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Making Sense of and Navigating the Stem Vapor: A Qualitative Study of a Single School Community’s Attempts to Understand the Stem Institution
No full textDespite its significant role in every level of education, the definition of the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics movement, or STEM, has remained elusive, becoming so vaporous as to provide little meaning. As education organizations navigate the STEM institution, they must collectively make sense of its norms, goals, and practices. Yet little is known about this process, including what sense is made, contributing factors, and implications. This paper describes a study guided by relational ethnography conducted in one K-8 school community that investigates how its members make sense of the STEM institution through cycles of interpretation and action. Sensemaking is investigated through interviews, concept maps, and surveys conducted with nine teachers, administrators, and external partners in the community along with analysis of school and external organization documents. Results are organized around three themes: the external nature of STEM, the process of sensemaking, and collective sensemaking in partnerships. First, the tension between the messy, amorphous institution of STEM and the organizational and personal context of teachers, disciplines, school, and community is described. It is proposed that the interpretation of STEM as external to the local context may contribute to a problem of curriculum narrowing, whereby aspects of disciplinary instruction, namely higher-order thinking skills, are also omitted. Second, four key factors influencing sensemaking of STEM are demonstrated: individual frames, disparate messaging from the environment, collaboration, or the lack thereof, and external partnerships. The factors are shown to provide dual obstacles to implementation of STEM as well as to contextual, collective sensemaking about STEM. Third, an investigation of external partnerships provide evidence for the institutions’ messy and inequitable qualities. The paper concludes with a theory that resistance to STEM implementation demonstrated by study participants suggests problems lie not with a lack of clear institutional messages, but with an understanding by teachers that STEM, as presented, has little to do with their practice. Therefore, efforts to use STEM as a vehicle for implementing standards-based practices like higher-order thinking skills may be problematic. The paper concludes with proposals for research understanding the conflict between STEM and contextual, disciplinary practice, including epistemological and structural tensions
Global Age Patterns of Under-5 Mortality (GAPU5M) Site Profiles Series: Maternal and Child Health Surveillance System (MCHSS), China
Get PDFPenn Library\u27s LJS 437 - De re medicina. (Video Orientation)
No full texthttps://repository.upenn.edu/sims_video/1182/thumbnail.jp
Argument Ellipsis and Topicalization: A View from Their Interaction with Wh-dependencies
Get PDFIn recent syntactic literature, some cases of null arguments observed across languages have been analyzed as the result of argument ellipsis. The main observation of this paper is that the distribution of Japanese AE is systematically constrained with respect to its relative position against wh-phrases. I will propose what I call the \u27wh-scope generalization\u27, which states that AE is banned if the ellipsis site is c-commanded by a wh-phrase at LF. It will also be shown that topicalization exhibits exactly the same distribution as AE in terms of its interaction with wh-phrases. Based on these results, I argue that AE induces a topic-related A\u27-dependency, that is, it involves movement of the target argument to Spec,TopicP
Severing Case from Agreement: Non-finite Subjects in Hill Mari
Get PDFIn this paper, I discuss variation in case marking on subjects of non-finite relative clauses (RCs) in Hill Mari (Finno-Ugric, Uralic) which relativize on a constituent other than subject, as well as φ-feature agreement on two different heads: the nominal and the participial head. I use these novel data to argue in favor of configurational case assignment as opposed to case assignment by a particular head. Adopting the configurational theory of case, I argue that NOM appears on clause-internal subjects as the unmarked case in the clausal domain. GEN, on the other hand, is the realization of unmarked case in the nominal domain, where two subject positions, external and internal, are available. Two dialects of Hill Mari each realize one of these options, which can be distinguished by a number of diagnostics
Estimation and Inference for Convex Functions and Computational Efficiency in High Dimensional Statistics
