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BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: EARLY CHILDHOOD TEACHERS’ EXPERIENCES WITH MULTICULTURAL CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
No full textThis work is embargoed by the author and will not be publicly available until May 2028.The increasingly diverse student population calls for early childhood teachers who foster equitable classrooms, particularly through their literacy practices. One tool that teachers can leverage to promote a love of literacy and highlight student diversity is multicultural children’s literature. Yet, little is known about how teachers engage with these books, nor about the external structures that may influence their selection and use. This phenomenological study, informed by ecological systems theory and critical race theory, investigated early childhood teachers’ experiences as they navigated their ecological structures and engaged in (a) intentionality in their selection of multicultural children’s literature, (b) reflexivity in their use of multicultural children’s literature, and (c) processes for selecting books, editing classroom libraries, and curating book titles that highlight diversity. These findings support researchers and practitioners alike in understanding how ecological structures can influence teachers’ selection and use of multicultural children’s literature to build equitable classrooms for young learners.2028-05-1
A HUMAN-CENTERED INFRASTRUCTURE ASSET MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK USING BIM AND AUGMENTED REALITY
Get PDFBridges are crucial components of the United States' infrastructure system, and maintaining them at an acceptable level of service requires various inspections at varying frequencies. However, traditional physical and visual inspections are subjective and time-consuming, and they do not meet the objectives of element-level asset management, which is becoming increasingly important. To address these challenges, this study proposes a Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Augmented Reality (AR)-based supporting inspection system (BASIS) that can objectively record bridge defect information. A pedestrian bridge is used to validate the inspection platform. To enable accurate condition evaluation of in-service infrastructure systems, this research proposes using finite element analysis to evaluate the element-level condition of assets comprehensively. The proposed system is validated using synthetic data of a bridge. Asset prioritization is accomplished with the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which defines the relative significance of various asset criteria. Current decision-making is not centered on maintenance priorities at the element level. This study's innovative method for evaluating the condition of assets at the element level is a key step toward achieving more objective and comprehensive evaluation methodologies. By merging BIM with AR, the proposed computational system delivers precise defect information of assets, decreases costs, accelerates inspection, and facilitates quantitative condition evaluation. The provided framework's precision, efficiency, flexibility, and practicability were tested by comparing its performance on major infrastructure systems to that of conventional methods. Overall, this dissertation provides a novel and efficient approach to bridge inspection and asset management that has the potential to improve the long-term performance of bridges by making the inspection process less expensive, less intrusive, more quantitative, and more consistent
Using GEDI Data to Evaluate the Impact of the Australian 2019-2020 Fire Season on the Structure and Biomass of Gondwana Rainforests
Get PDFWildfires are increasing globally in their intensity, frequency, and range. A unique yet globally significant example is the devastating eastern Australia 2019-2020 fire season, which resulted in an unprecedented burnt forest area with > 21% of Australia’s temperate forests affected, and, in an unprecedented event, over 50% of Gondwana Rainforests in Australia were impacted. Currently, optical satellite imagery is used to detect active fires and assess burnt area, as well as impact. Assessing the impacts of fires solely through these techniques lacks information on vegetation structural changes, especially subcanopy changes. Lidar (light detection and ranging) can be used to evaluate the impacts of fire on vegetation structure more comprehensively. This study uses full waveform lidar data from NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) to study the Gondwana Rainforests of Willi Willi National Park and Werrikimbe National Park, in New South Wales, Australia. GEDI footprints were filtered to remove those incident upon steep slopes (>25°) and collected more than 9 months before and after the MODIS recorded burn date. GEDI footprint level canopy structure measurements (Level 2A and 2B data products) were aggregated into 5 km2 grid cells across the study sites and showed an average decrease of 19% in Plant Area Index, and a 15% decrease in Canopy Cover Fraction. Vertical profiles of Plant Area Volume Density (PAVD) grouped into 5 meter vertical profile height bins showed an average decrease of -15.6% (STD = 8.1) for bins from 0-5 meters to 35-40 meters, with the largest decrease of -27.63% occurring in the 10-15 meter vertical profile height bin. GEDI relative height (RH) metrics were lower post fire: RH50 decreased by average of 12.7%, RH75 by 5.1%, and RH90, RH95, RH98, and RH100 all by <1%. GEDI footprint level aboveground biomass density (Level 4A product) showed a -1.5% decrease, correlating closely with percent change in RH75 and the 20-25 meter PAVD vertical profile height bin. The PAVD metric change therefore captured the impact of the fire more effectively than RH metrics, which showed limited change. Consequently, the footprint-level GEDI biomass which is largely derived from RH metrics show minor changes after the fire. These results indicate that GEDI was uniquely positioned to directly quantify the effects of vegetation disturbance on vertical canopy structure. The structural damage resulting from these fires ranged from entire stand-replacing disturbance to primarily crown or understory fires. We discuss the potential implications of these findings to understand the impact of fire severity and post-fire recovery on carbon stocks at regional scales
Sharing Is Caring? How Childhood Is Portrayed, Hacked, and Hijacked Online
