Addressing Student Discipline Discrepancies Through Restorative Justice and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports

Schools throughout the country have relied on suspension and expulsion to create ‘safer’ schools, free from harm and distraction. This trend of reliance on suspension started in the mid-1990s, reaching its peak in 2011. This happened as a result of the implementation zero-tolerance discipline policies nearly nationwide. Zero-tolerance called for specific punishments for clearly outlined unsafe behaviors to start, but as years progressed, zero-tolerance in the form of suspension became a catch all for all types of behavior. In this shift toward suspension as a dominate form for behavior correction, Black students have been suspended at an alarming rate in comparison with their White counterparts. The degree to which suspension takes place is nearly three times the rate for Black students in comparison to white students. Compounding this, when students are suspended from school, the likelihood of interaction with he juvenile and criminal justice system roughly doubles. This is problematic but given the history of inequality that has existed in America across racial groups, this demands attention. There are several recommendations and strategies in this project, which seek to address this problem. This research looks in several directions to answer the challenge of responding to this inequity. Restorative Justice in place of suspension serves as a model for reducing the need and use of suspension for classroom misbehaviors. Further, school discipline policies demand revision to shift the focus from discipline and removal to restoring the community that was harmed by student misbehavior. Finally, there is professional development and training for school counselors to share restorative practices with their school staffs. Through these strategies, the reliance on suspension for addressing student misbehavior will recede

Diving into Assessment & Data with 1:1 Technology as Media Specialists

How do we prove the worth of Information Literacy classes? Where is the data? Learn to use a variety of formative assessments with 1:1 technology in the school library media center. We will explain our use of Socrative, Schoology, Google Apps, and more. Then we will detail a nationally-normed summative tool, TRAILS. Add your voice to help create Minnesota’s TRAILS Benchmarks, while providing individualized feedback to your students and administration. Links for presentation: Today’s Meet: https://todaysmeet.com/ITL Slideshow presentation: http://goo.gl/NqLVfB Biblionasium: https://www.biblionasium.com Schoology: https://www.schoology.com/ Book Trailer Tips: http://www.booktrailersforreaders.com/How+to+make+a+book+trailer TRAILS: http://www.trails-9.org/ TRAILS Wiki: http://goo.gl/KxWmt

What Is Quality? Advancing Value-Added Approaches to Assessing Law School Bar Exam Performance

U.S. News & World Report rankings and tier groupings are often used as proxy measures of law school quality. But many of the factors that contribute to both law school outcomes and U.S. News rankings (e.g., undergraduate GPAs [UGPA], LSAT scores, admission rates) do not reflect the impact law schools have on student outcomes, such as bar passage and employment. We propose a method for measuring institutional quality that is based on a school’s ability to improve its graduates’ likelihood of first-time bar passage while controlling for those students’ preadmission characteristics. Using a value-added modeling technique, we first isolate each law school’s expected bar performance for the 2013–2018 bar takers given those cohorts’ entering characteristics and the school’s attrition and transfer patterns, then identify the degree to which this prediction overperforms or underperforms the school’s actual bar performance. Additionally, we utilize a bar pass differential rather than a school’s first-time bar pass rate, allowing us to account for variation between jurisdictions’ grading and cut scores. Finally, we provide a ranked list of law schools based on their added value for each entering cohort

Persuading others to avoid persuasion: inoculation theory and resistant health attitudes

Inoculation theory, a theory of conferring resistance to persuasive influence, has established efficacy as a messaging strategy in the health domain. In fact, the earliest research on the theory in the 1960s involved health issues to build empirical support for tenets in the inoculation framework. Over the ensuing decades, scholars have further examined the effectiveness of inoculation-based messages at creating robust positive health attitudes. We overview these efforts, highlight the structure of typical inoculation-based health messages, and describe the similarities and differences between this method of counter-persuasion and other preparatory techniques commonly employed by health researchers and practitioners. Finally, we consider contexts in which inoculation-oriented health messages could be most useful, and describe how the health domain could offer a useful scaffold to study conceptual issues of the theory

Junior Recital: Zachary Opitz

A junior recital featuring Zachary Opitz, Tyrone Jackson, Piper Johnson, and Josh Baffour.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/2416/thumbnail.jp

It\u27s Not Where You Start, It\u27s How You Finish: Predicting Law School and Bar Success

In this study, we examine the extent to which academic and student engagement factors explain law school grades and first-time bar exam performance. Applying fixed effects linear and logit modeling, our analysis leverages law student transcript data and responses to the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) among students from a diverse group of 20 law schools to estimate academic performance and odds of bar passage. Most notably, we find that GPA improvement during law school is associated with greater odds of passing the bar exam, particularly among students who struggle the most during the first semester. Furthermore, while we find that LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA are predictive (p \u3c 0.05) of both law school performance and bar success (as in previous research), these effects are quite modest. Based on these findings, we propose and discuss several recommendations. These should be helpful to higher education scholars and practitioners, particularly law school deans, administrators, faculty, and academic support staff

Bluefish: A Relational Framework for Graphic Representations

Complex graphic representations -- such as annotated visualizations, molecular structure diagrams, or Euclidean geometry -- convey information through overlapping perceptual relations. To author such representations, users are forced to use rigid, purpose-built tools with limited flexibility and expressiveness. User interface (UI) frameworks provide only limited relief as their tree-based models are a poor fit for expressing overlaps. We present Bluefish, a diagramming framework that extends UI architectures to support overlapping perceptual relations. Bluefish graphics are instantiated as relational scenegraphs: hierarchical data structures augmented with adjacency relations. Authors specify these relations with scoped references to components found elsewhere in the scenegraph. For layout, Bluefish lazily materializes necessary coordinate transformations. We demonstrate that Bluefish enables authoring graphic representations across a diverse range of domains while preserving the compositional and abstractional affordances of traditional UI frameworks. Moreover, we show how relational scenegraphs capture previously latent semantics that can later be retargeted (e.g., for screen reader accessibility).Comment: 27 pages, 14 figure

Junior Recital: “Out of the Loop, The Music of The Brecker Brothers”

Junior Recital: “Out of the Loop, The Music of The Brecker Brothershttps://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/2441/thumbnail.jp

Harvest

A poster presented by Samantha Coffey, Ellie Barber, Lucy Gipson, Jack Hoskins-Harris, Jackson Huff and Josh Groves for the class Business, Accounting, and Entrepreneurship.https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/gsp_projects_2019/1015/thumbnail.jp