A Comparison of Student Academic Growth Between Indiana Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools

Compares the characteristics and academic growth of the state's charter school students and those of traditional public school students. Compares costs and benefits with districts matched for poor and minority students and annual expenditures per student

Science for gifted children in grade four.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Flow Field Measurement and Qualification of the West Virginia University Environmental Wind Tunnel

In 2013 West Virginia University acquired an Environmental Wind Tunnel from Cornell University. Due to the state of the tunnel, elements of the tunnel were redesigned and rebuilt at the West Virginia University Hangar in Morgantown, West Virginia. The motivation of this research was to evaluate and qualify the flow field within the test section of this redesigned and reconstructed wind tunnel. The tunnel has many uses for the university, including outside research opportunities as well as educational purposes for students in the Aerospace Engineering Department. The methods employed for this effort included developing a grid of pitot tubes to cover the test section cross sectional area. An electric pressure-scanning module that contained 64 pressure scanning ports was utilized, thus allowing the grid to contain 64 pitot tubes arranged into an 8x8 formation. Using this grid and pressure-scanning module system, the flow field of the test section was mapped across the velocity range of the tunnel. The available power in the test section was also calculated along with the tunnel efficiency. Results revealed variation in motor speed across the test section had little impact on the shape of the velocity profile in the test section. A linear relationship between test section average speed and motor speed was found to be almost one knot, or roughly 1.16 MPH per Hz. This relationship allows for a quick estimation of necessary motor speed given a desired average speed in the test section. The wind power in the test section was found to be approximately half that of the total power output of the motors. The relationship between motor speed and power required was cubic. From this, a model was created so that desired test section speed could be input and required motor speed in Hz was output

Unexpected Modes of Gendered Inheritance: How Royal Women Bequeathed Knowledge and Power in Sixteenth Century Europe through Letters, Translations, and Memoirs

During the sixteenth century, western European women were rarely able to inherit property, money, or titles. Even for noble women privileged with education, monarchies favored male heirs, and women rarely ruled as regents. It was even more rare for a woman to inherit from another woman. Such restrictions required women to work within rigid gender roles and develop more unconventional modes of inheritance. Rather than passing on material goods or a title, women could pass on certain social inheritances, such as personality traits or religious and educational teachings to their daughters. In order to examine these social inheritances, I have turned to the writings of royal women during the sixteenth century to determine what these social inheritances were and how they were passed from generation to generation. The writing of letters amongst royal women convey that education and religion were important social inheritances that women could transmit through letter writing. Translations and memoirs are two other genres of interest that could connect women across time and geographic region to either transfer or reveal social inheritances. Sixteenth century western Europe, despite aforementioned restrictions, was a place where many women rose to power and were often related through blood relation or marriage. By examining the relationships between these women through the lens of social inheritance, this project seeks to place them in direct conversation with one another in a way the history books have often failed to do

Natural History of Discourse of Missouri House Bill 1042: Bringing a Critical Perspective to Policy Engagement in Two-Year Contexts

In this autoethnographically-infused natural history of discourse (NHD) (Silverstein and Urban, 1996; Slembrouck, 2001), I use methods from critical discourse studies (CDS) to trace 10 years of changes in “remediation” discourses within a corpus of texts associated with Missouri HB 1042, a piece of legislation passed in 2012 that requires higher education institutions to “replicate best practices in remediation” (CBHE, 2013). After providing national and state context related to HB 1042 and the discourses circulating within the HB 1042 corpus of texts, I describe what I call the “higher ed’s remediation problem” discourse, focusing on three discourse features that I surmise provoked affective responses on the part of the two-year faculty and program administrators who participated in the early HB 1042 policy creation and implementation process. Then, I document the near disappearance of the three features of the “higher ed’s remediation problem” discourse and describe the shift to a student deficit discourse in the finalized “remedial” education policy that resulted from HB 1042, paying particular attention to what is known as a placement floor or threshold. After describing faculty and program administrator beliefs and rationales for supporting the threshold, I describe how the “remediation” discourses began to intermingle. Next, I discuss how the “higher ed’s remediation problem” discourse has been circulated and taken up in recent years in a new form: the “higher ed’s remediation equity problem” discourse. Drawing upon my experiences engaging with HB 1042 and reflecting on the critical discourse study, I conclude with a justification for using a critical engagement lens in policy contexts and begin to sketch out frameworks and principles that might be useful for applying this lens in two-year contexts

