A study of the nature of perceptual skills in relation to spelling and an analysis of spelling errors

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Iowa Staters Plan Food

Margaret Mitchell tells of two alumnae who direct activity in modern kitchen

Theoretical Orientations of Chapter I Reading Teachers: Consistency Between Beliefs and Practices.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the consistency between Chapter I teachers\u27 theoretical orientations and instructional practices related to preactive planning and interactive decision-making. Twenty-three Chapter I teachers were administered screening instruments that included: (a) a biographical survey, and (b) instruments focusing on teachers\u27 theoretical orientations about reading and instructional choices. Primary consideration for selection included education and professional experience, beliefs about reading, and instructional decision-making. Based on this information, four Chapter I teachers, each with a reader-based orientation, were purposively selected to participate in this study. For each participant, the researcher selected a pull-out class (6-10 students) to observe during 10 separate Chapter I instructional sessions. During the observations, the researcher wrote field notes, audiotaped the lessons, and collected relevant learning materials. At the conclusion of each observation, the researcher held a brief interview with each teacher about that day\u27s lesson. Additionally, each participant\u27s principal and a cooperating teacher were interviewed and completed the screening instruments for the purpose of gaining insight into each school\u27s reading program. All data were qualitatively analyzed using concurrent flows of analysis: data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing/verification. Data sources were triangulated to validate an occurrence and to control for biases from other sources. Final interpretation was achieved following searches for meaningful patterns across, between, and within participants, involving multiple perspectives of the research team. Results indicated that: (a) teacher A\u27s beliefs were consistent with his stated planning; however, his decision-making, which stemmed from a text-based explanation of reading, was not; (b) teacher B\u27s planning and decision-making reflected a text-based explanation, which did not match her reader-based beliefs about reading; (c) teacher C\u27s beliefs were inconsistent with her skill-driven planning, but consistent with her interactive decision-making; and (d) teacher D\u27s reader-based beliefs were consistent with her planning and interactive decision-making, except when she had to abandon her favored instructional practices to prepare her learners for state-mandated tests. These findings support the premise that, although teachers may share similar beliefs about reading, there is great variation in their instructional practices related to preactive planning and interactive decision-making

Breeding bird occurrence in mid-Missouri forest fragments

"Objectives: This study was conducted to explore the relationship between forest fragmentation and current avian populations in central Missouri in light of the island biogeographic theory of MacArthur and Wilson (1967). The theory was first developed in reference to fauna of oceanic islands. More recently, it has been applied to patches or "islands" of habitat in terrestrial situations (Moore and Hooper 1975, Galli et al. 1976, Morse 1977, Whitcomb 1977, Robbins 1979, Whitcomb et al. 1981) such as forest fragments in an agricultural matrix. The concept emphasizes area size and distance to a colonizing source as important factors in determining species richness (MacArthur and Wilson 1967). The continued fractionation of natural habitat into insular parcels suggests the importance of the development of terrestrial island biogeographic theory to the construction of long-range biological conservation strategies. Forest fragments in Missouri represent a complicated island system. In contrast to the oceanic island system, non-forested habitats which surround terrestrial forest islands do not restrict movement of birds to the same extent as an ocean barrier. In addition, an edge habitat bounding each forest island provides for another community of birds that can affect the species present. Previous research in the central oak-hickory ecosystem has not addressed species/area relationships. Specific objectives of this thesis are: 1. To assess avian species richness in forest fragments of different sizes during the breeding season. 2. To investigate the impact of vegetative structure, area shape, isolation, and area size of forest fragments on the distribution and abundance of avian species. 3. To ascertain avian species-area relationships, and make recommendations for management of oak-hickory forests for area-sensitive bird species."--Page 3.Includes bibliographical references

Generating Natural Questions About an Image

There has been an explosion of work in the vision & language community during the past few years from image captioning to video transcription, and answering questions about images. These tasks have focused on literal descriptions of the image. To move beyond the literal, we choose to explore how questions about an image are often directed at commonsense inference and the abstract events evoked by objects in the image. In this paper, we introduce the novel task of Visual Question Generation (VQG), where the system is tasked with asking a natural and engaging question when shown an image. We provide three datasets which cover a variety of images from object-centric to event-centric, with considerably more abstract training data than provided to state-of-the-art captioning systems thus far. We train and test several generative and retrieval models to tackle the task of VQG. Evaluation results show that while such models ask reasonable questions for a variety of images, there is still a wide gap with human performance which motivates further work on connecting images with commonsense knowledge and pragmatics. Our proposed task offers a new challenge to the community which we hope furthers interest in exploring deeper connections between vision & language.Comment: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistic