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Sustained Engagement and Motivation in Young Children Learning String Instruments
No full textThe opportunity to learn an instrument can be an exciting milestone in a young child’s life. Yet the considerable time and effort required to sustain this pursuit often result in many students quitting. This study examines the factors that support young children’s continued engagement with a string instrument after the initial novelty has subsided. Guided by Deci and Ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory and Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) flow theory, this qualitative instrumental case study investigates the lived experiences of six third-grade musicians in an after-school orchestra program at a Jewish day school in Los Angeles, California.
Recognizing children as “experts and agents in their own lives” (Clark & Moss, 2011), the study employs multimodal semi-structured interviews, a mini-lesson teaching activity, an arts-based drawing prompt, and flow observations of group rehearsals to center children’s perspectives. Findings revealed six themes: meaningful connection through musical engagement, self-directed musicianship, navigating the joys and struggles of learning, the role of family in supporting persistence, flow as a dynamic system of skill and social connection, and the challenges of navigating a digital world.
Together, these findings suggest that children’s motivation is best understood not as a fixed intrinsic–extrinsic dichotomy, but as a dynamic continuum shaped by autonomy, competence, relatedness, cultural resonance, and the broader learning environment (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Implications are offered for music educators and parents seeking to support young children in developing sustainable, joyful, and identity-affirming relationships with their instruments
Garbage Cans and Marching Bands: A Mixed Methods Examination of College Marching Band Role, Function and Organizational Identity
No full textEntering the second quarter of the twenty-first century, intercollegiate athletics have recently undergone rapid and extreme policy change with little-to-no stability in sight. College marching and athletic bands operate within and across the terrain of college sport, providing a performance outlet for thousands of college students across the nation with unparalleled scale and scope. This mixed methods study investigated the role, function, and organizational identities of collegiate athletic bands within the changing landscape of American higher education and intercollegiate athletics.
Using a convergence design, the research unfolded in three phases: (1) a focus group of practicing college athletic band directors (N= 4) to identify emergent issues of governance, policy, and identity; (2) a national quantitative survey (N = 98) distributed to members of the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA) to measure the broad trends across institution types; and (3) a collective case study of four athletic and athletic band directors at schools competing at the highest levels of American college football.
Guided by Pratt and Foreman’s (2000) framework for managing multiple identity organizations, Cohen and March’s (1972) garbage can model of decision making, and Brand’s (2006) philosophical standard versus integrated view of college athletics, the study examined how athletic bands and their primary stakeholders–athletic band directors and athletic directors–interpret their professional roles and navigate competing institutional logics and priorities. Data revealed variance in perceptions of the athletic band’s role and function, diffuse reporting structures, policy opacity, administrative liminality, and frequent misalignment between symbolic visibility and structural authority. While most directors identified with the integrated view of athletic bands—seeing marching bands as central to institutional culture—they simultaneously described persistent marginality, financial precarity, and role confusion. Quantitative findings confirmed correlations between perceived stakeholder understanding and overall band director satisfaction.
Across cases, athletic bands emerged as hybrid organizations—educationally housed, operationally athletic, and socially grounded in student life–that are simultaneously central to campus identity yet often peripheral in funding and policy-related attention. Directors functioned as singleton specialists—faculty members with limited peer understanding—who act as policy mediators, managers, and educators. Themes of administrative liminality and policy improvisation underscored the field’s volatility amid sweeping changes in intercollegiate athletics legislation, conference realignment, and the high visibility that college athletics demand and afford. Furthermore, a cultural shift for students and staff emerged in which student athletes’ and musicians’ awareness of labor and capital become more pronounced and commercial interests begin to supersede academic interest.
