Measuring the Social and Emotional Skills of Hispanic American Students in an Afterschool Karate Program

The social and emotional learning skills of children play an important role in their development. These skills include persistence, self-control, and social competence. The lack of these skills can often be a predictor of future criminality and antisocial behavior. Aggressiveness in youth plays a key role in violence among juveniles. Violent crime committed by juvenile offenders has been a longstanding issue facing the United States criminal justice system. It lacks an effective prevention method, disproportionately affects minority youth, and is often cited as a future predictor of criminality. The purpose of this quasi-experimental, one-group, pretest–posttest design study, was twofold. First, it examined the effects of traditional martial arts training on the social and emotional learning skills of persistence, self-control and social competence of students within a structured afterschool setting. Secondly, it investigated the effects of traditional martial arts training on the ability to resolve problems with peers without becoming aggressive in these same students. The research subjects consist of 57 predominantly Hispanic students (ages 5-11) enrolled in an afterschool program at Tiger and Dragon Youth Center (T&D), throughout the 2018-19 academic school year. This program teaches the traditional martial art of Kenpo Karate

Experimental insight into the domain decomposition method for a finite element method code

The use of Domain Decomposition Methods (DDM) for a Finite Element Method (FEM) framework was a hot topic in the past decade, leading to very powerful results in terms of scalability and widening the problems that could be full-wave simulated with the FEM, [1–3]. However, despite the promising results shown in these references, it seems not to be a widespread use of the DDM in commercial FEM softwares or publications, whereas the common research topics (adaptivity, higher-order basis functions, different element shapes) in FEM have not been explored together with DDM. In this communication, we share experimental details with different non-overlapping DDM within FEM. We explore the use of different finite element shapes with up to fourth-order basis functions. We propose a propagation problem through a rectangular waveguide as a benchmark, and we show the different implementation choices available and their impact in the performance of the code

Prácticas educativas potenciadoras de los estudiantes del programa de licenciatura en educación física y deportes de una institución de educación superior.

Maestría en Educación y Desarrollo Humano, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas.Este artículo tiene como objetivo comprender los elementos potenciadores que hacen parte de las prácticas educativas de los estudiantes del programa de licenciatura en educación física y deportes de una Institución de Educación Superior del departamento del Quindío. Por tanto, su metodología es cualitativa desde una aproximación comprensiva de la realidad propuesta por la Teoría Fundamentada de Glaser y Strauss (1968) y Strauss y Corbin (2008). Esto permitió que de las voces de los actores emergieran las categorías y en la construcción de sentido, que sintetizó los datos hasta comprender a profundidad los elementos potenciadores inmersos en las prácticas educativas de 6 educandos -participantes de estudio-, a quienes se les aplicó una entrevista semiestructurada y un grupo focal..

Forest landscape restoration in the drylands of Latin America

Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) involves the ecological restoration of degraded forest landscapes, with the aim of benefiting both biodiversity and human well-being. We first identify four fundamental principles of FLR, based on previous definitions. We then critically evaluate the application of these principles in practice, based on the experience gained during an international, collaborative research project conducted in six dry forest landscapes of Latin America. Research highlighted the potential for FLR; tree species of high socioeconomic value were identified in all study areas, and strong dependence of local communities on forest resources was widely encountered, particularly for fuelwood. We demonstrated that FLR can be achieved through both passive and active restoration approaches, and can be cost-effective if the increased provision of ecosystem services is taken into account. These results therefore highlight the potential for FLR, and the positive contribution that it could make to sustainable development. However, we also encountered a number of challenges to FLR implementation, including the difficulty of achieving strong engagement in FLR activities among local stakeholders, lack of capacity for community-led initiatives, and the lack of an appropriate institutional and regulatory environment to support restoration activities. Successful implementation of FLR will require new collaborative alliances among stakeholders, empowerment and capacity building of local communities to enable them to fully engage with restoration activities, and an enabling public policy context to enable local people to be active participants in the decision making process. © 2012 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance