Response to Intervention and the Impact on Eligibility for Special Education Services in Texas

Response to Intervention (RTI) trends and special education referrals were examined and compared with the self-reported data of special education directors and evaluation staff to determine the overall impact of RTI on special education referrals. A descriptive nonexperimental design study using existing data and survey methods was used. Findings from archival data demonstrated that during the period ranging from 2007 to 2011, trends at the state level, across regional services centers, and in one independent school district showed an increase in the number of students who were referred and found eligible for special education services. However, there was an average decrease in the number of students receiving special education services at the regional and state levels and an increase according to one district level. The trends that evolved suggest a possible relationship between the RTI process and increasingly accurate referrals for special education services. Findings from the survey administered at the Education Service Center (ESC) indicated the perceptions of special education directors and evaluation staff did not mirror the findings of the archival data. However, data gathered from the survey administered at the Independent School District (ISD) indicated the perceptions of the special education director and evaluation staff did mirror the findings of actual archival data

Triadic closure as a basic generating mechanism of communities in complex networks

R.K.D. and S.F. gratefully acknowledge MULTIPLEX, Grant No. 317532 of the European Commission

Determinants of Physical Activity in an Inclusive Setting

The purposes of this study included (a) to determine if the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) predicted intentions of individuals with and without disabilities to be physically active, (b) to determine if the TPB predicted behaviors of individuals with and without disabilities to be physically active, and (c) to determine if significant differences were present in physical activity opportunities between inclusive and non-inclusive elementary physical education classes taught by the same teacher. Students (N = 114, ages 10-13) completed questionnaires assessing the TPB constructs and had four days of PA evaluated through pedometer measurements. Analyses revealed that subjective norm and perceived behavioral control predicted studentsʼ intentions to be active, while behavioral intention was the only significant predictor of activity level by step count accrued in PE classes. Finally, the inclusion of students with autism did not significantly affect overall physical activity

Guidelines for Safe, High Performing Li-Ion Battery Designs for Manned Vehicles

New design features and test methods are in development at NASA to take advantage of the newest high power and energy dense commercial Li-ion cell designs and to achieve passively thermal runaway (TR) propagation resistant (PPR) designs for manned missions requiring high power/voltage. The goal is to minimize the parasitic mass and volume of the battery components; thus reaching a balance between high battery specific power (W/kg) and energy (Wh/kg) as well as power (W/L) and energy density (Wh/L). Current 18650 cell designs achieve greater than 275 Wh/kg, greater than 725 Wh/L, but present high risks of side wall breaching during TR which can defeat many other safety features resulting in nearly immediate TR propagation. This work seeks to better understand the phenomena of cell side wall breaches and to determine the effectiveness of promising battery design features for achieving safe, high performing battery designs for high voltage/power applications

Impact of a Student-teach-student Model for IPE Between Pharmacists and Dermatologists on Student Knowledge and Attitude

Introduction: The effective delivery of patient care is a complex venture, often requiring efficient collaboration among varied healthcare professions. Not surprisingly, research continues to indicate collaboration between these diverse professionals can be challenging. Early exposure of health professions students to interprofessional education (IPE) offers a promising way to improve this collaboration and, in turn, improve patient care and service delivery. Objectives: This study examines the impact of an innovative IPE cocurricular event on knowledge, understanding, and attitudes, regarding future healthcare delivery between medical and pharmacy students. Method: Students developed and conducted an IPE cocurricular event involving medical students of a dermatology-interest club, and pharmacy students of a compounding-interest club. Medical students introduced a patient case, delivered in a standardized-patient format. This was followed by a pharmacy student presentation representing compounding the prescriptions needed for the patient case and writing accurate prescriptions. Following both presentations, students from each program were paired.  Each interprofessional pair then communicated and compounded two medications for the case, working collaboratively.  Pre- and post-questionnaires were designed with rating scales and open-ended questions for data collection.  Results: Both parametric and nonparametric tests revealed significant differences between the pretests and posttests. There was no significant difference in responding between the groups. Inspection of the open-ended questions revealed changes in attitudes regarding collaboration and learning. Conclusions: This study found students of both professions reported significant improvements in their level of knowledge, understanding, and interest in interprofessional collaboration. The open-ended questions revealed both groups of students began the event with different expectations regarding cooperation and interprofessional activities but left the session with very similar perspectives. By including similar IPE activities in early healthcare education, medical students will gain an understanding of the knowledge, skills, and services that a compounding pharmacist can offer in personalized patient care, and pharmacy students will acquire clinical reasoning based on patient presentations. Both factors promote collaboration between professions and ultimately show promise in improving outcomes in patient care

Combining Fractional Calorimetry with Statistical Methods to Characterize Thermal Runaway

Fractional thermal runaway calorimetry (FTRC) techniques were introduced to examine thermal runaway (TR) behavior of lithium-ion (Li-ion) cells. Specifically, FTRC considers the total energy released vs. the fraction of the total energy that is released through the cell casing vs. through the ejecta material. This device has been expanded to universally support FTRC testing of additional cell types including 21700-format, D-Cell format, and large prismatic format Li-ion cells. The TR behavior as influenced by cell format, manufacturer, chemistry, capacity, and in situ safety features are described in this presentation

Cantor type functions in non-integer bases

Cantor's ternary function is generalized to arbitrary base-change functions in non-integer bases. Some of them share the curious properties of Cantor's function, while others behave quite differently

The effects of grain shape and frustration in a granular column near jamming

We investigate the full phase diagram of a column of grains near jamming, as a function of varying levels of frustration. Frustration is modelled by the effect of two opposing fields on a grain, due respectively to grains above and below it. The resulting four dynamical regimes (ballistic, logarithmic, activated and glassy) are characterised by means of the jamming time of zero-temperature dynamics, and of the statistics of attractors reached by the latter. Shape effects are most pronounced in the cases of strong and weak frustration, and essentially disappear around a mean-field point.Comment: 17 pages, 19 figure

Inference of hidden structures in complex physical systems by multi-scale clustering

We survey the application of a relatively new branch of statistical physics--"community detection"-- to data mining. In particular, we focus on the diagnosis of materials and automated image segmentation. Community detection describes the quest of partitioning a complex system involving many elements into optimally decoupled subsets or communities of such elements. We review a multiresolution variant which is used to ascertain structures at different spatial and temporal scales. Significant patterns are obtained by examining the correlations between different independent solvers. Similar to other combinatorial optimization problems in the NP complexity class, community detection exhibits several phases. Typically, illuminating orders are revealed by choosing parameters that lead to extremal information theory correlations.Comment: 25 pages, 16 Figures; a review of earlier work

Local multiresolution order in community detection

Community detection algorithms attempt to find the best clusters of nodes in an arbitrary complex network. Multi-scale ("multiresolution") community detection extends the problem to identify the best network scale(s) for these clusters. The latter task is generally accomplished by analyzing community stability simultaneously for all clusters in the network. In the current work, we extend this general approach to define local multiresolution methods, which enable the extraction of well-defined local communities even if the global community structure is vaguely defined in an average sense. Toward this end, we propose measures analogous to variation of information and normalized mutual information that are used to quantitatively identify the best resolution(s) at the community level based on correlations between clusters in independently-solved systems. We demonstrate our method on two constructed networks as well as a real network and draw inferences about local community strength. Our approach is independent of the applied community detection algorithm save for the inherent requirement that the method be able to identify communities across different network scales, with appropriate changes to account for how different resolutions are evaluated or defined in a particular community detection method. It should, in principle, easily adapt to alternative community comparison measures.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure