Too Pretty for Homework: The Academic Correlates of Sexualized Gender Stereotypes Among Adolescent Girls

Girls grow up in a culture of ubiquitous female sexualization, and this culture propagates stereotypes that could interfere with their academic outcomes. The current study examined the academic correlates of these sexualized gender stereotypes (SGS) among early adolescent girls. Girls (N = 99) aged 11 to 14 (Mage = 12.4 years, SD = .57 years) completed a survey assessing their academic performance, attitudes, and beliefs. The survey also assessed the degree to which girls believed that boys and girls should act in accordance with these sexualized gender stereotypes. Results indicated that higher endorsement of sexualized gender stereotypes was associated with lower academic performance, more negative academic attitudes, and less adaptive approaches to learning. Implications for girls’ academic trajectories are discussed

Is What Works Working? Thinking Evaluatively About the What Works Clearinghouse

Since the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. Department of Education has drafted and enacted policies to bridge the research-practice gap—that is, the gap between “what works” according to educational research and what is actually practiced by teachers and their administrators (e.g., Dirkx, 2006; Joyce & Cartwright, 2019; Tseng, 2012). One of the latest manifestations of this “what works” political legacy is the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), which took shape as part of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in 2002. The WWC’s mission is to be a “central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education” (WWC, 2020d, p. 1) while, at the same, helping the IES “…increase [the] use of data and research in education decision-making” (IES, n.d.-a). The purpose of this dissertation is to evaluate the extent to which the WWC has realized its own mission as well as contributed to the IES’s larger goal. Guided by principles of evaluative thinking (Vo & Archibald, 2018) and premises of the Two-Communities theoretical tradition (Caplan, 1979; Farley-Ripple et al., 2018), this project used a theory-based evaluation approach called contribution analysis (Mayne, 2008, 2012b, 2019) to investigate three guiding questions. Those questions inquired into (a) the extent of the WWC’s impact among educators, (b) the reasons why its impact may be wanting, and (c) the changes it could make to maximize its impact. To investigate these questions, a six-step procedure was used to both articulate and scrutinize the WWC’s theory of change according to available evidence. An array of evidence was considered, including existing publications (e.g., previously published evaluations, literature reviews, and large-scale surveys), analyses of publicly available data (e.g., public data exports, data requested through the Freedom of Information Act, transcripts from congressional hearings), and findings from a preservice teacher survey conducted for this project. The results of this contribution analysis offered compelling answers to each of the three guiding questions. First, given the WWC’s original benchmark for success (e.g., Baldwin et al., 2008), evidence suggested that it is likely failing to fully reach educators and guide their decision-making. This was especially true for teachers. Second, the evidence suggested that the WWC’s impact may be wanting because its theory of change depends on several unsupported assumptions. Not only were many of the WWC’s causal assumptions refuted by the evidence, but some of its foundational assumptions—such as the belief that systematic research review would be an effective way of bringing educational research to practice—were refuted as well. Finally, because several of its foundational assumptions were refutable, the WWC may only be able to maximize its impact if it fundamentally retools its approach to systematic research review or to educational research more generally. Suggestions for doing so are discussed

Reconstructing thawing quintessence with multiple datasets

In this work we model the quintessence potential in a Taylor series expansion, up to second order, around the present-day value of the scalar field. The field is evolved in a thawing regime assuming zero initial velocity. We use the latest data from the Planck satellite, baryonic acoustic oscillations observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and Supernovae luminosity distance information from Union2.1 to constrain our models parameters, and also include perturbation growth data from the WiggleZ, BOSS and the 6dF surveys. The supernova data provide the strongest individual constraint on the potential parameters. We show that the growth data performance is competitive with the other datasets in constraining the dark energy parameters we introduce. We also conclude that the combined constraints we obtain for our model parameters, when compared to previous works of nearly a decade ago, have shown only modest improvement, even with new growth of structure data added to previously-existent types of data.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures and 1 table. Version 2 with minor changes to match Physical Review D accepted versio

Modelación de la Accesibilidad en ArcView 3: Una extensión para calcular el tiempo de viaje y obtener información sobre captación de mercados

CIAT programmed this simple and flexible GIS tool to automate the creation of accessibility surfaces. Previously, these surfaces were laboriously created, step-by-step, using ArcINFO software from the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI). You can install the Accessibility Analyst if you have the ESRI ArcView 3 software and its ArcView Spatial Analyst. From this page, you can download the extension and documentation, see case studies of the extension at work, and follow up links with other people working in the same field. CIAT donors generously funded the development of Accessibility Analyst, in particular, the Ecoregional Fund to Support Methodological Initiatives (managed by the International Service for National Agricultural Research); Environmental Economics and Indicators Unit of the World Bank; and the Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Environment Programme

The Divine Clockwork: Bohr's correspondence principle and Nelson's stochastic mechanics for the atomic elliptic state

We consider the Bohr correspondence limit of the Schrodinger wave function for an atomic elliptic state. We analyse this limit in the context of Nelson's stochastic mechanics, exposing an underlying deterministic dynamical system in which trajectories converge to Keplerian motion on an ellipse. This solves the long standing problem of obtaining Kepler's laws of planetary motion in a quantum mechanical setting. In this quantum mechanical setting, local mild instabilities occur in the Kelperian orbit for eccentricities greater than 1/\sqrt{2} which do not occur classically.Comment: 42 pages, 18 figures, with typos corrected, updated abstract and updated section 6.

The Most Distant Stars in the Milky Way

We report on the discovery of the most distant Milky Way (MW) stars known to date: ULAS J001535.72$+$015549.6 and ULAS J074417.48$+$253233.0. These stars were selected as M giant candidates based on their infrared and optical colors and lack of proper motions. We spectroscopically confirmed them as outer halo giants using the MMT/Red Channel spectrograph. Both stars have large estimated distances, with ULAS J001535.72$+$015549.6 at $274 \pm 74$ kpc and ULAS J074417.48$+$253233.0 at 238 $\pm$ 64 kpc, making them the first MW stars discovered beyond 200 kpc. ULAS J001535.72$+$015549.6 and ULAS J074417.48$+$253233.0 are both moving away from the Galactic center at $52 \pm 10$ km s$^{-1}$ and $24 \pm 10$ km s$^{-1}$, respectively. Using their distances and kinematics, we considered possible origins such as: tidal stripping from a dwarf galaxy, ejection from the MW's disk, or membership in an undetected dwarf galaxy. These M giants, along with two inner halo giants that were also confirmed during this campaign, are the first to map largely unexplored regions of our Galaxy's outer halo.Comment: Accepted and in print by ApJL. Seven pages, 2 figure