Prior Knowledge Base Of Constellations And Bright Stars Among Non-Science Majoring Undergraduates And 14-15 Year Old Students

As part of an effort to improve students’ knowledge of constellations and bright stars in an introductory level descriptive astronomy survey course, we measured the baseline knowledge that students bring to the class and how their score evolve over the course of the semester.  This baseline is needed by the broader astronomy education research community for future comparisons about which strategies and environments are the best for learning the stars and constellations.  As a comparison group, we also examined the baseline knowledge of 14-15 year old, 9th grade students from the United States. 664 university students averaged 2.04±0.08 on a constellation knowledge survey, while 46 additional students averaged higher at 8.23±0.23. The large, lower scoring group is found to have the same knowledge level as the 14-15 year old 9th grade students which scored 1.79±0.13.  The constellations most often identified correctly were Orion and Ursa Major. For the star portion of the survey, which was only given to the university students, we found essentially no statistically significant prior knowledge for the 17 brightest stars surveyed. The average score for the stars was 1.05±0.05, as expected for guessing, although Polaris and Betelgeuse are labeled correctly more often than any other stars

Dutch Author Recognition Test

Book reading shows large individual variability and correlates with better language ability and more empathy. This makes reading exposure an interesting variable to study. Research in English suggests that an author recognition test is the most reliable objective assessment of reading frequency. In this article, we describe the efforts we made to build and test a Dutch author recognition test (DART for older participants and DART_R for younger participants). Our data show that the test is reliable and valid, both in the Netherlands and in Belgium (split-half reliability over .9 with university students, significant correlations with language abilities) and can be used with a young, non-university population. The test is free to use for research purposes

Forage Crop Research: Evaluating Forage Species in Iowa for Productivity during Drought Conditions—Quality

The objective of this research is to evaluate the forage quality of forage species for their seasonal productivity differences and their ability to withstand droughty environmental conditions in Iowa

Forage Crop Research: Evaluating Forage Species in Iowa for Productivity during Drought Conditions

Drought often results in greater agricultural damage in southern, western, and northeastern Iowa than in the rest of the state. Slight to severe slopes are prone to erosion, and soils high in clay content are slow to drain excess moisture during wet periods and have low amounts of available moisture during periods of drought. The land is predominantly used for livestock production because of factors that limit level of productivity in row-crop production

Distinguishing integration and prediction accounts of ERP N400 modulations in language processing through experimental design

Prediction of upcoming input is thought to be a main characteristic of language processing (e.g. Altmann & Mirkovic, 2009; Dell & Chang, 2014; Federmeier, 2007; Ferreira & Chantavarin, 2018; Pickering & Gambi, 2018; Hale, 2001; Hickok, 2012; Huettig 2015; Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016; Levy, 2008; Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2016; Pickering & Garrod, 2013; Van Petten & Luka, 2012). One of the main pillars of experimental support for this notion comes from studies that have attempted to measure electrophysiological markers of prediction when participants read or listened to sentences ending in highly predictable words. The N400, a negative-going and centro-parietally distributed component of the ERP occurring approximately 400ms after (target) word onset, has been frequently interpreted as indexing prediction of the word (or the semantic representations and/or the phonological form of the predicted word, see Kutas & Federmeier, 2011; Nieuwland, 2019; Van Petten & Luka, 2012; for review). A major difficulty for interpreting N400 effects in language processing however is that it has been difficult to establish whether N400 target word modulations conclusively reflect prediction rather than (at least partly) ease of integration. In the present exploratory study, we attempted to distinguish lexical prediction (i.e. ‘top-down’ activation) from lexical integration (i.e. ‘bottom-up’ activation) accounts of ERP N400 modulations in language processing

Nuclear structure studies at intermediate energies

This report discusses the following topics: Search for dibaryon resonances; analysis of {sup 208}Pb({pi}{sup {plus minus}},{pi}{sup {plus minus}}) data; analysis of {sup 206,207,208}Pb(p,p{prime}) data; study of transition nuclei by (p,p{prime}); search for recoil free {delta}-production; search for low lying magnetic states; proton nucleus scattering and swelling of nucleons; measurement of spin observables in {sup 28}Si(p,p{prime}); strength of tensor force in nuclei; global analysis of (p,p{prime}) reactions to high spin states in {sup 28}Si and {sup 58}Ni and density dependent modifications; MRS Setup and development; and development of coincidence studies with the MRS