Hands-On or Hands-Off: Effective Elements of Elementary Social Studies Hands-on Lessons

In today’s American school system a hole has begun to form in elementary schools as social studies education has been on the decline, or in some cases, cut out entirely in order to allow more time for mathematics and literacy instruction. Modern educators have begun to acknowledge this gap and want to develop new ways of instructing social studies as a way to keep the subject current, interesting, and effective. Hands-on learning may be one solution for this issue. The purpose of this study was to describe what happened in regard to students’ understanding of and engagement in social studies content when presented in a hands-on teaching style. One fifth grade inclusive classroom, one fourth grade inclusive classroom, and one self-contained fourth grade classroom were taught using hands-on social studies lessons in a rural school district in Western New York. After utilizing a variety of hands-on lessons and activities, and researching the existing literature there is on hands-on learning as it relates to social studies instruction, five themes of effective hands-on lessons emerged that may aid elementary teachers in their creation of these types of lessons: Collaboration, Open-Ended, Meaning, Experience, and Timing (C.O.M.E.T.)

Hands-On or Hands-Off: Effective Elements of Elementary Social Studies Hands-on Lessons

In today\u27s American school system a hole has begun to form in elementary schools as social studies education has been on the decline, or in some cases, cut out entirely in order to allow more time for mathematics and literacy instruction. Modern educators have begun to acknowledge this gap and want to develop new ways of instructing social studies. Hands-on learning may be one solution for this issue. The purpose of this study was to describe what happened in regard to students\u27 understanding of and engagement in social studies content when presented in a hands-on teaching style. One fifth grade inclusive classroom, one fourth grade inclusive classroom, and one self-contained fourth grade classroom were taught using hands-on social studies lessons in a rural school district in Western New York. Five themes of effective hands-on lessons emerged throughout the study that may aid elementary teachers in their creation of these types of lessons: Collaboration, Open-Ended, Meaning, Experience, and Timing (C.O.M.E.T.)

Fusing Literacy and the Arts to Meet Common Core Standards

The literacy demands of current elementary students continues to increase through the use of state testing and Common Core State Standards while the time devoted to creative exploration suffers on the sidelines. As a way to bridge this increasing gap, educators may look towards new means of integrating literacy with the fine arts to produce a creative, fresh appearance to literacy instruction beyond that of traditional reading and writing instruction. The fine arts can serve either as literacy or as a component to a literacy lesson. This project researches the benefits of including the fine arts in some capacity to literacy instruction while also providing twelve lessons that utilize the fine arts to increase student learning. Each lesson combines literacy skills with a fine art focus, not to use art as part of the lesson assessment but as a tool to increase the student understanding, all while remaining aligned to Common Core State Standards

The Promethean: Winter 2012

Winter 2012 edition of The Promethean. Contents: From the Director 2 Temple Grandin 3 Harry Potter Party 4 Why I Teach Honors Courses 5 Phoenix, AZ NCHC Conference 6 Art and Poetry 8https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/promethean/1009/thumbnail.jp

Feasibility and Promise of a Remote-Delivered Preconception Motivational Interviewing Intervention to Reduce Risk for Alcohol-Exposed Pregnancy

Background: Alcohol-exposed pregnancy (AEP) is a leading cause of birth defects. Effective face-to-face preconception interventions based on motivational interviewing (MI) exist and should be translated into remote formats for maximum public health impact. This study investigated the feasibility and promise of a one-session, remote-delivered, preconception, MI-based AEP intervention (EARLY Remote) for non-treatment-seeking community women. Subjects and Methods: This was a single-arm, prospective pilot intervention study. All participants received the intervention via telephone and mail. Feasibility of remote-delivery methods, treatment engagement, treatment credibility, MI treatment integrity, and therapeutic alliance were examined. Outcomes were 3- and 6-month drinks per drinking day (DDD), rate of unreliable contraception, and proportion of women at risk for AEP due to continued risk drinking and no or unreliable contraception use. Results: Feasibility of remote delivery was established; participants were engaged by the intervention and rated it as credible. Integrity to MI and therapeutic alliance were good. Both DDD and rate of unreliable contraception decreased significantly over time. Proportions of women who drank at risk levels, used unreliable or no contraception, and/or were at risk for AEP in the past 90 days decreased significantly from baseline to 6 months. Conclusions: Remote delivery was feasible, and the translated remote intervention may reduce AEP risk. Refinement of EARLY Remote may facilitate its placement within a spectrum of effective MI-based preconception AEP interventions as part of a stepped-care approach. EARLY Remote may have an important role within a stepped-care model for dissemination to geographically disperse women at risk for AEP. This could result in substantial public health impact through reduction of AEP on a larger scale

