It takes a village to raise a teacher: the Learning Assistant programme in Sierra Leone

This is a report on research funded by Plan International on the impact of Learning Assistant (LA) component of Girls Education Challenge Sierra Leone. The LA programme has enabled nearly 500 young women to train as teachers in remote rural areas where schools are understaffed and there are few female teachers. The LA programme provides a pathway to teaching through guided distance study and in-school work experience. This research examines empowering and constraining factors of the LA programme. The research draws on interviews in two rural locations with 18 participants: Learning Assistants themselves, and those who work alongside and support them: headteachers, class teachers, subject tutors, community leaders, family members and programme staff

Children of divorce versus children of intact families and their adjustment to college

Children of divorce and children of intact families grow up in very different worlds. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects that being a child of divorce has on later adjustment in college. A sample of 95 undergraduate students were administered the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire. Of the 95 students, 18 reported being from divorced families, two reported parental death, and 75 reported their parents still being married. Results indicated that the age a child experiences their parents divorce can have a significant impact on their later attachment to college and social adjustment to college. More specifically, the younger a child was when they experienced their parents\u27 divorce the less attachment to college they reported. Also, children who experienced their parents\u27 divorce before the age of four reported higher social adjustment to college than students who reported experiencing their parents\u27 divorce at age four or older. No significant differences between children of divorce and children of intact families were found on all measures of the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire

Community and Place: A Study of Four African American Benevolent Societies and their Cemeteries

Located on Charleston\u27s Neck, immediately west of Magnolia Cemetery\u27s main entrance, are a number of small cemeteries created by a variety of ethnicities and religions. These small cemeteries all possess the same physical orientation, giving no indication that the sites were created by differing groups. Among these are Friendly Union Cemetery, Brown Fellowship Cemetery, Humane and Friendly Cemetery, and Unity and Friendship Cemetery. All four cemeteries were created just before the outbreak of the Civil War by Free People of Color who organized themselves into benevolent societies. Free People of Color were African Americans who were not enslaved but did not enjoy the civil liberties possessed by white citizens. The benevolent societies that Free People of Color created provided a sense of security, especially financially, to people in an uncertain position. This thesis seeks to understand the people who created these cemeteries and their benevolent societies. To accomplish this, a study of the status of Free People of Color and the social structure of benevolent societies was conducted. The cemeteries were studied to determine the level of activities of each society and to understand how the societies have faded in the 20th century. The decline of each community and the impact of this decline is the second half of this thesis

A Multilevel Analysis of County and State Variation in the Severity of Sentences Imposed in Large Urban Courts

This study explored the structural sources behind variability in the sentences applied to felons convicted in state courts located across the U.S. Multilevel regression models were used to explore whether various state and county-level attributes help to account for why defendants experience a significantly higher probability of incarceration versus probation in certain jurisdictions. Drawing upon a broad theoretical landscape, the analyses test several hypotheses derived from macro level theories of social control which predict that that the legal and organizational culture of courts, and the socioeconomic and political attributes of the communities they serve, influence sentencing outcomes. This study sought to fill two important gaps in the existing research. First, it broadened the theoretical framework used to interpret community variation in punishment to include the impacts of state sentencing policies that have been linked to the increase in mass incarceration among U.S. states. The second major goal of this study was to bring new data to bear on the issue of whether social and cultural attributes of communities are associated with the severity of the sentences their courts impose. The analysis examines this issue by linking individual sentencing outcomes to aggregate-level General Social Survey (GSS) responses that capture community variation in public sentiment. The sentencing data used to test these hypotheses are derived from the State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS) for the years 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. Information on a sample of 26,000 felony cases in the SCPS were appended to a unique county and state level database containing measures that capture variation in sentencing policy, criminal statutes, correctional resources, crime rates, court case load pressures, GSS survey responses, and census-derived demographic attributes

Contextualizing Worship and Music in a Multicultural Church: A Case Study at Christ Fellowship Miami

Christ Fellowship Church is a Southern Baptist, multicultural, multigenerational, and multilingual church with eight local campuses, which hosts worshipers from seventy-six nations every weekend in Miami-Dade County. While the worshiping body of Christ Fellowship Miami is extremely diverse, the music and worship genres and styles are predominantly homogeneous. This case study serves the worship ministry at Christ Fellowship Miami as they seek to engage in more culturally conscious methods of worship and music by exploring the diverse cultures, languages, and music styles represented in the congregation. It discusses the planning, development, and execution of a global worship experience at the church that facilitated the exploration of creative approaches to worship through ethnodoxology in a safe and controlled environment. The results of the study revealed several practical approaches to engage in more culturally conscious worship through the contextualization of language and music in worship gatherings. Additionally, this case study not only benefits the existing worship ministry but can be used to further edify the church and equip their mission and vision to continue launching Christ Fellowship campuses throughout Miami-Dade County, online, and globally

Reactive Power Compensation

Reactive power compensation serves to increase the power factor of large industrial loads and increase the efficiency of power transmission. In doing so, reactive power compensation decreases overall energy consumption and has lasting economic and environmental impacts. This paper discusses a simulation to model power consumption in a multitude of different loads, which gives industrial consumers a solution to increase the power factor of their systems to a more desirable level. The MATLAB simulation that we built successfully calculates and displays how much energy can be saved and it shows how that energy can be saved. If physical implementations of our simulation are adopted on a large scale, the economic and environmental impact will be substantial

Electron-hole interactions in coupled InAs-GaSb quantum dots based on nanowire crystal phase templates

We report growth and characterization of a coupled quantum dot structure that utilizes nanowire templates for selective epitaxy of radial heterostructures. The starting point is a zinc blende InAs nanowire with thin segments of wurtzite structure. These segments have dual roles: they act as tunnel barriers for electron transport in the InAs core, and they also locally suppress growth of a GaSb shell, resulting in coaxial InAs-GaSb quantum dots with integrated electrical probes. The parallel quantum dot structure hosts spatially separated electrons and holes that interact due to the type-II broken gap of InAs-GaSb heterojunctions. The Coulomb blockade in the electron and hole transport is studied, and periodic interactions of electrons and holes are observed and can be reproduced by modeling. Distorted Coulomb diamonds indicate voltage-induced ground-state transitions, possibly a result of changes in the spatial distribution of holes in the thin GaSb shell.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure