Making homework count: Homework as a collective task for language minority families

In response to a writing prompt asking, “What can parents do to ensure academic success for their child?” a mother with three children under the age of six wrote: “In my opinion he needs motivation from his parents and interest in his homework. [He needs] to read a lot so he will have good confidence with his friends and about everything, about his teacher.” This response was typical of those given by participants in a family literacy program (FLP) sponsored by a small urban school district. This program was originally designed to help minority language and culture parents learn functional English in the broader sense, along with strategies to support their children’s academic development through parent education focused on school practices. Parents not raised in the United States know there is a mainstream expectation to have a role in motivating and supporting their children’s learning, but they often wonder what types of support are expected in an unfamiliar school system (Paratore, Melzi, & Krol-Sinclair, 1999; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988). Our research found that while parents in this family literacy program had an overwhelming commitment to maintaining family traditions, they also valued learning about mainstream schooling practices, or the mainstream academic discourse practices expected of students to succeed in schools for productivity in society (Gutierrez, 1995; Hicks, 1995). For the participating families, homework and other materials sent home with their children were important resources of school knowledge, as well as valuable sources of English print. Homework served as a mediator between English and Spanish language as the homework was discussed and interpreted in both languages. The daily ritual of unpacking the book bag was a collective practice that included the whole family—the school-age child, siblings, and parents. This ritual was shown to be an acknowledgement of the rich literacy resources a school offers. The contrast of what came to be seen as the collective benefits of homework and other literacy events surrounding school materials with the previously assumed more individualistic benefits of homework and school materials has implications for how teachers and schools view the practice

Exploring Literacy In Our Own Backyard: Increasing Teachers’ Understanding of Literacy Access through Community Mapping

Teachers develop a greater understanding of children when they leave their classrooms and become learners in the community. This article describes a project involving both pre-service and in-service teachers as they practice action research at community sites, such as a local homeless center, and then use these authentic experiences to inform their teaching

Planning and scheduling for robotic assembly

A system for reasoning about robotic assembly tasks is described. The first element of this system is a facility for itemizing the constraints which determine the admissible orderings over the activities to be sequenced. The second element is a facility which partitions the activities into independent subtasks and produces a set of admissible strategies for each. Finally, the system has facilities for constructing an admissible sequence of activities which is consistent with the given constraints. This can be done off-line, in advance of task execution, or it can be done incrementally, at execution time, according to conditions in the execution environment. The language of temporal constraints and the methods of inference presented in related papers are presented. It is shown how functional and spatial relationships between components impose temporal constraints on the order of assembly and how temporal constraints then imply admissible strategies and feasible sequences

Home-Based Parent Child Therapy for Young Traumatized Children Living In Poverty: A Randomized Controlled Trial

A randomized control trial was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a home-based, parent-and-child therapy program specifically developed for toddlers and preschoolers living in poverty with trauma symptoms. Sixty-four children 5-years of age and younger were referred to a community-based clinic for behavior problems and emotional difficulties. All children had experienced one or more potentially traumatic events and met the DSM-5’s criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Children Six Years of Age and Younger. All families received government assistance indicating that their income met the federal definition for poverty. Participants were randomly assigned to either immediate treatment or wait list control groups. Significant between-group differences on all post-treatment measures were found. After the waitlist group completed treatment, significant improvements for both groups were found on all measures at six-weeks follow-up. Outcomes included reductions in challenging behaviors and emotional symptoms of trauma, improved caregiver-child relationships, and increased caregiver adherence to treatment strategies. This study offers support for early intervention of children with trauma symptoms and identifies the clinical challenges and advantages of providing therapy services in a home setting for very young children in poverty

Validating plans with exogenous events

We are concerned with the problem of deciding the validity of a complex plan involving interacting continuous activity. In these situations there is a need to model and reason about the continuous processes and events that arise as a consequence of the behaviour of the physical world in which the plan is expected to execute. In this paper we describe how events, which occur as the outcome of uncontrolled physical processes, can be taken into account in determining whether a plan is valid with respect to the domain model. We do not consider plan generation issues in this paper but focus instead on issues in domain modelling and plan validation

VAL : automatic plan validation, continuous effects and mixed initiative planning using PDDL

This paper describes aspects of our plan validation tool, VAL. The tool was initially developed to support the 3rd International Planning Competition, but has subsequently been extended in order to exploit its capabilities in plan validation and development. In particular, the tool has been extended to include advanced features of PDDL2.1 which have proved important in mixed-initiative planning in a space operations project. Amongst these features, treatment of continuous effects is the most significant, with important effects on the semantic interpretation of plans. The tool has also been extended to keep abreast of developments in PDDL, providing critical support to participants and organisers of the 4th IPC

The mechanisms of temporal inference

The properties of a temporal language are determined by its constituent elements: the temporal objects which it can represent, the attributes of those objects, the relationships between them, the axioms which define the default relationships, and the rules which define the statements that can be formulated. The methods of inference which can be applied to a temporal language are derived in part from a small number of axioms which define the meaning of equality and order and how those relationships can be propagated. More complex inferences involve detailed analysis of the stated relationships. Perhaps the most challenging area of temporal inference is reasoning over disjunctive temporal constraints. Simple forms of disjunction do not sufficiently increase the expressive power of a language while unrestricted use of disjunction makes the analysis NP-hard. In many cases a set of disjunctive constraints can be converted to disjunctive normal form and familiar methods of inference can be applied to the conjunctive sub-expressions. This process itself is NP-hard but it is made more tractable by careful expansion of a tree-structured search space