Improving Interlaminar Shear Strength

To achieve NASA's mission of space exploration, innovative manufacturing processes are being applied to the fabrication of complex propulsion elements.1 Use of fiber-reinforced, polymeric composite tanks are known to reduce weight while increasing performance of propulsion vehicles. Maximizing the performance of these materials is needed to reduce the hardware weight to result in increased performance in support of NASA's missions. NASA has partnered with the Mississippi State University (MSU) to utilize a unique scalable approach of locally improving the critical properties needed for composite structures. MSU is responsible for the primary development of the concept with material and engineering support provided by NASA. The all-composite tank shown in figure 1 is fabricated using a prepreg system of IM7 carbon fiber/CYCOM 5320-1 epoxy resin. This is a resin system developed for out-of-autoclave applications. This new technology is needed to support the fabrication of large, all composite structures and is currently being evaluated on a joint project with Boeing for the Space Launch System (SLS) program. In initial efforts to form an all composite pressure vessel using this prepreg system, a 60% decrease in properties was observed in scarf joint regions. Inspection of these areas identified interlaminar failure in the adjacent laminated structure as the main failure mechanism. This project seeks to improve the interlaminar shear strength (ILSS) within the prepreg layup by locally modifying the interply region shown in figure 2.

Effect of spatial data aggregation on highway safety analysis

In recent highway safety studies, there has been increasing attention to the accuracy and timeliness of crash data, but there have been limited studies on data aggregation. This thesis tests the effects of the underlying preprocessing of crash data for identifying high crash locations. The first portion of this thesis shows a sensitivity analysis of assigning crashes to intersections by spatial proximity and crash data attributes. In addition the sensitivity of using fixed length segmentation was tested along with the influence of using crash rate for identifying high crash locations.;The results indicate minimal effects of using different spatial proximities in identifying high crash locations. The use of spatial proximity and crash data attributes in assigning crashes to intersections may have implications on benefit/cost analyses. Predetermined fixed length segmentation and the use of crash rate may both have impacts on identifying high crash locations

The Effects of Self-Efficacy on Lower Body Power

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of increased self-efficacy on three separate jump tests. Forty-seven students (18 females & 29 males) from Utah State University were randomly assigned to a treatment or control group. Participants performed a vertical jump test, a standing broad jump test, and a 30-s Bosco test on three separate days over a span of 1 week. The treatment group (n = 24) were given false, positive feedback about their performance while the control group (n = 23) were told their true results. Self-efficacy was measured pre and post using the Physical Self-Efficacy scale (PSE) and was found to increase more for the treatment group than the control group. A 3 x 2 ANOVA showed a significant improvement for the Bosco test but no significance for the other two tests, suggesting that self-efficacy has an effect on power endurance but not explosive power

Constrained Task Assignment and Scheduling on Networks of Arbitrary Topology.

This dissertation develops a framework to address centralized and distributed constrained task assignment and task scheduling problems. This framework is used to prove properties of these problems that can be exploited, develop effective solution algorithms, and to prove important properties such as correctness, completeness and optimality. The centralized task assignment and task scheduling problem treated here is expressed as a vehicle routing problem with the goal of optimizing mission time subject to mission constraints on task precedence and agent capability. The algorithm developed to solve this problem is able to coordinate vehicle (agent) timing for task completion. This class of problems is NP-hard and analytical guarantees on solution quality are often unavailable. This dissertation develops a technique for determining solution quality that can be used on a large class of problems and does not rely on traditional analytical guarantees. For distributed problems several agents must communicate to collectively solve a distributed task assignment and task scheduling problem. The distributed task assignment and task scheduling algorithms developed here allow for the optimization of constrained military missions in situations where the communication network may be incomplete and only locally known. Two problems are developed. The distributed task assignment problem incorporates communication constraints that must be satisfied; this is the Communication-Constrained Distributed Assignment Problem. A novel distributed assignment algorithm, the Stochastic Bidding Algorithm, solves this problem. The algorithm is correct, probabilistically complete, and has linear average-case time complexity. The distributed task scheduling problem addressed here is to minimize mission time subject to arbitrary predicate mission constraints; this is the Minimum-time Arbitrarily-constrained Distributed Scheduling Problem. The Optimal Distributed Non-sequential Backtracking Algorithm solves this problem. The algorithm is correct, complete, outputs time optimal schedules, and has low average-case time complexity. Separation of the task assignment and task scheduling problems is exploited here to ameliorate the effects of an incomplete communication network. The mission-modeling conditions that allow this and the benefits gained are discussed in detail. It is shown that the distributed task assignment and task scheduling algorithms developed here can operate concurrently and maintain their correctness, completeness, and optimality properties.Ph.D.Aerospace EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91527/1/jpjack_1.pd