33760 research outputs found
Sort by
UNDERSTANDING THE LANDSCAPE OF RESEARCH-PRACTICE PARTNERSHIPS IN EDUCATION SETTINGS: AN ANALYSIS OF CURRENT TRENDS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
No full textThere is a growing need to bridge the research-to-practice gap in educational settingsby effectively translating and disseminating research to address the practical needs of
educators. One approach that has gained significant attention among researchers,
practitioners, and funders is the research-practice partnership (RPP) model. As RPPs
have evolved over the past decades, various types of partnerships have emerged, and
the nature of collaboration among RPP members has varied significantly. Thus, this
dissertation aims to enhance understanding of the current landscape of RPPs in
educational settings and explore potential future directions. Chapter 1 is an
introduction to the dissertation, providing an overview of the current problems, and
outlining the chapters in the dissertation. Chapter 2 presents a synthesis of the
literature on RPPs focused on instructional or programmatic change in mathematics,
identifying 16 relevant studies. By analyzing the characteristics of partnership
members, collaborative processes, areas of focus, and outcomes related to
mathematics instruction and intervention, the findings reveal a shift from
coordination to deeper collaboration within RPPs and the development of
collaborative knowledge. However, the synthesis also suggested a need for more
detailed reporting on RPP members’ characteristics, the processes they undergo, and
the challenges and facilitators that shape partnership dynamics. Addressing these gaps
will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how RPPs function and
evolve in educational contexts. Chapter 3 is a qualitative study that sought to expand
upon the experience and perception of members who engage in RPPs, focusing on the
planning and development stage by interviewing seven currently or formerly
research-side members and school-partner-side members in the RPPs. This study
aims to investigate the planning and development stage of RPPs to understand how
partners initiate, communicate, and negotiate to launch the RPPs and the challenges
and facilitators identified at this stage. Through interviews and thematic analysis, the
study identified four major themes: forming structural collaboration and foundation,
perceived involvement in partnership, challenges and barriers faced, and facilitators
and strengths of RPPs. The major themes, related subthemes, and implications for
future RPPs are discussed. Chapter 4 is a practitioner paper designed as a practice
guide for practice-side and research-side members seeking to establish new research-
practice partnerships (RPPs). Specifically, this paper provides a comprehensive
overview of different types of RPPs, the roles and levels of involvement of various
partners, and key considerations for collaboration. Additionally, the paper offers
practical recommendations for initiating and planning an RPP, including concrete
examples centered on developing an RPP with a shared vision of supporting students
with learning disabilities. By outlining essential steps and strategies, this guide aims
to facilitate the formation of effective and sustainable partnerships between
researchers and practitioners
MENTAL WORKLOAD AND PERFORMANCE DYNAMICS UNDERLYING HIERARCHICAL PLANNING PROCESSES DURING COMPLEX ACTION SEQUENCE EXECUTION UNDER VARIOUS DEMANDS
No full textMental workload arises from the link between task demands and the engagement of processing resources. While mental workload has been studied extensively, only a limited body of work has examined this notion as it relates to the generation of discrete, goal-oriented action sequences which are critical to most daily activities (e.g., making a cup of coffee). Such action sequences engage high-level (cognitive) processes to plan the order of actions in combination with low-level (sensorimotor) processes for movement execution. The study of this hierarchical mechanism is important to inform how action sequences governed by a goal and rules are generated such that some are more parsimonious (e.g., fewer actions) than others. In such a context, the examination of mental workload could further characterize the engagement of high- and low-level processing resources along with their interaction to face cognitive and sensorimotor demands. Although prior efforts have examined discrete action sequence performance, they did not study mental workload dynamics via a combined assessment of complementary neurophysiological correlates (i.e., regional activity, functional connectivity) while simultaneously manipulating both cognitive and motor demands to characterize the relationship between high- and low-level processing resources. Further, most prior action sequence studies overlooked the functional interaction between regions thought to be critical for coordinating these high- and low-level processes such as the dorsolateral prefrontal (dlPFC), premotor (PMC), and sensorimotor (SMC) cortices. Also, most of these studies were clinical without considering healthy individuals or computational tools that can assess in detail the structure of the performed action sequences. Therefore, through a combined evaluation of performance and brain dynamics, this work aimed to examine the engagement of high- and low-level processing resources underlying mental workload when individuals execute action sequences under varying cognitive and motor demands. In the present study, participants solved an action sequence task (Tower of Hanoi) under normal (i.e., physical) and altered (i.e., virtual) sensorimotor conditions and low and high cognitive demand. Performance was examined using task completion time and sequence structure (Levenshtein distance). Regional EEG power activity along with functional connectivity between the dlPFC, PMC, and SMC were used to evaluate cortical effort and cortico-cortical communication in the