Districts Developing Leaders: Lessons on Consumer Actions and Program Approaches From Eight Urban Districts

Profiles eight Wallace-supported approaches to preparing future principals to succeed in improving troubled city schools, including establishing clear expectations so that university preparation programs can craft training accordingly

Trauma-Informed Practices in Early Childhood Education

Young children who have experienced trauma risk falling behind peers academically, and socially, and may have lifelong mental and physical impairments (Bartlett, 2021). Half of the young children in the United States have been victims of early childhood trauma (Bartlett, et al., 2017). Findings analyzed for this paper show that trauma-informed care (TIC) can increase children’s chance of recovering and thriving, despite trauma (Bartlett, 2021). The following studies showed how early childhood teachers can best prepare themselves for students of trauma in their classrooms. Preparation included TIC that focused on strong social-emotional development (SED), helping build resilience, and preparing for kindergarten and beyond (Bartlett, 2021). Studies also noted the importance of building positive teacher-child relationships and the impact of culture and the current pandemic on SED. This paper summarized and analyzed fifteen research articles and has shown how early childhood teachers can use trauma-informed practices to help young children develop strong social-emotional skills

Evolutionary dynamics of speciation and extinction

Presented here is an interdisciplinary study that draws connections between the fields of physics, mathematics, and evolutionary biology. Importantly, as we move through the Anthropocene Epoch, where human-driven climate change threatens biodiversity, understanding how an evolving population responds to extinction stress could be key to saving endangered ecosystems. With a neutral, agent-based model that incorporates the main principles of Darwinian evolution, such as heritability, variability, and competition, the dynamics of speciation and extinction is investigated. The simulated organisms evolve according to the reaction-diffusion rules of the 2D directed percolation universality class. Offspring are generated according to one of three reproduction schemes. Mate choice dictates offspring placement, and it defines a species based on reproductive isolation (known as the biological species concept), while a globally enforced death process ensues within each generation. This system is shown to exhibit nonequilibrium, continuous phase transitions as a function of the individual death probability. The dynamical rules that enable phase transition and clustering behavior to transpire behavior is discussed, and a connection is drawn to another type of phase transition that arises by mate choice alone. Coalescent theory is then used to explore common descent in evolved phylogenetic tree structures at both the individual and cluster level. Finally, an extinction scenario is implemented where, after reaching a steady-state, a large population percentage is killed. Historical contingency is shown to play a major role in recovery from mass extinction at criticality --Abstract, page iii

Perceptions of Mentoring among High-Achieving, First-Generation College Students

The purpose of this study was to explore how high-achieving first-generation college students perceived their mentoring experiences at a public research university in the midsouth and examined what role mentoring played in their persistence. Using the narrative inquiry, the study captured mentoring perceptions and experiences of 13 high-achieving first-generation college students. Data collection included one pre-interview activity, one semi-structured interview, and a follow-up meeting with the participants if needed. Participants provided insight on five areas related to mentoring: perceptions of mentoring, development of mentoring relationships, experiences that fostered mentoring relationships, the most influential mentors, and the influence of mentoring on persistence. This study offers recommendations on ways higher education administrators, staff, and faculty can better mentoring relationships for high-achieving first generation college students. Understanding how mentoring influences high achieving first-generation college student persistence can also help institutions better support and retain these students

The Relationship between Participation in Goal Setting, Company Size and Performance, Commitment, Acceptance and Job Satisfaction in the United States and Macedonia.

While some researchers have suggested that participative goal setting increases performance, acceptance, commitment, and satisfaction, others have suggested that it does not. Additionally, much research on goal setting has been done in the US while none has been done in Macedonia. The purpose of this study was to clarify the relationship between participation in goal setting and company size on these variables and to determine if there are differences in the effects of participation in goal setting in the US and Macedonia. The independent variables were country, company size, and type of participation and dependent variables were performance, commitment, acceptance, and satisfaction. Participants also completed Hofstede’s (1994) VSM and demographic questions. Workers from the US scored significantly higher on all dependent variables. There were no significant differences in participation verses assigned goal setting on the four dependent variables. Multiple regressions revealed that some VSM questions predicted the four dependent variables

Classification of Phase Transition Behavior in a Model of Evolutionary Dynamics

Amongst the scientific community, there is consensus that evolution has occurred; however, there is much disagreement about how evolution happens. In particular, how do we explain biodiversity and the speciation process? Computational models aid in this study, for they allow us to observe a speciation process within time scales we would not otherwise be able to observe in our lifetime. Previous work has shown phase transition behavior in an assortative mating model as the control parameter of maximum mutation size (µ) is varied. This behavior has been shown to exist on landscapes with variable fitness (Dees and Bahar, 2010), and is recently presented in the work of Scott et al. (submitted) on a completely neutral landscape, for bacterial-like fission as well as for assortative mating. Here I investigate another dimension of the phase transition. In order to achieve an appropriate ‘null’ hypothesis and make the model mathematically tractable, the random death process was changed so each individual has the same probability of death in each generation. Thus both the birth and death processes in each simulation are now ‘neutral’: every organism has not only the same number of offspring, but also the same probability of being randomly killed. Results show a continuous nonequilibrium phase transition for the order parameters of the population size and the number of clusters (analogue of species) as the random death control parameter δ is varied for three different mutation sizes of the system. For small values of µ, the transition to the active state of survival happens at a small critical value of δ; in contrast, for larger µ, the transition happens later – suggesting a robustness of the system with increased mutation ability

Perceptions of Mentoring among High-Achieving, First-Generation College Students

The purpose of this study was to explore how high-achieving first-generation college students perceived their mentoring experiences at a public research university in the midsouth and examined what role mentoring played in their persistence. Using the narrative inquiry, the study captured mentoring perceptions and experiences of 13 high-achieving first-generation college students. Data collection included one pre-interview activity, one semi-structured interview, and a follow-up meeting with the participants if needed. Participants provided insight on five areas related to mentoring: perceptions of mentoring, development of mentoring relationships, experiences that fostered mentoring relationships, the most influential mentors, and the influence of mentoring on persistence. This study offers recommendations on ways higher education administrators, staff, and faculty can better mentoring relationships for high-achieving first generation college students. Understanding how mentoring influences high achieving first-generation college student persistence can also help institutions better support and retain these students

Evolutionary Dynamics of Speciation and Extinction

Presented here is an interdisciplinary study that draws connections between the fields of physics, mathematics, and evolutionary biology. Importantly, as we move through the Anthropocene Epoch, where human-driven climate change threatens biodiversity, understanding how an evolving population responds to extinction stress could be key to saving endangered ecosystems. With a neutral, agent-based model that incorporates the main principles of Darwinian evolution, such as heritability, variability, and competition, the dynamics of speciation and extinction is investigated. The simulated organisms evolve according to the reaction-diffusion rules of the 2D directed percolation universality class. Offspring are generated according to one of three reproduction schemes. Mate choice dictates offspring placement, and it defines a species based on reproductive isolation (known as the biological species concept), while a globally enforced death process ensues within each generation. This system is shown to exhibit nonequilibrium, continuous phase transitions as a function of the individual death probability. The dynamical rules that enable phase transition and clustering behavior to transpire behavior is discussed, and a connection is drawn to another type of phase transition that arises by mate choice alone. Coalescent theory is then used to explore common descent in evolved phylogenetic tree structures at both the individual and cluster level. Finally, an extinction scenario is implemented where, after reaching a steady-state, a large population percentage is killed. Historical contingency is shown to play a major role in recovery from mass extinction at criticality

The seizure of illicit assets: patterns of civil forfeiture in Canada and Ireland

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