“Wonder” Through the Eyes of Empathy: A Middle Grades Teacher’s Guide

This Practitioner Perspective provides brief definitions to the three main components of empathy (cognitive, affective, and behavioral) and outline the importance of incorporating empathy education into the classroom, specifically looking at the areas of diversity, social skills, and moral development. In addition, the paper provides teachers with discussion questions, prompts, and a “how to” guide to assist students in exploring each character through the eyes of that individual, while also helping to build empathy as they read and discuss the book. The objective of this paper is to help teachers think more deeply about how to use literature to encourage empathy in their own classrooms. By connecting diversity, social skills, and moral development to empathy, middle grades teachers are not just teaching empathy but are also enhancing important life skills for their students and thereby helping to promote productive citizenship for the future

Understanding the Unique Needs of Adolescent Refugee Students

Using the Essential Attributes of developmentally responsive, challenging, empowering, and equitable guidelines established by This We Believe: Keys to Educating Young Adolescents, this article will provide a frame of reference for readers to assist their understanding of the kaleidoscope of issues that face our refugee adolescent population (AMLE/NMSA, 2010). For each of the four essential attributes, practical application for the middle grades classroom is offered. These ideas are to assist teachers in meeting the needs of their students who come from a refugee background and to give a foundation in an area that is often overlooked in the current educational system

The Impact of Power Training on Balance and Visual Feedback Removal

Because power training has been known to augment stability, the purpose of this study was to assess whether the removal of visual input affects lower limb muscle power production in young women who are resistance trained to the same degree it affects the untrained. This provided insight as far as the need for resistance training protocols in a largely untrained visually impaired population. To study this, fourteen college-aged female participants (18-23 years) performed a seated double-leg press on a leg sled machine, isolating power production of the lower limbs. After establishing baselines, which involved finding an average of power produced during five trials, the subjects were asked to close their eyes for the following set of five pushes. The power production was assessed by utilizing a Tendo Unit, with placement on one of the limbs of the machine, to measure power output during leg extension (measured in Watts). Statistics analyzed in SPSS determined the average power deficit of the athletic population to be 11.57 Watts, whereas the general population had an average power deficit of 37.43 Watts. The deficits experienced by each respective group upon visual removal were significantly different from one another, as evidenced by a p-value of .048. This accentuated the power-trained group’s resilience. A suggested training plan regimen including cardiorespiratory, resistance, flexibility, and neuromotor exercises has been appended for persons experiencing visual impairment and seeking to better their balance through power

Retrograde Soul : A Song Cycle

The song cycle is a classical music genre originating from the German Lieder tradition with roots in the early romantic period. Its versatility as a compositional form has ensured its popularity from its 19th century origins on, and accounts for the diversity of works within the genre. This thesis is a creative project involving the composition of a song cycle for female voice, accompanied by a string quartet and containing an original poetic text. The purpose of the project was to allow acquired knowledge of music theory, history, and technique to inform the creative process of generating an original work. The overall theme of the piece is conveyed through the integration of words and music, necessitating careful attention to the inherent nature of the text and the relationship between music and poetry

Efficiency wage theory, labormarkets, and adjustment

Conventional labor theory argues that wages are determined by the interaction of labor supply and demand. Policy analysis on wage rigidity has emphasized distortions arising from exogenous intervention. One emphasis in adjustment lending has been deregulation of labor markets. Efficiency wage models of unemployment try to explain persistent real wage rigidities when unemployment persists. Their central assumption is that higher real wages can improve labor productivity. A major implication of these theories is that wages (and hence labor markets) may be unresponsive to typical macroeconomic policies that seek to lower real wages, change resource allocation, and reduce open unemployment. The three central macroeconomic implications of efficiency wage theory are : 1) there is an equilibrium"natural"level of open unemployment, which differs among groups in the labor force and cannot be affected by demand management policies; 2) when reducing the level of production, the typical firm will resort to laying off labor instead of reducing wages, thereby introducing a significant wage inertia and an overshooting of open unemployment; and 3) wages do not respond to clear the labor market and are not responsive to macroeconomic policies and microeconomic deregulation. The authors conclude that applying the theory in developing countries requires suitably defining labor costs and tackling the problem of segmentation of the labor market.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Youth and Governance

