STEM, STEAM, and German Language Acquisition: Modified Project-Based Learning in a German Conversation Course

This project describes an investigation into the efficacy of employing a modified project-based learning model to enhance the presentation and conversation skills of students in German 235: Intermediate German Conversation. Unlike usual language conversation courses that rely on expensive textbooks and focus on reading selections followed by discussion questions, GER 235 sought to engage students in a journey of discovery as they explored topics typically more at home in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses (STEM) and that were supplemented by the arts: STEAM. The impetus for this course developed out of a teaching unit that I created on the concept of the “ecological backpack,” my final project for a professional development seminar at the University of Leipzig, Germany, in Summer 2015

Girls vs. boys in mathematics: Test scores provide one interpretation girls narratives suggest a different story

This study seeks to provide a data based critique of the claims of gender equity in mathematics. Specifically, this paper is an analysis of the personal well-remembered events (WREs) told and recorded by women who are in the first course of their preservice teaching professional sequence. Importantly, these are women who are on the professional track to teach mathematics. Using a narrative based methodology, the writings provide another angle of the intricate pieces of equity (i.e. test results say both genders are just as capable, stories of females say otherwise). The themes center around the safe zones, struggles, embarrassment, competition, and self-fulfilling prophecies. From these stories, we see subtle illustrations of existing gender inequities in mathematics

Calibration of conditional composite likelihood for Bayesian inference on Gibbs random fields

Gibbs random fields play an important role in statistics, however, the resulting likelihood is typically unavailable due to an intractable normalizing constant. Composite likelihoods offer a principled means to construct useful approximations. This paper provides a mean to calibrate the posterior distribution resulting from using a composite likelihood and illustrate its performance in several examples.Comment: JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings, 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), San Diego, California, USA, 9-12 May 2015 (Vol. 38, pp. 921-929). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1207.575

The present status of women\u27s and gender studies programs at community colleges

According to the State University of New York-Oneanta (2013), “women’s and gender studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that takes gender as its main category of analysis, and works to reframe the place of gender as essential to the workings of social, cultural, political, and economic systems.” These programs, especially at community colleges, have not benefitted from much research and/or scholarship within the last ten years. For this reason, I chose to explore the history of women’s and gender studies programs at community colleges, their place within higher education, and the creation and maintenance of such programs. A case study methodology was used to conduct this study. Eight community college faculty, all who identified as women, were interviewed. Data were gathered from semi-structured interviews and analysis of institutional artifacts such as program reviews and sample syllabi. Through the data analysis, specific themes emerged regarding women’s and gender studies programs at the community college level, including faculty perspectives on why students enroll in women’s and gender studies courses, issues of intersectionality and identity within women’s and gender studies programs, and the importance of women’s and gender studies programs at community colleges. Several recommendations were provided that could help strengthen women’s and gender studies programs at the community college level, as well as possible topics for future research. This study has implications not only for women’s and gender studies programs at community colleges, but within higher education. All educational institutions—regardless of the students they serve and the level of women’s and gender studies courses that are offered—can benefit from learning about the involvement of community colleges and the value in creating alliances to further increase women’s and gender studies programs throughout academia

Welfare policies and covert behaviors: Understanding the effects on low-income families needing child support in central Iowa

When President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) into law on August 22, 1996, programs to strengthen child support enforcement and improve receipt efforts were established. However, the lives of welfare recipients who were receiving child support were forever changed. These single mothers would now have to attempt to find employment, no matter what their skill level, in order to keep their welfare benefits for the five-year time limit mandated by this legislation. Some of the new welfare-to-work rules helped raise welfare recipients out of poverty by helping them gain work experience and various job skills. However, most jobs found by welfare recipients provided low wages, limited or no benefits, and no flexibility when it came to childcare situations. Before 1996, custodial parents were allowed to keep the first $50 per month in child support collected on their behalf without their welfare benefits being reduced. However, PRWORA now allowed states to increase or decrease the amount of this child support disregard. Many states, including Iowa, decided to keep the child support paid by non-custodial parents in order to offset welfare payments. This thesis includes a brief history of welfare and child support policies and the recovery by states of their welfare costs, with an analysis of pass-through and disregard policies stemming from the passage of PRWORA. PRWORA eliminated mandatory pass-through. As of June 2009, approximately 25 states keep all of the child support paid by the non-custodial parent as reimbursement for the custodial parent receiving welfare benefits (Center for Law and Social Policy, 2009). For this study, custodial and non-custodial parents, judges, and administrators from the Iowa Department of Human Services were interviewed. They were asked about their experiences with the formal child support and welfare systems, and how they navigated through the rules and regulations. Respondents also had a chance to give suggestions as to how the welfare and child support systems could be improved. This thesis reports the effects that covert non-compliance and covert support have on custodial parents who receive child support, and on non-custodial parents who pay child support. It also reports that when child support is not made readily available to families who use welfare benefits, custodial parents may choose to engage in covert non-compliance, covert support, and/or informal support. Most of the respondents had negative experiences with the formal welfare and child support systems. They understood the rules, regulations, and eligibility requirements of the programs they were involved in, but did not always agree with the stipulations. Some of the respondents also felt that welfare benefits and child support should be two separate financial supplements. My recommendations include an educational campaign for Iowa Department of Human Services administrators, workers, and clients, a switch in federal marriage promotion funding to a positive parenting curriculum, job training, and skill building programs, and a policy brief of my research that can be used by various policymakers to help understand the plight of welfare families in central Iowa and how future policies concerning child support and welfare can be beneficial to both the state and low-income families

Noisy Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for doubly-intractable distributions

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has been progressively incorporated within the statistician's toolbox as an alternative sampling method in settings when standard Metropolis-Hastings is inefficient. HMC generates a Markov chain on an augmented state space with transitions based on a deterministic differential flow derived from Hamiltonian mechanics. In practice, the evolution of Hamiltonian systems cannot be solved analytically, requiring numerical integration schemes. Under numerical integration, the resulting approximate solution no longer preserves the measure of the target distribution, therefore an accept-reject step is used to correct the bias. For doubly-intractable distributions -- such as posterior distributions based on Gibbs random fields -- HMC suffers from some computational difficulties: computation of gradients in the differential flow and computation of the accept-reject proposals poses difficulty. In this paper, we study the behaviour of HMC when these quantities are replaced by Monte Carlo estimates

Do the low PN velocity dispersions around elliptical galaxies imply that these lack dark matter?

While kinematical modelling of the low PN velocity dispersions observed in the outer regions of elliptical galaxies suggest a lack of dark matter around these galaxies, we report on an analysis of a suite of $N$-body simulations (with gas) of major mergers of spiral galaxies embedded in dark matter halos, and find that the outer velocity dispersions are as low as observed for the PNe. The inconsistency between our dynamical modelling and previous kinematical modelling is caused by very radial stellar orbits and projection effects when viewing face-on oblate ellipticals. Our simulations (weakly) suggest the youth of PNe around ellipticals, and we propose that the universality of the PN luminosity function may be explained if the bright PNe in ellipticals are formed after the regular accretion of very low mass gas-rich galaxies.Comment: Contributed talk at meeting, "Planetary Nebulae as astronomical tools", Gdansk, Poland, June-July 2005, ed. R. Szczerba, G. Stasi\'nska, and S. K. G\'orny, AIP Conference Proceedings, Melville, New York, 2005. 4 or 5 pages, 6 figure