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Environmental conditions, biotic interactions, dispersal and history have been suggested to be important processes influencing the spatial distribution of organisms and thus to affect community assembly. Understanding how these processes influence community assembly is important, particularly because community diversity and composition are suggested to be relevant for ecosystem functioning. Moreover, bacteria are strongly contributing to nutrient and carbon cycle. Bacteria are highly abundant and ubiquitous, and thus it is relevant to study how they are assembled. This thesis aims to gain insight on the role of these processes on aquatic bacterial community assembly, diversity and functioning. The studies included in this thesis involve transplant and microcosm experiments performed in the lab as well as manipulation experiments and field surveys in a natural rock pool systems. Bacterial community composition was addressed by analysis of 16S rRNA gene and community functioning by measuring bacterial production, community respiration and the ability to use different carbon substrates. This thesis highlights that species sorting is a very important assembly mechanism for bacterial communities, but also finds that other processes such as dispersal and history contribute to the patterns observed. Dispersal caused rescuing effects compensating for losses of diversity; at the same time it increased the similarity between communities. Moreover, bacteria have shown a high level of functional plasticity when colonizing a new locality. Interestingly, past environmental conditions explained the structure of bacterial communities better than present-day environmental conditions. Disturbances and biotic interactions are also important in the assembly of communities. Disturbance caused temporary shifts in bacterial function and changes in composition, the magnitude of which depended on the intensity and the frequency of the disturbance. However, natural aquatic bacterial communities showed quite high resilience capacities. Competition can shift the proportion of generalists and specialists species whereas predation or trophic interactions have been found to decrease diversity and to modify the importance of stochasticity. Both caused alterations of community functioning. Finally, this thesis shows that the diversity-functioning relationship is context dependent. Further research should be directed to understanding the intensity and direction of changes in composition and how this affects the functionality of bacterial communities

In program evaluation research, measures of realized classroom instruction are often referred to as fidelity measures. Although there is a wide consensus that fidelity measures should be grounded in the program theories guiding the intervention, there is very little explicit discussion of how to adequately represent program theories, or how to scale a measure that can be interpreted in terms of the program theories. This dissertation is an example of a construct modeling approach to fidelity measurement. Here program theory is represented as the structure, processes, and underlying constructs of the designed intervention. Observable variables were generated and scored, and the data was modeled using a Partial Credit Model. The model largely supports the distinctions in the construct map and the correspondence between construct and scale. Additional implications for observation measures of classroom interactions are discussed.

Diversity management and diversity training have been part of the standard management repertoire for several decades, and have recently received fresh impetus in the UK through the Equality Act 2010. The Police Services in England and Wales and in Scotland have further reasons to ensure the fair treatment of their own workforces and equality in their dealings with the public since the Macpherson Inquiry and the subsequent revelations relating to the Stephen Lawrence case. For the Police Service, diversity is particularly crucial as it forms a key element of public legitimacy and therefore impacts upon the very principle of ‘policing by consent’, the foundation of British policing (Jackson et al. 2012). However, diversity policies and diversity training tend to be viewed narrowly and used as a decontextualised medium to reduce racism (and other ‘isms’), seen as fulfilling their purpose regardless of the political and occupational context. This thesis, in contrast, suggests that there is a need to examine diversity management and diversity training, not only within an organisational context, but also within the broader political economy into which it is introduced and in which it is implemented. Tracing the various aspects that make up the political economy of policing, the thesis outlines social, economic, legal and political influences, as well as the occupational culture of the police and its emotional ecology. Given the longitudinal design of the research, and the profound changes that have occurred to the political economy of policing over a relatively short time, the thesis is able to examine the impact of these changes on diversity practices within the Police Service of Scotland. Longitudinal data collected at two points in time, 2008/9 and 2013 – straddling not only the introduction of the Equality Act 2010, but also the creation of a single Police Service in Scotland, amongst other changes – suggests that significant changes have occurred to diversity training and diversity professionals, as well as to the ways in which diversity is managed. Using the notion of emotional spaces, diversity training in particular reveals complex interactions in the context of the changes, exposing the tensions police officers and police staff are currently experiencing. Drawing on the analytical framework of emotional ecology, it is argued that in addition to other changes to the political economy of policing, diversity training courses reflect demands for the police to be more open, sensitive and collaborative, by challenging and ‘opening up’ the emotional ecology of the police during training. Interviews and longitudinal observational data suggest that this process has intensified greatly since the creation of Police Scotland, thereby placing competing demands on officers to consolidate the new with the conventional emotional ecology of the police.

