Lessons Learned From a Rural Classroom Study: Transitioning From Concrete to Virtual Manipulatives to Teach Math Fact Fluency to Students With Learning Disabilities

As the use of technology has become more prevalent within the educational environment over the past decade, the emergence of the use of virtual manipulatives to support student learning in math has made transitioning to technology-infused math instruction unavoidable. Students in rural areas, however, have tended to receive far less technology-infused instruction due to the many challenges faced by rural schools that can adversely affect academic opportunities and disrupt equity in learning and teaching. In the current paper, we report on a classroom study conducted to examine whether the previously proven effects of concrete manipulatives can carry over into those of virtual manipulatives when teaching math fact fluency in multiplication and explored the potential for virtual manipulatives in rural classrooms from the teacher’s perspective.  Quantitative and qualitative results both indicated a promising potential for usage of virtual manipulatives, with meaningful implications for practitioners. The educational implications for designing and planning effective instruction incorporating virtual manipulatives are discussed

Stemming on STEM: A STEM Education Framework for Students with Disabilities

There has been increased attention paid to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics also known as STEM. The focus on STEM has been both educational and occupational. Unfortunately, students with disabilities perform below their peers without disabilities in math and science. The authors discuss issues related to STEM and students with disabilities. These issues include (1) traditional views of STEM education, (2) the importance of STEM education, and (3) students with disabilities performance in STEM. The authors posit a framework for STEM education for students with disabilities and promote the incorporation of the arts to increase students’ STEM knowledge and achievement

An Examination of the Current Status of Paraprofessionals through their Lens: Role, Training, and Supervision

Revisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1997 allowed for districts to hire teachers’ aides to assist in the educational process. These teachers’ aides, known as paraprofessionals or paraeducators, have increased in number since 1997 and now play an important role in helping students with disabilities. The purpose of the current study is to diagnose the current situation of paraprofessionals in special education within the four key aspects of appropriate role, inappropriate role, training, and supervision. A total of 47 paraprofessionals participated in the survey. Using the paraprofessionals’ perspectives on what the challenges and demanding areas were, we aim to establish a basis for providing teachers and school administrators guidelines to better support paraprofessionals who work with students with disabilities. Future research and limitations are discussed

Entrepreneurship and Incarceration

This dissertation examines entrepreneurship as a way to overcome labor market discrimination. Specifically, the three empirical essays of this dissertation introduce and evaluate entrepreneurship as a career choice for the formerly incarcerated population in the United States, by studying the antecedents and economic and social impacts of entrepreneurship for formerly incarcerated individuals. The first essay examines whether entrepreneurship is a response to labor market discrimination for formerly incarcerated individuals and establishes entrepreneurship as a route to achieve economic and social reintegration. I take advantage of a quasi-experimental setting using the staggered implementation of the “Ban-the-Box” policy in the United States to disentangle the underlying mechanism of how labor market discrimination affects formerly incarcerated individuals in their entrepreneurial choices. The findings suggest that formerly incarcerated individuals, especially those who are African American, are pushed into entrepreneurship due to the discrimination they face from employers. Yet, I also find that entrepreneurship is a viable alternative career choice for formerly incarcerated people, yielding higher income and lower recidivism rates. The second essay investigates the long-term impacts of entrepreneurship on subsequent employment outcomes for the formerly incarcerated population. This essay argues that entrepreneurship will benefit formerly incarcerated entrepreneurs in subsequent employment outcomes, because entrepreneurship provides a positive signal of commitment and fit to potential employers. Results suggest that, compared to formerly incarcerated individuals without any entrepreneurial experience, those with entrepreneurial experience have an increased likelihood of securing employment, regardless of actual entrepreneurial success. This is particularly true for formerly incarcerated individuals who are high school dropouts or racial, suggesting that entrepreneurship provides long-term benefits to those who are especially lacking in other positive credentials and, thus, are the most stigmatized by employers. The third essay studies the entrepreneurial barriers that formerly incarcerated individuals face in starting their businesses and the implications of such barriers on entrepreneurial outcomes. I find that formerly incarcerated individuals are far less likely to gain access to capital from financial institutions or the government compared to similar non formerly incarcerated individuals, having to rely on personal savings or capital from family and friends. This barrier to gaining resources from financial institutions is more pronounced for African American or Hispanic formerly incarcerated individuals. Furthermore, I find that such barriers to entrepreneurship negatively impact the ventures that formerly incarcerated individuals found regarding the industry, longevity, size, and legal form. These findings provide implications to understanding how such barriers to entrepreneurship can inhibit the role of entrepreneurship as an alternative pathway for discriminated individuals to achieve upward mobility and integration