Findings suggest that athletic bands exemplify the broader hybridity of the modern university: autonomous, symbolic, multidimensional, and perpetually negotiating the boundaries between art and sport, mission and market. Recommendations include the establishment of formal policy agreements such as MOUs between stakeholder units at universities, cross-campus coalitions to stabilize governance, and a national task force to develop baseline standards for athletic band support and policy inclusion. Together, these findings contribute to an emerging policy discourse on how hybrid educational-athletic-student life entities can sustain coherence, equity, and civic purpose within twenty-first century higher education
Professional Development of Master of Fine Arts Photography Graduates: A Qualitative Case Study Using Transformative Learning Theory as a Lens
No full textMaster of Fine Arts (MFA) degrees are considered to be essential for professional artists. As a terminal degree, MFAs are also often required to pursue a career teaching studio art at the collegiate level. However, graduates often become disoriented and disillusioned when they find themselves without the necessary skills for obtaining a career in their desired field, despite the costly investment. With little existent research on the efficacy of MFA curriculum and structure, this study seeks to understand where the disconnect is between educator, student, and employer.
This qualitative case study collects data through open-ended semi-structured interviews of twelve participants and document collection. It follows four cases, representing four institutions: Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Pratt Institute, Maryland Institute College of Art, and State University of New York at New Paltz. Each case included accounts from one educator participant and two graduates from the respective Master of Fine Arts photography program. Constant comparative and cross-case analysis were utilized to analyze the data collected from interviews and literature to illuminate the areas for improvement in preparing MFA students for successful futures.
Data and analysis reveal graduates’ desires for additional professional development and its absence in their curriculum. It also confirms the hypothesis that educators and graduates are not aligned in their understanding regarding the success of these programs. Although educators were able to identify that students had a variety of goals, none were able to offer a solution to providing support for each student’s distinctive needs. Graduates displayed varying levels of satisfaction or disappointment in their programs, but most did not occupy positions utilizing their degrees.
This dissertation includes recommendations for adaptations of both educators and MFA programs, as well as recommendations for future research. It argues that MFA photography programs can be improved by reconsidering their curriculum and incorporating professional development and emphasized the need for continued research, including feedback from graduates
AI Power at Tempo: Conversion, Harnesses, and Anticipatory Influence
No full textArtificial intelligence is often described as a technology of automation and prediction. This paper argues that the framing is too narrow. As AI systems are embedded in workflows, they do not merely improve decisions; they increasingly structure the decision environment itself, shaping what gets surfaced, routed, prioritized, and acted upon before formal deliberation begins. We describe this as anticipatory influence and argue that AI becomes power only through conversion: the disciplined process by which technical capability is translated into outcomes of value. In the agentic age, that conversion depends less on models alone than on the harnesses around them - the memory, tools, permissions, escalation paths, verification routines, feedback loops, and encoded intent through which organizational purpose becomes machine-executable action. The practical implication follows directly. As AI makes production cheaper and faster, the bottleneck shifts to coordination, verification, override, recourse, and trust. Managers therefore become stewards of operating architecture at tempo, while leaders authorize, bound, and legitimate the forms of pre-emption that AI will exercise in practice. The paper develops this argument through a framework of conversion, harnesses, anticipatory influence, and governable power. It illustrates the argument through Klarna, Spotify, NYPD’s Patternizr, and Massachusetts Division of Social Services. It closes with the Viz.ai stroke-alert pathway at UC Davis Health, where prediction becomes coordinated intervention
Steroids, stress and body mass index interact to accelerate female pubertal development: Supplemental Files
No full textBackground: Estrogens underlie puberty in girls, but the steroid metabolome may also regulate pubertal timing in response to elevated stress and increasing body mass index. Our objective was to identify steroid metabolome patterns linked to accelerated puberty and test whether BMI and stress markers modify this relationship.
Methods: From the LEGACY Girls Study, a longitudinal cohort followed for 6 years, we selected 327 girls aged 5-13 years at baseline to measure 36 steroid metabolites of glucocorticoids, androgens, progesterone, and estrogens in two urine specimens collected before and during puberty. Parents reported the age at onset of breast development (thelarche) which had a high correlation in the subset with clinically assessed Tanner. Study staff measured height and weight and administered questionnaires, including the Internalizing Composite Scale, a parental proxy of child stress. We estimated hazard ratios for the association between doubled steroid metabolites and ages at thelarche, pubarche, and menarche using Weibull survival models, testing interactions with stress and BMI z-scores.
