A case study of a district's intended and unintended results connected to the implementation of a required ninth-grade algebra 1 strategic initiative

There is a long history of debate around mathematics standards, reform efforts, and accountability. This research identified ways that national expectations and context drive local implementation of mathematics reform efforts and identified the external and internal factors that impact teachers’ acceptance or resistance to policy implementation at the local level. This research also adds to the body of knowledge about acceptance and resistance to policy implementation efforts. This case study involved the analysis of documents to provide a chronological perspective, assess the current state of the District’s mathematics reform, and determine the District’s readiness to implement the Common Core Curriculum. The school system in question has continued to struggle with meeting the needs of all students in Algebra 1. Therefore, the results of this case study will be useful to the District’s leaders as they include the compilation and analysis of a decade’s worth of data specific to Algebra 1.

Precoder Detection for Cooperative Decode-and-Forward Relaying in OFDMA Systems

We consider an LTE network where a secondary user acts as a relay, transmitting data to the primary user using a decode-and-forward mechanism, transparent to the base-station (eNodeB). Clearly, the relay can decode symbols more reliably if the employed precoder matrix indicators (PMIs) are known. However, for closed loop spatial multiplexing (CLSM) transmit mode, this information is not always embedded in the downlink signal, leading to a need for effective methods to determine the PMI. In this thesis, we consider 2x2 MIMO and 4x4 MIMO downlink channels corresponding to CLSM and formulate two techniques to estimate the PMI at the relay using a hypothesis testing framework. We evaluate their performance via simulations for various ITU channel models over a range of SNR and for different channel quality indicators (CQIs). We compare them to the case when the true PMI is known at the relay and show that the performance of the proposed schemes are within 2 dB at 10% block error rate (BLER) in almost all scenarios. Furthermore, the techniques add minimal computational overhead over existent receiver structure. Finally, we also identify scenarios when using the proposed precoder detection algorithms in conjunction with the cooperative decode-and-forward relaying mechanism benefits the PUE and improves the BLER performance for the PUE. Therefore, we conclude from this that the proposed algorithms as well as the cooperative relaying mechanism at the CMR can be gainfully employed in a variety of real-life scenarios in LTE networks.