Impacts of MTSS on the Performance of Struggling Students

The purpose of this paper is to share the impact and results of implementing multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) in Oskaloosa High School. The high school was showing an increase in struggling students, which led to an increasing proportion of the student population failing courses. The study is an overview of the changes over the past three years, evaluating how struggling students were supported prior to and after the implementation of a robust MTSS program. Specific data on the number of students receiving a failing grade at the end of each trimester was collected and analyzed. Results show a positive effect on student performance and confidence after the implementation of a MTSS system. The old system of gathering students after a less-than-proficient assessment has been sidelined for a much more effective in-progress monitoring system that is now called MTSS at Oskaloosa High School

Stress-strain behavior and geometrical properties of packings of elongated particles

We present a numerical analysis of the effect of particle elongation on the quasistatic behavior of sheared granular media by means of the Contact Dynamics method. The particle shapes are rounded-cap rectangles characterized by their elongation. The macroscopic and microstructural properties of several packings subjected to biaxial compression are analyzed as a function of particle elongation. We find that the shear strength is an increasing linear function of elongation. Performing an additive decomposition of the stress tensor based on a harmonic approximation of the angular dependence of branch vectors, contact normals and forces, we show that the increasing mobilization of friction force and the associated anisotropy are key effects of particle elongation. These effects are correlated with partial nematic ordering of the particles which tend to be oriented perpendicular to the major principal stress direction and form side-to-side contacts. However, the force transmission is found to be mainly guided by cap-to-side contacts, which represent the largest fraction of contacts for the most elongated particles. Another interesting finding is that, in contrast to shear strength, the solid fraction first increases with particle elongation, but declines as the particles become more elongated. It is also remarkable that the coordination number does not follow this trend so that the packings of more elongated particles are looser but more strongly connected.Comment: Submited to Physical Review

Quasi F-Covers of Tychonoff Spaces

A Tychonoff topological space is called a quasi F-space if each dense cozero-set of X is C*-embedded in X. In Canad. J. Math. 32 (1980), 657-685 Dashiell, Hager, and Henriksen construct the minimal quasi F-cover QF(X) of a compact space X as an inverse limit space, and identify the ring C(QF(X)) as the order-Cauchy completion of the ring C*(X). In On perfect irreducible preimages, Topology Proc. 9 (1984), 173-189, Vermeer constructed the minimal quasi F-cover of an arbitrary Tychonoff space. In this paper the minimal quasi F-cover of a compact space X is constructed as the space of ultrafilters on a certain sublattice of the Boolean algebra of regular closed subsets of X. The relationship between QF(X) and QF(βX) is studied in detail, and broad conditions under which β(QF(X)) = QF(βX) are obtained, together with examples of spaces for which the relationship fails. (Here βX denotes the Stone-Cech compactification of X.) The role of QF(X) as a projective object in certain topological categories is investigated

The Space of Minimal Prime Ideals of C(x) Need not be Basically Disconnected

Problems posed twenty and twenty-five years ago by M. Henriksen and M. Jerison are solved by showing that the space of minimal prime ideals of the ring C(X) of continuous real-valued functions on a compact (Hausdorff) space need not be basically disconnected-or even an F-space