Can a Broader Education Narrow the Gap? Evidence on Non-Academic Features of Schooling

Empirical studies of education programs and systems, by nature, rely upon use of student outcomes that are measurable. Often, these come in the form of test scores. However, in light of growing evidence about the long-run importance of other student skills and behaviors, the time has come for a broader approach to evaluating education. This dissertation undertakes experimental, quasi-experimental, and descriptive analyses to examine social, behavioral, and health-related mechanisms of the educational process. My overarching research question is simply, which inside- and outside-the-classroom features of schools and educational interventions are most beneficial to students in the long term? Furthermore, how can we apply this evidence toward informing policy that could effectively reduce stark social, educational, and economic inequalities?

The first study of three assesses mechanisms by which the Fast Track project, a randomized intervention in the early 1990s for high-risk children in four communities (Durham, NC; Nashville, TN; rural PA; and Seattle, WA), reduced delinquency, arrests, and health and mental health service utilization in adolescence through young adulthood (ages 12-20). A decomposition of treatment effects indicates that about a third of Fast Track’s impact on later crime outcomes can be accounted for by improvements in social and self-regulation skills during childhood (ages 6-11), such as prosocial behavior, emotion regulation and problem solving. These skills proved less valuable for the prevention of mental and physical health problems.

The second study contributes new evidence on how non-instructional investments – such as increased spending on school social workers, guidance counselors, and health services – affect multiple aspects of student performance and well-being. Merging several administrative data sources spanning the 1996-2013 school years in North Carolina, I use an instrumental variables approach to estimate the extent to which local expenditure shifts affect students’ academic and behavioral outcomes. My findings indicate that exogenous increases in spending on non-instructional services not only reduce student absenteeism and disciplinary problems (important predictors of long-term outcomes) but also significantly raise student achievement, in similar magnitude to corresponding increases in instructional spending. Furthermore, subgroup analyses suggest that investments in student support personnel such as social workers, health services, and guidance counselors, in schools with concentrated low-income student populations could go a long way toward closing socioeconomic achievement gaps.

The third study examines individual pathways that lead to high school graduation or dropout. It employs a variety of machine learning techniques, including decision trees, random forests with bagging and boosting, and support vector machines, to predict student dropout using longitudinal administrative data from North Carolina. I consider a large set of predictor measures from grades three through eight including academic achievement, behavioral indicators, and background characteristics. My findings indicate that the most important predictors include eighth grade absences, math scores, and age-for-grade as well as early reading scores. Support vector classification (with a high cost parameter and low gamma parameter) predicts high school dropout with the highest overall validity in the testing dataset at 90.1 percent followed by decision trees with boosting and interaction terms at 89.5 percent.

Development of a New Client-Server Architecture for Context Aware Mobile Computing

This dissertation studies the context-aware application with its proposed algorithms at client side. The required context-aware infrastructure is discussed in depth to illustrate that such an infrastructure collects the mobile user’s context information, registers service providers, derives mobile user’s current context, distributes user context among context-aware applications, and provides tailored services. The approach proposed tries to strike a balance between the context server and mobile devices. The context acquisition is centralized at the server to ensure the usability of context information among mobile devices, while context reasoning remains at the application level. Hence, a centralized context acquisition and distributed context reasoning are viewed as a better solution overall. The context-aware search application is designed and implemented at the server side. A new algorithm is proposed to take into consideration the user context profiles. By promoting feedback on the dynamics of the system, any prior user selection is now saved for further analysis such that it may contribute to help the results of a subsequent search. On the basis of these developments at the server side, various solutions are consequently provided at the client side. A proxy software-based component is set up for the purpose of data collection. This research endorses the belief that the proxy at the client side should contain the context reasoning component. Implementation of such a component provides credence to this belief in that the context applications are able to derive the user context profiles. Furthermore, a context cache scheme is implemented to manage the cache on the client device in order to minimize processing requirements and other resources (bandwidth, CPU cycle, power). Java and MySQL platforms are used to implement the proposed architecture and to test scenarios derived from user’s daily activities. To meet the practical demands required of a testing environment without the impositions of a heavy cost for establishing such a comprehensive infrastructure, a software simulation using a free Yahoo search API is provided as a means to evaluate the effectiveness of the design approach in a most realistic way. The integration of Yahoo search engine into the context-aware architecture design proves how context aware application can meet user demands for tailored services and products in and around the user’s environment. The test results show that the overall design is highly effective,providing new features and enriching the mobile user’s experience through a broad scope of potential applications.

