Sense of Belonging as Perceived by Youths Who Continue Participation in 4-H

Sense of belonging is an essential element of a high-quality 4-H program. However, little research exists quantifying sense of belonging among 4-H club members. We measured perceived sense of belonging among Florida 4-H members in middle and high school as well as seven factors that influenced continued participation in 4-H. Parental involvement, 4-H events, and interactions with friends were factors important to participants\u27 continued enrollment. Interaction with a caring adult was the factor most strongly positively correlated with perceived sense of belonging, suggesting the importance to retention of providing a framework that allows a new 4-H member to develop a positive relationship with a caring adult in a safe and inclusive environment

Improving accuracy in particle methods using null spaces and filters

While particle-in-cell type methods, such as MPM, have been very successful in providing solutions to many challenging problems there are some important issues that remain to be resolved with regard to their analysis. One such challenge relates to the difference in dimensionality between the particles and the grid points to which they are mapped. There exists a non-trivial null space of the linear operator that maps particles values onto nodal values. In other words, there are non-zero particle values values that when mapped to the nodes are zero there. Given positive mapping weights such null space values are oscillatory in nature. The null space may be viewed as a more general form of the ringing instability identified by Brackbill for PIC methods. It will be shown that it is possible to remove these null-space values from the solution and so to improve the accuracy of PIC methods, using a matrix SVD approach. The expense of doing this is prohibitive for real problems and so a local method is developed for doing this