New literacies for teachers: researching the curriculum design, materials development, implementation and redesign of a compulsory, core course in literacy for first year B Ed students

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Johannesburg, 2016This research explores the processes involved in designing and developing a compulsory course, New Literacies for Teachers, for first year Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) students at the Wits School of Education (WSoE). The need for academic literacy development has long been recognised in various ways in programme development at most universities around the world. This course takes a broader perspective on literacy and aims to develop students as fully literate subjects. The conceptualisation of the course is based on a sociocultural approach which sees literacy as a set of socially situated practices. The course development team began by identifying five literacy domains that are important for student teachers: academic literacies, research literacies, personal literacies, school literacies and multimodal and digital literacies. Initial curriculum design developed a course structure that would enable the course designers to pull these literacy domains through the curriculum as threads for the year, thus implementing socio-cultural theory in practice. The main research question is “What processes enabled and/or constrained the design, implementation and redesign of a New Literacies for Teachers course for first year B.Ed. students?” The sub questions specifically identify the processes of curriculum design, interdisciplinary design and group collaboration. The data consists of tape recordings and transcriptions of all the course meetings during the processes of curriculum design, materials development (2009), implementation and redesign (2010). This data was analysed in two ways. The processes of curriculum design, interdisciplinary design, implementation and redesign were analysed using thematic content analysis. The process of group collaboration was analysed using a sociolinguistic approach that focussed on the dynamics of the groups and a discourse analysis of patterns of interaction. The findings provide insight into the course design and redesign processes, selection of content, framing, sequencing, pacing, the conditions of implementation and the dynamics that affected group participation and interaction. During implementation several problems emerged: logistical constraints, curriculum overload, lack of systematic development of academic literacy, problems with interdisciplinary design and lack of systematic assessment and constructive alignment (Biggs, 2003). These problems were addressed in the redesign. Whilst a key purpose of the course was to design an “integrated curriculum” (Bernstein, 1996, 2000) in which students could apply what they had learned in New Literacies for Teachers to their own studies and in their own teaching, the initial attempt at interdisciplinary design in the first semester proved to be quite difficult to achieve. One of the main findings in the analysis is that knowledge about socio-cultural theories are the privileged funds of knowledge in this course, and the lack of these funds of knowledge on the part of course designers from other disciplines and tutors on the course proved to be critical. Although the initial attempts at interdisciplinary design were a failure, the course designers found an alternative way of working with literacy across the curriculum in the second semester that introduced students to the way literacy works in the subjects they were preparing to teach. The conclusion summarises the findings about literacies for teachers; curriculum design and development; and group collaboration. Key words: socio-cultural theory of literacy, literacy domains, literacy practices, literacy across the curriculum, curriculum design, materials development, implementation, redesign, group dynamics, group interactions, teacher educatio

312— Mineralogical analysis of slag from iron production in the Adirondack State Park

Slag is a byproduct of iron production formed from the melting of iron-bearing rocks. Iron production in the Adirondacks reached a high in the early to mid 1800s, with many blast furnaces in operation throughout Northern New York. Two sets of samples from different regions in the Adirondacks were collected in the summers of 2019-2020. An unknown sample was taken from the Ausable River at Flume Falls near Wilmington, New York, while other samples were collected from the Mt. Hope iron furnace near Fort Ann, New York. Samples were analyzed through the creation of thin sections and x-ray diffraction. Results were compared against existing slag samples to determine origin in the context of the Wilmington slag, while the Mt. Hope slag was compared against nearby samples to compare mineralogy. The minerals Fayalite and Wostite were found in the Wilmington slag through analysis of x-ray diffraction patterns and thin sections