The purpose of this study is to gain increased knowledge on how three special education teachers include students with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) in math lessons. Moreover, the study aims to provide a deeper understanding of the challenges and benefits of inclusive math education for NDD students. The study provides an overview of previous research on inclusion, inclusion in mathematics, and NDD. The investigation was conducted through semi-structured interviews with three special education teachers in math. The results of the study show that the special education teachers' view on inclusion aligns with the dilemma perspective, where students work with math borh in the classroom and in groups outside of it. Important factors for inclusive education for NDD students that are supported by research, include hands-on materials, structured teaching, adapted books, a permissive climate, personalized instruction, meaningful lessons and fostering a sense of context and belonging. The teachers in the study believe that the biggest challenges include difficulty keeping up with everything due to students' different needs and levels. They also mention challenges that arise over time, such as decreased student motivation and attendance. However, through observations in the regular classroom and their results, they also believe that students achieve higher levels of fulfillment and increased self-confidence in math, and, because of increased learning, they feel more included in the classroom.

This is a book on numerical methods for singular perturbation problems - in particular stationary convection-dominated convection-diffusion problems. More precisely it is devoted to the construction and analysis of layer-adapted meshes underlying these numerical methods. An early important contribution towards the optimization of numerical methods by means of special meshes was made by N.S. Bakhvalov in 1969. His paper spawned a lively discussion in the literature with a number of further meshes being proposed and applied to various singular perturbation problems. However, in the mid 1980s this development stalled, but was enlivend again by G.I. Shishkin's proposal of piecewise- equidistant meshes in the early 1990s. Because of their very simple structure they are often much easier to analyse than other meshes, although they give numerical approximations that are inferior to solutions on competing meshes. Shishkin meshes for numerous problems and numerical methods have been studied since and they are still very much in vogue. With this contribution we try to counter this development and lay the emphasis on more general meshes that - apart from performing better than piecewise-uniform meshes - provide a much deeper insight in the course of their analysis. In this monograph a classification and a survey are given of layer-adapted meshes for convection-diffusion problems. It tries to give a comprehensive review of state-of-the art techniques used in the convergence analysis for various numerical methods: finite differences, finite elements and finite volumes. While for finite difference schemes applied to one-dimensional problems a rather complete convergence theory for arbitrary meshes is developed, the theory is more fragmentary for other methods and problems and still requires the restriction to certain classes of meshes.

L’évolution croissante de l’obésité n’épargne pas les adolescents présentant une déficience intellectuelle. Nos travaux reposent sur le principe d’une « recherche- action » avec pour but l’amélioration de la prise en charge des personnes en situation de handicap mental. Réalisées dans 5 instituts médico-éducatifs, notre première étude montre que plus de 40% des adolescents déficients intellectuels présentent un excès de masse grasse. Plus de 30% des adolescents rapportent un faible niveau d’activité physique et seule la moitié pratiquerait suffisamment d’activité physique pour lutter contre le développement de l’obésité. De plus, les adolescents les plus actifs présentent moins de risques de développer un excès de masse grasse. Leur faible niveau de condition physique observé est un facteur de risque élevé pour la santé. Pour ces jeunes présentant un handicap mental, cela constitue un « sur-handicap » qui peut accentuer la restriction de participation sociale et altérer la qualité de vie. Etre actif au quotidien permettrait de limiter les risques pour la santé, notamment de limiter le développement de l’obésité. De ce fait, un programme d’Activité Physique Adaptée a été proposé aux jeunes repérés en situation de sur-adiposité. Celui-ci a permis d’augmenter les temps de pratique d’activité physique et de stabiliser l’évolution du poids, tout en diminuant la masse grasse et le tour de taille. L’approche interdisciplinaire de cette recherche nous a permis de considérer l’évolution du concept de soi chez ce public spécifique et de constater qu’il n’était pas altéré par cette prise en charge visant le contrôle du poids. / The growing evolution of obesity has not spared children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities. Ours studies based on "research-action", with the aim of improving care for people with mental disabilities. Conducted in 5 specialized schools, our first study shows that over 40% of adolescents with intellectual disabilities have an excess body fat. More than 30% of adolescents report a low physical activity level, and only half reaches enough physical activity to avoid an excess of body fat. Moreover, the most active adolescents are less likely to develop an excess body fat. Their low level of physical fitness is a high risk factor to health. For these adolescent with intellectual disabilities, this is an "extra-handicap" which may increase the restriction of social participation and impair quality of life. Being active daily would reduce the health risks, including limiting the obesity development. Thus, we proposed an Adapted Physical Activity program to over-fatness adolescents. This program has helped to increase level of physical activity and stabilize weight, while decreasing fat mass and waist circumference. The interdisciplinary approach of this research has allowed us to consider the evolution of self-concept and to note that it was not altered by this weight management program.

