The Merit of Inclusion: A Policy Review Examining the Convergence of Special Education and Inclusions Policies with Compensatory Medicaid Policies in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) formally recognized the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak as a global pandemic. This global issue compelled governments to announce careful virus containing policies in order to prevent further spread and control of the disease. Although it has been proven that measures like social isolation could aid in scaling the spread of illness, the resulting extended school closures that occurred in response to an increased number of COVID-19 outbreaks posed significant challenges for all students, but especially those students with special needs. The unpredictable nature of COVID-19 at the outset of the pandemic presented didactic stakeholders with several hurdles stemming from uncertainty concerning how to guarantee student safety and account for continuing modifications to instructional delivery and, most importantly for this study, services to special needs students

Teacher perceptions of ADHD causality implication for educational leaders

Students who exhibit behaviors commonly associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are at risk for academic struggles and impaired relationships, often needing targeted interventions to be successful. While research supports the need for using interventions to improve classroom performance for students impacted by ADHD, it does not show if there is a relationship between the interventions a teacher uses or believes are effective and a teacher's perception of ADHD causality. Therefore, this study examined if there was a relationship. The data showed when a teacher feels something in the student's body is causing symptoms of ADHD, they are more willing to provide school-based supports. The data also showed when a teacher feels the child has more of a choice in their behaviors, the teacher is less likely to provide school-based supports. The data also showed that as the teacher's perception of a biological cause increased, they assumed more responsibility in providing interventions for the student. In addition, as the teacher's perception of an environmental cause increased, they placed increased responsibility on the child's family for interventions. Administrators can best support students impacted by ADHD by being proactive in advocating for stronger family and community partnerships and ensuring school-based interventions are being used with fidelity.Includes bibliographical references

Missions unaccomplished: Female missionaries, Native American rights, and media in the nineteenth-century American West

Two-faced. Deceitful. Insincere. These words summarize the actions of Anglo-Americans toward Native peoples in the United States in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Under the guise of maternal instinct female missionaries and activists contributed to assimilationist agendas put forth by the United States Government. This thesis will examine the life of Caroline Weldon, an activist with the National Indian Defense Association (NIDA) in the historical record and three modern media depictions: two Derek Walcott works, The Ghost Dance (1990) and Omeros (1992), and the film Woman Walks Ahead (2017).Caroline Weldon did not act alone in Dakota Territory, rather she is a single example for a larger trend. By using an array of unconventional sources, the story of Weldon's contemporaries Lucy Arnold, Mary Collins, and Corabelle Fellows have become apparent. Combined together, media depictions and the historical record provide a better understanding of four women who have eluded historian's attention for many years. It is my hope that the lives of Caroline Weldon, Lucy Arnold, Mary Collins, and Corabelle Fellows will shed a new light on an old history.This story is broken into two parts: Part I explores the historical role of Caroline Weldon and assimilation policy in the final two decades of the nineteenth century and Part II analyzes the role media has played in shaping historical memory and legacies. The historical legacy of Caroline Weldon has grown with each and every newspaper article, book, play, and movie based on her life. As historians have had access to modern technologies, new sources on Weldon and the nineteenth century have allowed her story to be told and re-told

The conflict between data and perception in placement reform and acceleration of English coursework

Doctor of EducationDepartment of Educational LeadershipMajor Professor Not ListedThis work studied an institution’s experiences with acceleration and placement reform in English coursework as changes in these measures affected student persistence, completion, and subject mastery in English composition. Through assessing student learning outcomes after placement reform and acceleration, this study compared students’ success through institutional data with the perceptions of their success among faculty and counselors. Perceptions were gathered through a Likert-scale survey coupled with thematically coded open-ended questions that reveal an innate desire for increased agency in the implementation of new initiatives. For practitioners, this study provides further insight into placement reform and the acceleration of English in a real-world context with suggestions for increased engagement from faculty and staff when implementing new initiatives. Ultimately, this study found far reaching implications for practice that include consistently gauging the perception of faculty and counselors, transparently clarifying processes and data, establishing a best-practice assessment plan, and developing a shared understanding of student success

The separate effects of shoe mass and cushioning on the energetic cost of barefoot vs. shod running

