Relational Trust within an Urban Public Comprehensive High School District in Northern California

The 2013 adoption of the Local Control Funding Formula and Local Control Accountability Plan provides local communities and districts with educational decision-making and provides a roadmap of how to improve outcomes in low-performing districts. One of the eight-priority areas California public school districts are held accountable to make progress on an annual basis is improving school climate. Building strong trust based relationships prepares schools to address a myriad of complex challenges. This dissertation examined the key facets that build relational trust between high school teachers and principals within a hierarchical role relationship in a public comprehensive high school district in Northern California. This mixed methods study stretched previous research to understand how secondary principals and teachers conceptualize relational trust. Survey and one-on-one interview data suggest gender, ethnicity, and years of experience are not significantly related to the conceptualization of relational trust and that high school teachers largely feel the same way, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or years of experience. Of note, principals and high school teachers may view the importance of the five facets of relational trust in a dissimilar manner. Principals are encouraged to understand that 10 out of 11 high school teacher groups, while also recognizing that past experiences have a profound influence on the trust building process, ranked reliability as the most important facet in the trust building process

Kepler Data Validation I: Architecture, Diagnostic Tests, and Data Products for Vetting Transiting Planet Candidates

The Kepler Mission was designed to identify and characterize transiting planets in the Kepler Field of View and to determine their occurrence rates. Emphasis was placed on identification of Earth-size planets orbiting in the Habitable Zone of their host stars. Science data were acquired for a period of four years. Long-cadence data with 29.4 min sampling were obtained for approx. 200,000 individual stellar targets in at least one observing quarter in the primary Kepler Mission. Light curves for target stars are extracted in the Kepler Science Data Processing Pipeline, and are searched for transiting planet signatures. A Threshold Crossing Event is generated in the transit search for targets where the transit detection threshold is exceeded and transit consistency checks are satisfied. These targets are subjected to further scrutiny in the Data Validation (DV) component of the Pipeline. Transiting planet candidates are characterized in DV, and light curves are searched for additional planets after transit signatures are modeled and removed. A suite of diagnostic tests is performed on all candidates to aid in discrimination between genuine transiting planets and instrumental or astrophysical false positives. Data products are generated per target and planet candidate to document and display transiting planet model fit and diagnostic test results. These products are exported to the Exoplanet Archive at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, and are available to the community. We describe the DV architecture and diagnostic tests, and provide a brief overview of the data products. Transiting planet modeling and the search for multiple planets on individual targets are described in a companion paper. The final revision of the Kepler Pipeline code base is available to the general public through GitHub. The Kepler Pipeline has also been modified to support the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission which is expected to commence in 2018