theta, low-alpha, and high-alpha bands. Sensorimotor mu-rhythm, frontal theta/parietal alpha (FTPA), and frontal theta/frontal alpha (FTFA) power ratios were also computed. Results revealed larger task completion time, elevated EEG power in all three frequency bands in the anterior-frontal and occipital regions, enhanced temporal theta and low-alpha power, and attenuated mu-rhythm during the normal relative to the altered sensorimotor conditions. Cortico-cortical communication between the dlPFC and both the PMC and SMC increased with cognitive demand under the normal but not altered conditions. Further, larger task completion time and Levenshtein distance were associated with enhanced theta power in the anterior-frontal, frontal and occipital regions, increased FTFA ratio, and larger functional theta connectivity as cognitive demand increased. Findings indicate degraded performance along with increased mental workload as revealed by greater recruitment of cognitive-motor resources in response to increased cognitive demand and under normal relative to the altered conditions suggesting that the former imposed larger sensorimotor demands compared to the latter. Connectivity results suggest resources may, to some extent, be shared when facing combined elevation of cognitive and motor demands and highlight the PMC’s role in the low- and high-level interface for action sequence execution. These results may inform applications related to physical and/or virtual execution of action sequence tasks such as, but not limited to, rehabilitation, human factors, and human-robot interactions
Point Lookout Sea-Level Rise Resilience Design Plan
No full textFinal report for LARC331: Regional Design and GIS Studio (Spring 2025). University of Maryland, College ParkPoint Lookout State Park is valued for its rich culture and natural history. The park exhibits signs of rising sea-levels -- especially in low lying areas -- and needs extra care to build resiliency for the next 25-50 years.
A masterplan is presented here that addresses healthy marsh migration, oyster reef construction, and site-specific proposals for protecting and enhancing important site amenities. Issues of sea-level rise, habitat preservation, educational opportunities, and accessibility are given special consideration.
By implementing coastal resilience techniques, the plan aims to prepare the park to respond to its changing environment and accommodate users of all ages and abilities!St. Mary's County, M
Vector Kernel Representation Theory, Applications in Point Clouds and Events Cameras
No full textPoint set representation is a fundamental problem in fields such as point cloud processing and event-based vision. A point set is an unordered collection of points in Euclidean space, typically generated by sensing technologies like 3D scanners or event cameras. The goal of point set representation is to transform these unordered points into fixed-length vectors suitable for machine learning tasks. A key challenge in this process lies in handling point sets of varying sizes and uneven distributions. This requires representation methods that scale effectively to large point sets while remaining resilient to noise and variations in point density.
Existing point set representation methods generally fall into two categories: point-based and voxel-based approaches. Point-based methods, like PointNet and its variants, use multi-layer perceptrons to convert point clouds into fixed-length vectors. However, they often struggle with noise and variations in point density, especially when these variations were unseen in the training set. These methods can also be computationally expensive and do not scale well to large point sets, such as event streams from event cameras. Voxel-based methods, on the other hand, voxelize point sets into regular grid structures, allowing for convolutional operations. While methods like E-RAFT show promise, voxel-based approaches often suffer from performance drops when point set densities vary and face challenges with generalizability across different domains.
This thesis introduces Vector Kernel Representation (VKR), a novel framework for point set representation that addresses the limitations of existing methods. We first establish Vector Kernel Representation Theorem, proving that Gaussian kernel mixtures can be represented as fixed-length complex vectors through a predefined operation. Building on top of the theorem, VKR is applied to various tasks, demonstrating superior accuracy and computational efficiency. In point cloud encoding, VKR significantly improves performance and reduce computational costs. When extended to event-based normal flow estimation, VKR significantly improves accuracy and generalizability compared to voxel-based methods. The thesis concludes by highlighting potential future directions, including time series modeling, integrating VKR with temporal architectures for event-based tasks, and advancing moving object segmentation through robust normal flow estimation
Writing Abolition: Dismantling Carceral Literacies of the Prison-Industrial Complex through Black Queer Activism
