language-internal diversity, and on the central role of a range of sociocultural and demographic factors that intervene in the relationship between humans, languages, and the physical environments in which communities live

Letter from Alice Freeman Palmer, Boxford, Massachusetts, to Anne Whitney, Shelburne, New Hampshire, 1891 August 14

https://repository.wellesley.edu/whitney_correspondence/1870/thumbnail.jp

Letter from Alice Freeman Palmer, Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Anne Whitney, Boston, Massachusetts, 1897 March 15

https://repository.wellesley.edu/whitney_correspondence/1867/thumbnail.jp

Letter from Alice Freeman Palmer, to Anne Whitney, 1892 January 2

https://repository.wellesley.edu/whitney_correspondence/1868/thumbnail.jp

Letter from Alice Freeman Palmer, Boxford, Massachusetts, to Anne Whitney, Boston, Massachusetts, 1891 April 6

https://repository.wellesley.edu/whitney_correspondence/1869/thumbnail.jp

Letter from Anne Whitney, Boston, Massachusetts, to Alice Freeman Palmer, 1886 June 21

https://repository.wellesley.edu/whitney_correspondence/1871/thumbnail.jp

Letter from Alice Freeman Palmer, to Anne Whitney, between 1894 and 1902

https://repository.wellesley.edu/whitney_correspondence/1866/thumbnail.jp