No full textOptimization and statistics are intrinsically intertwined with each other. Optimization has been the ends of some statistical problems, like estimation and inference for the minimizer and the minimum of convex functions, and the means for other statistical problems, like computational concerns in high dimensional statistics. In this dissertation, we consider both optimization-related problems. Estimation and inference for the minimizer and minimum of convex functions have been longstanding problems with wide application in economics and health care. But existing approaches are insufficient due to their asymptotic nature and/or incapability of characterizing function-specific difficulty. We investigate the problems under non-asymptotic frameworks that characterize function-specific difficulty and propose adaptive computational-efficient optimal methods. The first two parts of the dissertation address these problems, briefly summarized as follows. • The first part focuses on univariate convex functions. We develop computationally efficient adaptive optimal procedures under local minimax framework and discover a novel Uncertainty Principle that provides a fundamental limit on how well the minimizer and minimum can be estimated simultaneously for any convex regression function. • The second part focuses on multivariate additive convex functions. Under function-specific benchmarks, we propose computationally efficient optimal methods and establish their optimality. Computational efficiency is another optimization-related problem of increasingly importance in statistics, especially in the AI age where the scale of data is big and the requirement on computational time is high. To achieve the balance between running time and statistical accuracy, we propose a framework that provides theoretically guaranteed optimization methods together with the analysis of interplay between running time and statistical accuracy for a class of high-dimensional problems in the third part of the dissertation. Our framework consists of three parts, statistical-optimization interplay analysis, which characterizes optimization induced statistical error in a more essential way, optimization template algorithm, and optimization convergence analysis. We showcase the power of our framework through three example problems, where we get novel results for the first two and show that our framework adapts to the degenerate case through the third example
Exploring the implications of cryptocurrencies in selected developing countries
Get PDFThere is great controversy about how developing countries should approach cryptocurrency regulation. China and certain countries in the Middle East have passed strict regulations banning decentralized virtual currencies due to worries about fraud and religious reasons. In contrast, in September 2021 and April 2022, respectively, El Salvador and the Central African Republic (CAR) have been placed under international scrutiny for their decisions to make Bitcoin legal tender. A shared motivation behind both decisions includes boosting economic growth through increased foreign investment and tourism and decreased dependence on traditional central banks. However, Bitcoin volatility raises concern about its ability to perform as a currency and motivate risky financial decisions within vulnerable populations. Additionally, limited internet penetration in El Salvador and the CAR leads to apprehension about exasperated socioeconomic inequalities that will emerge under a decentralized financial system. The future of crypto in the developing world is a complex and dynamic topic that can set the stage for how individuals, organizations, and governments make critical financial decisions in the coming years
Traumas New and Old: A Two Paper Exploration of Co-Parenting Relationships and Heightened Racial Tension for Black, Latinx, and Asian Parents During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic broadly impacted the human experience since it emerged on the scene in late 2019/early 2020 (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) 2020). Parents in the United States experienced a uniquely high level of stress related to childrearing through the pandemic and the social-political implications of pandemic-related societal decision making (Elder & Greene, 2021; Fortuna et al., 2020; Patrick et al., 2020). People of color experienced compounding stressors of the heightened racial tensions, which reached a boiling point with the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, on top of decades of inequities embedded within social systems (Buchanan et al., 2020; DePouw, 2017). This two-paper qualitative dissertation study interviewed fifteen parents of color with school-aged children who are in coparenting relationships to explore two independent but related experiences of pressures faced by parents of color during the COVID-19 pandemic and temporally associated heightened racial tensions. The first paper explores stressors on parents of color related to COVID-19 (e.g., remote learning, access to services, household management, changes extended social support, etc.) and the changes in and impact on coparenting relationships, with a focus on how coparenting relationships worked to buffer and/or aggravate parental stress levels. The second paper explores how parents of color experienced, coped with, and navigated parenting during the rise in societal racial stress in late 2019/early 2020 through fall of 2022 that spurred the uptick in the Black Lives Matter movement and the beginning of the Stop Asian Hate movement. A total of 15 parents of color participated in qualitative interviews. All data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Analyses revealed several salient themes that centered around coparenting, social support, and that illuminated the unique stressors experienced by parents of color. Implications for social work practice, policy, and research are discussed
