Finding No One

Finding No one is a Non-Fiction creative writing piece written around one young woman’s desire to overcome obstacles in order to prove she is the complete opposite of her enemies: strong, determined, and brave. The main character shares her story of surviving childhood abuse, how she used Anorexia to cope with the aftermath, and what it took to become someone with a desire to fight for a future. The writer has taken the readers directly into vivid scenes of abuse and the innermost thoughts of self-loathing, refusing to hide any secrets. Finding No One explicitly shares details of therapy and methods used to detangle the manipulative tricks that Anorexia created in her mind in attempt to break the shame of abuse and mental illness

An Exploration of Math Trauma Through Ability Grouping and Teacher Language in Elementary Schools

This literature review approaches the question of ability grouping and other forms of teacher communication in elementary school math curriculum through the lens of equity and student outcomes. Types of grouping practices in elementary schools are discussed, along with the positives and negatives of each general form of grouping, with special consideration paid to the topic of math trauma and the ways that ability grouping contributes to it. This review concludes that teachers have a profound effect on students and that students have a profound effect on one another, leading to a discussion on the moral and ethical responsibility that exists between a student and various authority figures in their life

The Effect Of Emphasizing Key Vocabulary On Student Achievement With English Learners

This action research seeks to determine the impact of teacher training and the use of specific instructional strategies, per the research-based SIOP® teaching model, on English language arts achievement of formally identified first grade English Learners. The study aims to discover if using strategic techniques to teach vocabulary positively affects language acquisition and comprehension. English Learners have historically lagged behind grade level peers in all academic areas. English Learners tend to have many outside variables that can affect their ability to focus on school. Issues with immigration, class, culture, and race are all relevant topics with this population. This study discusses many of these issues present both in and outside of the classroom. The action research involved a series of professional development sessions, organized and implemented by a certified SIOP® coach, in this case the action researcher, which included specific strategies on how to foster vocabulary acquisition. Through a series of non-evaluative observations and opportunities for reflection, teachers collaborated in order to refine their practices. Both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered to determine the effectiveness this model, knowing that it is limited in scope due to the sample size and the time parameters involved with this study. However, this study provided insight into best practices in supporting language instruction and suggested opportunities for additional research. The goal of this study was to determine if being strategic in how and what we teach English Learners fosters student engagement within their classroom community. v The ultimate goal was that this knowledge would help level the playing field in terms of understanding and accessing grade level and beyond content so that these diverse learners can achieve academically

Creative Book Arts Preserving Family History

For the project I have developed a series of four artist\u27s books from material I have collected pertaining to my family history. Over the last four years I have collected written narratives, photographs, tape-recorded interviews, genealogies, letters, electronic communications, and other documents. The first book in the series is an accordion-style book contrasting a trip my Great Grandmother took to Yellowstone National Park by covered wagon from Oklahoma Territory in 1903 with my trip from Maine to the same park in 1978. Though technology had changed the mode of transportation, and the intervening years had seen changes in many other things, the images recorded in 1978 are remarkably similar to those in 1903. The second book in the series was taken from a typed narrative written by my Grandmother about her childhood in Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It is the story of a pet chicken, Rook, and takes the form of a children\u27s book with large linoleum block images, large type, and few words on each page. The third book in the series commemorates my two children, Philip and Jennifer, and combines images and text along with mementoes from their pasts. Two accordion-style books are enclosed in a case that rests on top of a box containing memorabilia. The last book in the series traces my matrilineal line back seven generations, from my Great Great Great Grandmother down to my daughter. The images are photographs of each woman transferred on to silk and embellished with beads and sequins. The text for each is a biography telling each woman\u27s story. The format of the book is accordion with signatures sewn into the folds. For this project I have taken information about the family that speaks to me and I have researched historical information pertaining to the particular event or time and have created a series of artist\u27s books using a variety of formats that document, in part, who I am and where I come from Though there are four books created so far, the family material collected over the past four years demands more, so that I see this thesis project as a beginning rather than as a finished entity

Dracula’s Inky Shadows: The Vampire Gothic of Writing

Always a story about a story, the vampire tale is forever in dialogue with the past, conscious of its own status as a rewrite. This makes the vampire a figure onto which readers and authors can project ambivalence about writing – the gothic of living with texts. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) vividly illustrates this connection. The novel presents textual interactions as both dangerous and pleasurable. What is more, Dracula has accumulated significance through criticism and adaptation. These retellings tie the novel even more closely to the processes of writing and rewriting. This thesis will begin by examining Dracula’s gothic of reading and writing. After this follows a consideration of the vampire fiction preceding Stoker’s novel, beginning with the figure of the embodied author in early nineteenth-century works like John William Polidori’s The Vampyre’ (1819), and James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney, the Vampyre (1845-47). The thesis will then address the gothic of scientific and institutional language in the vampire fiction of the mid nineteenth-century, including Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (1872). A return to the fin de siècle follows, with a consideration of degeneracy and art vampirism outside Dracula, and discussion of works including Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) and George Sylvester Viereck’s The House of the Vampire (1907). The thesis will proceed to the twentieth century, studying the gothic interplay of film and literature in works like F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). It will then trace the resemblance between Victorians and their modern adapters, suggesting that re-imaginings of Dracula, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), betray an affinity between Victorians and the ‘enlightened’ twentieth century. The thesis will conclude by examining the vampire as a figure of intertextuality, and considering the way in which postmodern vampires like those of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) acknowledge that their world is comprised of other texts. Buffy offers the possibility that the world shaped by narratives may also be rewritten, with results that can be either terrifying or liberating