A Simple Model of Access and Capacity for Post-Secondary Schooling in Canada (Working Paper 40)

This paper develops a simple model of the post-secondary education system in Canada that provides a useful basis for thinking about issues of capacity and access. It uses a supply-demand framework, where demand comes on the part of individuals wanting places in the system, and supply is determined not only by various directives and agreements between educational ministries and institutions (and other factors), but also the money available to universities and colleges through tuition fees. The supply and demand curves are then put together with a stylised tuition-setting rule to describe the “market” of post-secondary schooling. This market determines the number of students in the system, and their characteristics, especially as they relate to “ability” and family background, the latter being especially relevant to access issues. The manner in which various changes in the system – including tuition fees, student financial aid, government support for institutions, and the returns to schooling – are then discussed in terms of how they affect the number of students and their characteristics, or capacity and access.

A HARD PUSH FOR SOFT SKILLS: AN EXAMINATION OF POLICY AND RESEARCH ON NON-COGNITIVE SKILLS IN CANADIAN K-12 SCHOOLING

Non-cognitive skills have caught the attention of current education policy writers in Canada. Within the last 10 years, almost every province has produced a document including the importance of supporting non-cognitive skills in K-12 students in the classroom. Although often called different names (such as learning skills, cross curricular competencies, and 20th Century Skills) and occasionally viewed through different lenses (such as emotional intelligence skills, character skills, and work habits), what unifies non-cognitive skills within the policy documents is the claim that students that are strong in these skills are more successful in academic achievement and are more successful in post-secondary endeavors. Though the interest from policy-makers and educators is clear, there are still many questions about non-cognitive skills that have yet to be answered. These include: What skills are the most important for teacher’s to support in the classroom? What are these skills’ exact contributions to student success? How can teachers best support these skills? Are there currently reliable and valid measures of these skills? These are very important questions worth answering if Canadian teachers are expected to support non-cognitive skills in their classrooms with an already burdened workload. As well, it can begin to untangle the plethora of research that exists within the non-cognitive realm. Without a critical look at the current literature, it is impossible to ensure that these policies are effective in Canadian classrooms, and to see an alignment between research and policy. Upon analysis of Canadian curriculum, five non-cognitive skills were found to be the most prevalent among many of the provinces: Self-Regulation, Collaboration, Initiative, Responsibility and Creativity. The available research literature was then examined to determine the utility of teaching these skills in the classroom (can students improve on these skills, do these skills impact other aspects of students’ lives, and are there methods to validly and reliably assess these skills). It was found that Self-Regulation and Initiative had the strongest basis for being implemented in the classroom. On the other hand, Creativity still requires a lot more justification in terms of its impact on students’ lives and ability to assess in the classroom.

D2.1 - First bundle of server-side components

This document describes the first bundle of core WP2 (user data analytics) serverside components, including their specifications, usecases, and working prototypes. Included assets contain a description of their current status, and links to their full designs and downloadable versions.

On Multi- Server Queues With Consultation With Main Server

Queueing Theory is the mathematical study of queues or waiting lines. Queues abound in every day life - in computer networks, in tra c islands, in communication of electro-magnetic signals, in telephone exchange, in bank counters, in super market checkouts, in doctor's clinics, in petrol pumps, in o ces where paper works to be processed and many other places. Originated with the published work of A. K. Erlang in 1909 [16] on congestion in telephone tra c, Queueing Theory has grown tremendously in a century. Its wide range applications includes Operations Research, Computer Science, Telecommunications, Tra c Engineering, Reliability Theory, etc.

