The Inclusion of Students with Special Needs in the General Education Classroom

The inclusion of students with special needs in the general education classroom has been a major topic of discussion for many years. Inclusion education means that all students are part of the school community, regardless of their strengths and weaknesses (“Sec. 300.8 Child With a Disability.” n.d.). These students deserve to have full access to all resources and social interactions that are present in the general education classroom. The ultimate goal of many schools is to create a classroom that has the least restrictive environment to meet the needs of all students, including those with special needs. However, many teachers were not taught how to teach students with special needs. Despite this lack of education, students with special needs are still placed in the general education classrooms (Hyunjeong et al., 2014, p. 16). Studies show that teachers do want students with special needs in their classroom; however they do not feel prepared to fully address the educational needs of these students. Teachers should be given the opportunity to learn more about how to create successful inclusion classrooms. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to address the different teaching strategies that teachers can use in order to have a successful inclusion classroom. This study answered one research question: How do teachers create and maintain successful inclusion classrooms? Data to answer this research question was collected through a review of scholarly literature and observations in two elementary classrooms. The researcher results showed that teachers can set students with special needs up for success if they are knowledgeable of a variety teaching strategies to do so

Implement Multi-Factor Authentication on All Federal Systems Now

The White House Office of Management and Budget recorded 31,107 information security incidents in fiscal year 2018. The most common attacks to gain access to a user’s login credentials were e-mail/phishing, web-based attack, and brute force entering of username/password combinations. Given this high number of incidents, strong reliance on computers for everyday business, and common attacks that target passwords, information security should be a priority for information technology administrators working in federal agencies

Language Interventions and Social-Emotional Learning Helps Students Who Are Emotionally Disturbed

Students who are classified as being Emotionally Disturbed (ED) often struggle in the general education classroom setting because they do not receive the proper support to be the most successful. Many teachers do not understand how to work with these students due to a lack of training and understanding of the disability. Additionally, these students who typically have behavioral issues will continue to act out without forming interpersonal relationships with their teacher. Although research has demonstrated some understanding of working with these students, few studies have explored the use of language interventions and social-emotional learning to promote positive student-teacher relationships. The purpose of the research was to better understand how a focus on pragmatic language skills and social-emotional learning can impact student-teacher interpersonal relationships. This study involved conducting interviews with the teachers of students’ who are ED, and then creating a six-week one-on-one intervention that focused on pragmatic language skills and social-emotional learning. The study concluded with another set of interviews, with the classroom teachers, to see if the goals of the intervention were met. The findings from the research show that after the six-week intervention students were able to better regulate their emotions in the classroom setting. However, not all students were able to fully express their feelings when they became dysregulated. They often needed extra support and prompts from their classroom teacher, which can only happen if the teachers understand how to meet the emotional needs of these students

Family Businesses: An In-Depth Look at Communicative Strategies Used by Firms to Implement a Shared Value System within the Work Environment

Since family owned enterprises are a driving force in the present day economy and yet they fail to withstand succession from first generation ownership at an alarmingly high rate, this study seeks to understand the factors that contribute to a family owned company’s ability to withstand succession. Since family businesses differ most from traditional organizations in terms of their value orientations, this research sought to answer which value orientation this family owned business incorporates into its business model, as well as how management within a family business communicates their desired value system to their employees and how much emphasis is put on said value system. The participants involved in this study came from a family owned organization that is successfully thriving in its second generation of ownership. Through the qualitative research methods of interviewing and observing the participants, it was made evident that the value system upheld by this family owned organization is a marriage between moral and competence value orientations, that the importance of this value system is very heavily stressed to their employees and that the value system is communicated through their building’s structure and physical use of space, their use of verbal and nonverbal communication, and their use of promoting organizational pride

Navigating the literacy landscape of the twenty-first century: parents and families supporting young children’s emergent literacy

This research investigated the lived experiences of 21st century parents, supporting their pre-school child’s emergent literacy. A Mixed Methods approach was guided by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and survey by written questionnaire. The findings demonstrate parents’ positive literacy attitudes. Parents prefer informal literacy practices influenced by their childhood experiences. Technology is utilised to support emergent literacy. Outside agencies are most supportive while a lack of time prevents parents from engaging in literacy activities with their child

