Arts Smarts or Random Visits: Arts Field Trips in the American Education Policy Context

The school field trip is as much a part of the American educational experience as letter grades and recess. However, in response to a variety of pressures such as accountability, safety, and funding, the school field trip is reported to be in decline. Traditional field trip destinations, like museums and zoos, claim that attendance has declined. Further, these institutions feel pressure to connect field trips directly to state educational standards, or even design field trips to meet state standards that may be outside their areas of expertise, in order to justify a field. In this collection of three studies, I examine the effects of culturally enriching field trips to arts institutions on student outcomes in an experiment. I conduct a qualitative study of multiple field trips and report stakeholder perspectives. Finally, I examine the state of arts field trips across the country, including a longitudinal report on field trip attendance to art museums in multiple states. I find positive benefits of field trips to students on social-emotional outcomes. Further, there is evidence that these benefits compound with more field trip attendance. Stakeholders, including the student participants, report benefits from these field trips that both align with and expand from the experimental study findings. Lastly, I find that there is evidence of a decline in field trips to art museums and document the reported impact of the policy pressures on these field trips

An Experimental Evaluation of Arts Field Trips

This paper presents results of a multi-visit, longitudinal experiment on the academic and social-emotional effects of arts-based field trips. We randomly assign fourth and fifth grade students to receive arts-based field trips throughout the school year or to serve as a control. Treatment students express greater tolerance for people with different opinions and a desire to consume arts. Additionally, treatment students have fewer behavioral infractions, attend school more frequently, score higher on their end-of-grade exams, and receive higher course grades. Effects are strongest when students enter middle school. We find no effect on students’ desire to participate in the arts, empathy, or social perspective taking

Precursors To and Pathways Through Conversion: Catalytic Experiences of Born Again Christian College Students

Born again Christians are a significant religious population in the United States, and throughout the world. The process by which a born again identity is assumed is not clearly described in the research literature. Therefore, we asked 18 born again Christian college students a series of questions designed to uncover what led to their identity of being born again. Responses fell into three overarching themes. First, participants described exposure within relationships to God’s principles. Second, participants noted the influence of introspection and reflection on their lives apart from the influence of God. Third, participants had an active response in which they reported such things as recognizing conviction by the Holy Spirit, that they decided to act on that conviction, and that they took action to follow Jesus. Findings are discussed within the framework of Cohen and Hill’s (2007) theory of religion as culture

The Play’s the Thing: Experimentally Examining the Social and Cognitive Effects of School Field Trips to Live Theater Performances

Field trips to see theater performances are a long-standing educational practice, however, there is little systematic evidence demonstrating educational benefits. This article describes the results of five random assignment experiments spanning two years where school groups were assigned by lottery to attend a live theater performance, or for some groups, watch a movie-version of the same story. We find significant educational benefits from seeing live theater, including higher levels of tolerance, social perspective taking, and stronger command of the plot and vocabulary of those plays. Students randomly assigned to watch a movie did not experience these benefits. Our findings also suggest that theater field trips may cultivate the desire among students to frequent the theater in the future

A Unified Account of the Moral Standing to Blame

Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the question, not when a given agent is blameworthy for what she does, but when a further agent has the moral standing to blame her for what she does. Philosophers have proposed at least four conditions on having “moral standing”: 1. One’s blame would not be “hypocritical”. 2. One is not oneself “involved in” the target agent’s wrongdoing. 3. One must be warranted in believing that the target is indeed blameworthy for the wrongdoing. 4. The target’s wrongdoing must some of “one’s business”. These conditions are often proposed as both conditions on one and the same thing, and as marking fundamentally different ways of “losing standing.” Here I call these claims into question. First, I claim that conditions (3) and (4) are simply conditions on different things than are conditions (1) and (2). Second, I argue that condition (2) reduces to condition (1): when “involvement” removes someone’s standing to blame, it does so only by indicating something further about that agent, viz., that he or she lacks commitment to the values that condemn the wrongdoer’s action. The result: after we clarify the nature of the non-hypocrisy condition, we will have a unified account of moral standing to blame. Issues also discussed: whether standing can ever be regained, the relationship between standing and our "moral fragility", the difference between mere inconsistency and hypocrisy, and whether a condition of standing might be derived from deeper facts about the "equality of persons"