No full textThis dissertation uses various storytelling methods to introduce abolitionist praxes in composition pedagogies, community-engaged writing, and writing program administration. Chapter 1 of this dissertation posits that some literacies are carceral and help continue our facilitation of the prison-industrial complex. This chapter defines carceral literacies as the practices, documents, genres, and logics that help enact carceral harm and provides real-world examples of each element of carceral literacies. In addition to theorizing how carceral literacies infiltrate our civic discourses and educational spaces, I focus on composition pedagogies, community-engaged writing, and writing program administration via storytelling methods to visualize the integration of abolition in our fields. Chapter 2 uses autoethnography to demonstrate abolitionist responses to attendance and assessment in writing classrooms. In this chapter, I reflect on my own time as a student and the ways I witnessed carceral harm in education. Furthermore, I use my teaching materials and experiences as data to illustrate abolitionist teaching in various writing and rhetoric classes across two institutions. This chapter describes the initial steps for abolitionist teaching and the results of my autoethnographic research on abolitionist teaching. Chapter 3 is a multimodal chapter that employs podcasting and counterstory as a method to amplify the community literacies in #StopCopCity—a Southern abolitionist movement spearheaded by queer activists of color. The podcast chapter also seeks to subvert the true crime genre by focusing on harm instead of crime, as crime is a socially and politically constructed category that often disenfranchises marginalized communities. Whereas in true crime, storytellers focus on the police procedures of solving the crime of a harmed victim, in my podcast chapter I offer an abolitionist counter-narrative of someone who was a victim of police procedures. This chapter interrogates the public narrative of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita. Tortuguita was a victim of police violence in 2023 when they were shot and killed by Georgia State Patrol Troopers during a raid of the Stop Cop City encampment. Chapter 4 re-envisions writing program administration by looking at the work of abolitionist organizers. This chapter parallels abolitionist practices of radically imagining alternatives to punitive and carceral approaches. Specifically, I explore how to address programmatic issues like plagiarism, campus rhetoric, and labor issues through approaches of restorative practices, transformative justice, mutual aid, and grassroots organizing. This chapter reveals what is possible for writing program administrators wanting to engage in abolition
Crowded Out: The Competitive Landscape of Contemporary International NGOs
No full textCrowded Out delves into the complex landscape of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Bush and Hadden trace INGOs' rise to prominence at the end of the twentieth century and three significant but overlooked recent trends: a decrease in new INGO foundings, despite persistent global need; a shift toward specialization, despite the complexity of global problems; and a dispersal of INGO activities globally, despite potential gains from concentrating on areas of acute need. Assembling a wealth of new data on INGO foundings, missions, and locations, Bush and Hadden show how INGOs are being crowded out of dense organizational environments. They conduct case studies of INGOs across issue areas, relying on dozens of interviews and a large-scale survey to bring practitioners' voices to the study of INGOs. To effectively address today's global challenges, organizations must innovate in a crowded world.https://doi.org/10.1017/978100955735
Times are Changing: Temporal Features of Speech to Children Who Stutter
No full textAbstractPurpose: Treatments for stuttering often offer advice that parents modify temporal features of speech during conversational interaction to assist the child who stutters (CWS) and entrain them to a less demanding model of speech. Advice includes but is not limited to increasing turn-taking/response-time latencies (RTL), reducing interruptions, and slowing adult speech. We looked specifically at RTL and parental speech rate as well as adherence to advice in a longitudinal data set that included behaviors before and after advice were made specifically to alter speech behaviors.
Method: We used data from one-year follow-up recordings (N=12 CWS persistent; 18 CWS recovered) of the Illinois International Stuttering Research Project (IISRP) at FluencyBank, using CLAN software with audio linkage to PRAAT (Lieshout, 2003).
Results: Overall, mothers of CWS-P increased their response time latency and decreased their speech rate more than mothers of CWS-R a year following intake. Both children who persisted and recovered decreased their weighted stuttering-like disfluency score by the year follow-up.
Conclusions: This is a retrospective, observational study, and caution must be used in interpreting our findings. Current results continue not to add evidentiary support that parental adjustments in temporal parameters of speech impact short or long-term fluency in CWS. The results of the study led us to re-evaluate the widely circulated notions that parental speech behaviors may influence the persistence of stuttering. We discuss how these findings can guide clinical decision making at the counselling level
Experimental Investigation of Air Entrainment by Disturbed Plunging Jets
No full textThe ubiquity of bubble creation, or air entrainment, by plunging jets in the modern world cannot be overstated. They appear in environmental flows such as breaking waves, in waste treatment and aquaculture, in metal casting, and even in the home. Of particular interest to modern industry is the role that air entrainment plays in affecting the quality of cast metal parts. Air entrainment during the pouring of a casting can cause pockets of air to be entrapped within the melt, weakening parts and impacting their mechanical properties. The ubiquity and importance of air entrainment has made it the object of study for many years, yet certain crucial physics remain poorly understood. In particular, little systematic attention has been paid to the role that disturbances, or roughness, upon a plunging jet play in entraining air.
This dissertation describes experiments conducted using an apparatus that generates controlled, repeatable disturbances upon a plunging water jet. The conditions are such that in the absence of disturbances, no air is entrained, enabling the direct association of known disturbance parameters with air entrainment physics. Multiple air entrainment mechanisms were documented, including one mediated by the action of Faraday gravity-capillary waves induced by harmonic jet forcing.
