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Navigating a Rapidly Changing Landscape for Teaching Literacy: A Mixed-Methods Study of Kindergarten Educators' Self-Efficacy Beliefs
Get PDFIn response to a rapidly changing context for teaching literacy, including the impact of recommendations in the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s 2022 Right to Read report calling for changes to beginning reading instruction in schools, this study investigated the role, experiences, and beliefs of n=48 kindergarten educators. Given the inquiry- and play-based learning framework currently in place in Ontario kindergarten classrooms, many educators face uncertainty and are frustrated by the lack of clarity in the messaging they have received about how to integrate explicit and systematic reading instruction into their programs and the pressure they feel due to the rapid change from responsive literacy instruction to more direct instructional approaches with limited support. The study documented the experiences of educator participants and supported them in enhancing instructional approaches for teaching foundational literacy skills, investigating ways to be both explicit and responsive with students as they learn to read. The study sought to identify (a) the self-efficacy beliefs of kindergarten educators related to
foundational reading skills instruction in the current context of education in Ontario, and (b) how professional learning focused on enhancing the instructional repertoire for teaching foundational reading skills influences the self-efficacy beliefs and instructional approaches of kindergarten
educators in inquiry- and play-based programs.
This design-based mixed-method study used an online survey to identify the current self-efficacy beliefs for teaching reading and the professional learning needs of a sample of 48 kindergarten educators, who consisted of Ontario certified teachers (OCT) and registered early childhood educators (RECE). The project’s second phase documented the experience of a subsample of seven OCTs and three RECEs who each participated in two interviews and a series of professional conversations focused on instructional practices for beginning reading instruction. The study found that kindergarten educators, no matter their role, had only moderate self-efficacy for teaching literacy. Educators who participated in the professional conversations reported that this experience had increased their self-efficacy. Providing collaborative and job-embedded professional learning, including three suggested frameworks for effective professional learning, has the potential to build educator self-efficacy and potentially improve literacyinstruction among educators
Compiling a Functional Programming Language Using Combinators
Get PDFOur work explores functional programming (FP), a paradigm grounded in lambda calculus and term rewriting that emphasizes immutability and pure functions, ensuring consistent outputs without side effects. We design and implement a strongly typed functional language that leverages FP principles to create robust, reliable code with inherent type safety. Our approach involves translating functional programs into a combinator language that bypasses variables and substitution. The combinators serve as higher-order constructs, transforming lambda terms into variable-free expressions to streamline execution. Subsequently,
we develop a custom abstract machine specifically designed to execute combinator instructions, implemented in both Java and x86 assembler to generate an executable version that
can run on actual hardware. By bridging high-level functional constructs with low-level executable code, this thesis demonstrates a clear pathway from functional programming
concepts to practical machine-level computation including lazy and eager evaluation of language constructs. It highlights the efficiency and reliability of FP principles while laying the groundwork for future advancements in functional programming-based processors
An Investigation of Hydrologic Changes in the Monimolimnion of Crawford Lake, Ontario, Canada, and Possible Linkages with Indigenous Settlement
Get PDFUntil about 500 years ago, the presence of okenone, a fossil pigment produced by obligately anaerobic purple sulfur bacteria, records anoxia in the monimolimnion of Crawford Lake. The last appearance of okenone correlates with the end of the Indigenous Agricultural Zone (IAZ), a period of about 200 years between around 1300 and 1500 CE when Ontario Woodland Tradition (OWT, part of the Iroquoian language group) people inhabited longhouses on thick glacial drift in the northeastern part of the small catchment. Drops in okenone and increased precipitation of Mn, which indicate a change in the redox conditions of the monimolimnion, correlate with elevated relative abundances of non-arboreal pollen and microcharcoal, along with elevated terrigenous elements including Si, K, Ti, and Fe, recording nearby anthropogenic impact consistent with archaeological evidence of the first OWT settlement above the Escarpment beginning around 1030 CE. Land disturbance may have led to more severe flooding, flushing a buildup of sediment from the karst aquifers that transect Crawford Lake, and increasing the flow of highly oxygenated groundwater to the monimolimnion. Comparison of surface soil samples from the catchment with an anomalous terrigenous unit capping the IAZ (high in Rb, Fe, and Zr) reveals similarities with karst groundwater sediments and floodplain sediments of Crawford Lake’s inlet stream, suggesting that the disappearance of okenone and onset of monimolimnetic oxygenation may be related to a particularly severe flood in the early 16th century. This flood, together with the onset of cold, dry Little Ice Age conditions, may have led to the abandonment of the Crawford Lake site
The New Sail Model: A Promising Alternative to School Reform
Get PDFTraditional forms of schooling (e.g., age- and grade-based, and fixed periods for classes) established in early 19th-century Western Europe continue to dominate the global educational landscape, even with numerous reform efforts and increasing recognition of such models’ limitations and challenges. In contrast, alternatives emerging from the Global South, such as Colombia’s Escuela Nueva, Mexico’s Learning Community Project, and Bangladesh’s Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee Non-Formal Primary Education Programs, have shown notable success. Despite little recognition in the North, these models have been widely promoted in the South. Grounded in this background, the New Sail (NS) model has been developed as a novel pedagogical approach based on these successful alternatives since 2019.
