The Role of Elementary Teacher Experience On Classroom Management Self-Efficacy: A Causal Comparative Study

This quantitative causal-comparative study sought to determine if there was a difference in self-efficacy with classroom management between different levels of experience among teachers: pre-service, novice, mid-career, and late-career. Classroom management is an aspect of education that many teachers have famously struggled with, resulting in an increasing number of teachers leaving the field. Strong classroom management self-efficacy among teachers results in higher confidence levels for managing disruptions and unwanted behavior within the classroom. For this study, 166 participants were drawn from a convenience sample of elementary, public, and charter school teachers and pre-service teacher candidates from universities within the state of Utah. The Efficacy in Classroom Management subscale of the Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale was used to assess the strength of self-efficacy for teachers with different experience levels. An ANOVA tested if a difference in classroom management self-efficacy could be attributed to teachers with different classroom experience levels. The results of this study showed a statistically significant difference between the self-efficacy scores of novice teachers and late-career teachers. The data did not reveal a statistically significant difference between the self-efficacy scores of pre-service and mid-career teachers. This suggests that teaching experience may have some impact on self-efficacy, but other factors likely play a more significant role in determining skill in classroom management. Recommendations for future research are made, including doing a longitudinal study, different methods of data collection, or including other variables such as teacher motivation, burnout, and job satisfaction

A Proposed Curriculum for Prenatal, Postnatal, and Early Childhood Christian Music Education

From the prenatal to postnatal/infancy stages, to early childhood and beyond, music plays an integral role in development. This research study aims to detail and describe the benefits of a prenatal, postnatal/infant, and early childhood Christian music education. Employing a mixed-methods and historical research approach, this study seeks to answer the question, in what ways, if any, could a prenatal, postnatal/infant, and early childhood Christian music education be beneficial for developing children and their mothers? By combining the benefits of an early childhood music education with Christian principles, the results of this study will have significance in not only the field of music education but in ministry settings as well. As a result of this study, a curriculum was developed to teach prospective music educators and children’s ministry personnel how to effectively use Christian music in the early childhood stages of development. While many music education programs are readily available for infants and children in the early childhood stages, these programs do not include the prenatal and immediate postnatal development stages and lack biblical principles. The proposed curriculum will teach students how to successfully implement age-appropriate music activities in all three stages of development to support developing children and their mothers through a music-based ministry. This curriculum embodies the call of the Great Commission and strives to transform lives through the power of Jesus while incorporating the immense blessing of music and education

The Role of Drag in the Energetics of Strongly Forced Exoplanet Atmospheres

In contrast to the Earth, where frictional heating is typically negligible, we show that drag mechanisms could act as an important heat source in the strongly-forced atmospheres of some exoplanets, with the potential to alter the circulation. We modify the standard formalism of the atmospheric energy cycle to explicitly track the loss of kinetic energy and the associated frictional (re)heating, for application to exoplanets such as the asymmetrically heated "hot Jupiters" and gas giants on highly eccentric orbits. We establish that an understanding of the dominant drag mechanisms and their dependence on local atmospheric conditions is critical for accurate modeling, not just in their ability to limit wind speeds, but also because they could possibly change the energetics of the circulation enough to alter the nature of the flow. We discuss possible sources of drag and estimate the strength necessary to significantly influence the atmospheric energetics. As we show, the frictional heating depends on the magnitude of kinetic energy dissipation as well as its spatial variation, so that the more localized a drag mechanism is, the weaker it can be and still affect the circulation. We also use the derived formalism to estimate the rate of numerical loss of kinetic energy in a few previously published hot Jupiter models with and without magnetic drag and find it to be surprisingly large, at 5-10% of the incident stellar irradiation.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, ApJ accepted; minor revision

A Feasibility Study of a Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy Group for Domain-Specific Self-Esteem and its Impact on Global Self-Esteem, Depression, Anxiety and Psychological Wellbeing

The study aimed to investigate the feasibility and acceptability of a cognitive-behavioural therapy group for domain-specific self-esteem. It also sought to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention on global self-esteem, depression, anxiety and psychological wellbeing. The study used a pretest-posttest single group design, with a one-month follow-up. The intervention was predominantly deemed to be feasible and acceptable. Recruitment rates and post-treatment retention rates exceeded the study targets. However, retention rate at follow-up was below the study target. Significant improvements were observed in global self-esteem, depression and psychological wellbeing following the intervention. No changes were observed in anxiety. The intervention should now be evaluated further in a randomised controlled trial

Youth-focused citizen science: Examining the role of environmental science learning and agency for conservation

AbstractCitizen science by youth is rapidly expanding, but very little research has addressed the ways programs meet the dual goals of rigorous conservation science and environmental science education. We examined case studies of youth-focused community and citizen science (CCS) and analyzed the learning processes and outcomes, and stewardship activities for youth, as well as contributions to site and species management, each as conservation outcomes. Examining two programs (one coastal and one water quality monitoring) across multiple sites in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA, in- and out-of-school settings, we qualitatively analyzed in-depth observations and pre- and post-program interviews with youth and educators. First, we examined evidence from the programs' impacts on conservation in the form of contribution to site and species management. We found that youth work informed regional resource management and local habitat improvement. Second, we examined the youth participants' environmental science agency (ESA). ESA combines not only understanding of environmental science and inquiry practices, but also the youths' identification with those practices and their developing belief that the ecosystem is something on which they act. We found that youth developed different aspects of environmental science agency in each context. We identify three key CCS processes through which many of the youth developed ESA: ensuring rigorous data collection, disseminating scientific findings to authentic external audiences, and investigating complex social-ecological systems. Our findings suggest that when CCS programs for youth support these processes, they can foster youth participation in current conservation actions, and build their capacity for future conservation actions

Surveying the Safety Culture of Academic Laboratories

The university traditionally has been the foundation for young adults’ professional development, yet the proclivity toward safety culture has garnered less focus in higher education than in the workforce. A survey of faculty at a medium-sized, research-active, private institution revealed specific areas of policy noncompliance as well as specific safety attitudes that can be targeted for interventions. Albeit a snapshot view, the survey implies that safety needs better representation in the classroom, teaching laboratories, and research facilities at universities. Safety is not abandoned by any means, and there is a strong presence of safety-oriented individuals, but the data show barriers to safety do exist that need to be addressed. The implications of this small-scale study serve as a foundation for a more comprehensive multi-institutional study in the future

Done to death? Re-evaluating narrative construction in slasher sequels.

