Staying informed: superintendents and their experience with evidence-based research in the West Virginia public school system

The purpose of this study was to explore the sources used by West Virginia public school superintendents to stay informed; how useful they find evidence-based research; the perceptions they have regarding the overall usefulness/credibility of evidence-based research; the barriers that exist to the use of evidence-based research; and whether there are relationships between selected demographic variables and superintendents’ consumption of evidence-based research. Data were collected using a 10-question researcher adapted survey administered to 59 superintendents in West Virginia. This study continues the work of Treadway (2015) and Hoylman (2017) in the local public education arena. The most relied upon source of information by superintendents was their own professional experience. Evidence-based research was identified as useful, to a degree, in executing professional duties, but was not identified as a frequently relied upon source of information by superintendents; paradoxically, superintendents reported using evidence-based research to inform board of education members, policymakers, members of the general public, and in public relations. For superintendents to effectively inform policymaking, they must be efficient consumers of evidence-based research, fellowship with members of professional organizations, and develop methods of succinctly communicating evidence-based research to policymakers

A Study of Attention-Free and Attentional Methods for LiDAR and 4D Radar Object Detection in Self-Driving Applications

In this thesis, we re-examine the problem of 3D object detection in the context of self driving cars with the first publicly released View of Delft (VoD) dataset [1] containing 4D radar sensor data. 4D radar is a novel sensor that provides velocity and Radar Cross Section (RCS) information in addition to position for its point cloud. State of the art architectures such as 3DETR [2] and IASSD [3] were used as a baseline. Several attention-free methods, like point cloud concatenation, feature propagation and feature fusion with MLP, as well as attentional methods utilizing cross attention, were tested to determine how we can best combine LiDAR and radar to develop a multimodal detection architecture that outperforms the baseline architectures trained only on either modality alone. Our findings indicate that while attention-free methods did not consistently surpass the baseline performance across all classes, they did lead to notable performance gains for specific classes. Furthermore, we found that attentional methods faced challenges due to the sparsity of radar point clouds and duplicated features, which limited the efficacy of the crossattention mechanism. These findings highlight potential avenues for future research to refine and improve upon attentional methods in the context of 3D object detection

Moduli spaces for Bondal quivers

Given a sufficiently nice collection of sheaves on an algebraic variety V, Bondal explained how to build a quiver Q along with an ideal of relations in the path algebra of Q such that the derived category of representations of Q subject to these relations is equivalent to the derived category of coherent sheaves on V. We consider the case in which these sheaves are all locally free and study the moduli spaces of semistable representations of our quiver with relations for various stability conditions. We show that V can often be recovered as a connected component of such a moduli space and we describe the line bundle induced by a GIT construction of the moduli space in terms of the input data. In certain special cases, we interpret our results in the language of topological string theory.Comment: 17 pages, major revisio

Reviews

Managing Change in Higher Education: A Learning Environment Architecture by Peter Ford and eight other authors, Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press, 1996. ISBN 0–335–19791–4. 161 pages, paperback. No price indicated

Implementing quadratic supergravity inflation

We study inflation driven by a slow-rolling inflaton field, characterised by a quadratic potential, and incorporating radiative corrections within the context of supergravity. In this model the energy scale of inflation is not overly constrained by the requirement of generating the observed level of density fluctuations and can have a physically interesting value, e.g. the supersymmetry breaking scale of $10^{10}$ GeV or the electroweak scale of $10^3$ GeV. In this mass range the inflaton is light enough to be confined at the origin by thermal effects, naturally generating the initial conditions for a (last) stage of inflation of the new inflationary type.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur

Toward a Dialogue: Following Professional Standards on Education Achievement Testing

The authors describe challenges of following professional standards for educational achievement testing due to the complexity of gathering appropriate evidence to support demanding test interpretation and use. Validity evidence has been found to be low for some individual testing standards, leading to the possibility of faulty or impoverished test interpretation and use. In response to this context, measurement professionals have called for a theory of action including behavior changes of multiple agents involved in the testing process. Also, changing roles have been seen for a broad range of agents including test developers, those who influence testing, and those influenced by testing. Some of these roles are discussed and others illustrated with examples from practice. A sociocultural theory of action noted in the literature is proposed as a thematic guide to practice. The paper concludes with a call for dialogue and two research and development tasks that might advance practice

Reviews

Europe In the Round CD‐ROM, Guildford, Vocational Technologies, 1994

Forum: Is Public Archaeology a menace?

So sang my friend, colleague, and then-office manager Ron Melander in about 1971, in a song he wrote about me. I quote it here to help establish my bona fides in "public archaeology." I began my career as an amateur archaeologist (some would use less complimentary terms) and am now engaged in ending it similarly. In its course I've worked as an academic and applied professional archaeologist, often -if not always- with a strong tilt toward public involvement, participated in the development of "cultural resource management" (CRM)1, worked and published in that milieu, and incidentally was involved in U.S. archaeological politics at the time when C.R. McGimsey more or less invented the term "public archaeology" (McGimsey 1972). I had qualms about the term then, and I have qualms about it now. I want to explain why