This model, which has been progressively implemented in various Asian schools, stands out for its success across multiple domains, including academic performance and overall well-being, as perceived by students, teachers, school administrators, families, and local communities. This conceptual research comprehensively discusses the NS model, including its framework and core components (the roles of students and teachers, learning sites, teaching and learning materials,
and the local community). Additionally, the paper explores strategies for effectively implementing the NS model in school settings, including its guiding principles, specific preparation, and the structural framework. By doing so, this paper highlights the NS model’s potential to catalyze large-scale educational transformation
Comparing the Effects of Acoustical Feedback and Praise within the TAGteach® Framework to Teach Off-Ice Figure Skating Skills to Children
Get PDFFigure skating demands increasingly complex technical skills, which has contributed to rising injury rates among these skaters (Porter, 2013; Kowalczyky et al., 2019). To enhance performance and reduce injury risk, skaters often engage in off-ice training. Research has shown that off-ice training can reduce training time (Anca & Carmen, 2014) and lower injury risk (Liptez & Kurse, 2000; Reilly et al., 1990, p. 292). Only one known study has assessed whether off-ice training improves on-ice performance, and they reported overall positive effects on on-ice performance (Anca & Carmen, 2014). TAGteach is a multicomponent package that uses an auditory stimulus to provide immediate feedback following correct skill performance (Quinn et al., 2017), but its effects have not been evaluated in figure skating. Both auditory feedback and verbal praise have been used to increase performance in sport-specific skills, but only auditory feedback has been used within TAGteach, based on the proposed rationale that it provides more immediate (Fogel et al., 2010), precise (LaMaraca et al., 2018), and consistent (Arnall et al., 2021) feedback than verbal praise. However, to date, no known studies have compared these feedback forms within TAGteach. This study used an adapted alternating treatments design to compare the effects of auditory feedback and verbal praise within TAGteach on the performance of off-ice figure skating jumps. All three participants mastered all jumps, and improvements maintained at 2- and 4-week follow up. We observed increased on-ice performance for the two participants for whom we assessed generalization to on-ice performance
Investigating β- and γ-secretase function and processing of APP with genetic and pharmacological tools
Get PDFThe sequential cleavage of Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP) by BACE1 and the gamma secretase complex (γS) generates amyloid-beta (Aβ), a small peptide that is highly implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s Disease. Despite decades of research, there remains a lack of understanding of the endogenous functions of APP, BACE1, and γS in the brain, their subcellular distribution, and why the physiological production of Aβ becomes pathogenic, underscoring a critical need for further research into the basic molecular mechanisms that govern APP processing.
Here, I demonstrate the endogenous tagging of Nicastrin, an integral subunit of γS, with the fluorescent protein mEmerald in human cells using CRISPR-Cas9, allowing for subcellular visualization of γS distribution in real time. I also test the ability of an optogenetic nanobody to perturb tagged γS function by light-induced clustering, and outline the creation of homology directed repair templates for endogenous tagging of the catalytic subunit of γS (PSEN1), as well as BACE1, with a genetic construct allowing for fluorescent visualization and optogenetic manipulation. I then create and test several genetic constructs that can potentially allow for manipulation of enzymatic function in a subcellular compartment-specific manner.
Using confocal microscopy and quantitative image analysis, I demonstrate that the neurotrophin BDNF, previously shown to reduce BACE1 activity, alters the subcellular distribution of BACE1 in SH-SY5Y cells, increasing plasma membrane localization and reducing endosomal localization, and that this is coincident with reduced amyloidogenic processing of APP. Further, I show that this effect appears to be independent of clathrin-mediated endocytosis. I conclude that BDNF may reduce production of Aβ by altering BACE1 distribution, decreasing upstream β-cleavage.