Results: Accelerated thelarche was associated with higher pre-pubertal urinary metabolites of glucocorticoids (HR=1.9, 95% CI 1.5-2.5), androgens (HR=3.9, 95%CI 2.7-5.6), and progesterone (HR=6.7, 95%CI 4.1-10.9). Girls with high glucocorticoid metabolites combined with high BMI and stress reached thelarche 7 months earlier than their counterparts with low measures in these parameters.
Conclusion: Elevated metabolites of glucocorticoids, androgens and progesterone are associated with accelerated pubertal onset, and BMI and stress modify this association. Previous studies have focused on estrogens, menarche and BMI; our results suggest that androgens and stress impact the timing of thelarche as well explaining secular declines in pubertal timing
The One Which Got Away: A Fifteenth-Century Arabic Fragment from Hafsid Tunisia (WAM Ms. W.580)
No full textThe separation and dispersal of a four-volume luxury manuscript of the Kitāb al-Shifāʾ (“The book of healing”) by the Maghribi jurist Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (475–544/1083–1149 CE) offers a lens through which to explore the cognitive dissonance provoked by encountering fragmentation within a multi-volume codex that once appeared complete. The separation of the third volume (Walters Art Museum, Ms. W.580) from its three companions occurred in the sixteenth century, within the imperial library of the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul. Already by the fifteenth century, Ottoman readers venerated the Shifāʾ as a work of pious Sunni literature about the life of the Prophet. Literary sources and the extant holdings in Istanbul document that, in the late fifteenth century, the imperial library owned multiple manuscripts with the Shifāʾ’s complete text. Against this backdrop, the independent circulation of an unusual textual fragment of the Shifāʾ suggests a pragmatic approach to library collection management at the imperial library—one in which literary content took precedence over material splendour: aesthetic opulence alone did not protect a textual fragment from being deaccessioned
Lucerna Extincta: Spiritual Promiscuities in Performance and Installation Art, 1970s-80s
No full textThis dissertation examines how artists in Bogotá, Port of Spain, London, and Los Angeles during the 1970s and 1980s engaged in what I term spiritual promiscuities—the purposeful synthesis of Indigenous, Afro-Diasporic, Asian, and European belief systems—as creative platforms to challenge modernist, colonial hierarchies and forge subaltern social coalitions. By analyzing key yet understudied performance and installation works, I argue that these artists navigated sacred and profane expressions of the otherworldly, complicating and resisting aesthetic distinctions, state repression, racialized exclusion, and, to varying degrees, the commodification of spiritual traditions.
Drawing on archival research, oral histories, comparative religious studies, and art historical analysis—as well as feminist, queer, and performance theory—this study situates these artistic interventions within the broader sociopolitical transformations of the countercultural, post-Civil Rights, and postcolonial era. The selected case studies reveal how these artists transformed ritualistic practices, community engagement, and site-specific installations into strategies of artistic and social resistance that blurred the boundaries between public and private devotion, as well as trained and self-taught artistic traditions.
