Teacher evaluations have always been a part of school leaders' jobs (Horng, Klasik, and Loeb, 2010). Teacher evaluation is used as a factor in determining whether or not a teacher receives a continuing contract in Virginia, and it has also been a part of the process in determining if a teacher is labeled as highly effective. In some school divisions, the rating a teacher receives may be tied to their merit-based compensation. In 2012, the Virginia Department of Education released the Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Principals, which provides school divisions a structure for their teacher evaluation instrument (Virginia Department of Education [VDOE], 2012). This document requires that Virginia school divisions include a quantifiable measure of student performance as a component of their teacher evaluation instrument. When teachers transfer from one school to another within the same school division many aspects of their job change. For example, the school leader who performs the teacher's evaluation changes and the student population changes as well. The presence of these variables may have an effect on a teacher's evaluation, but they are not controlled by the teacher being evaluated. The purpose of this basic qualitative study is to determine teachers' attitudes toward teacher evaluation when the teacher has transferred schools within the same school division. Eight teachers were interviewed regarding their attitude toward teacher evaluation. The data indicate that the change in evaluator when a teacher transfers work sites has a stronger impact than any other variable in the transfer process. The data also indicate that a change in the context for the teacher being evaluated does not affect their attitude towards evaluation. / Ed. D.

Accessibility plays an important role in a number of scientific fields, and significant advances in measuring accessibility have been made over the past two decades. However, since the comprehensive review of accessibility measures conducted by Geurs and van Wee in 2004, no attempt has been made to update their study. In addition, the emergence of Automated Vehicles (AVs) is expected to dramatically impact accessibility. Therefore, based on the relevant assessment criteria proposed by Geurs and van Wee (2004) (i.e., theoretical basis, interpretability, operationalization, and usability), this research reviews: (1) progress made over the past two decades on measuring accessibility; and (2) how accessibility measures have incorporated the impacts of AVs. A total of 495 papers and books were identified through a search of Scopus, Web of Science, and EBSCOhost in May 2019. The results found that the existing accessibility measures have been further refined, and new measures have been created by leveraging more advanced behavior theories and/or models. In addition, the operationalization of almost all of the measures has become easier due to more readily available data and more advanced implementation tools. As a result of these changes, accessibility measures are becoming more usable and can more accurately assess social, economic, and environmental impacts. However, the interpretation of these measures is becoming more difficult due to the incorporation of more complicated theories and models. Interestingly, very few papers discussed AVs in the context of accessibility measures. Finally, as a result of this study, future research opportunities are identified. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning / The concept of accessibility plays an important role in a number of scientific fields (e.g., transportation planning, environmental conservation, and economic development, etc.), and a change in accessibility can have a direct impact on an individual's quality of life. Transportation accessibility is a function of the connectivity between origins (e.g., a home) and destinations (e.g., a place of employment). Significant advances in measuring accessibility have been made over the past two decades. However, since the comprehensive review of accessibility measures conducted by Geurs and van Wee in 2004, no attempt has been made to update their study. In addition, the emergence of Automated Vehicles (AVs) is expected to dramatically impact accessibility. Therefore, based on the relevant assessment criteria proposed by Geurs and van Wee (2004) (i.e., theoretical basis, interpretability, operationalization, and usability), this research reviews: (1) progress made over the past two decades on measuring accessibility; and (2) how accessibility measures have incorporated the impacts of AVs. The theoretical basis refers to whether an accessibility measure is developed based on solid theories or models, and whether the measure is sensitive to: (a) opportunity changes (e.g., changes in the location of jobs); (b) transport cost changes (e.g., travel time changes); (c) temporal changes (e.g., the change of travel options throughout different times-of-day); and (d) individual changes (e.g., how residents' travel behavior changes due to the emergence of a new subway line). Interpretability refers to how easy an accessibility measure can be explained and understood by planners, engineers, and decision makers. Operationalization refers to how easy it is to use a measure in practice. Finally, usability refers to whether the results of an accessibility measure can be used to assess social, economic, and environmental impacts. A total of 495 papers and books were identified through a search of Scopus, Web of Science, and EBSCOhost in May 2019. The results found that existing accessibility measures have been further refined, and new measures have been created by leveraging more advanced behavior theories and/or models. In addition, the operationalization of almost all of the measures has become easier due to more readily available data and more advanced implementation tools. As a result of these changes, accessibility measures are becoming more usable and can more accurately assess social, economic, and environmental impacts. However, the interpretation of these measures is becoming more difficult due to the incorporation of more complicated theories and models. Interestingly, very few papers discussed AVs in the context of accessibility measures. Finally, as a result of this study, future research opportunities are identified.