Lastly, BACE1 and γS play important roles in neural differentiation through regulation of Notch signalling. Here, I characterize the ability of several compounds with previously reported neurogenic effects, many of which are directly or indirectly linked to APP processing, to increase neuronal differentiation in two commonly used human neural cell lines by assessing the expression of neuron- and glia-specific markers. I also show that Neurogenin-2, a protein indirectly regulated by the same enzymes that process APP, can be used to improve the differentiation capacity of both cell types
Transformer-Based Intrusion Detection for 5G Core Networks
Get PDFThe security of the 5G Core network is critical, particularly as it adopts a cloud-native, service-based architecture. While this design enhances scalability and flexibility, it also increases the network’s exposure to novel and evolving attack vectors. Recent research has addressed this issue, but more robust models are needed, and more study is required to assess the feasibility of deploying such models in real-world scenarios especially when considering hundreds of packets are sent and received each second by the 5G Core network. To address this challenge, we present a Transformer-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) tailored for 5G Core environments. Leveraging BERT and its variants—RoBERTa, DistilBERT, and ALBERTa—our system classifies network traffic as benign or malicious using data collected from a containerized testbed built with Free5GC and UERANSIM. Experimental results demonstrate that BERT, DistilBERT, and RoBERTa each achieved 100% accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, while ALBERTa followed closely with 99.87% on all metrics. Among them, DistilBERT stands out as the most efficient, achieving perfect accuracy with the lowest training time (191.68 s), inference time (0.28 s), GPU memory usage (1987.88 MB), and parameter count (66.96M). These results highlight DistilBERT as the most suitable model for real-time deployment in cloud-native 5G security frameworks, offering a strong balance between detection performance and computational efficiency
Exercise: A Neurostructural Remodeling Perspective
Get PDFExercise is accepted as a positive health behaviour. However, the mechanisms that
underlie the beneficial effects of exercise are still being elucidated, particularly with respect to
cognitive health. Chronic exercise can decrease neuroinflammation and increase
neuroplasticity. However, exercise is also a metabolic stressor that can transiently upregulate
systemic inflammation, while less is known about neuroinflammatory changes with acute
exercise. Some forms of neuroinflammation may be beneficial in promoting neurostructural
remodeling. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to elucidate the inflammatory and
neuroplastic, and behavioural changes (open field, novel object recognition, novel object
location) from acute and chronic exercise in young healthy male and female mice. In the first
phase of the study, mice were placed on a treadmill for two-hours at a speed of 15 m/min and a
5% incline, followed by euthanasia 2-hours post exercise. In the second phase of the study, a
separate cohort of mice underwent the same exercise paradigm and underwent behavioural
testing 2-hours post exercise. In the third phase of the study, another cohort of mice underwent
an 8-week treadmill exercise paradigm followed by behavioural testing. Biological endpoints
included cytokine measurement and western blot analysis of aggrecan and matrix
metalloprotinase-9. In males, acute exercise decreased time spent in the centre of the open field,
consistent with increased anxiety-like behaviour. However, this effect was not observed in the
exercised females. Regardless of sex, chronic exercise increased the number of entries made into
the centre of the open field, consistent with decreased anxiety-like behaviour. There were no
exercise or sex dependent differences in object location or object recognition memory. Acute
exercise increased IL-6 and decreased TNF in the serum and had minimal effects on various
regions of the brain. Conversely, chronic exercise increased IL-6 in the prefrontal cortex and
decreased TNF in the dorsal hippocampus and had minimal effects on cytokine levels in the
blood. Chronic exercise reduced aggrecan in the dorsal hippocampus and acute exercise
produced a similar near significant trend. These results demonstrate the differential effects of
acute and chronic exercise on anxiety and inflammation despite similar effects on neuroplasticity
The Influence of Arm Posture on Wrist Proprioception and Hand Tracking Performance
Get PDFProprioception is critical for fine motor control and is essential in occupations requiring high precision such as surgery, dentistry, and gaming. While previous research has highlighted the influence of posture on proprioceptive feedback, there remains limited understanding of how specific elbow positions and movement directions impact wrist proprioception and movement accuracy. The purpose of this study was to investigate how elbow posture (60°, 90°, and 120°) and movement direction (flexion/extension, radial/ulnar deviation, pronation/supination) influence proprioceptive acuity and tracking accuracy at the wrist. Twenty healthy young adults completed two experimental tasks under the three elbow postures: a joint position matching (JPM) task and a continuous tracking task. Proprioceptive outcomes included matching error and error bias, while motor control outcomes included mean tracking error and percent accuracy.
Results showed that elbow angle did not significantly affect proprioceptive performance on the Joint Position Matching task, indicating relative robustness of wrist proprioception across mid-range postures. In contrast, movement direction significantly influenced outcomes, with flexion/extension producing greater variability and error than radial/ulnar deviation or pronation/supination. Tracking performance was more sensitive to elbow posture, with accuracy reduced at more flexed positions. This study provides novel evidence that proprioceptive processing at the wrist is more direction-dependent than posture-dependent under static conditions, while posture plays a larger role in dynamic motor accuracy. Findings highlight the importance of considering joint configuration and movement direction when designing ergonomic interventions, surgical training protocols, and rehabilitation strategies
Invoice from Thomas Towers, St. Catharines, September 16, 1845
Get PDFThomas Towers was a St. Catharines industrialist. He built a home on King Street in St. Catharines in 1855.An invoice to the Town of St. Catharines from Thomas Towers. The invoice is dated at St. Catharines, September 16, 1845. The invoice contains an illustration of a stove and cookware, with printing that reads “Bought of Thomas Towers, manufacturer of cooking, parlour, and shop stoves; stove furniture, hollow ware; copper, sheet iron & tin wares; ploughs and plough castings; machinery; brass and iron founder, &c., &c.” The invoice is for $18.50. A note at the bottom indicates that payment was received and is signed by Thomas Towers