Title: The influence of dance training on mood and feelings of people with paraplegia Objectives: The objective of this work was to detect using POMS questionnaire, whether the dance education has a positive effect on mood of people with paraplegia. Specifically, we focused on feelings such as depression, activity, anxiety and fatigue. Methods: The survey is a quantitative type using the POMS questionnaire (Profile of Mood State). Research has become a set of 40 people with paraplegia. 20 people were the control group and 20 persons were experimental group. Results: Dance education has significantly reduce the feeling of depression, anxiety, fatigue, and increase activity in patients with paraplegia. Dance in our case, show better results than any other sporting activity. Keywords: Dance education, paraplegia, mood, feelings, emotions, sports, music, adapted physical activities

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / There is an increasing amount of user-generated information in online documents, includ- ing user opinions on various topics and products such as movies, DVDs, kitchen appliances, etc. To make use of such opinions, it is useful to identify the polarity of the opinion, in other words, to perform sentiment classification. The goal of sentiment classification is to classify a given text/document as either positive, negative or neutral based on the words present in the document. Supervised learning approaches have been successfully used for sentiment classification in domains that are rich in labeled data. Some of these approaches make use of features such as unigrams, bigrams, sentiment words, adjective words, syntax trees (or variations of trees obtained using pruning strategies), etc. However, for some domains the amount of labeled data can be relatively small and we cannot train an accurate classifier using the supervised learning approach. Therefore, it is useful to study domain adaptation techniques that can transfer knowledge from a source domain that has labeled data to a target domain that has little or no labeled data, but a large amount of unlabeled data. We address this problem in the context of product reviews, specifically reviews of movies, DVDs and kitchen appliances. Our approach uses an Adapted Naive Bayes classifier (ANB) on top of the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to predict the sentiment of a sentence. We use grams derived from complete syntax trees or from syntax subtrees as features, when training the ANB classifier. More precisely, we extract grams from syntax trees correspond- ing to sentences in either the source or target domains. To be able to transfer knowledge from source to target, we identify generalized features (grams) using the frequently co-occurring entropy (FCE) method, and represent the source instances using these generalized features. The target instances are represented with all grams occurring in the target, or with a reduced grams set obtained by removing infrequent grams. We experiment with different types of grams in a supervised framework in order to identify the most predictive types of gram, and further use those grams in the domain adaptation framework. Experimental results on several cross-domains task show that domain adaptation approaches that combine source and target data (small amount of labeled and some unlabeled data) can help learn classifiers for the target that are better than those learned from the labeled target data alone.