Master of Science

thesisThe primary purpose of this study is to develop a method for estimating the location of a single point source of a greenhouse gas (GHG) leak. The case study is the University of Utah campus. Specifically, we hypothesized that sewer access covers (“manholes”) are significant sources of GHG emissions on campus, and we used these known point source locations to test the ability of standard GHG measurement instruments to develop methods for identifying a priori unknown locations. We sited gas analyzers at specific distances and directions from sewer access covers and then evaluated whether tailored probability density functions would “point” towards the sites. All GHG data were measured by a Picarro© cavity ring-down spectrometer (CRDS) gas analyzer and contemporaneous wind speed and direction were measured with a 3-dimensional (3D) anemometer. Since this study focused on locating leakage sources, we assigned the concentration threshold for leakage concentration to be the 99th percentile concentration of each dataset, a common approach in leakage detection studies. The leakage concentration data along with corresponding wind speed and direction were used to create conditional bivariate probability function (CBPF) plots. All CBPF plots were constructed for varying time spans throughout the day at each collection site to discern the probable location of GHG leakage sources. The results revealed that all 99th percentile concentrations were associated with lower wind speeds (<1.5 m/s). Higher GHG concentrations associated with high wind speeds were most likely diluted before the signal could reach the receptor. Furthermore, the study site is characterized by hilly terrain, large buildings, and a moderate amount of large vegetation (trees) that likely tend to disperse what would otherwise be detectable GHG signals. Differences in CBPF plots at different receptor (tower) locations confirm that the distance between the tower and leakage sources is a critical issue. To our knowledge, this study is the first to apply CBPF’s with the intent of quantifying trends in spatio-temporal GHG distributions from point leakage sources and determining probable locations of those sources

Predictability of biomass burning in response to climate changes

Climate is an important control on biomass burning, but the sensitivity of fire to changes in temperature and moisture balance has not been quantified. We analyze sedimentary charcoal records to show that the changes in fire regime over the past 21,000 yrs are predictable from changes in regional climates. Analyses of paleo- fire data show that fire increases monotonically with changes in temperature and peaks at intermediate moisture levels, and that temperature is quantitatively the most important driver of changes in biomass burning over the past 21,000 yrs. Given that a similar relationship between climate drivers and fire emerges from analyses of the interannual variability in biomass burning shown by remote-sensing observations of month-by-month burnt area between 1996 and 2008, our results signal a serious cause for concern in the face of continuing global warming

Cultivating Empathy: Lessons from an Interdisciplinary Service-Learning Course

In “Thinking Critically, Acting Justly,” Naomi Yavneh Klos suggests that the key questions for honors education and social justice are first “how to engage our highest-ability and most motivated students in questions of justice” and second “how honors can be a place of access, equity, and excellence in higher education.” These goals are both important and complementary; achieving the latter helps achieve the former. Honors education creates a fruitful space for inclusion where the knowledge and experience of diverse students develop skills oriented toward justice for the whole community. Making honors a place of access and equity prompts deeper engagement in questions of justice for all. Particularly in its emphasis on interdisciplinary and experiential learning, honors education creates, as Yavneh Klos writes, opportunities to “develop an understanding of the world in its complexities [and to] listen and engage [across difference].” Honors also prompts students to learn from the intersections of experience, recognize assumptions based in privilege, and challenge the notion that justice is about helping distant others. Through these practices, honors education is particularly well-positioned to cultivate empathy, a necessary foundation of social justice education. We base our conclusions about building empathy in honors education on our experience team-teaching an experiential, interdisciplinary course focused on mass incarceration in the University of New Mexico Honors College. Titled “Locked Up: Incarceration in Question,” the two-semester course integrated methodologies and approaches from sociology and art, fostering interdisciplinary inquiry into the historic roots and contemporary practices of incarceration. The aim of the class was to cultivate empathetic and engaged citizens, both caring about the world around them and prepared to create change in their communities. During the fall semester, students examined mass incarceration as a civil rights issue and explored how art allows us to both construct meaning and communicate knowledge about injustice. This class prepared students for service learning projects during the spring semester, when student groups worked with community partners to provide requested services. During the activities of both semesters, students came to destabilize the false dichotomy between themselves—often relatively privileged students in their state’s flagship university—and individuals directly impacted by the injustices of the carceral apparatus. Students found such complexities also mirrored in their own lives

Assessment of Pragmatically Complex, Authentic Listening Tasks

The use of authentic materials has grown in second language (L2) classrooms within the last decade due to contributions in technological accessibility. This is beneficial for the L2 classroom, as communication does not exist within a vacuum but instead is experiential and multi-modal. A speakers’ performance constructs a more complex, dynamic relationship between verbal and nonverbal expression. It is our duty as language teachers to prepare students for the world beyond the classroom: a dynamic world. Such dynamism can be seen in the accompanying media of a culture, where conversations include contextualized pragmatic exchanges and their nonverbal compliments. In this one-directional listening assessment of complex pragmatic exchanges between native speakers of English, students view clips from authentic American sitcom media (Friends). Each scene is framed around a large, overarching speech act context and involves a point of contention or misalignment in understanding between characters. Students are assessed based on their ability to identify the source of conflict, infer meaning of interactions involving physicality-linked communication or prosodic cues, and predict and support rationale for future outcome