Elongin B-Mediated Epigenetic Alteration of Viral Chromatin Correlates with Efficient Human Cytomegalovirus Gene Expression and Replication

Elongins B and C are members of complexes that increase the efficiency of transcriptional elongation by RNA polymerase II (RNAPII) and enhance the monoubiquitination of histone H2B, an epigenetic mark of actively transcribed genes. Here we show that, in addition to its role in facilitating transcription of the cellular genome, elongin B also enhances gene expression from the double-stranded DNA genome of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a pathogenic herpesvirus. Reducing the level of elongin B by small interfering RNA- or short hairpin RNA-mediated knockdown decreased viral mRNA expression, viral protein accumulation, viral DNA replication, and infectious virion production. Chromatin immunoprecipitation analysis indicated viral genome occupancy of the elongating form of RNAPII, and monoubiquitinated histone H2B was reduced in elongin B-deficient cells. These data suggest that, in addition to the previously documented epigenetic regulation of transcriptional initiation, HCMV also subverts cellular elongin B-mediated epigenetic mechanisms for enhancing transcriptional elongation to enhance viral gene expression and virus replication

The level of perception of illusory vowels

We report on results of perception experiments comparing Korean and English native speakers on stop-nasal sequences. In a categorization task, Korean listeners reported the presence of a vowel significantly more often than English listeners only when the stop was voiced. However, in an ERP experiment, both groups displayed significant MMN responses to the presence/absence of the vowel regardless of the voicing of the stop. The results of the current experiments provide evidence that language-specific perception of the absence/presence of a vowel in stop-nasal sequences takes place not at the preattentive auditory level but rather at the level of phonological categorization

Is There a Bilingual Advantage in Phonetic and Phonological Acquisition? The Initial Learning of Word-Final Coronal Stop Realization in a Novel Accent of English

Research question: We address the question of whether the cognitive advantage of the bilingual mind, already demonstrated in the case of auditory processing or novel word acquisition, also applies to other linguistic domains, specifically to phonetic and phonological learning. Design: We compare the performance of 17 monolinguals and 25 bilinguals from Canada in a production experiment with two tasks: imitation and spontaneous reproduction of a novel foreign accent, specifically Sussex English. Data and analysis: To eliminate potential sources of variability, our focus is on a sound already existing in the subjects’ production (the glottal stop), but differently mapped to surface representations in the novel accent to which they were exposed (i.e. as an allophone of coronal stops in word-final position). We measured the glottal stop rates of our subjects in baseline, training, and post-training. Results: The two groups behaved differently, with bilinguals showing a larger increase of their glottal stop rate post-training. Our results are thus consistent with a bilingual advantage in phonetic and phonological learning. Originality: We interpret these findings in light of recent psycholinguistic work and conclude that echoic memory strategies, possibly underlain by stronger subcortical encoding of sound in bilinguals, may account for our results by facilitating the re-mapping between existing mental representations of sounds and existing articulatory command configurations. Significance: Our study adds to the body of work showing that there is an advantage of bilingualism in second dialect learning in adulthood, and provides an explanation in terms of perceptual strategies in which echoic memory is involved. We also contribute to the recent body of research suggesting that imitation of an action can result in improved understanding of that action