Contexte : Les tests de marche de 6 minutes (TM6) et de stepper de 6 minutes (TS6) permettent d’évaluer et de suivre en routine la tolérance à l’effort des patients porteurs pneumopathies interstitielles idiopathiques fibrosantes (PII-f). En général, les programmes de réhabilitation respiratoire (RR), améliorent la tolérance à l’effort et la performance à ces tests, la qualité de vie et les symptômes chez les patients atteints de PII-f, qu’ils soient réalisés en centre ou au domicile des patients. Peu d’études rapportent un maintien des bénéfices de la RR plusieurs mois après la fin de celle-ci chez les patients PII-f.Objectif : L’objectif général de la thèse était d’évaluer comparativement les adaptations cardioventilatoires au TM6 et TS6 chez les patients PII-f à différentes étapes de leur prise en charge en RR (pré et post-RR). Nous avions également pour objectif majeur d’évaluer la faisabilité et l’efficacité d’un programme de maintenance réalisé dans des structures proposant des activités physiques adaptées (APA) proches du domicile des patients PII-f sur le maintien des bénéfices à six mois post-RR.Matériel et méthodes : L’ensemble des patients atteints de PII-f ont réalisé un programme de RR au domicile de 8 semaines. Durant la période de suivi post-RR, les patients avaient le choix de bénéficier d’un suivi en APA dans une structure extérieure au domicile (groupe APA) ou de continuer la pratique d’une activité physique régulière en autonomie (groupe contrôle). Pré et post-RR, nous avons mesuré la tolérance à l’effort (TM6 et TS6) avec mesure des paramètres cardioventilatoires, les fonctions pulmonaires, la qualité de vie, la dyspnée, l’anxiété/dépression et la motivation des patients. Ces évaluations ont été réalisées aussi après 6 et 9 mois de suivi post-RR.Résultats : Parmi les 21 patients PII-f recrutés, 19 PII-f ont réalisé le programme de RR et sont revenus pour l’évaluation après 6 mois de suivi. Le TM6 et le TS6 induisent des adaptations cardioventilatoires différentes chez les patients atteints de PID, notamment une réponse ventilatoire supérieure au TS6 susceptible de jouer un rôle important sur la moindre désaturation en O2 observée comparé au TM6. A la suite d’un programme de RR, nous avons observé une amélioration des capacités physiques chez les patients PII-f. De manière individuelle, cependant, 58% des patients ne s’amélioraient pas post-RR, et 32% ne continuaient pas de pratiquer régulièrement les exercices physiques recommandés post-RR. La mise en place d’un programme de maintenance dans différentes structures locales proposant des APA proches du domicile chez des patients PII-f est réalisable et permet d’optimiser le maintien des bénéfices post-RR, qu’ils soient répondeurs ou non-répondeurs à la RR.Conclusion : Nos travaux ont souligné l’importance du choix du test d’effort, de la typologie de la PII-f et de la sévérité de l’hypoxémie sur les adaptations cardioventilatoires à l’effort, les adaptations physiologiques et l’évolution de la tolérance à l’effort post-RR. De plus, nous avons constaté que la réalisation de programmes de maintenance en APA, en s’appuyant sur des structures locales est réalisable et favorise un maintien des bénéfices à long terme chez les patients PII-f. Ainsi, l’évaluation des freins à l’activité physique chez un tiers des patients PII-f qui reste non-observant et arrête la pratique d’exercices physiques post-RR, est ainsi d’actualité. De plus, étudier plus précisément les différents profils de patients PII-f (répondeurs/non-répondeurs) pourrait être intéressant afin de comprendre les mécanismes potentiellement responsables de l’absence d’amélioration des capacités physiques post-RR chez les patients non-répondeurs, qu’elle soit liée à la pathologie, la médication ou une éventuelle pathologie musculaire associée. / Context: The 6-minute walk test (6MWT) and 6-minute stepper test (6MST) are routinely performed to measure and monitor exercise tolerance in patients with fibrosis interstitial idiopathic pneumonia (f-IIP). In those patients, exercise capacity, quality of life and symptoms are usually improved after a pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) program which can either