Slasher sequels, such as those in the Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street series, are often criticised for their derivative processes of narrative construction, which are widely perceived to sacrifice development and complexity for the sake of repetition and formula. Thus, although scholars such as Carol Clover, Ian Conrich, and Tony Williams have examined these films from a range of psychoanalytical and sociocultural perspectives, academics have generally avoided engaging in processes of close formal analysis. Where such analyses do exist, in Vera Dika's structural study of the slasher film, for example, the research tends to be geared toward interrogating the generic properties of the films, rather than the properties associated with their status as film sequels. As a result, there is a general lack of understanding about the narrative construction of the slasher sequel, leaving the dominant critical assumptions to proliferate largely unchallenged. However, for theorists such as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, working within the domain of 'historical poetics,' even the most conventionalised systems of narrative operate according to complex constructive processes, often perceptible only to those willing to engage in close scrutiny. The reluctance to engage with slasher sequels as sequels is indicative of a wider tendency within film studies, where the practice of cinematic sequelisation has traditionally remained beyond the purview of academic analysis. In recent years, however, writers including Stuart Henderson have begun to re-examine the sequel from new critical perspectives, drawing on both historical poetics and Gerard Genette's concept of hypertextuality to offer fresh insights into the processes involved in constructing a system of narrative continuity over multiple films. With hypertextuality and historical poetics demonstrating the potential to provide new perspectives on the film sequel, this study draws on both approaches to create a combined framework of analysis capable of answering the question: is there any evidence to suggest that the processes of narrative construction in slasher sequels are more complex than previously acknowledged? Using this framework to engage in a formal analysis of the Halloween films reveals a network of dynamic narrative processes operating beneath the conventionalised surface of the series. By subjecting the original story to extension, expansion, elaboration, and modification, each Halloween sequel serves to enhance, complicate, or compromise the coherence of the narrative system as a whole, and, in doing so, prompts the continual reconceptualisation and recontextualisation of previously-established information. In this way, the processes of narrative construction within the Halloween series can be seen to demonstrate complexity at both a formal and cognitive level. These findings suggest that there is evidence to challenge not only the existing critical assumptions about the Halloween sequels, but also the critical assumptions pertaining to other sequels in the slasher sub-genre. With the sequels in the Halloween series generally representative of those in other slasher series, sharing many narrative properties and drawing similar criticisms for many of the same perceived deficiencies, the study concludes that the array of dynamic narrative processes shown to operate in the Halloween sequels is also likely to be present in other slasher sequels. In drawing this conclusion, the study ultimately establishes that there is evidence to suggest that the processes of narrative construction in slasher sequels are more complex than previously acknowledged. By expanding the existing understanding of slasher sequels in this way, this study succeeds in making an original contribution to knowledge, serving to advance both the established field of research surrounding the slasher sub-genre and the emergent field of research surrounding the film sequel

Lyapunov-Based Dropout Deep Neural Network (Lb-DDNN) Controller

Deep neural network (DNN)-based adaptive controllers can be used to compensate for unstructured uncertainties in nonlinear dynamic systems. However, DNNs are also very susceptible to overfitting and co-adaptation. Dropout regularization is an approach where nodes are randomly dropped during training to alleviate issues such as overfitting and co-adaptation. In this paper, a dropout DNN-based adaptive controller is developed. The developed dropout technique allows the deactivation of weights that are stochastically selected for each individual layer within the DNN. Simultaneously, a Lyapunov-based real-time weight adaptation law is introduced to update the weights of all layers of the DNN for online unsupervised learning. A non-smooth Lyapunov-based stability analysis is performed to ensure asymptotic convergence of the tracking error. Simulation results of the developed dropout DNN-based adaptive controller indicate a 38.32% improvement in the tracking error, a 53.67% improvement in the function approximation error, and 50.44% lower control effort when compared to a baseline adaptive DNN-based controller without dropout regularization

Ohmic Dissipation in the Atmospheres of Hot Jupiters

Hot Jupiter atmospheres exhibit fast, weakly-ionized winds. The interaction of these winds with the planetary magnetic field generates drag on the winds and leads to ohmic dissipation of the induced electric currents. We study the magnitude of ohmic dissipation in representative, three-dimensional atmospheric circulation models of the hot Jupiter HD 209458b. We find that ohmic dissipation can reach or exceed 1% of the stellar insolation power in the deepest atmospheric layers, in models with and without dragged winds. Such power, dissipated in the deep atmosphere, appears sufficient to slow down planetary contraction and explain the typically inflated radii of hot Jupiters. This atmospheric scenario does not require a top insulating layer or radial currents that penetrate deep in the planetary interior. Circulation in the deepest atmospheric layers may actually be driven by spatially non-uniform ohmic dissipation. A consistent treatment of magnetic drag and ohmic dissipation is required to further elucidate the consequences of magnetic effects for the atmospheres and the contracting interiors of hot Jupiters.Comment: Accepted to the Astrophysical Journa