Interpretation of the Top-of-Atmosphere Energy Flux for Future Arctic Warming

With the trend of amplified warming in the Arctic, we examine the observed and modeled top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiative responses to surface air-temperature changes over the Arctic by using TOA energy fluxes from NASA’s CERES observations and those from twelve climate models in CMIP5. Considerable inter-model spreads in the radiative responses suggest that future Arctic warming may be determined by the compensation between the radiative imbalance and poleward energy transport (mainly via transient eddy activities). The poleward energy transport tends to prevent excessive Arctic warming: the transient eddy activities are weakened because of the reduced meridional temperature gradient under polar amplification. However, the models that predict rapid Arctic warming do not realistically simulate the compensation effect. This role of energy compensation in future Arctic warming is found only when the inter-model differences in cloud radiative effects are considered. Thus, the dynamical response can act as a buffer to prevent excessive Arctic warming against the radiative response of 0.11 W m^(−2) K^(−1) as measured from satellites, which helps the Arctic climate system retain an Arctic climate sensitivity of 4.61 K. Therefore, if quantitative analyses of the observations identify contribution of atmospheric dynamics and cloud effects to radiative imbalance, the satellite-measured radiative response will be a crucial indicator of future Arctic warming

Too little, too late: A longitudinal study of English corrective focus by Mandarin speakers

This study tracks the production of English corrective focus by Mandarin speakers (MS) living in the US over a two-year period. We show that the MS differed from English speakers (ES) in the alignment of the corrective focus pitch accent: while ES productions typically showed a pitch peak on the stressed syllable, followed by an abrupt fall, the pitch rise and fall for MS was later and less steep. While the MS productions became more English-like over time in some respects, the failure to correctly align pitch accent persisted over time. We argue that this misalignment of pitch peak cannot be attributed to a lack of sensitivity to English stress, but rather represents a common failure to master the complex timing patterns involved in synchronizing pitch, intensity, and duration cues with segmental structure in a second language

Hubble Space Telescope Pixel Analysis of the Interacting Face-on Spiral Galaxy NGC 5194 (M51A)

A pixel analysis is carried out on the interacting face-on spiral galaxy NGC 5194 (M51A), using the HST/ACS images in the F435W, F555W and F814W (BVI) bands. After 4x4 binning of the HST/ACS images to secure a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio for each pixel, we derive several quantities describing the pixel color-magnitude diagram (pCMD) of NGC 5194: blue/red color cut, red pixel sequence parameters, blue pixel sequence parameters and blue-to-red pixel ratio. The red sequence pixels are mostly older than 1 Gyr, while the blue sequence pixels are mostly younger than 1 Gyr, in their luminosity-weighted mean stellar ages. The color variation in the red pixel sequence from V = 20 mag arcsec^(-2) to V = 17 mag arcsec^(-2) corresponds to a metallicity variation of \Delta[Fe/H] ~ 2 or an optical depth variation of \Delta\tau_V ~ 4 by dust, but the actual sequence is thought to originate from the combination of those two effects. At V < 20 mag arcsec^(-2), the color variation in the blue pixel sequence corresponds to an age variation from 5 Myr to 300 Myr under the assumption of solar metallicity and \tau_V = 1. To investigate the spatial distributions of stellar populations, we divide pixel stellar populations using the pixel color-color diagram and population synthesis models. As a result, we find that the pixel population distributions across the spiral arms agree with a compressing process by spiral density waves: dense dust \rightarrow newly-formed stars. The tidal interaction between NGC 5194 and NGC 5195 appears to enhance the star formation at the tidal bridge connecting the two galaxies. We find that the pixels corresponding to the central active galactic nucleus (AGN) area of NGC 5194 show a tight sequence at the bright-end of the pCMD, which are in the region of R ~ 100 pc and may be a photometric indicator of AGN properties.Comment: 27 pages, 20 figures, accepted for publication in Ap