Gun ownership as an expression of whiteness and masculinity.

Public discourse on the topic of gun ownership in the U.S. is polarized, with the debate framed as a binary between unquestioned gun rights versus a complete ban. Gun ownership can have grave consequences: guns are used to commit acts of violence and suicide. Interviews with white male gun owners explore the influence of white backlash, masculinity, and racial identity development in their decisions to own guns. This project explores the extent these reasons are related to race on the part of white males, starting with these two questions: How much does race play a factor in the action and thought related to guns? To what extent does a “white backlash” (King 1967) relate to gun ownership? Ultimately, the participants rarely expressed overt racialized sentiments or white backlash. However, themes emerged that align with current literature to suggest how gun ownership among white men operates as a “racial project” (Omi and Winant [1986] 2015) that reinforces white male hegemony

The Impact of Institutional Characteristics on the Use and Effectiveness of Rainy Day Funds: A Pilot Study of Municipal Governments in West Virginia

This research focuses on enhancing the understanding of the use of “rainy day funds” to deal with municipal fiscal shortfalls. It is a pilot study, examining the largest 15 cities in West Virginia. Analysis of data from state reports and interviews with finance directors are used to determine whether, how, and to the degree the cities studied use various reserve fund mechanisms. While almost every city was found to have fiscal reserves, there was great variation in the methods used and amounts in how it was done – some cities followed predictable patterns found elsewhere while others did not.Rainy day funds, municipal governments, West Virginia

A Changing Role for Technology Teacher Education

Is it time for a major redesign in technology teacher education? The field of technology education has gone through considerable introspection and revision in recent years. Welty (2003) suggested that over the last twenty years, the recommended curriculum for the study of technology has evolved dramatically in response to a new emphasis on teaching design, the development of standards, and other new initiatives. Welty further stated that, In light of these advancements, technology teacher educators are being challenged to evaluate their technical curricula, to look beyond traditions in teacher education, to reflect on the nature of knowledge, and to update both technical and professional courses for undergraduate technology teacher education (p. 74). The convergence of new standards, accreditation requirements, research on teaching and learning, as well as new state certification policies have forced many technology teacher education programs to consider changes. In addition to these challenges, technology teacher education programs are facing unparalleled external problems. Some of these problems include shortages of entering pre-service teachers, program closures, and shortages of funding to support substantial programmatic adaptations. Pressure also comes from school administrators to maintain or reinstate traditional programs for students with limited abilities, from business and industry to focus on trade-specific courses, from community colleges to prepare students for post-secondary technical programs (Welty, 2003), and from professional associations to include courses related to pre-engineering, design, and technological literacy

Closing Reading Achievement Gaps for Middle School Students

This research examined how self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and professional development compared between core content and special education middle school teachers working with middle school students in reading comprehension and fluency. Accordingly, no statistically significant difference in teacher self-efficacy between core content and special education teachers was discovered based on the ANOVA analysis results. An analysis of professional development and collective teacher efficacy showed mixed results with a negative relationship predicted between increased professional development hours for core content teachers. A predicted positive relationship existed with the number of professional development hours increasing for special education teachers. There was no statistically significant difference between core content and special education teachers’ numbers of professional development hours identified as low, medium, or high. The chi statistic showed that both populations of teachers had insufficient training

Enhanced kinetics and modeling of PAN-based carbon felt anodes in vanadium redox flow batteries

All-vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) are a promising technology for grid-level energy storage, however, there are still several limitations in the forms of durability, efficiency, and overall costs, which are barriers to its commercial viability. With both bulk electrolyte flowing through its porous matrix and species flux at the solid-electrolyte interface, electrodes are the component of VRFB systems which host electrochemical reactions and facilitate contact between the liquid phase electrolyte and the electronically conductive solid phase. While the more limiting electrode in VRFB systems is dependent on the material, for polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-based carbon felts, the anode constitutes a larger portion of the total overpotential than the cathode. In-situ characterization of modified felts can pro-vide both a path towards understanding the source improvements to the anode but also their transient behavior, thereby creating a path to higher voltage and energy efficiencies and higher commercial viability.The primary experimental components of this work are the symmetric cell con-figuration and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The symmetric cell is an in-situ experimental configuration, which utilizes a single electrolyte at both half-cells of a reactor. The symmetric cell allows an experiment to maintain a constant state of charge, incur no net-crossover and isolate a single redox couple.Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy is the focal experimental diagnostic technique in this work, owing to both its minimal perturbation of the state of a cell and to the insights into electrochemical interfaces it provides. The combination of these two techniques is utilized in this work to both characterize several material modifications and to enhance the understanding of the sensitivity of this diagnostic for the purposes of model selection. A novel experimental configuration is also developed, which combines a cell-in-series approach with the symmetric cell in order to continuously characterize VRFB electrodes as a function of state of charge.The outcomes of this work elucidate methodologies for in-situ characterization of anode modifications from an experimental perspective and also frameworks for characterizing porous electrochemical interfaces, investigating sensitivity, and elucidating systematic approaches to separate electrochemical phenomena occurring at a VRFB anode interface

Microfaunal Analysis of an Upper Pennsylvanian Dark Shale (Heebner) And Several Lower Permian Dark Shales (Lower Council Grove Group) from the Northern Midcontinent, U.S.A.

Geolog

Comparison of Characteristics Associated with Technology Education

Occupational and Adult Educatio

Expanding Earth Science in STEM: A Model

Despite the national call for STEM preparation, there is still a need to foster student interest in STEM at an early age. Although stakeholders have begun to develop STEM curricula at the elementary level, many of these focus on single disciplinary content and often have an emphasis on physical science. Efforts must be made to develop STEM curriculum that is truly integrated and adequately represents NGSS grade-level learning. This may require the use of interdisciplinary teams to improve integrated STEM programs. Projects like the covered wagon mini greenhouse can be used to strengthen student interest in STEM and encourage students to understand and practice the design process while engaging in earth science instruction

UC-20 Analyzing Concentration Levels in Online Education Using Machine Learning

These past few years have introduced the most important time in history to study new faucets of online learning. Due to COVID\u27s impact, online learning became a staple in millions of homes across the country. Guided by the research question, “Can a machine learning model be created and trained to detect student concentration level based on eye and facial data?”, we set out to contribute to society’s understanding of online learning under the guidance of Dr. Ying Xie and Dr. Linh Le. Our process involved recording ourselves participating in online classes to garnish eye and facial data. Each student recorded data where they were staring directly at the screen and focused while also recording data from when the student was distracted and looking elsewhere. Next, deepfake technology was used to swap our faces with celebrity images to protect our privacy while also generating a large pool of data. Finally, we created, trained, and tested different machine learning models to try and find settings best suited for our needs. Preliminary results indicated our top constructed models hovering around 65-75% accuracy. This was all completed using open source software, and we believe that if access was granted to even more accurate eye tracking/deepfake technologies, the accuracy of the model would increase even further. Overall, our results indicate that it would be possible to develop a model that could indicate whether a student was concentrated or distracted based on eye and facial data while implementing a process that could protect the student’s identity, which could be useful data for either the student to review their own performance in class or for a teacher to see at what point students become distracted during an online session.Advisors(s): Dr. Ying Xie (Co-sponsor) Dr. Linh Le (Co-sponsor)Topic(s): Data/Data AnalyticsIT 498