Location, location, location: Anaphor selection in English locative prepositional phrases

This paper presents experimental work on the relative naturalness of subject-oriented reflexives (herself) and pronouns (her) in English locative prepositional phrases (e.g., Michele set a glass next to her/herself). Syntactic approaches to anaphor licensing have tended to focus on the lack of complementarity in such constructions; however, it has long been observed that preferences between forms may depend on verb meaning (change in location vs. perception vs. possession) and spatial relation (+contact vs. -contact), with very strong preferences reported in some cases. This study aims to clarify the extent to which these two factors shape anaphor choice. Results confirm that both play a significant role: reflexives are most natural in the expression of change in location and direct contact, while pronouns pattern oppositely. Importantly, preferences between forms are less stark than those found in constructions where syntactic constraints are assumed to render one form ungrammatical. I suggest that these findings favor a treatment of English anaphora that takes event structure into account

Evidence from Oromo on the typology of complementation strategies

This paper explores the clausal complementation strategies found in Oromo (Cushitic). Recent work by Wurmbrand and Lohninger (2019) suggests that languages distinguish three broad semantic categories of complement clauses, which are hierarchically ordered with respect to their syntactic complexity. Based on newly elicited data and examples from the literature, I propose that Oromo complement clauses also show this three-way split, lending support to Wurmbrand and Lohninger’s (2019) proposal. However, the distribution of clausal complement categories appears to diverge somewhat from what has been reported for other languages, suggesting some flexibility in the way certain states and events can be linguistically encoded. Situating Oromo within the typology of clausal complementation thus sheds light on the diversity of ways in which basic semantic building blocks may be incorporated into the expression of complex meanings and speaks to the import of understudied languages to typological research

Meeting the Needs of Gifted Students at Quail Run Elementary School: An Action Research Report

Appropriately differentiating for gifted students can be a daunting task. There are many issues to consider when individualizing instruction for the gifted and talented student population. I teach gifted students in an elementary resource setting. This Action Research paper identifies a number of the issues I discovered when conducting my action research project-meeting the needs of my gifted students. I also offer recommendations on how I plan to improve my teaching in particular and gifted education at Quail Run Elementary in general

It\u27s Nothing Personal: Competing Discourses for Girls and Women in Mathematics

This dissertation used a post-structural feminist theoretical lens to examine women’s under-representation in mathematics graduate programs and careers. Five dominant discourses that potentially influence women’s decision to enter mathematical careers were discussed, including how those discourses interact in competing and complementary ways to shape women’s and men’s ideas about the nature of mathematics. The study investigated the long-term impact of a single-sex reform-based summer mathematics program on high school girls. The study utilized a variety of data collection techniques including surveys, field observations, phenomenological interviews, and artifact collection. Nine participants who were enrolled in a summer mathematics program for high school girls in 2000 were purposefully selected to best represent the overall population of program participants during that time period. Results of this study indicate that these women rejected the traditional procedural way that mathematics was taught to them. They saw mathematics as irrelevant and had very little knowledge of potential careers in mathematics. However, the findings of this study suggest that programs like the one studied here can have positive outcomes on girls’ academic performance, their perceptions of their own math ability, and their perceptions of mathematics as field of study. Overall, this study allows researchers to better understand the lived experiences of women in mathematics, hopefully leading to a more dynamic model that can begin to explain how competing discourses influence girls’ and women’s decision to enter mathematics careers. Based on these findings, recommendations for changes in teaching practice are discussed

Working in partnership with students for assessment topics in postgraduate education: lessons from physiotherapy education

Student-led assessment encompasses a variety of practices through which students are actively involved in their own learning and assessment processes. It was first documented in 1938 by John Dewey, who coined the phrase ‘progressive education’ as a move away from didactic, teacher-led education towards a more social/context-oriented model. At its core, student-led assessment aims to empower students to take responsibility for their own learning, and the learning of their peers. This might include peer feedback (Lui & Carless, 2006), group portfolios (Lopez-Pastor et al, 2010), or co-creating a database of multiple-choice questions (Harris et al, 2015). Much of the research into student-led assessment is focused on formative assessment that does not carry a mark or module weighting, often as part of a broader student-led pedagogical shift (Rowley et al, 2017). Indeed the 2015 Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (Standard 1.3), states that universities “should ensure that programme are delivered in a way that encourages students to take an active role in creating the learning process, and that the assessment of students reflects this approach” (ESG, 2015). The UCL ‘Acute Cardiorespiratory Physiotherapy Skills’ module is delivered across a 6 day programme, .Learners on the programme are post-registration postgraduate physiotherapy students. Most work in a specific subspeciality within the cardiorespiratory field, either locally or overseas. The module is assessed by a written, case-study based exam. The module lead (an academic with expertise in cardiorespiratory physiotherapy) sets the exam paper, with input from external lecturers who have contributed to the module. It is sent to the external examiner for final amendments and sign-off In 2020-21, 11% of students reported that they felt the exam topics that had been selected were somewhat removed from their own clinical reality, involving scenarios they were unlikely to see in their own practice. The challenge is that each cohort is diverse (in terms of area of specialism and country of training) and it is impossible to predict the clinical expertise that each student will bring to the module. To address this, we designed a student-led collaborative exam preparation session, which sought to better understand students’ own clinical environments (e.g. community, hospital or school setting), specialty areas (e.g. intensive care, surgery, long-term ventilation, palliative care) and patient population (e.g. asthma, chronic obstructive lung disease, burns, neuromuscular conditions). This was used to guide and inform the content of the written assessment

Situation types in complementation: Oromo attitude predication

Though languages show rich variation in the clausal embedding strategies employed in attitude reports, most mainstream formal semantic theories of attitudes assume that the clausal complement of an attitude verb contributes at least a proposition to the semantics. The goal of this paper is to contribute to the growing cross-linguistic perspective of attitudes by providing semantic analyses for the two embedding strategies found with attitude verbs in Oromo (Cushitic): verbal nominalization, and embedding under akka 'as'. We argue that Oromo exemplifies a system in which non-speech attitudes uniformly embed situations rather than propositions, thereby expanding the empirical landscape of attitude reports in two ways: (i) situations and propositions are both ontological primitives used by languages in the construction of attitude reports, and (ii) attitude verbs in languages like Oromo do the semantic heavy lifting, contributing the "proposition" to propositional attitudes