Inception conditions for the appearance of Faraday waves in the plunging jet and the subsequent onset of entrainment were documented, as were their morphology and spatial symmetry. The volumetric air entrainment rate was measured for three different entrainment mechanisms across a variety of forcing and jet flow conditions, using both direct measurement (by way of physically capturing bubbles) as well as indirectly via image analysis. Scaling arguments derived from physical reasoning and prior work are provided alongside empirical correlations for all the documented entrainment mechanisms.
It was found that the submerged jet flow plays a significant role in creating bubbles, and this was investigated further by way of time-resolved particle image velocimetry measurements and the calculation of instantaneous pressure fields from those data. The fusion of multiple data sources including bubble profile measurement, velocity, and pressure field data reveal a multi-step process of air entrainment that is initiated and controlled by jet disturbances, and the physical components that underlie the process are discussed
An Archaeological Exploration of Health Disparities in the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania
No full textThis dissertation applies the frameworks of structural violence and structural vulnerability to archaeological analyses in order to trace the longitudinal presence of health disparities in the anthracite coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Through operationalizing the concepts of the social gradient and the structural determinants of health, this dissertation presents a collection of articles that historically root the social structures that influence health disparities in both the past and the present. Analyzing the social norms and processes that were established in the region by the coal mining industry since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, this dissertation highlights how health disparities in the past have reproduced and repeated themselves in the present
“JUST DO THE WORK”: SOCIAL, REPARATIVE, AND RESTORATIVE JUSTICE AT AMERICAN ACADEMIC ARCHIVES
No full textThe early 2020s have been years of great change across the United States – amid a global pandemic, George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis focused national and worldwide attention on anti-Black violence, and the subsequent spate of protests around the world marked a shift in institutional acceptability of Black Lives Matter as a strategic priority rather than a “fringe” or radical view. That movement has had direct impacts on the archival field, generating a wealth of professional talks and other disseminations that aim to shed light on the history of archives as institutions that uphold white supremacy and discuss the opportunities and challenges of conducting justice work. Challenges to this work are currently exacerbated by moves since early 2025 to halt or curb these practices in the wake of the 2024 US presidential election. Despite the steady increase of published work on the relationship between justice and archives in the last 15 years, and a more recent explosion of social, reparative, and restorative justice work within archives and by archivists, there have not been localized, in-depth, systematic studies of challenges to implementing and engaging in social justice as an archival imperative within institutional settings. Academic archives in particular have begun to grapple with the legacies of slavery that built and funded many academic institutions, and how that past continues to echo today. Without in-depth studies of how these relatively new priorities have been carried out (or not carried out), we cannot understand the practice of archival justice on the ground.
This dissertation examines the role of social, reparative, and restorative justice in academic archives, investigating the gap between published archival literature and practice through an interview study of archival practitioners at academic institutions that are engaging in racial justice work, supported by and triangulated with qualitative content analysis of a corpus comprising documents sourced from academic archives’ websites related to archival justice. Though the American archival field continues to reinforce the whiteness and Eurocentrism that remain embedded in professional standards, norms, and practices, archivists engaging in justice work do so in a myriad of ways which are explored in this dissertation. I argue that there is ample evidence of racial justice activities in academic archives, with new findings demonstrating from how deeply ideas of archival justice have permeated American academic archival practice, as shown by nearly three-quarters of the documents within the document corpus study sample containing language around justice or diversity, equity, and inclusion. This dissertation establishes catalysts or levers for change that push racial justice forward at universities, as well as clarifying challenges to engaging in archival justice work beyond the limits on staff time and funding, such as pushing against established institutional narratives, institutional politics and structures, and state and regional politics. Additionally this dissertation sheds light on how academic archivists are defining success in their archival justice engagements, sheds light on how archivists doing the work see justice in relation to their other job duties, and reveals that reparative description has become one of the most popular methods of engaging with racial justice in academic archives.
This project uniquely contributes to the archival field by identifying thosemany of the myriad forms that archival justice currently takes, including archival justice actions,; lays out challenges to engaging in archival justice work,; defines successes,; and provides a window into archival practice at a critical time in American history. New insights include establishing categories of types of archival justice actions that archivists are engaging in currently, including increased community, student, and faculty collaboration, creating positions dedicated to archival justice, rewriting policies and redefining mission and vision statements, conducting diversity audits of collections, and increased mentorship in order to diversify the pipeline to archives and library positions. This research study also reveals catalysts for change within academic institutions, such as the power of student activism in effecting change, the widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests in summer 2020 in moving racial justice to the forefront at universities, and the critical role of university leadership in making racial archival justice a priority; identifying barriers to racial justice beyond those common to cultural heritage work, including the challenge of troubling established institutional narratives and the risks of engaging in justice work given local, regional, and national politics