The Beliefs and Practices of Second Grade Teachers Who Implement Independent Reading and Its Effect on Students’ Reading Achievement and Reading Volume

The purpose of the present study was to explore the beliefs and practices of teachers who implement independent reading in their classrooms. Results showed that teachers who implemented independent reading believed in the importance of both the quantity and quality of student reading. The teachers’ practices of independent reading showed students selecting books that were “just-right” for them to read, social experiences around reading, guided practice through reading conferences with the teacher, and setting a purpose for reading through response activities. A nonexperimental comparative design was used to examine the effects of independent reading on reading volume and reading achievement. Results indicated that there were no statistically significant effects between the independent reading group and the no independent reading group for reading achievement or reading volume. Additionally, there was no statistically significant difference in growth of reading achievement between higher and lower readers in the independent reading group

Most Asked Agronomic Questions

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Transgranular Stress Corrosion Cracking of 304L Stainless Steel Pipe Clamps in Direct Use Geothermal Water Heating Applications

Direct use geothermal heating relies on heat extracted from naturally occurring geothermal water sources to provide heating needs for commercial and residential use. The city of Boise, Idaho maintains the largest district geothermal heating system in the United States, utilizing a source of geothermal water at 80 °C. 304 Stainless steel (UNS S30400) pipe clamps are used throughout the system as repair seals and for new service connections. Occasionally unexpected fracture of the stainless steel clamps occurs with time-in-service periods as short as 1 year. A failure analysis was conducted, including visual, microstructural, compositional, and mechanical characterization, to determine the cause and source of the degradation. Cracking of the clamps was limited to localized regions with the remainder of the clamp unaffected. Branched, brittle cracks were observed in the failure region and exhibited transgranular propagation. Based on the temperature, available moisture, stress level, and type of material used it was determined that the likely cause of failure was neutral pH, dilute chloride-induced stress corrosion cracking. Based on this failure analysis, geothermal or other buried heated water systems must consider protective measures or more SCC-resistant materials to prevent susceptible conditions from developing, compared to conventional water systems, to ensure maximum lifetime performance

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER)

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER) is a balloon-borne cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarimeter designed to search for evidence of inflation by measuring the large-angular scale CMB polarization signal. BICEP2 recently reported a detection of B-mode power corresponding to the tensor-to-scalar ratio r = 0.2 on ~2 degree scales. If the BICEP2 signal is caused by inflationary gravitational waves (IGWs), then there should be a corresponding increase in B-mode power on angular scales larger than 18 degrees. PIPER is currently the only suborbital instrument capable of fully testing and extending the BICEP2 results by measuring the B-mode power spectrum on angular scales $\theta$ = ~0.6 deg to 90 deg, covering both the reionization bump and recombination peak, with sensitivity to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio down to r = 0.007, and four frequency bands to distinguish foregrounds. PIPER will accomplish this by mapping 85% of the sky in four frequency bands (200, 270, 350, 600 GHz) over a series of 8 conventional balloon flights from the northern and southern hemispheres. The instrument has background-limited sensitivity provided by fully cryogenic (1.5 K) optics focusing the sky signal onto four 32x40-pixel arrays of time-domain multiplexed Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers held at 140 mK. Polarization sensitivity and systematic control are provided by front-end Variable-delay Polarization Modulators (VPMs), which rapidly modulate only the polarized sky signal at 3 Hz and allow PIPER to instantaneously measure the full Stokes vector (I, Q, U, V) for each pointing. We describe the PIPER instrument and progress towards its first flight.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9153. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014, conference 915

A pedagogic appraisal of the Priority Heuristic

We have explored how science and mathematics teachers made decisions when confronted with a dilemma in which a fictitious young woman, Deborah, may choose to have an operation that might address a painful spinal condition. We sought to explore the extent to which psychological heuristic models, in particular the Priority Heuristic, might successfully describe the decision-making process of these teachers and how an analysis of the role of personal and emotional factors in shaping the decision-making process might inform pedagogical design. A novel aspect of this study is that the setting in which the decision-making process is examined contrasts sharply with those used in psychological experiments. We found that to some extent, even in this contrasting setting, the Priority Heuristic could describe these teachers' decision-making. Further analysis of the transcripts yielded some insights into limitations on scope as well the richness and complexity in how personal factors were brought to bear. We see these limitations as design opportunities for educational intervention

Corroborative Study on Maize Quality, Dry-Milling and Wet-Milling Properties of Selected Maize Hybrids

A corroborative study was conducted on the maize quality properties of test weight, pycnometer density, tangential abrasive dehulling device (TADD), time-to-grind on the Stenvert hardness tester (SHT), 100-kernel weight, kernel size distribution, and proximate composition as well as maize dry- and wet-millability by six participating laboratories. Suggested operating procedures were given to compare their measurements and provide the variance structure within and between laboratories and hybrids. Partial correlation coefficient among maize quality properties varied among laboratories. The repeatability and reproducibility precision values were acceptably low for the physical quality tests, except for TADD and SHT time-to-grind measurements. The yields of dry- and wet-milled products and their correlation with maize quality properties were dependent on the collaborating laboratory. This paper highlights the importance of laboratory variation when considering which maize hybrids are best suited for dry-milling and wet-milling