Belief State Planning for Autonomously Navigating Urban Intersections

Urban intersections represent a complex environment for autonomous vehicles with many sources of uncertainty. The vehicle must plan in a stochastic environment with potentially rapid changes in driver behavior. Providing an efficient strategy to navigate through urban intersections is a difficult task. This paper frames the problem of navigating unsignalized intersections as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and solves it using a Monte Carlo sampling method. Empirical results in simulation show that the resulting policy outperforms a threshold-based heuristic strategy on several relevant metrics that measure both safety and efficiency.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, accepted to IV201

Macroeconomic reform and growth in Africa : adjustment in Africa revisited

The 1994 World Bank study,"Adjustment in Africa: reforms, results, and the road ahead,"assessed the extent of, and economic payoffs from, policy reform in 29 countries in sub-Saharan Africa in the mid-1980s and 1990s. Here, the authors update the results of that report with 1992 macroeconomic data and explore some issues in more detail. The conclusions of the earlier report still hold: improved policies are still associated with improved performance, but countries fall short of having sound policies. In fact, the 1991-92 policy stance was not as strong as the 1990-91 stance, reflecting the slow, fragile, and often reversal-prone nature of macroeconomic reform in Africa. Getting the real exchange rate right and reducing the fiscal deficit should be the top priority for restoring growth. Countries that significantly reduced their budget deficits and reduced the black market premium (by devaluing) enjoyed the greatest payoffs from reform. Devaluation of the CFA franc in January 1994 represents a real opportunity for the CFA franc zone countries to restore growth. Many countries have made considerable progress in moving toward competitive real exchange rates. There still remains the challenge of reducing budget deficits in ways consistent with poverty-reducing growth. Hence, the need to reorient public spending to the essential tasks of government, especially providing social services. Reform in two areas will be important to sustaining fiscal reform: implicit subsidies to public enterprises must be cut, and the cost of restructuring the banking sector must not be absorbed by the budget. Policy reforms undertaken so far have paid off in higher growth rates, but the level of growth is still too low to sustain rapid rates of poverty reduction. Increased growth seems to have come more from efficient use of existing capacity than from new investments. Only steady and increased policy reform will convince investors of the credibility of reform and thus of a more favorable investment climate.Economic Stabilization,Macroeconomic Management,Economic Theory&Research,Achieving Shared Growth,Environmental Economics&Policies

The Tragedy of the Commons or the Curse of Federalism

It has been suggested that …scal federalism is a good way to induce decentralized entities to behave parsimoniously, but this has been largely criticized in the literature, in particular because of the Common-Pool problem. In this paper, we present an extra facet of the latter problem. We present a simple theoretical model con…rmed by empirical evidence suggesting that vertical imbalance induces govenments to substitute redistributive spending for non-distributive expenditures. This drives …scal policies to be less efficient in reducing income inequality.Federalism, Income Inequality, Common Pool, Redistribution

An extension of the Rescorla and Wagner Simulator for context conditioning

This paper introduces R&W Simulator version 4, which extends previous work by incorporating context simulation within standard Pavlovian designs. This addition allows the assessment of: (1) context–stimulus competition, by treating contextual cues as ordinary background stimuli present throughout the whole experimental session; (2) summation, by computing compound stimuli with contextual cues as an integrating feature, with and without the addition of specific configural cues; and (3) contingency effects in causal learning. These new functionalities broaden the range of experimental designs that the simulator is able to replicate, such as some recovery from extinction phenomena (e.g., renewal effects). In addition, the new version permits specifying probe trials among standard trials and extracting their values