Student-teacher relationship as a moderator of the relation between classroom behavior and reading achievement

Extant research documents associations between child classroom behavior and reading achievement as well as the associations between student-teacher relationships and children's reading success. Less is known about how all three of these variables may develop and influence one another together, and virtually no research has examined these issues with populations of young students living in rural communities. The current study examined a moderation model of reading achievement in which student-teacher relationship was expected to moderate the relations between fall classroom behavior of rural kindergarten and first grade students and their spring reading achievement. Using a hierarchical linear regression model, child demographic characteristics and beginning levels of reading achievement were controlled for and models predicting both phonological and comprehension skills were examined. Results indicate a significant but weak and un-interpretable interaction between classroom behavior and student-teacher relationship in predicting phonological skills. No interaction was found in predicting comprehension scores

A Catalog of Cool Dwarf Targets for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite

We present a catalog of cool dwarf targets ($V-J>2.7$, $T_{\rm eff} \lesssim 4000 K$) and their stellar properties for the upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), for the purpose of determining which cool dwarfs should be observed using two-minute observations. TESS has the opportunity to search tens of thousands of nearby, cool, late K and M-type dwarfs for transiting exoplanets, an order of magnitude more than current or previous transiting exoplanet surveys, such as {\it Kepler}, K2 and ground-based programs. This necessitates a new approach to choosing cool dwarf targets. Cool dwarfs were chosen by collating parallax and proper motion catalogs from the literature and subjecting them to a variety of selection criteria. We calculate stellar parameters and TESS magnitudes using the best possible relations from the literature while maintaining uniformity of methods for the sake of reproducibility. We estimate the expected planet yield from TESS observations using statistical results from the Kepler Mission, and use these results to choose the best targets for two-minute observations, optimizing for small planets for which masses can conceivably be measured using follow up Doppler spectroscopy by current and future Doppler spectrometers. The catalog is incorporated into the TESS Input Catalog and TESS Candidate Target List until a more complete and accurate cool dwarf catalog identified by ESA's Gaia Mission can be incorporated.Comment: Accepted to The Astronomical Journal. For the full catalog, please contact the corresponding autho

Lidar Scanning of Momentum Flux in the Marine Boundary Layer

Momentum flux measurements are important for describing the wind profile in the atmospheric boundary layer, modeling the atmospheric flow over water, the accounting of exchange processes between air and sea, etc. It is also directly related to the friction velocity, which is a velocity scale required for wind engineering. Estimations of friction velocity over the sea can be performed by combining wind speed measurements, a sea roughness length formulation and the surface-layer wind profile, i.e. a bulk-derived method. This method was tested in Peña et al. (2008) by comparison with direct turbulence measurements from a sonic anemometer, showing high agreement. In this study, a conical scanning lidar is used to derive the momentum flux, which compares well to the estimations from the bulk-derived method, but it also shows a filtering effect due to the large spatial-averaging volume of the lidar. The spectral model by Mann (1994) is then used to numerically estimate the filtering effect of the lidar and the predictions have a good agreement with the observations for near-neutral conditions over the North Sea at the Horns Rev wind farm