Law, Biology, and Property: A New Theory of the Endowment Effect

Recent work at the intersection of law and behavioral biology has suggested numerous contexts in which legal thinking could benefit by integrating knowledge from behavioral biology. In one of those contexts, behavioral biology may help to provide theoretical foundation for, and potentially increased predictive power concerning, various psychological traits relevant to law. This Article describes an experiment that explores that context. The paradoxical psychological bias known as the endowment effect puzzles economists, skews market behavior, impedes efficient exchange of goods and rights, and thereby poses important problems for law. Although the effect is known to vary widely, there are at present no satisfying explanations for why it manifests when and how it does. Drawing on evolutionary biology, this Article provides a new theory of the endowment effect. Briefly, we hypothesize that the endowment effect is an evolved propensity of humans and, further, that the degree to which an item is evolutionarily relevant will affect the strength of the endowment effect. The theory generates a novel combination of three predictions. These are: (1) the effect is likely to be observable in many other species, including close primate relatives; (2) the prevalence of the effect in other species is likely to vary across items; and (3)the prevalence of the endowment effect will increase or decrease, respectively, with the increasing or decreasing evolutionary salience of the item in question. The authors tested these predictions in a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) experiment, recently published in Current Biology. The data, further explored here, are consistent with each of the three predictions. Consequently, this theory may explain why the endowment effect exists in humans and other species. It may also help both to predict and to explain some of the variability in the effect when it does manifest. And, more broadly, the results of the experiment suggest that combining life science and social science perspectives could lead to a more coherent framework for understanding the wider variety of other cognitive heuristics and biases relevant to law

Using an Evolutionary Approach to Improve Predictive Ability in Social Sciences: Property, the Endowment Effect, and Law

From the perspective of other disciplines, evolutionary approaches more often provide explanation and coherence than they help to solve discrete problems. We believe that more examples of the latter sort will help both with disciplinary synthesis and with the advance of knowledge. Here we describe a 20-year arc of research to demonstrate the problem-solving utility of an evolutionary perspective by focusing, as a case study, on a particular cognitive bias – the endowment effect – that has implications for law. Legal systems often assume that humans make decisions that are substantively rational, consistent, and aimed at maximizing their own wellbeing. But prevalent cognitive biases disrupt this, showing that humans consistently make decisions that seem to violate rationality and/or their own best interests. And despite decades of research, there has been little progress in understanding why these biases exist. We are among the scholars who have converged on the idea that many cognitive biases may have evolved as adaptations to pre-modern conditions, the evolutionarily sudden changes from which often leave them mis-matched to current conditions, prompting us to situationally irrational outcomes. Here, we discuss our data testing hypotheses derived from this perspective in both humans and nonhuman primates and consider how it has advanced our understanding of both the endowment effect narrowly and cognitive biases generally – including those relevant to law and policy

Law, Biology, and Property: A New Theory of the Endowment Effect

Recent work at the intersection of law and behavioral biology has suggested numerous contexts in which legal thinking could benefit by integrating knowledge from behavioral biology. In one of those contexts, behavioral biology may help to provide theoretical foundation for, and potentially increased predictive power concerning, various psychological traits relevant to law. This Article describes an experiment that explores that context. The paradoxical psychological bias known as the endowment effect puzzles economists, skews market behavior, impedes efficient exchange of goods and rights, and thereby poses important problems for law. Although the effect is known to vary widely, there are at present no satisfying explanations for why it manifests when and how it does. Drawing on evolutionary biology, this Article provides a new theory of the endowment effect. Briefly, we hypothesize that the endowment effect is an evolved propensity of humans and, further, that the degree to which an item is evolutionarily relevant will affect the strength of the endowment effect. The theory generates a novel combination of three predictions. These are: (1) the effect is likely to be observable in many other species, including close primate relatives; (2) the prevalence of the effect in other species is likely to vary across items; and (3) the prevalence of the endowment effect will increase or decrease, respectively, with the increasing or decreasing evolutionary salience of the item in question. The authors tested these predictions in a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) experiment, recently published in Current Biology. The data, further explored here, are consistent with each of the three predictions. Consequently, this theory may explain why the endowment effect exists in humans and other species. It may also help both to predict and to explain some of the variability in the effect when it does manifest. And, more broadly, the results of the experiment suggest that combining life science and social science perspectives could lead to a more coherent framework for understanding the wider variety of other cognitive heuristics and biases relevant to law