An Examination of Research to Practice Gaps in Education: Whole Language, Learning Modalities, and Brain Gym

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the documented research to practice gap in education by discussing three recent trends in education that gained momentum with little to no empirical support: (a) whole language reading instruction; (b) modality-based instruction; and (c) Brain Gym. This thesis examines the trend in education toward embracing unsubstantiated strategies by spotlighting these three educational trends and offers recommendations for addressing the research to practice gap in the field of education

Methods for Teaching Hispanic English Language Learners

With the increase of diversity in American schools and the growing importance of English around the world, teaching English as a second language has become an essential aspect to education. It is difficult to have students of different cultural backgrounds in the classroom who are not proficient in English. A teacher cannot expect these students to succeed in an English only classroom setting. It is important that there be specialized teachers to address the needs of these students in order to reach all students where they are and help them accomplish all that they need to in order to succeed. Countless methods have been proposed for teaching students English. My thesis will examine the different methods and primarily focus on how they are used with Hispanic students and which ones seems to produce better results

Christmas Tree Sales

This year\u27s sale ran for two weeks from December 1st through 15th, (sales were cancelled for two days due to bad weather). The club purchased two hundred forty-five trees from Woodland Acres in Decorah, Iowa. We were not able to use any trees from our own plantation, but, maybe next year! Sales were slower than we had hoped they would be and we ended up throwing out thirty trees. Still, the Club had a net profit of almost six hundred dollars

Content-Based Weak Supervision for Ad-Hoc Re-Ranking

One challenge with neural ranking is the need for a large amount of manually-labeled relevance judgments for training. In contrast with prior work, we examine the use of weak supervision sources for training that yield pseudo query-document pairs that already exhibit relevance (e.g., newswire headline-content pairs and encyclopedic heading-paragraph pairs). We also propose filtering techniques to eliminate training samples that are too far out of domain using two techniques: a heuristic-based approach and novel supervised filter that re-purposes a neural ranker. Using several leading neural ranking architectures and multiple weak supervision datasets, we show that these sources of training pairs are effective on their own (outperforming prior weak supervision techniques), and that filtering can further improve performance.Comment: SIGIR 2019 (short paper

Preservative treatments for eucalyptus fence posts

References: p. 18-19.Mode of access: Internet

Rapid Delivery of Massive Geospatial Data Over Internet2

We study the feasibility of the on-demand delivery of a massive geospatial dataset over Internet2 for educational use. The dataset (20TB uncompressed, 2.5TB compressed), generously made available for this study by AirphotoUSA, provides a seamless, one-meter resolution aerial orthophotograph covering over three million square miles of the continental United States. We identify factors that limit the scalability, availability and user-perceived performance of serving such a dataset. To do this, we conduct experiments that measure response times for various levels of network congestion, bandwidth, and load. We also provide a proof-of-concept experiment by serving the dataset over Internet2 to students at Oklahoma State University. Given this information, we determine the server-side architecture and resource requirements sufficient to serve this dataset from Cal Poly. We discuss the funding for wide distribution of high-resolution datasets to universities and the student response to use of this data for education