Tech Town and Lighthouse

Friday night the junior cohort went on an excursion to tour Tech Town and a Litehouse spec home! I think I can speak on behalf of my entire cohort in saying that we all thought both places were AWESOME

Paddling with the President\u27s Council!

On Friday, August 24, the Rivers Institute had the great pleasure of taking the President and members of his council out for their first ever kayak trip in Dayton

A Summer in Dayton with the Rivers Institute....

Today I was walking up the stairs to Zehler to stop in and see the lovely Bethany Renner, and as I was walking up the stairs, I was having flashbacks on the incredible summer that I spent working for the Rivers Institute. I was part of an incredible summer team that successfully completed many tasks including planning the steward orientation, developing the River Leadership Curriculum, and running summer programs for hundreds of people from preschoolers to adults. We all had our own specific tasks, but we really worked as a team. We had some great bonding moments, a lot of learning experiences, and developed new skills. I could write hundreds of blogs about my summer, but I will just try to hit the highlights

Effects of a One-To-One Computer Environment on Student Academic Achievement

A gap exists in current research due to a lack of studies that explore the effect of schoolwide one-to-one computer implementations on academic achievement. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect a one-to-one computing environment had on student academic achievement means of middle school students in rural Nevada. This quantitative, non-experimental study used a causal-comparative design and analysis of academic achievement archival data from the 2015–2016, the year before implementation; 2016–2017, the first year of one-to-one implementation; and 2017–2018, the second year of implementation. Two research questions guided this study: RQ1. Is there a significant difference in mean scores on end-of-year grade point averages comprised of semester grades in math, English, social studies, and science between middle school students who participated in a one-to-one computing environment and those that did not? and, RQ2. Is there a significant difference in mean scores on the Nevada Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Math and English Language Arts/Literacy Summative Tests between middle school students who participated in a one-to-one computing environment and those that did not? This study was conducted at a rural middle school with a total sample population of 1,344 students between the two years of study. The data showed that a one-to-one computing environment had no significant effect on students’ end-of-year grade point average means comprised of semester grades in math, English, social studies, and science. The results of this study call for further research into the effect a one-to-one computing environment has on academic achievement means, especially student GPA means

Amy Jane Price in a Senior Piano Recital

This is the program for the senior piano recital of Amy Jane Price. This recital took place on April 15, 2005, in the McBeth Recital Hall

Neural Mechanisms for Combinatorial Semantics in Language and Vision: Evidence From FMRI, Patients, and Brain Stimulation

Throughout our daily experience, humans make nearly constant use of semantic knowledge. Over the last 20-30 years, the majority of work on the neural basis of semantic memory has examined the representation of semantic categories (e.g., animate versus inanimate). However, a defining aspect of human cognition is the ability to integrate this stored semantic information to form complex combinations of concepts. For example, humans can comprehend “plaid” and “jacket” as separate concepts, but can also effortlessly integrate this information to create the idea of a “plaid jacket.” This process is essential to human cognition, but little work has examined the neural regions that underlie conceptual combination. Many models of semantic memory have proposed that convergence zones, or neural hubs, help to integrate the semantic features of word meaning to form coherent representations from stored semantic knowledge. However, few studies have specifically examined the integrative semantic functions that these high-level hub regions carry out. This thesis presents three experiments that examine lexical-semantic combinatorial processing (as in the “plaid jacket” example above): 1) a study in healthy adults using fMRI, 2) a study in healthy adults using brain stimulation, and 3) a study examining impairments of lexical-semantic integration in patients with neurodegenerative disease. The fourth and final experiment of this thesis examines semantic aspects of combinatorial codes for visual-object representation. This study identifies neural regions that encode the feature combinations that define an object’s meaning. The findings from these four experiments elucidate specific cortical hubs for semantic-feature integration during language comprehension and visual-object processing, and they advance our understanding of the role of heteromodal brain regions in semantic memory

Effects of a One-To-One Computer Environment on Student Academic Achievement

A gap exists in current research due to a lack of studies that explore the effect of schoolwide one-to-one computer implementations on academic achievement. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect a one-to-one computing environment had on student academic achievement means of middle school students in rural Nevada. This quantitative, non-experimental study used a causal-comparative design and analysis of academic achievement archival data from the 2015–2016, the year before implementation; 2016–2017, the first year of one-to-one implementation; and 2017–2018, the second year of implementation. Two research questions guided this study: RQ1. Is there a significant difference in mean scores on end-of-year grade point averages comprised of semester grades in math, English, social studies, and science between middle school students who participated in a one-to-one computing environment and those that did not? and, RQ2. Is there a significant difference in mean scores on the Nevada Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Math and English Language Arts/Literacy Summative Tests between middle school students who participated in a one-to-one computing environment and those that did not? This study was conducted at a rural middle school with a total sample population of 1,344 students between the two years of study. The data showed that a one-to-one computing environment had no significant effect on students’ end-of-year grade point average means comprised of semester grades in math, English, social studies, and science. The results of this study call for further research into the effect a one-to-one computing environment has on academic achievement means, especially student GPA means