Estimating School-Level Achievement in Belize

This dissertation consists of five chapters: introduction, literature review, methodology, results, and discussion with final thoughts. The research design of this dissertation study attended to structures, cultures, and characteristics associated with, and specific to, the Belize education system. The processes for data collection and types of analyses were appropriate, yielded meaningful results, and served as a segue for national application. The Belize Educator Survey was developed to capture the educators’ voices and illuminate their relationship to educational achievement in Belize. The Belize Educator Survey was piloted and revised with direct input from educators and experts who work in the Belize education system. In this dissertation study, the Belize Educator Survey was the primary data collection instrument for a district-wide, full-coverage survey approach in one of the six districts in Belize. All primary school educators in the district were invited to participate (N = 524), and the response rate was 60.11% (n = 315). One of the end goals of this study was to create a pragmatic way of estimating School-Level Achievement that incorporated data about all grade levels and include the voice of all educators associated with the school. Two methods, the Weighted-Indicator Estimation Protocol (WISP) and a Multilevel Achievement Estimation Protocol (MAEP), were compared. The Weighted-Indicator Scores Protocol estimation uses a combination of classic statistical analyses, while the Multilevel Achievement Estimation Protocol version relies on a multilevel approach that estimates the within- and between-school statistics simultaneously. The 2018 Primary School Examinations school-level performance served as the primary criterion-referenced variable. Analyses of variances, comparisons of standard errors of the mean, and rank-order matchings show that the school-level estimates derived from the Weighted-Indicator Scores Protocol and Multilevel Achievement Estimation Protocol methods are statistically different. Possible extensions of this study could identify or develop additional measures of academic performance that align to grade-level expectations in the Belize education system. The statistically significant negative associations between educators’ perceptions, School Size, and Location are also worthy of investigation for strategic planning purposes. Advisor: Kurt F. Geisinge

A lower bound in an approximation problem involving the zeros of the Riemann zeta function

We slightly improve the lower bound of Baez-Duarte, Balazard, Landreau and Saias in the Nyman-Beurling formulation of the Riemann Hypothesis as an approximation problem. We construct Hilbert space vectors which could prove useful in the context of the so-called `Hilbert-Polya idea'.Comment: 17 pages, v2 adds two references. No mathematical change

An adelic causality problem related to abelian L-functions

I associate to a global field K a Lax-Phillips scattering which has the property of causality if and only if the Riemann Hypothesis holds for all the abelian L-functions of K. As a Hilbert space closure problem this provides an adelic variation on a theme initiated by Nyman and Beurling. The adelic aspects are related to previous work by Tate, Iwasawa and Connes.Comment: 18 pages, latex2e with amsfonts. Final version, accepted for publicatio

Radio Galaxy Zoo: The Distortion of Radio Galaxies by Galaxy Clusters

We study the impact of cluster environment on the morphology of a sample of 4304 extended radio galaxies from Radio Galaxy Zoo. A total of 87% of the sample lies within a projected 15 Mpc of an optically identified cluster. Brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) are more likely than other cluster members to be radio sources, and are also moderately bent. The surface density as a function of separation from cluster center of non-BCG radio galaxies follows a power law with index $-1.10\pm 0.03$ out to $10~r_{500}$ ($\sim 7~$Mpc), which is steeper than the corresponding distribution for optically selected galaxies. Non-BCG radio galaxies are statistically more bent the closer they are to the cluster center. Within the inner $1.5~r_{500}$ ($\sim 1~$Mpc) of a cluster, non-BCG radio galaxies are statistically more bent in high-mass clusters than in low-mass clusters. Together, we find that non-BCG sources are statistically more bent in environments that exert greater ram pressure. We use the orientation of bent radio galaxies as an indicator of galaxy orbits and find that they are preferentially in radial orbits. Away from clusters, there is a large population of bent radio galaxies, limiting their use as cluster locators; however, they are still located within statistically overdense regions. We investigate the asymmetry in the tail length of sources that have their tails aligned along the radius vector from the cluster center, and find that the length of the inward-pointing tail is weakly suppressed for sources close to the center of the cluster.Comment: 23 pages, 17 figures, 2 tables. Supplemental data files available in The Astronomical Journal or contact autho

Instrumentations pour l’étude des géosystèmes anciens

Jean-Paul Gilg, maître de conférences avec Georges Tate, professeur à l’Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines et Pierre Bildgen, ingénieur de recherche à l’Université Paris-V

Instrumentations pour l’étude des géosystèmes anciens

Jean-Paul Gilg, maître de conférences avec Georges Tate, professeur à l’Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines et Pierre Bildgen, ingénieur de recherche à l’Université Paris-V

Instrumentation pour l’étude des géosystèmes anciens

Jean-Paul Gilg, maître de conférencesPierre Bildgen, ingénieur de recherche au CNRSet Georges Tate, professeur à l’Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines La première partie de l’enseignement a été consacrée à un cadrage thématique : dynamique des systèmes (P. Bildgen) et historique des aménagements et peuplements (G. Tate). La deuxième partie a dressé un bilan des possibilités offertes par les principaux outils mis à la disposition des chercheurs : données spatiales (cartes, photo..

Instrumentations pour l’étude des géosystèmes anciens

Jean-Paul Gilg, maître de conférences avec Georges Tate, professeur à l’Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines et Pierre Bildgen, ingénieur de recherche à l’Université Paris-VI Compte rendu non communiqué