By foregrounding the intersections of spirituality, corporeality, and performative agency, this dissertation contributes to discourses on decolonial aesthetics while critically engaging spirituality within modern and contemporary art historiography. In doing so, it illuminates how alternative and hegemonic epistemologies coalesce in spiritual, artistic, and sociopolitical conversations across the Americas and the Caribbean in the second half of the twentieth century
A Consumer-driven Approach to Addressing Stigma for HIV Care and Treatment Programs
No full textThis Chapter provides an overview of the history of HIV stigma in the U.S., describes early HIV advocacy efforts, highlights different initiatives that have been implemented to reduce stigma, and proposes efforts to address HIV stigma in HIV care and treatment programs. More specifically, it highlights discriminatory state-sanctioned laws, like HIV criminalization laws that included behaviors not scientifically proven to transmit HIV/AIDS, describes the efforts of advocates like Ryan White and Larry Kramer to reduce HIV stigma and increase public HIV education, and the enactment of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act in 1990. It provides the history of government-sanctioned efforts to address stigma in the United States, an overview of stigma, and describes the three aims proposed for addressing stigma among three priority populations in HIV care and treatment programs
Advancing Code Intelligence with Language Models
No full textThe software development landscape is experiencing a revolutionary transformation with Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs show significant potential in code generation, especially in standalone function completion (e.g., LeetCode problems), their current capabilities fall short of real-world, more complex software engineering (SE) tasks, such as systematic debugging and large-scale programming and patching. The fundamental challenges for LLMs to reliably assist with realistic SE tasks lie in (1) reasoning about code-specific semantics, such as runtime behaviors of programs, and (2) handling complex and dynamic interactions, such as managing inter-file references or contexts and supporting the iterative nature of programming.
This dissertation centers around enabling LLMs to meet the real-world demands of software development, driven by three key insights. First, code semantics are rich, complex, and multi-modal (e.g., static code structure and dynamic execution are different modalities), and as a programming expert, LLMs should not only be able to generate code snippets but also deeply understand what they are doing -- those key properties, constraints, and runtime behaviors of programs. Second, real-world software development is inherently context-rich and interactive, involving complicated dependencies and iterative refinement. LLMs must go beyond static, single-file comprehension and exhibit the ability to navigate cross-file contexts, manage dependencies, and synthesize feedback from execution. Third, evaluation approaches and metrics of LLMs for code should reflect the realistic complexity of software development, quantifying model capabilities in critical applications under realistic scenarios. Therefore, we implement approaches to train LLMs to reason about comprehensive code semantics, enhancing their adaptability to context-rich and iterative development workflows, and constructing realistic evaluation frameworks for LLM-powered programming assistants.
We have developed pre-/post-training strategies to represent and reason about program properties, dynamic executions, and multi-modal code semantics, enabling improved performance in crucial SE applications, including code generation, clone retrieval, debugging, and program repair. We also designed novel approaches to retrieve and incorporate project-level code context for code completion and empowered LLMs with iterative self-refinement by analyzing the execution feedback. To rigorously evaluate LLMs, we constructed frameworks that uncover LLMs' weaknesses for practical utility, including dependency management, self-consistency, and vulnerability detection. Besides addressing software engineering challenges, my work contributes to fundamental LLM research in code reasoning and understanding, and robust evaluations, pushing the boundaries of LLM-driven program analysis and synthesis
A Micro-Reflective Approach to Preparing TESOL Teachers in Post-Observation Meetings
No full textThis dissertation explores a micro-reflective, conversation-analytic intervention for the preparation of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) teachers during post-observation meetings. The research question addresses how micro-reflection is collaboratively achieved by supervisors (SUPs) and TESOL P-12 student teachers (STs) during post-observation meetings (POMs) that employ the micro-reflective framework called FAB (Waring & Creider, 2021). POMs between three supervisors and six student teachers where FAB was implemented were video-recorded and transcribed.
The data were then analyzed using Conversation Analysis (CA) to understand exactly how micro-reflection takes place in interaction. Findings show that micro-reflection in POM talk has unique sequential features (launching the collaborative viewing, noticing and replaying, and considering implications). Furthermore, over time, SUPs cultivate STs’ micro-reflective stance by demonstrating exploration and evidence-based analysis and refocusing non-micro-reflective contributions. SUP supports are removed as STs become more adept at micro-reflection. Overall, micro-reflection provides a ST-centered approach to fostering deep professional and pedagogical insights based on exploration and evidence-based analyses instead of evaluation and speculation