The Chemistry of Making Soap: Chemical and Physical Changes in 6th Grade Science

This unit is designed primarily for 6th grade students, but it can be paired to work with 10th grade curriculum as well. In the unit, students will be introduced to elements and compounds before moving into identifying chemical changes. As part of the final lab, students will create soap. Please note that this unit has multiple hands-on activities that require many household products or items to be brought and used in classroom experiments. This unit also uses Stemscopes, a purchased curriculum. When possible free alternative assignments are provided to the Stemscopes activities

Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Cells (6th grade)

This unit is meant to provide a concrete and hands-on approach to introducing cells and differences between prokaryotic cells (cells without a nucleus), and eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus). Certain organelles and their functions are introduced, although this is covered much more in depth in 7th grade; the unit is based on the TEKS (Texas Standards). The conclusion of the unit is a fun lab in which students practice using the scientific method as well microscopes to collect data. Students will be expected to apply their knowledge to identify the eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells provided on the slides. This unit comes at the beginning of the biology unit, introducing the concepts of cells and differentiating between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell types. After this unit, students will move to a brief introduction of taxonomy

Addition and Subtraction with Decimals Review [6th grade]

This unit briefly reviews the skills of multiple-digit addition and subtraction with decimals. The culminating project is a bazaar where students buy and sell homemade goods while practicing their addition and subtraction skills. This unit is designed for a small group and is intended to be paired with flipped videos. Videos are available at teacher weebly linked in the unit

Understanding Poetry: 5th Grade Introduction to Writing Poetry

This unit introduces 5th grade students to 5 primary poetic forms: haiku, limerick, cinquain, narrative poetry, and free verse. This unit includes a brief review of similes and metaphors and can likely be adapted for younger or older students. This poetry unit is projected to take 13-14 class days, but it can be extended or reduced depending on the needs of the class. The final performance task is writing a poem that will be performed in a poetry slam

Addition and Subtraction Review with a Purpose

This addition and subtraction review unit is designed to take place over 2 weeks during the first days of school. The culminating assessment is a field trip to the local grocery store to purchase student-chosen items that will be placed in care packages and then delivered to a local Ronald McDonald House near the school by the students. During the first week, students play TGT (Team-Game-Tournament) style reviews covering basic addition and subtraction as well as addition and subtraction using money and decimals. During the second week, students shop online to select items, and then go shopping, finally taking the care packages to the Ronald McDonald House. In addition to understanding addition and subtraction, this unit also sets students up to learn the relationship between numbers in fact families and how to find missing numbers

Educator Perceptions of a Schoolwide Writing Intervention Implementation: Implications for Practice

Students with disabilities continue to perform below peers without disabilities in writing. To address the need for improving written expression for students with learning differences, schools are implementing instructional strategies. This study investigated teacher perceptions of a four-year, schoolwide, K–12 implementation of strategic instruction model (SIM) learning strategies addressing written expression. A survey (n = 22) and semistructured interviews (n = 16) were administered to examine the perceptions of educators on schoolwide supports to strengthen writing skills across all grades and content areas. The analysis of these data can provide insight to faculty knowledge and attitudes toward implementation of SIM as well as guidance to inform change and implementation practices in providing targeted intervention in writing to address K–12 goals for students with various learning differences

Mimicry and just world beliefs: Mimicking makes men view the world as more personally just

People's just world beliefs are related to how they feel and behave towards others: the stronger people hold beliefs that the world treats them fairly, the more they feel and act pro-socially towards others. It is conceivable, therefore, that pro-social feelings and behaviours towards others can strengthen people's personal belief in a just world, especially when people expect these positive feelings to be returned. Because mimicry enhances pro-social feelings towards others, we argue that mimicry may strengthen peoples’ personal just world beliefs via positive feelings for the mimicked person and the expectation that these positive feelings are returned. Moreover, we expect these effects to be more pronounced for men because men have stronger reciprocity beliefs than women. The results of three studies supported this line of reasoning, showing that mimicry made men believe more strongly that the world is personally just to them. Further support for our line of reasoning was obtained by positive feelings for the (non)mimicked person (Study 2) and reciprocity beliefs (Study 3) mediating the effects. Taken together, the findings suggest that mimicry makes men view the world as more just

Source Coding Optimization for Distributed Average Consensus

Consensus is a common method for computing a function of the data distributed among the nodes of a network. Of particular interest is distributed average consensus, whereby the nodes iteratively compute the sample average of the data stored at all the nodes of the network using only near-neighbor communications. In real-world scenarios, these communications must undergo quantization, which introduces distortion to the internode messages. In this thesis, a model for the evolution of the network state statistics at each iteration is developed under the assumptions of Gaussian data and additive quantization error. It is shown that minimization of the communication load in terms of aggregate source coding rate can be posed as a generalized geometric program, for which an equivalent convex optimization can efficiently solve for the global minimum. Optimization procedures are developed for rate-distortion-optimal vector quantization, uniform entropy-coded scalar quantization, and fixed-rate uniform quantization. Numerical results demonstrate the performance of these approaches. For small numbers of iterations, the fixed-rate optimizations are verified using exhaustive search. Comparison to the prior art suggests competitive performance under certain circumstances but strongly motivates the incorporation of more sophisticated coding strategies, such as differential, predictive, or Wyner-Ziv coding.Comment: Master's Thesis, Electrical Engineering, North Carolina State Universit

Explaining the relationship between number line estimation and mathematical achievement: the role of visuomotor integration and visuospatial skills

Performance on number line tasks, typically used as a measure of numerical representations, are reliably related to children’s mathematical achievement. However, recent debate has questioned what precisely performance on the number line estimation task measures. Specifically, there has been a suggestion that this task may measure not only numerical representations but also proportional judgment skills; if this is the case, then individual differences in visuospatial skills, not just the precision of numerical representations, may explain the relationship between number line estimation and mathematical achievement. The current study investigated the relationships among visuospatial skills, visuomotor integration, number line estimation, and mathematical achievement. In total, 77 children were assessed using a number line estimation task, a standardized measure of mathematical achievement, and tests of visuospatial skills and visuomotor integration. The majority of measures were significantly correlated. In addition, the relationship between one metric from the number line estimation task (R2LIN) and mathematical achievement was fully explained by visuomotor integration and visuospatial skill competency. These results have important implications for understanding what the number line task measures as well as the choice of number line metric for research purposes

Addressing climate change with behavioral science:A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior-several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people's initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.</p