be performed in a rehabilitation centre or at home.Aim: First, we aimed, to compare the cardio-pulmonary adaptations during a 6MWT and a 6MST in patients with f-IIP, before and after PR. We aimed to assess patients’ adhesion to physical activity maintenance programs which are offered and located near the f-IIP patient's homes. And their efficiency in maintaining benefits observed post-PR.Methods: All the f-IIP patients included followed a 8-week PR program at home. During the post-PR follow-up period, patients voluntarily chose to perform physical activity in a structure proposed by the investigator (APA group), or by themselves at home (control group). Before and after the PR program, we quantified the patient's exercise capacity (6MWT and 6MST) and measured cardiopulmonary parameters during both tests, pulmonary function at rest, quality of life, dyspnoea at rest and after each exercise, anxiety/depression and patients’ motivation. The same evaluations were repeated at 6 and 9 months post-PR.Results: Among the 21 recruited f-IIP patients, 19 finished the PR program and had an evaluation at 6 months post-PR. The 6MST was characterized by a higher minute ventilation compared with the 6MWT, and this may have contributed to the lower O2 desaturation also observed during the 6MST. Following the PR program, there was a mean improvement of exercise tolerance in f-IIP patients. However, among the patients, 58% showed no improvement in the 6MWT distance post-PR nor in the cardiorespiratory parameters during the test, and 32% did not continue to practise a regular physical activity post-PR. Finally, the individual support from the investigators for the patients to follow a maintenance program in local structures, near the f-IIP patient's home, probably contributed to their voluntary inscription in these programs, which allowed the patients to maintain the post-PR benefits, whether they patients initially responded to the PR program or not.Conclusion: Our works emphasized the importance of selecting an appropriate test, according to the fixed objective; of the f-IIP clinicopathological entities, and of the hypoxemia severity on exercise cardiorespiratory and physiological adaptations and changes of exercise tolerance post-PR. Moreover, we observed that patients from the APA group regularly attended the chosen physical maintenance program in local structures, which contributed to the maintenance the post-PR benefits in f-IIP. The evaluation of physical activity engagement barriers, that lead to the non-participation of a third of f-IIP patients to physical activities post-PR, remains to be conducted. Further studies should also focus on the explanation for the absence of improvement of exercise tolerance and cardiorespiratory parameters in about half of f-IIP patients post-RR, either due to their pathology, medication, or possible muscle disorders.

Nesta tese consideramos um modelo de regressão não paramétrica, quando a variável explicativa e um processo estritamente estacionário e alpha-mixing. São estudadas as condições sobre o processo Xt e sua estrutura de dependência, assim como do domínio da função f a ser estimada. Também são feitas as adaptações necessárias aos procedimentos para obter as taxas de convergência do risco para a norma Lp, no caso de ondaletas deformadas. Em relação às ondaletas adaptativas de Haar, obtêm-se as taxas de convergência do risco do estimador proposto. Mediante estudos de simulação, e avaliado o desempenho dos procedimentos propostos quando aplicados a amostras finitas sob diferentes níveis de perturbação do sinal e diferentes tamanhos da amostra. Também são feitas aplicações a dados reais. / In this thesis we consider a nonparametric regression model, when the exploratory variables are alpha-mixing stationary processes. We obtain convergence rates for risk for Lp norm, via warped wavelets, under suitable regularity conditions. For estimation using design adapted Haar wavelets we obtain convergence rates for the risk of the proposed estimator. The performance of the estimators are assessed via simulation studies with dierent sample sizes and dierent signal-to-noise ratios. Applications to real data are also given.