Studie zur Web-Server-Sicherheit von Unternehmen aus Hannover und Umgebung

Der vorliegende Artikel beschreibt die Ergebnisse einer Studie zur Sicherheit von Web-Servern niedersächsischer Unternehmen aus dem Raum Hannover. Untersucht wurden vier Unternehmensgruppen, die sich aus Mitgliedern von Unternehmensverbänden und berufsständischen Körperschaften zusammensetzen. Insgesamt werden mehr als 1800 Unternehmen betrachtet. Als Indikator für die IT-Sicherheit wurden vier Sicherheitslücken herangezogen, die leicht überprüft werden können, ohne die Web-Server in ihrem Betrieb zu beeinträchtigen. Die Ergebnisse sind ernüchternd: Viele Unternehmen setzen keine Verschlüsselung ein oder die Web-Server-Software ist nicht auf dem neusten Stand. Bei ungefähr jedem dritten Unternehmen, welches Verschlüsselung einsetzt, enthält die Software seit mehr als einem Jahr bekannte Schwachstellen und sollte umgehend aktualisiert werden. Dies zeigt, dass das IT-Sicherheitsmanagement in vielen Unternehmen mangelhaft ist.

An exploratory study of creativity, personality and schooling achievement

International audience

Plurilingualism vs multilingualism in early years of schooling: The rise of a critical cultural awareness in primary school

Since early 80s the Council of Europe has taken a great approach to teaching and learning of languages by encouraging plurilingual practices instead of multilingual practices, being these understood as the coexistence of several languages within a given society. In this context, we believe that once one learns many languages, one values one's native language, allowing one to understand it more clearly and to communicate with others on an equal footing and, more importantly, one also learns about other cultures. This is an issue of great importance in order to value and respect one's own and other cultures in the context of European integration. Considering this, in this article, we present two linked projects: a) the “PrimaLang” project, related teaching practices multilingual promoting critical cultural awarenessl in the 1st cycle of Portuguese Primary School System; b) the “Plurilingual” project, which refers to the design of a coursebook which stimulates the development of a plurilingual competence in the 1st cycle of Portuguese Primary School System. At the same time, we analyze some materials made by students and teachers in the projects to better understand their contribution under the InterNetwork Comenius Project

Transition into adulthood : the impact of the great recession in schooling and financial choices of young adults

Mestrado em Finanças

Towards near-threshold server processors

The popularity of cloud computing has led to a dramatic increase in the number of data centers in the world. The ever-increasing computational demands along with the slowdown in technology scaling has ushered an era of power-limited servers. Techniques such as near-threshold computing (NTC) can be used to improve energy efficiency in the post-Dennard scaling era. This paper describes an architecture based on the FD-SOI process technology for near-threshold operation in servers. Our work explores the trade-offs in energy and performance when running a wide range of applications found in private and public clouds, ranging from traditional scale-out applications, such as web search or media streaming, to virtualized banking applications. Our study demonstrates the benefits of near-threshold operation and proposes several directions to synergistically increase the energy proportionality of a near-threshold server.

The pedagogical content knowledge of Danish geography teachers in a changing schooling context

This study examines the self-reported, topic-specific professional knowledge (TSPK) of Danish geography teachers seen as an aspect of their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) when teaching weather formation and climate change. This topic is considered representative of geography teaching in Denmark. In the last ten years Danish primary and lower-secondary schooling has undergone several significant changes, including the introduction of a final multiple-choice exam in geography in 2007, and a fundamental reconstruction of the curriculum in 2014. These changes are expected to influence the TSPK of geography teachers in ways that potentially have an impact on their classroom practice. Teachers´ responses to specific questions relating to their choice of learning goals and the content and organisation of their lessons show that geography teachers take into account not only the knowledge aspects which point to the final multiple-choice exam, but also the ‘bildung’ perspectives of the subject equipping students to develop their own opinions when dealing with socio-scientific issues (SSI).

