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Slouching Towards Causality: Does Our Writing Center Tutoring Work?
Get PDFReplicable, aggregable, data-supported (RAD) research has become standard in writing center studies. Choice of research question is determined by local conditions and exigencies, often influenced by institutional assessment policy and national mandates. The methodology of choice in most writing center research is qualitative inquiry, though quasi-experimental quantitative studies, with their inherently difficult protocols and ethical problems, persist in their effort to address the question fundamental to writing center labor: Does writing center tutoring improve student writing? In a quasi-experiment applying propensity score matching to a sample of student users of the Rockowitz Writing Center at Hunter College of the City University of New York, this study comprehensively surveys the scholarship and interrogates the local context, argues for the authority of grades and GPAs as outcome measures, and offers results that, considered in aggregate with center lore and quantitative writing center research, infer causality: Yes, we do help students improve their academic writing
Comprehensive Pavement Patching Tools and Web-Based Software for Pavement Condition Assessment and Visualization
Get PDFIt is a common practice among state agencies to manually inspect road segments and decide maintenance requirements based on the pavement condition index (PCI). However, standalone PCI only evaluates the pavement surface condition. When coupled with the variability in human perception of pavement distress, this limits the accuracy of current pavement maintenance practices and undermines the automated pavement maintenance suggestions systems, especially for actionable recommendations related to accurate patching location, depth, and priority. This project explores integrating pavement structural and surface condition assessment with pavement ratings of distress to estimate the appropriate pavement patching strategy for accurate location, depth, and quantity. The developed patching management tool will provide an automated pavement management option with high resolution patching location and improved patching depth and priority suggestions
Business Processes to Prioritize Traffic Signal Retiming and Assess the Impact of Retiming Activities
Get PDFThe Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) manages over 2,000 traffic signals in the State. It is unfeasible to identify systemwide improvement opportunities by evaluating the performance of thousands of traffic signals on monitoring dashboards. This report describes how a scalable technique based on connected vehicle (CV) trajectory data systematically evaluates performance at the movement level to prioritize retiming and maintenance activities. In total, eleven timing changes were implemented at nine traffic signals over various time-of-day (TOD) periods using the proposed approach. The method achieved average control delay and split failure reductions of up to 53 sec/veh and 30%, respectively. A before-after performance analysis is presented for each intersection and the business processes implemented to achieve these results are discussed. The business process analysis resulted in a companion study, SPR-4857, which identified signals with operational performance problems that should be further evaluated for potential capital investments, such as turn lane additions