CMB observations from the CBI and VSA: A comparison of coincident maps and parameter estimation methods

We present coincident observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from the Very Small Array (VSA) and Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) telescopes. The consistency of the full datasets is tested in the map plane and the Fourier plane, prior to the usual compression of CMB data into flat bandpowers. Of the three mosaics observed by each group, two are found to be in excellent agreement. In the third mosaic, there is a 2 sigma discrepancy between the correlation of the data and the level expected from Monte Carlo simulations. This is shown to be consistent with increased phase calibration errors on VSA data during summer observations. We also consider the parameter estimation method of each group. The key difference is the use of the variance window function in place of the bandpower window function, an approximation used by the VSA group. A re-evaluation of the VSA parameter estimates, using bandpower windows, shows that the two methods yield consistent results.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures. Final version. Accepted for publication in MNRA

Small-Scale and Global Dynamos and the Area and Flux Distributions of Active Regions, Sunspot Groups, and Sunspots: A Multi-Database Study

In this work we take advantage of eleven different sunspot group, sunspot, and active region databases to characterize the area and flux distributions of photospheric magnetic structures. We find that, when taken separately, different databases are better fitted by different distributions (as has been reported previously in the literature). However, we find that all our databases can be reconciled by the simple application of a proportionality constant, and that, in reality, different databases are sampling different parts of a composite distribution. This composite distribution is made up by linear combination of Weibull and log-normal distributions -- where a pure Weibull (log-normal) characterizes the distribution of structures with fluxes below (above) $10^{21}$Mx ($10^{22}$Mx). We propose that this is evidence of two separate mechanisms giving rise to visible structures on the photosphere: one directly connected to the global component of the dynamo (and the generation of bipolar active regions), and the other with the small-scale component of the dynamo (and the fragmentation of magnetic structures due to their interaction with turbulent convection). Additionally, we demonstrate that the Weibull distribution shows the expected linear behavior of a power-law distribution (when extended into smaller fluxes), making our results compatible with the results of Parnell et al. (2009)

Thermal Conductivity of Monolayer Molybdenum Disulfide Obtained from Temperature-Dependent Raman Spectroscopy

Atomically thin molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) offers potential for advanced devices and an alternative to graphene due to its unique electronic and optical properties. The temperature-dependent Raman spectra of exfoliated, monolayer MoS2 in the range of 100-320 K are reported and analyzed. The linear temperature coefficients of the in-plane E-2g(1) and the out-of-plane A(1g) modes for both suspended and substrate-supported monolayer MoS2 are measured. These data, when combined with the first-order coefficients from laser power-dependent studies, enable the thermal conductivity to be extracted. The resulting thermal conductivity kappa = (34.5 +/- 4) W/mK at room temperature agrees well with the first-principles lattice dynamics simulations. However, this value is significantly lower than that of graphene. The results from this work provide important input for the design of MoS2-based devices where thermal management is critical

Therapeutic DNA vaccine induces broad T cell responses in the gut and sustained protection from viral rebound and AIDS in SIV-infected rhesus macaques.

Immunotherapies that induce durable immune control of chronic HIV infection may eliminate the need for life-long dependence on drugs. We investigated a DNA vaccine formulated with a novel genetic adjuvant that stimulates immune responses in the blood and gut for the ability to improve therapy in rhesus macaques chronically infected with SIV. Using the SIV-macaque model for AIDS, we show that epidermal co-delivery of plasmids expressing SIV Gag, RT, Nef and Env, and the mucosal adjuvant, heat-labile E. coli enterotoxin (LT), during antiretroviral therapy (ART) induced a substantial 2-4-log fold reduction in mean virus burden in both the gut and blood when compared to unvaccinated controls and provided durable protection from viral rebound and disease progression after the drug was discontinued. This effect was associated with significant increases in IFN-γ T cell responses in both the blood and gut and SIV-specific CD8+ T cells with dual TNF-α and cytolytic effector functions in the blood. Importantly, a broader specificity in the T cell response seen in the gut, but not the blood, significantly correlated with a reduction in virus production in mucosal tissues and a lower virus burden in plasma. We conclude that immunizing with vaccines that induce immune responses in mucosal gut tissue could reduce residual viral reservoirs during drug therapy and improve long-term treatment of HIV infection in humans