In recent years, leading educational scholars have argued for computational thinking to be an essential focus of K12 curriculum. Although now incorporated as an essential concept for STEM education, research has shown that curricular integration of computational thinking and modeling is a complex and challenging endeavor which involves the introduction and adoption of new literacies to both teachers and students, alongside disciplinary ideas and practices that students already find challenging to understand. This three-paper dissertation addresses the challenge of merging computational thinking and modeling with elementary science curricula along three dimensions â material, cognitive and social - by investigating how students and the classroom teacher make use of forms of activity that integrate agent-based computational modeling with other forms of scientific modeling to support the co-development of scientific and computational literacy in the elementary classroom. The first paper examines the close-interplay between the material and cognitive dimensions by investigating the forms of reasoning fourth graders utilized to develop more expert-like explanations of predator-prey relationships and population change due to natural selection after interacting with an agent-based model. The second paper elaborates on the interplay between the material and cognitive dimensions as well as extends the work conducted in the first paper by investigating how computational modeling is enhanced through its integration with other material forms, specifically with scientific modeling. The role of the teacher in re-shaping the structure of activity, and how those re-shapings influenced the knowledge that developed during activity was an additional component of this work. The third paper takes a more integrative stance and investigates the interplay between social, material and cognitive dimensions of emerging computational and scientific literacies through the development of sociomathematical norms across several months of activity. This paper advances an argument that the teacherâs emphasis on mathematizing and measurement as key forms of learning activities helped to meaningfully establish computation as the âlanguageâ of science in the elementary classroom. As a set, this work contributes to our understanding of how computational thinking and programming can transform elementary science education. Together, these papers illustrate how integration of computation as a language of science in the elementary classroom involves careful consideration of the complex interplay between materials, both computational and non-computational, cognition and classroom culture and highlights the complex social dimensions that allow (or do not allow) various computational competencies to thrive in a classroom setting.

Several studies have identified positive relationships between strong principal instructional leadership and improved student outcomes. However, few researchers have examined how principals influence the nature of instruction, particularly as it relates to ambitious goals for student learning. I conducted a mixed-methods analysis to investigate relationships between principalsâ understanding of inquiry-oriented mathematics instruction, district context, school context, and the extent to which they implemented strategies that had the potential to support teachersâ development of ambitious instructional practices. In a logistic regression analysis, I found district membership significantly predicted the implementation of improvement strategies rather than principalsâ understanding of inquiry-oriented mathematics instruction. A follow-up qualitative analysis revealed that principals who implemented improvement strategies often sought out other instructional leaders (e.g. district math specialists, school math coach) to both diagnose issues in current math instruction and facilitate learning events (e.g. professional development) to foster improvements in the quality of instruction. Additionally, principals who implemented instructional improvement strategies worked in districts that provided more support for principals as instructional leaders and worked with teachers who had greater instructional expertise. Additional research is needed to understand how principals come to recognize and value instructional leaders with expertise in inquiry-oriented math instruction.

Much of the research on vocabulary development in preschool children has focused on the dimension of breadth, or the number of words known. However, vocabulary depth, or the quality of knowledge for known words, predicts reading comprehension above and beyond the contribution made by breadth. A focus on depth can also better inform instruction by providing more detailed information about childrenâs word-learning. This three-paper dissertation is aimed at clarifying depth as a concept, tracking how it develops and how it can be fostered in preschoolers, and examining how it can be measured. The first paper looks at preschoolersâ depth of learning for words from different form classes, examining the kinds of semantic information that were learned during a book-reading and play intervention. The second paper is a conceptual review of vocabulary measures used with preK-1st grade children. This paper maps these measures on to features of depth, making visible the aspects of word knowledge assessed by each, and also argues for the use and development of measures that tap higher-quality word knowledge. The third paper reports the results of an informational book-reading and play intervention designed to support preschoolersâ depth of word knowledge. This paper examines the impact of the intervention, and also looks at specific features of instruction and interaction that may contribute to depth, such as teaching words in taxonomies and the potential benefit of using target words in responsive interactions. As a set, these papers seek to add to the fieldâs theoretical understanding of depth and to shift the focus in vocabulary interventions and measurement to include a greater attention to quality of word knowledge.