An integrated library system on the CERN document server

O CERN - a Organização Europeia para a Investigação Nuclear - é um dos maiores centros de investigação a nível mundial, responsável por diversas descobertas na área da física bem como na área das ciências da computação. O CERN Document Server, também conhecido como CDS Invenio, é um software desenvolvido no CERN, que tem como objectivo fornecer um conjunto de ferramentas para gerir bibliotecas digitais. A fim de melhorar as funcionalidades do CDS Invenio foi criado um novo módulo, chamado BibCirculation, para gerir os livros (e outros itens) da biblioteca do CERN, funcionando como um sistema integrado de gestão de bibliotecas. Esta tese descreve os passos que foram dados para atingir os vários objectivos deste projecto, explicando, entre outros, o processo de integração com os outros módulos existentes bem como a forma encontrada para associar informações dos livros com os metadados do CDS lnvenio. É também possível encontrar uma apresentação detalhada sobre todo o processo de implementação e os testes realizados. Finalmente, são apresentadas as conclusões deste projecto e o trabalho a desenvolver futuramente. ABSTRACT: CERN - The European Organization for Nuclear Research - is one of the largest research centers worldwide, responsible for several discoveries in physics as well as in computer science. The CERN Document Server, also known as CDS Invenio, is a software developed at CERN, which aims to provide a set of tools for managing digital libraries. ln order to improve the functionalities of CDS Invenio a new module was developed, called BibCirculation, to manage books (and other items) from the CERN library, and working as an Integrated Library System. This thesis shows the steps that have been done to achieve the several goals of this project, explaining, among others aspects, the process of integration with other existing modules as well as the way to associate the information about books with the metadata from CDS lnvenio. You can also find detailed explanation of the entire implementation process and testing. Finally, there are presented the conclusions of this project and ideas for future development.

[climacteric Syndrome In A Northeastern Brazilian City: A Household Survey].

To assess the prevalence of Climacteric Syndrome (CS) in women from a municipality of Northeastern Brazil which is less developed socioeconomically. A prospective household survey was performed in São Luís, Maranhão, Brazil with 1,210 climacteric women aged 45 to 60 years. Interviews were applied using previously tested standard questionnaires from April to July 2008. The severity of climacteric symptoms was analyzed by circulatory and psychological indexes and the latter were associated with menopausal status. Multiple correspondence analysis was used to assess the relation among climacteric symptoms. Most patients were 55 to 60 years old (35.3%), mulatto (37.9%), with 9-11 years of schooling (39.8%), with a partner (56%), Catholic (73.9%) and belonged to the socioeconomic class C (51.1%). The prevalence of CS was 85.9%, and hot flashes (56.4%) and sweating (50.4%) were the most prevalent symptoms. The most frequent psychological symptoms were nervousness (45%) and emotional liability (44.8%). The severity of vasomotor and psychological symptoms was significantly higher during the peri and postmenopausal period (p<0.05). Vaginal dryness (62.7%) was the most prevalent urogenital complaint. The prevalence of CS was high among women from São Luís, Maranhão, Brazil.

Health-related And Socio-demographic Factors Associated With Frailty In The Elderly: A Systematic Literature Review.

Frailty is a syndrome that leads to practical harm in the lives of elders, since it is related to increased risk of dependency, falls, hospitalization, institutionalization, and death. The objective of this systematic review was to identify the socio-demographic, psycho-behavioral, health-related, nutritional, and lifestyle factors associated with frailty in the elderly. A total of 4,183 studies published from 2001 to 2013 were detected in the databases, and 182 complete articles were selected. After a comprehensive reading and application of selection criteria, 35 eligible articles remained for analysis. The main factors associated with frailty were: age, female gender, black race/color, schooling, income, cardiovascular diseases, number of comorbidities/diseases, functional incapacity, poor self-rated health, depressive symptoms, cognitive function, body mass index, smoking, and alcohol use. Knowledge of the complexity of determinants of frailty can assist the formulation of measures for prevention and early intervention, thereby contributing to better quality of life for the elderly.