Orientador: Débora Deliberato / Banca: Lúcia Helena Reily / Banca: Tânia Moron Saes Braga / Resumo: A literatura tem discutido a importância de o professor utilizar a história como instrumento mediador para a aquisição de conceitos e para a expansão de enunciados. Profissionais da educação e da saúde têm discutido a necessidade de adequar e adaptar os livros de histórias para alunos com deficiência visual, para que possam ter oportunidades de aprendizagem significativas. Este trabalho teve como objetivo adaptar graficamente livros de literatura infantil para alunos cegos. Participaram desta pesquisa três alunos cegos da educação infantil de uma cidade do interior de São Paulo, suas famílias e seus professores. Foram utilizados como instrumentos de coleta de dados a entrevista semiestruturada, a filmagem e o caderno de registro. A pesquisa foi dividida em dois momentos: no primeiro foram feitos procedimentos com os alunos cegos, seus familiares e professores e, posterior e concomitantemente, foram estabelecidas as etapas da adaptação do material e os parâmetros para a produção gráfica em larga escala. Por meio da análise dos resultados obtidos nos procedimentos do primeiro momento foram encontrados os seguintes temas norteadores para as adaptações dos livros: os recursos pedagógicos utilizados em sala de aula e em casa; adaptações táteis feitas pelas professoras e mães; procedimentos para leitura do livro de literatura infantil; compreensão que o aluno cego tinha com a atividade do livro de literatura infantil; importância da contagem de histórias para aluno cego; orientações realizadas com os professores e familiares dos alunos cegos e critérios para seleção dos livros adaptados. No segundo momento, foram identificados parâmetros gráficos para adaptação de materiais por meio da impressão em serigrafia, ou seja, papéis, tintas e vernizes compatíveis com o processo e custo unitário de produção dos materiais adaptados... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The literature has discussed about the importance of teachers using story books like a mediator instrument for acquisition concepts and state expansion. Educational and health professionals have discussed about the need of not only suiting but also adapting story books to blind students, in order to achieve significative opportunities of learning. This work had the aim of adapting, graphically, children literature books to blind students. Three students, their families and teachers from a small town in São Paulo have taken part into this research. Registering notebook, filming and semi structured had been used for the interview. The research has been divided into two moments: at the first moment some procedures have been used on blind students, their families and teachers, afterwards and concomitant, the material level adaptation has been established, and the parameters to a wide scale graphic production. The analysis of the acquired results, obtained with the procedures of the first moment, found ruling topics to the adaptation of the books: the pedagogical resources used in the classroom and the home, tactile adaptations made by their teachers and mothers, reading procedures for literature children books, the comprehension that blind students had in activities with the literature books, the importance of telling stories for blind students, the orientations given to teachers and mothers, and criteria's used to selected books for adaptation. At the second moment, graphic parameters materials were identified to silkscreen press, so, papers, inks, varnish compatible with the print process and the costs of the adapted material per unit. At the end of the analysis conduct with selected adapted books it was possible to develop a manual orientation for the teachers and a manual orientation for the graphic producer. During the first moment, there was the conclusion about... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo principal a proposta de novas notas de rodapé para o livro I Promessi Sposi Adattamento del testo e note di Marisa Pasqualetti, CIDEB, 2007. Inicialmente, fizemos um levantamento dos livros de leitura graduada para estrangeiros existentes no mercado editorial italiano. Verificamos que alguns dos títulos eram adaptações de obras clássicas da literatura italiana, outros eram policiais, de aventura e romance. A característica comum a esses títulos, além da linguagem controlada, é que todos eles apresentam notas de rodapé e que, na maioria das vezes, essas notas trazem um vocabulário já conhecido pelo público brasileiro. Dessa forma, colocamos as questões que pretendemos responder ao final dessa pesquisa: para quem é destinada as notas de rodapé dessas obras? A simplificação lexical é suficiente para tornar uma obra de fácil leitura? Qual é o critério usado para a escolha das palavras que vão compor as notas de rodapé dessas obras? Para a proposta das novas notas de rodapé do livro I Promessi Sposi adaptado, aplicamos a leitura da obra a sete grupos de alunos que possuíam, de certa forma, o mesmo nível de conhecimento lexical. Foi pedido a esses alunos que ao final da primeira leitura realizassem uma segunda leitura (de modo a provocar o mínimo possível de ruído na primeira leitura) preenchendo uma tabela que continha três colunas: primeira coluna elenco das palavras que constavam nas notas de rodapé