Get PDFThe world wide web is a virtual landscape connecting adults and children around the globe, converging in semi-segregated spaces where identity, social and cultural norms—like race, sexuality, gender, and childhood—are navigated and contested. Social media and other internet technologies are seen at once as nefarious net-scapes, corrosive to one’s development, and as necessary skills for the successful social and financial future of one’s child. How caregivers navigate and participate in this digital landscape, for themselves and for their dependents, are contested, convoluted and multifaceted. To understand how children and childhood are portrayed online, largely by adults, I conducted interviews with adult caregivers of children and content analyses of virtual spaces meant for various age groups. This study uncovered intersecting issues of inequality in virtual spaces, social and sexual identity, privacy, security, supervision, and human rights, with children objectified for economic, familial, and other (adult) social benefits
Three Essays on Opioid Crisis: Theory and Experiments
Get PDFThe opioid crisis is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollarsin costs. A feature of this crisis is substantial underground transactions, leaving standard empirical methods largely unable to capture the health impact of prescription opioids and their diversion into secondary markets. Laboratory experiments constitute a tool to offer insights difficult to obtain otherwise. This dissertation focuses on measuring the behavioral impact and health consequences of both the black market and quotas in the opioid crisis. The findings shed light on the role of relevant policies in the current crisis and suggest paths for positive social change. Chapter 1 offers an analysis of the opioid-related economics literature detailing boththe highly-discussed and seemingly under-emphasized topics. Further, this chapter complements the discussion of the economics literature by offering a review of studies by physician-scientists. As practitioners in the front line, physicians are able to provide new insights into policy consequences that contributes to debates across disciplines. Leveraging this literature, I present the new challenges and potential solutions for the rapidly-evolving opioid crisis and discuss the ’downstream’ role of the government. In Chapter 2, I design a novel laboratory experiment that integrates the process ofprescribing and diverting prescription opioids. Drawing on Schnell’s (2017) model, the experiment investigates how secondary market incentives affect patient and physician behaviors. I find that when a secondary market is present, patients visit physicians more frequently and physicians provide more prescriptions than when there is no secondary market available. Consequently, I find that shutting down this distribution channel reduces the total consumption of opioids, and positively impacts overall health outcomes. The results provide clear evidence that policies aimed at restricting secondary markets can contribute significantly to mitigating the opioid crisis. In Chapter 3, I extend Chapter 2’s study by incorporating quotas that limit opioidavailability and a physician’s prescription capacity. By changing quotas in the lab, the experiment captures a quota’s impact on the patients’ and physicians’ behavior while also suggesting a quota’s overall health consequences. The result is that, when quotas are present, patients visit physicians less frequently and physicians prescribe more strictly. Further, quotas reduce the likelihood of diversion, suggesting that quotas reduce the responsibility of physicians’ prescription decisions on drug diversions. Overall, I find that introducing quotas reduces the total consumption of opioids as well as the probability of drug diversions and that it positively impacts overall health outcomes
Alternate Reality Games: A Cultural and Gaming Phenomenon
Get PDFThis thesis explores the history, cultural context, mechanics and perceptions associated with Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). To further this exploration, a survey was digitally administered to 111 participants across the world using Qualtrics and distributed to ARG themed Reddit pages and Discord servers. This survey addresses player demographics, experiences, and preferences concerning ARGs, specific ARG mechanics, and how they view ARGs compared to traditional video games. The data from this survey is analyzed to provide a demographic analysis and examination of reported preferences and experiences through a mixed methods approach. This analysis culminates in a proposed framework for ARG design focusing on the establishment and interaction of three elements, narrative, puzzles, and community. This research provides a fresh look into this unique and growing genre, as well as bringing focus to the players and communities it fosters
Cognitive Load and the Perception of Time
Get PDFThis thesis examined the role of instruction protocol and order of visual stimuli as methods of cognitive loading on the perception of time. A duration discrimination task was conducted in which the same participant pool was presented with two sets of instructions, as well as with visual stimuli presented in a standard-comparison or comparison-standard order. Previous research indicated that tasks with high cognitive load led to increased errors in discriminating intervals of time due to demands on the allocation of attentional resources and working memory. The results of the present study revealed that the combination of instruction protocol and order of visual stimuli had significant effects on the accuracy, but not the precision, of time perception in the duration discrimination task. It is thought that the use of instruction protocol may have mitigated the effects on precision, but further research is necessary to verify. Overall, the results of this study provide implications for real-world learning and how cognitive load interacts with human time perception and performance on tasks
Books in Public: Recognition of Evaluative Discourses in Popular Reading
Get PDFIndependent bookstores and online spaces like Goodreads.com have been celebrated as spaces that enable readers to form a community to evaluate books and discuss emotional impacts of reading, allowing space to bring embodied experiences to bear on reading and potentially open new avenues of discourse. Yet, at the same time, these spaces are marked by a reluctance to engage publicly as well as a continued deference to or centering of a perceived literary elite. This dissertation first argues that, regardless of how powerful reading seems to be, actual reading practices have largely been oriented toward authorities. While these spaces seem like a way to evade this orientation, the context of consumer capitalism in which these spaces inevitably must exist ensures that utterances of intimacy and embodiment, utterances that look challenging to the rational-critical discourse of literary aesthetics, still reproduce self-alienation and preclude the possibility of poetic world-making, the act of calling into being new publics and discourses
