Managing Urban Classrooms: Exploring Beginning Teachers’ Beliefs, Actions, and Influences of Classroom Management.

Beginning teachers struggle with classroom management, which is especially problematic for urban schools and other low-achieving, high-poverty environments that employ a disproportionate number of beginning teachers. These teachers tend to enter classrooms unprepared to deal with student misbehavior and tend not to receive adequate support to improve over time. In order to develop beginning teachers as effective classroom managers prior to and within their full-time placement, more needs to be learned about how beginning teachers manage their urban classrooms. This descriptive, mixed method study of one interim certification program explores first year urban teachers’ classroom management experience. I investigate how teachers conceptualize classroom management, what actions they implement to manage the classroom, and who or what they report as helping them to develop in classroom management. Programmatic surveys of 87 first year teachers provide broad trends of teachers’ beliefs, actions, and influences, while interviews, field visits, video recordings, and journals detail five case participants’ experiences throughout the year. Case study analyses indicate that teachers differed in the degree to which they emphasized relational dimensions of classroom management. Relatedly, teachers who reported relational beliefs on their program surveys received higher evaluation ratings as compared to teachers who did not report relational beliefs. This study also indicates that teachers felt they improved most as classroom managers when school and program personnel provided them with specific and timely feedback about alternative methods to manage classrooms, and when they learned from their mistakes during clinical and classroom experience. These findings have implications for teacher preparation and professional development on how to support teachers in managing classrooms. Findings suggest designing teacher education to emphasize a relational approach to classroom management that underscores the importance of establishing a safe environment and using strategies to promote positive interactions in the classroom. These findings also suggest improving how we prepare classroom managers by increasing the frequency that teacher educators observe new teachers and by offering feedback that is more targeted and presents alternative methods of managing classrooms.PhDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120664/1/kwok_1.pd

Enhanced Eddy Activity in the Beaufort Gyre in Response to Sea Ice Loss

The Beaufort Gyre freshwater content has increased since the 1990s, potentially stabilizing in recent years. The mechanisms proposed to explain the stabilization involve either mesoscale eddy activity that opposes Ekman pumping or the reduction of Ekman pumping due to reduced sea ice?ocean surface stress. However, the relative importance of these mechanisms is unclear. Here, we present observational estimates of the Beaufort Gyre mechanical energy budget and show that energy dissipation and freshwater content stabilization by eddies increased in the late-2000s. The loss of sea ice and acceleration of ocean currents after 2007 resulted in enhanced mechanical energy input but without corresponding increases in potential energy storage. To balance the energy surplus, eddy dissipation and its role in gyre stabilization must have increased after 2007. Our results imply that declining Arctic sea ice will lead to an increasingly energetic Beaufort Gyre with eddies playing a greater role in its stabilization

Viscous Cross-waves: An Analytical Treatment

Viscous effects on the excitation of cross‐waves in a semi‐infinite box of finite depth and width are considered. A formalism using matched asymptotic expansions and an improved method of computing the solvability condition is used to derive the relative contributions of the free‐surface, sidewall, bottom, and wavemaker viscous boundary layers. This analysis yields an expression for the damping coefficient previously incorporated on heuristic grounds. In addition, three new contributions are found: a viscous detuning of the resonant frequency, a slow spatial variation in the coupling to the progressive wave, and a viscous correction to the wavemaker boundary condition. The wavemaker boundary condition breaks the symmetry of the linear neutral stability curve at leading order for many geometries of experimental interest

Conditioned inhibition and reinforcement rate

We investigated conditioned inhibition in a magazine approach paradigm. Rats were trained on a feature negative discrimination between an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) reinforced at one rate versus a compound of that CS and a visual stimulus (L) reinforced at a lower rate. This training established L as a conditioned inhibitor. We then tested the inhibitory strength of L by presenting it in compound with other auditory CSs. L reduced responding when tested with a CS that had been reinforced at a high rate, but had less or even no inhibitory effect when tested with a CS that had been reinforced at a low rate. The inhibitory strength of L was greater if it signaled a decrease in reinforcement from an already low rate than if it signaled an equivalent decrease in reinforcement from a high rate. We conclude that the strength of inhibition is not a linear function of the change in reinforcement that it signals. We discuss the implications of this finding for models of learning (e.g. Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) that identify inhibition with a difference (subtraction) rule.Australian Research Counci

Magazine approach during a signal for food depends on Pavlovian, not instrumental, conditioning