desnecessariamente; segunda coluna palavras que não constavam nas notas de rodapé, porém, que deveriam constar (nesse caso, não seria todas as palavras desconhecidas, mas aquelas, que em uma leitura global ainda apresentavam-se incompreensíveis ou duvidosas); terceira coluna palavras que constavam no rodapé cuja explicação era insuficiente. Analisamos as colunas de 50 fichas preenchidas pelos alunos e verificamos que, das 213 palavras e/ou expressões que faziam parte das notas de rodapé, 77 eram desnecessárias, 19 deveriam ser reformuladas e 55 deveriam ser inseridas. Ao final, o título analisado teria 191 notas destinadas ao público brasileiro, 22 a menos do que o número total utilizado pela editora. / This research mainly aims at proposing new footnotes to the book I Promessi Sposi Adattamento del testo e note di Marisa Pasqualetti, CIDEB, 2007. At first, we made a survey of the graded readers for foreigners that we have access to in the Italian publishing industry. We identified that some of the books are adaptations from classic books in the Italian literature; others were suspense, adventure or romance stories. The common feature in all these classics, besides the graded language, is that all of them present footnotes, and that most of the times the vocabulary used is already familiar to the Brazilian readers. This way, we placed the following queries that we want to elicit in our research: Whom are the footnotes addressed to? Is the lexical simplification sufficient in order to make the reading of a piece of art of easy attainability? What is the criterion used for choosing the words which will come as footnotes in these books? In order to propose the new footnotes for the adapted I Promessi Sposi, we asked 07 different groups that were basically in the same lexical level to read the story. The students were asked to do a second reading right after the first one (in such a way so as to provoke the least interference in the first reading) and were asked to fill in a table with three columns: the first column demanded a list of words that were unnecessarily explained in the footnotes; the second column asked for words that were not in the footnotes but should be (in this case, not all the words would be unknown, but also words that could result in doubts or misunderstandings in a global reading); and the third column asked for words that were in the footnotes but whose explanations were insufficient. We analyzed the columns in 50 records filled up by the students and we found that from the 213 words and expressions that were in the footnotes, 77 were unnecessary, 19 should be reformulated and 55 should be inserted. By the end, the title which was chosen should have 191 footnotes destined to the Brazilian readers, 22 less that the number used by the publishing house.

A proposta deste trabalho partiu da suposição de que os estudantes têm dificuldade de aprendizagem de conceitos abstratos. As teorias de Piaget, Dewey e Kolb foram utilizadas como referências e também trabalhos da área de ensino de Física que mostram ser praticamente consensual entre os professores que a utilização de experiências concretas em sala de aula facilita a aprendizagem de um conceito abstrato. Este trabalho se propõe a verificar a aceitação, pelos alunos do ensino médio e de cursos de Ciências Contábeis, de uma experiência de física adaptada para aula de Matemática ou Contabilidade. Ele buscará confirmar se a atividade será eficiente no seu propósito, ou seja, se facilitará a aprendizagem do conceito de juros. Para tanto, a atividade será dividida em três tarefas (1 - tarefa abstrata, 2 - tarefa abstrata, 3 - tarefa concreta), que são apresentadas em detalhes no decorrer do texto. A atividade experimental foi aplicada em sala de aula, em turmas da escola média e também de faculdades, tanto públicas quanto privadas, para que se tivesse um amplo escopo acerca do conhecimento da noção de juros por parte dos estudantes. Verificou-se que esta atividade precisa ser aperfeiçoada, mas pode ser usada como material de apoio no ensino do conceito de juros nas escolas. / The proposal of this work has arisen from a supposition that students have learning difficulties of abstract concepts. Theories formulated by Piaget, Dewey and Kolb were used as references, as well as a few works from the field of Physics learning which demonstrate that it is practically consensual among teachers that the use of concrete experiences in classroom makes the learning of an abstract concept easier. This work proposes to verify how college students and high school students accept an experience in Physics adapted for Math or Accounting classes. It will try to confirm if this activity will be efficient in its purpose, that is to say, if it will make easier to learn the concept of interest. In order to do it, the activity will be divided in three tasks (1 - abstract task, 2 - abstract task, 3 - concrete task), which are presented in details along the text. The experimental activity was applied in classroom, for high school classes and also for college students, in private and public institutions, so that a wide range of students was studied in their knowledge of the interest notion. It was verified that this experimental activity needs to be improved, but it can be used as a supplementary material for teaching the concept of interest in schools.