The Impact of the Instructional Practices Inventory At an Illinois Middle School

This participatory action research study followed a middle school for two academic years to determine if incorporating the Instructional Practices Inventory (IPI) would increase classroom experiences that engaged students in learning and encouraged deeper, higher-order thinking skills. This study also used student standardized test scores, the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) and Northwest Evaluation Association Measures of Academic Progress (NWEA MAP), to determine if there was a relationship between the IPI process and improved test scores. I worked as the IPI coder, researcher, and facilitator for this study. During the research study, I kept field notes and observational data. Utilizing the IPI process, I created a series of “snapshots” to measure student learning experiences during a typical day at Kaskaskia Middle School (a pseudonym). The “snapshots” of learning experiences were collected during my focused walks through the middle school. A focused walk occurred when an educator, trained and approved in the IPI coding process, systematically walked through a school, recording a minimum of 100 classroom observations, and used the IPI tools to assess classroom learning experiences. Use of a trained and approved IPI coder was critically important, because the IPI required an understanding of -- and fidelity to -- the process for the purpose of collecting and processing accurate data. Using the data collected from these snapshots, I created pie charts for core, noncore and all classes, depicting my observational data. I presented these engagement profiles to the faculty for their analyses. This procedure encouraged faculty collaboration, an important tenet in the IPI, in both small and whole groups. The focused walks, followed by faculty analysis and collaboration, were repeated six times during the two-year study. During year two, I created longitudinal data to look for possible trends in student-engaged learning and test scores. From this study, data from MAP and ISAT tests showed a strong, upward trend. In addition, faculty collaboration improved during the use of the IPI. Implications for this research include the recommendation to continue the IPI process throughout this district, with the possibility of expanding to other school districts

The Illegitimate Children and Parental Rights Act

The Illegitimate Children and Parental Rights Act, signed into law March 20, 1973, has substantially altered procedures relating to adoption and custody in Washington. Both parents of an illegitimate child now have primary right to custody of the child. The putative father now is entitled to notice of those proceedings which may permanently terminate his parental rights, including a hearing to determine the necessity of his consent to his child\u27s adoption. In addition, a putative father now stands on an equal footing with the child\u27s natural mother when seeking custody of his child at a filiation proceeding

Investigating Dataset Distinctiveness

Just as a human might struggle to interpret another human’s handwriting, a computer vision program might fail when asked to perform one task in two different domains. To be more specific, visualize a self-driving car as a human driver who had only ever driven on clear, sunny days, during daylight hours. This driver – the self-driving car – would inevitably face a significant challenge when asked to drive when it is violently raining or foggy during the night, putting the safety of its passengers in danger. An extensive understanding of the data we use to teach computer vision models – such as those that will be driving our cars in the years to come – is absolutely necessary as these sorts of complex systems find their way into everyday human life. This study works to develop a comprehensive meaning of the style of a dataset, or the quantitative difference between cursive lettering and print lettering, with respect to the image data used in the field of computer vision. We accomplished this by asking a machine learning model to predict which commonly used dataset a particular image belongs to, based on detailed features of the images. If the model performed well when classifying an image based on which dataset it belongs to, that dataset was considered distinct. We then developed a linear relationship between this distinctiveness metric and a model’s ability to learn from one dataset and test on another, so as to have a better understanding of how a computer vision system will perform in a given context, before it is trained

Comparison of Visual Datasets for Machine Learning

One of the greatest technological improvements in recent years is the rapid progress using machine learning for processing visual data. Among all factors that contribute to this development, datasets with labels play crucial roles. Several datasets are widely reused for investigating and analyzing different solutions in machine learning. Many systems, such as autonomous vehicles, rely on components using machine learning for recognizing objects. This paper compares different visual datasets and frameworks for machine learning. The comparison is both qualitative and quantitative and investigates object detection labels with respect to size, location, and contextual information. This paper also presents a new approach creating datasets using real-time, geo-tagged visual data, greatly improving the contextual information of the data. The data could be automatically labeled by cross-referencing information from other sources (such as weather)

RhoH Regulates Subcellular Localization of ZAP-70 and Lck in T Cell Receptor Signaling

RhoH is an hematopoietic-specific, GTPase-deficient Rho GTPase that plays a role in T development. We investigated the mechanisms of RhoH function in TCR signaling. We found that the association between Lck and CD3ζ was impaired in RhoH-deficient T cells, due to defective translocation of both Lck and ZAP-70 to the immunological synapse. RhoH with Lck and ZAP-70 localizes in the detergent-soluble membrane fraction where the complex is associated with CD3ζ phosphorylation. To determine if impaired translocation of ZAP-70 was a major determinant of defective T cell development, Rhoh-/- bone marrow cells were transduced with a chimeric myristoylation-tagged ZAP-70. Myr-ZAP-70 transduced cells partially reversed the in vivo defects of RhoH-associated thymic development and TCR signaling. Together, our results suggest that RhoH regulates TCR signaling via recruitment of ZAP-70 and Lck to CD3ζ in the immunological synapse. Thus, we define a new function for a RhoH GTPase as an adaptor molecule in TCR signaling pathway