In the conditioned magazine approach paradigm, rats are exposed to a contingent relationship between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and the delivery of food (the unconditioned stimulus, US). As the rats learn the CS-US association, they make frequent anticipatory head entries into the food magazine (the conditioned response, CR) during the CS. Conventionally, this is considered to be a Pavlovian paradigm because food is contingent on the CS and not on the performance of CRs during the CS. However, because magazine entries during the CS are reliably followed by food, the increase in frequency of those responses may involve adventitious (“superstitious”) instrumental conditioning. The existing evidence, from experiments using an omission schedule to eliminate the possibility of instrumental conditioning (Farwell & Ayres, 1979; Holland, 1979), is ambiguous: rats acquire magazine CRs despite the omission schedule, demonstrating that the response does not depend on instrumental conditioning, but the response rate is greatly depressed compared with that of rats trained on a yoked schedule, consistent with a contribution from instrumental conditioning under normal (non-omission) schedules. Here we describe experiments in which rats were trained on feature-positive or feature-negative type discriminations between trials that were reinforced on an omission schedule versus trials reinforced on a yoked schedule. The experiments show that the difference in responding between omission and yoked schedules is due to suppression of responding under the omission schedule rather than an elevation of responding under the yoked schedule. We conclude that magazine responses during the CS are largely or entirely Pavlovian CRs.Australian Research Council: Grant DP109269

The radicalization of the Indian and Irish nationalist movements, 1914-1922 : a comparison

I initially conceived of this research when I was an honours student at the University of Tasmania. It was then that my supervisors, Dr. Asim Roy and Dr. Richard Davis, painstakingly showed me that the interaction of the Indian and Irish nationalist movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a much neglected field of research. Dr. Davis himself has already done some substantial work in this field. Other historians such as Dr. Mary Cumpston, Dr. J.V. Crangle, and Dr. Howard Brasted have also contributed significant studies to this fertile area of academic endeavour. However, most of the work on this rare domain of comparative studies is concentrated in the nineteenth century. Dr. Cumpston, for instance, discusses the nature of Irish nationalist advocacy of Indian interests during 1851-1906. Dr. Brasted, in two welldocumented articles which establish the Irish Home Rule influence on the development of Indian national consciousness, also confines himself to the 1870s and 1880s. Dr. Crangle, who analyses Irish nationalist diatribes against the imperial administration of India, too, focuses his attention on the period 1880-1884

Tracking-Data-Conversion Tool

Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT) is a software framework for creating a Web-based system for exchange of scientific data that are stored in diverse formats on computers at different sites under the management of scientific peers. OODT software consists of a set of cooperating, distributed peer components that provide distributed peer-topeer (P2P) services that enable one peer to search and retrieve data managed by another peer. In effect, computers running OODT software at different locations become parts of an integrated data-management system

Automated storage and active cleaning for multi-material digital-light-processing printer

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a novel technique for printing with multiple materials using the DLP method. Digital-light-processing (DLP) printing uses a digital projector to selectively cure a full layer of resin using a mask image. One of the challenges with DLP printing is the difficulty of incorporating multiple materials within the same part. As the part is cured within a liquid basin, resin switching introduces issues of cross-contamination and significantly increased print time

Semi-quantitative mass spectrometry in AML cells identifies new non-genomic targets of the EZH2 methyltransferase

Alterations to the gene encoding the EZH2 (KMT6A) methyltransferase, including both gain-of-function and loss-of-function, have been linked to a variety of haematological malignancies and solid tumours, suggesting a complex, context-dependent role of this methyltransferase. The successful implementation of molecularly targeted therapies against EZH2 requires a greater understanding of the potential mechanisms by which EZH2 contributes to cancer. One aspect of this effort is the mapping of EZH2 partner proteins and cellular targets. To this end we performed affinity-purification mass spectrometry in the FAB-M2 HL-60 acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) cell line before and after all-transretinoic acid-induced differentiation. These studies identified new EZH2 interaction partners and potential non-histone substrates for EZH2-mediated methylation. Our results suggest that EZH2 is involved in the regulation of translation through interactions with a number of RNA binding proteins and by methylating key components of protein synthesis such as eEF1A1. Given that deregulated mRNA translation is a frequent feature of cancer and that eEF1A1 is highly expressed in many human tumours, these findings present new possibilities for the therapeutic targeting of EZH2 in AML