Sullivan\u27s Cultivating the genius of black children: Strategies to close the achievement gap in the early years (Book Review)

Sullivan, D. R. (2016). Cultivating the genius of black children: Strategies to close the achievement gap in the early years. St. Paul, MN: Redleaf Press. 166 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978160554405

Perceived School Style and Academic Outcomes among Ethnically Diverse College Students

Students’ perceptions of their schools play an important role in achievement. One framework for measuring students’ perceptions is an adaptation of Baumrind’s parenting typology, which measures perceived “school style” (Pellerin, 2005) along two dimensions of responsiveness (warmth) and demandingness (high academic expectations). Although research suggests that perceptions of authoritative styles (both responsive and demanding) correlate with better student outcomes (Dornbusch et al., 1987), no existing research has considered whether these findings apply to ethnically diverse samples. We surveyed 301 students from five Midwestern colleges who completed measures of perceived school style, perceived discrimination, and several academic outcomes. Academically stigmatized students (African Americans and Latinos) perceived similar levels of demandingness but significantly lower levels of responsiveness from their instructors than did their non-stigmatized peers. Importantly, perceived discrimination in college fully mediated this relationship. With regard to the academic outcome variables, we found a significant interaction between responsiveness and demandingness such that only students who perceived high levels of both showed higher levels of attendance and out-of-class engagement. Finally, we found a significant three-way interaction between responsiveness, demandingness, and academic minority status in predicting academic efficacy. High levels of responsiveness and demandingness were related to increased academic efficacy only for non-academically stigmatized students. These results imply not only that the benefits of perceived school responsiveness and demandingness often depend on one another, but also that these benefits do not always apply equally to all students

Seglearn: A Python Package for Learning Sequences and Time Series

Seglearn is an open-source python package for machine learning time series or sequences using a sliding window segmentation approach. The implementation provides a flexible pipeline for tackling classification, regression, and forecasting problems with multivariate sequence and contextual data. This package is compatible with scikit-learn and is listed under scikit-learn Related Projects. The package depends on numpy, scipy, and scikit-learn. Seglearn is distributed under the BSD 3-Clause License. Documentation includes a detailed API description, user guide, and examples. Unit tests provide a high degree of code coverage

Finding Myself Here

Both the natural and civilized worlds establish a context within which I may understand my own existence. My search for “self” and the emotive qualities of life within these contexts provides the impetus for my work. I create juxtapositions: from found art assemblages to, more recently, intimate experiences in public park environments. Within these curated experiences I challenge myself to open up to unknown experiences derived from my relationship to the landscape and the life forms found within. My videos are a kind of self-surveillance fostering absurdly promiscuous behavior when I am alone, in front of a camera. These conjured “secret acts” appear to exist within a realm of magic, science fiction or spirituality. They are sincere attempts at socialization, which more accurately convey the ineffective, naive and pathetic tenderness of a rookie’s efforts

Supporting Student Completion: Implementing Strategic Academic Scheduling

Community Colleges have been striving to increase student retention and completion. Students are busier than ever and recognizing that, it is important for them to be able to attend classes around their lives, not life around their classes. Transitioning to a yearlong schedule and opening yearlong registration enables students to do just that, breaking down barriers to success. Strategic academic scheduling creates a more direct and achievable pathway for students and increases average class size to promote more constructive discussion and diversity, but also meets business needs of the institution by minimizing unnecessary course sections and reduced low-enrolled courses. A video recording of this presentation is available here

Thermodynamic and Magnetic Properties of Diatomic Molecules for Non-central Potentials under the Influence of External Magnetic Fields

This paper studies the thermodynamic and magnetic properties of some diatomic molecules governed by Scarf and Morse non-central potentials under external magnetic and electric fields. The Schrodinger equation with Scarf and Morse non-central potentials is solved using Supersymmetric WKB quantization conditions to obtain the energy equation and wave function. The influence of the magnetic and electric fields on the energy eigenvalue was discussed. The results show that energy increases with the increasing magnetic field and decreases with the increasing electric field. Moreover, the thermodynamic and magnetic properties involving internal energy, free energy, specific heat capacity, entropy, magnetization, magnetic susceptibility, and persistent current were determined by calculating the partition function. The internal energy increases linearly with the increasing magnetic field for a given temperature. Meanwhile, the specific heat capacity decreases with the increasing magnetic field. We point out that the presence of magnetic and electric fields makes the system exhibit diamagnetic behavior