A Program Evaluation Of The Career Pathways CTE Program At One High School

ABSTRACT A leading solution to many education problems in our country is Career and Technical Education (CTE). Jacob (2017) indicated that by combining traditional academic skills with hands-on experience that provide hands-on training, students can acquire the soft skills necessary to succeed in today\u27s workplace. As the 21st-Century economy grows more complex, the role of career and technical education is critical to the success of America\u27s future through increased student engagement, innovative math, science, and literacy integration, and meeting employer and economic need. In my study, I sought to determine the perceptions of administrators and instructional staff at one school concerning the effectiveness of the Career Pathways CTE program in increasing student achievement and graduation rates and giving students other options to pursue postsecondary education. I used a mixed-method research design based on qualitative and quantitative data. As a result of my research, I made a policy recommendation that students take a basic skills assessment before enrollment to decrease program remediation. In my policy, I also recommended professional development for all instructional staff and externships for CTE teachers to stay current with the workforce trends

Transfer of Metacognitive Skills and Hint Seeking in Monkeys

Metacognition is knowledge that can be expressed as confidence judgments about what we know (monitoring) and by strategies for learning what we don’t know (control). Although a substantial literature exists on cognitive processes in animals, little is known about their metacognitive abilities. Here we show that rhesus macaques, trained previously to make retrospective confidence judgments about their performance on perceptual tasks, transferred that ability immediately to a new perceptual task and to a working memory task. In a second experiment we show that monkeys can also learn to request “hints” when they are given problems that they would otherwise have to solve by trial and error. This shows, for the first time, that non-human primates share with humans the ability to monitor and transfer their metacognitive ability both within and between different cognitive tasks, and to seek new knowledge on a need to know basis.

Disabling Architecture: Aesthetics and Accessibility at Trinity University

Trinity University’s San Antonio campus is nationally renowned for its unique architectural design. Created by lead architect O’Neil Ford during the 1950s, its red-brick buildings often deploy the lift-slab method, at the time done for cost-saving purposes. More importantly embody Ford’s philosophy of incorporating architecture into the natural landscape. These buildings now bear national recognition from the Texas Historic Commission, and their pattern of design is reiterated in the campus’ newer buildings as well. Yet, as a campus constructed before the implementation of legislation such as the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, university facilities face issues with accessibility. Trinity’s campus was born out of an aesthetic-first design process, which concerned itself with buildings’ appearances, rather than their function. Before the campus can truly approach accessibility in a meaningful way, it must re-imagine itself, and engage with accommodation-first architecture

Annual Report, 2004

https://irl.umsl.edu/cab/1091/thumbnail.jp

Annual Report, 2005

https://irl.umsl.edu/cab/1092/thumbnail.jp

Perceptual category learning of photographic and painterly stimuli in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) and humans

Humans are highly adept at categorizing visual stimuli, but studies of human categorization are typically validated by verbal reports. This makes it difficult to perform comparative studies of categorization using non-human animals. Interpretation of comparative studies is further complicated by the possibility that animal performance may merely reflect reinforcement learning, whereby discrete features act as discriminative cues for categorization. To assess and compare how humans and monkeys classified visual stimuli, we trained 7 rhesus macaques and 41 human volunteers to respond, in a specific order, to four simultaneously presented stimuli at a time, each belonging to a different perceptual category. These exemplars were drawn at random from large banks of images, such that the stimuli presented changed on every trial. Subjects nevertheless identified and ordered these changing stimuli correctly. Three monkeys learned to order naturalistic photographs; four others, close-up sections of paintings with distinctive styles. Humans learned to order both types of stimuli. All subjects classified stimuli at levels substantially greater than that predicted by chance or by feature-driven learning alone, even when stimuli changed on every trial. However, humans more closely resembled monkeys when classifying the more abstract painting stimuli than the photographic stimuli. This points to a common classification strategy in both species, one that humans can rely on in the absence of linguistic labels for categories

Detecting Transfer of Training Through Simulator Scenario Design: A Novice Driver Training Study

Novice drivers in comparison to experienced drivers perform poorly due to incomplete mental models of roadway hazards. This paper describes the driving simulator scenario design methods used in a novice driver training study to detect a possible transfer of training for hazard perception. Applied in a high school driver education classroom, the data of trained versus un-trained drivers is presented for pre/post-test driving scenarios, N = 67. Results showed that while general simulator control performance between the trained and un-trained groups was similar, the trained group performed better at hazard events and exhibited fewer speeding behaviors at the post-test. Specific hazard encounters indicated that simulator training may have had an effect on performance even when the training group was not trained on the specific situation. Arguments for training transfer in hazard perception are presented

Transfer of a Serial Representation between Two Distinct Tasks by Rhesus Macaques

Do animals form task-specific representations, or do those representations take a general form that can be applied to qualitatively different tasks? Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) learned the ordering of stimulus lists using two different serial tasks, in order to test whether prior experience in each task could be transfered to the other, enhancing performance. The simultaneous chaining paradigm delivered rewards only after subjects responded in the correct order to all stimuli displayed on a touch sensitive video monitor. The transitive inference paradigm presented pairs of items and delivered rewards when subjects selected the item with the lower ordinal rank. After learning a list in one paradigm, subjects’ knowledge of that list was tested using the other paradigm. Performance was enhanced from the very start of transfer training. Transitive inference performance was characterized by ‘symbolic distance effects,’ whereby the ordinal distance between stimuli in the implied list ordering was strongly predictive of the probability of a correct response. The patterns of error displayed by subjects in both tasks were best explained by a spatially coded representation of list items, regardless of which task was used to learn the list. Our analysis permits properties of this representation to be investigated without the confound of verbal reasoning