Racial Dynamics and Psychosocial Outcomes of Marching Arts Participation
Get PDFThe Marching Arts (MA) are extracurricular activities that have been largely under-examined in the psychological and educational literature, despite large amounts of participation by adolescents and emerging adults. As such, this dissertation assessed psychological and social dynamics related to participation several marching arts activities. In study one, we assessed longitudinal psychosocial change over time in marching arts students participating in Drum Corps. We found evidence of dynamic, curvilinear psychosocial change in this sample, which provided evidence that marching arts participation is related to psychological change in the participants. In study two, we assessed inclusivity in the marching arts from the perspective of students of color, using online survey methods. We found evidence of variability in students of color’s experiences in the marching arts and that such variability was related to their psychological well-being, which provided evidence to suggest that the marching arts are dynamic intergroup contexts, but also highlighted a need for further examination into the development of intergroup connections in marching arts programs. As such, in study three, we examined predictors of cross-race friendship development using longitudinal social network analysis methods and Stochastic actor-oriented models. We found evidence that race was not a significant predictor of friendship development and that one’s well-being did not moderate that lack of relationship. Additionally, we mostly found evidence that one’s friends do not significantly influence their well-being, except marginally significant evidence to suggest cross-race peers are influential in the development of belonging to the band. Study three further provided evidence that marching can be an inclusive context, though it is unclear the mechanism through which student participation changes their psychological well-being. We suggest future research continue to examine marching arts activities’ relationship to adolescent and emerging adult development., with specific focus on identifying mechanisms
Extracurricular Activity Involvement and Justice System Outcomes
Get PDFRecent literature on the school-to-prison pipeline has emphasized the lack of empirical knowledge around key independent covariates that impact the pathway from school to criminal legal involvement, and whether that pathway is further impacted by the race of the student (Carter, Venkitasubramanian & Bradshaw, 2020; Barnes and Motz, 2018; Nance, 2016; Welch et. al, 2022). However, a portion of juvenile justice literature consistently finds that the system's response to person’s involved in the system can depend on extralegal factors beyond the severity of that person’s offense and their prior record. For example, prior research consistently concludes that factors such as race, ethnicity and sex are associated with juvenile justice outcomes, regardless of the involved individual’s actual behavior or prior record. Another section of juvenile justice literature is centered on relevant social phenomena at play during the commission of a criminal act. For example, Social Bond Theory (Hirschi, 1969) assumes that individuals have natural inclinations to commit crime, and the reason that they commit crime is because they have weak social bonds to conventional society, others, and goals such as education and employment. Largely absent from the existing literature, however, is an empirical assessment of the degree to which these social forces identified consistently in the literature may not only affect offending behavior of an individual, but also affect the system's treatment of a given individual. The present study argues that elements derived from Hirschi's social bond theory may not only affect offending behavior, but may likewise bias the system, such that peripheral by-products of the social bond, such as relationships and accrued social capital, can act as protective factors guarding youth against harsh treatment in the juvenile justice system. Building on the social bond framework, I argue that increased social capital may be one important byproduct of involvement in conventional activities, and that increased social capital, in turn, provides a buffer against harsh treatment in the system even after controlling for levels of self-reported delinquency. Importantly, researchers have previously found that participation in structured, supervised activities (extracurricular activities) is a valuable way to build connections with pro-social peers and adults. Opportunities for positive social connections may be especially important among youth most at risk for exposure to violence, delinquency, and anti-social behavior (Tolan et al. 2003; Wilson 2012), or for non-white youth. Although researchers have investigated extracurricular activity participation and involvement extensively among youth, most of this research has focused on its connection to academic achievement and other positive outcomes. Empirical investigation of the effect that involvement in extracurricular activities can have on youth, specifically those already involved in delinquency, through expanding positive social connections and social capital, has received limited attention. The proposed work seeks to understand whether involvement in conventional extracurricular activities serves as a buffer against more extensive involvement in the criminal legal system, while controlling for self-reported levels of delinquency. It does so by exploring one main research question: Do youth who engage in similar amounts of delinquency experience different legal system outcomes based on how involved they are in extracurricular activities because of the social capital built as a result of extracurricular involvement? It addresses this question using three waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). In addition to the main research question, analysis will further examine if these outcomes hold constant across activity type, level of involvement, and race. The racial component was examined in two ways, where race can be considered either: a moderator of the relationship between activities and criminal legal outcomes; or a variable whose association with criminal legal outcomes may be partly mediated by extracurricular activity involvement. With a diverse and growing minority population in the United States, exploring how race functions in the relationship between involvement in activities and legal system responses is warranted. Understanding how race functions with criminal legal outcomes and access to extracurricular activities or levels of involvement in extracurricular activities can have policy implications by considering how and to what extent state and local school administrators provide access to extracurricular activities