One might intuit that running barefoot would exact a lower energetic cost than running in shoes since shoes add mass to the foot. Although this is true for typical weight running shoes, lightweight cushioned shoes and barefoot have been shown to have similar costs. Other studies have indicated that there is an energetic cost of cushioning in running. Thus, the cost of barefoot running may reflect the combined effects of a decrease due to lower mass and an increase due to greater muscle actions for cushioning. We hypothesized that running barefoot on a cushioned surface would minimize both the mass cost and the cushioning cost. PURPOSE: To quantify the separate effects of shoe mass and cushioning on the energetic cost of running. METHODS: 12 male experienced barefoot runners ran at 3.35 m/s with a mid-foot strike pattern. Subjects ran both barefoot and in ultra-light cushioned racing shoes (~150 g /shoe) on a treadmill with a rigid deck and barefoot on the same treadmill equipped with a cushioned belt made with foam slats. In additional trials, small lead weights were added to the feet/shoes (~150, ~300, ~450 g). We measured the subjects‟ rates of oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production to quantify energetic cost. RESULTS: The mass effect was similar for all footwear conditions: approximately 1% increase in oxygen consumption per 100 g of mass added to each foot. The energetic costs of running barefoot with and without the treadmill surface cushioning were not different (p=0.52). Contrary to our hypothesis, running in ultra-light cushioned racing shoes had the lowest energetic cost: 3.4% less than the weight-matched barefoot condition (p=.02). There was no significant difference between the energetic cost of running barefoot with no added mass and shod with the ~150 g running shoe. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that when mass is controlled for, cushioned shoes provide an energetic advantage over running barefoot

Frex: dependently-typed algebraic simplification

We present an extensible, mathematically-structured algebraic simplification library design. We structure the library using universal algebraic concepts: a free algebra -- fral -- and a free extension -- frex -- of an algebra by a set of variables. The library's dependently-typed API guarantees simplification modules, even user-defined ones, are terminating, sound, and complete with respect to a well-specified class of equations. Completeness offers intangible benefits in practice -- our main contribution is the novel design. Cleanly separating between the interface and implementation of simplification modules provides two new modularity axes. First, simplification modules share thousands of lines of infrastructure code dealing with term-representation, pretty-printing, certification, and macros/reflection. Second, new simplification modules can reuse existing ones. We demonstrate this design by developing simplification modules for monoid varieties: ordinary, commutative, and involutive. We implemented this design in the new Idris2 dependently-typed programming language, and in Agda

Perpendicular magnetic anisotropy in conducting NiCo\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3eO\u3csub\u3e4\u3c/sub\u3e films from spin-lattice coupling

High perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA), a property needed for nanoscale spintronic applications, is rare in oxide conductors. We report the observation of a PMA up to 0.23 MJ/m3 in modestly strained (–0.3%) epitaxial NiCo2O4 films which are room-temperature ferrimagnetic conductors. Spin-lattice coupling manifested as magnetoelastic effect was found as the origin of the PMA. The in-plane x2-y2 states of Co on tetrahedral sites play crucial role in the magnetic anisotropy and spin-lattice coupling with an energy scale of 1 meV/f.u. The elucidation of the microscopic origin paves a way for engineering oxide conductors for PMA using metal/oxygen hybridizations

How Good is Automatic Segmentation as a Multimodal Discourse Annotation Aid?

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) in teams is tightly coupled with the creation of shared meaning between participants in a situated, collaborative task. In this work, we assess the quality of different utterance segmentation techniques as an aid in annotating CPS. We (1) manually transcribe utterances in a dataset of triads collaboratively solving a problem involving dialogue and physical object manipulation, (2) annotate collaborative moves according to these gold-standard transcripts, and then (3) apply these annotations to utterances that have been automatically segmented using toolkits from Google and OpenAI's Whisper. We show that the oracle utterances have minimal correspondence to automatically segmented speech, and that automatically segmented speech using different segmentation methods is also inconsistent. We also show that annotating automatically segmented speech has distinct implications compared with annotating oracle utterances--since most annotation schemes are designed for oracle cases, when annotating automatically-segmented utterances, annotators must invoke other information to make arbitrary judgments which other annotators may not replicate. We conclude with a discussion of how future annotation specs can account for these needs.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, Proceedings of 19th Joint ISO-ACL Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA 2023