Many problems in geometric measure theory are centered around finding conditions and structures on a set to guarantee that its distance set must be large. Two notions of structure that are of importance in this work are Hausdorff dimension and thickness. Recent progress has been made on generalizing the notion of thickness so part of this work also generalizes previous results using this new upgraded version of thickness. We also show why a famous conjecture about distance sets does not hold on the real line and thus, why this conjecture needs to happen in higher dimensions. Furthermore, we give explicit distance set and thickness calculations for a special class of self-similar sets. / Master of Science / Part of the study of geometric measure theory is centered around creating interesting structures to place on a set and determining what sort of threshold on that structure allows you to guarantee that some interesting geometric property exists for that set. An example of this is determining when you can guarantee that a set contains many unique distances between elements in that set. This work presents various types of structures that help to investigate the problem of when you can guarantee that a set has the previously mentioned geometric property.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:22:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011-03-14Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:09:06Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 santos_ejc_me_sjrp.pdf: 888426 bytes, checksum: 818c57bcf63e1b4a38fe5843f7d82fb2 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / Estudamos alguns tópicos da Teoria do Potencial Logarítmico. Enfatizamos o problema de caracterizar a medida do equilíbrio. Provamos um resultado sobre a assintótica da medida contadora de zeros, associada com uma classe de polinômios. / We study some basic topics of The Theory of the Logarithmic potential. We emphasize on the problem by characterizing the equilibrium measure. A result on the asymptotics of the zero counting measure associated with a class of polynomials is proved.

Comfort is a sensation and state of being that many people seek when they are working in the office, driving in a car, flying on an airplane, or laying in a hospital bed. The literature identifies many definitions and interpretations for comfort and discomfort, and many different ways that researchers have tried to measure comfort and discomfort. de Looze proposed a model to explain the relationship between comfort and discomfort using three key components: (a) the human, (b) the product, and (c) the environment. This dissertation added a measurement component to the model. In a repeated measures design, subjects (n=35) sat in three different office chairs for 60 minutes each on two different dates. Researchers collected subjective survey data and objective electronic data related to perceived sitting comfort and discomfort while participants completed office computer tasks. Data were analyzed to predict and quantify office worker seated comfort and discomfort using linear modeling and neural network modeling. Correlation values from the linear regression model developed in this experiment were R2 < 0.70, while the single hidden-layer neural network model predicted the comfort/discomfort responses with a higher correlation (R2=0.997). The 35 subjects in the study perceived measurable comfort differences between the three chairs tested. Subjective questions that treated comfort and discomfort in a non-linear relationship discriminated chair differences better than questions using a linear relationship. There was no significant difference between male and female comfort/discomfort responses. Comfort ratings decreased over time, while discomfort increased over time; at least 45-minute comfort testing is needed to understand subjects' comfort/discomfort in a particular office chair. Five common factors that were important to the model included: (a) fit of the product to the person, (b) the features of the product itself, (c) the time spent with the product, (d) the subjective questions, and (e) the objective pressure measurements.

We consider a system of infinitely many hard balls in R^d undergoing Brownian motions and submitted to a smooth pair potential. It is modelized by an infinite-dimensional stochastic differential equation with a local time term. We prove that the set of all equilibrium measures, solution of a detailed balance equation, coincides with the set of canonical Gibbs measures associated to the hard core potential added to the smooth interaction potential.

We consider an infinite system of hard balls in Rd undergoing Brownian motions and submitted to a smooth pair potential. It is modelized by an infinite- dimensional Stochastic Differential Equation with an infinite-dimensional local time term. Existence and uniqueness of a strong solution is proven for such an equation with fixed deterministic initial condition. We also show that Gibbs measures are reversible measures.

We consider a system of infinitely many hard balls in Rd undergoing Brownian motions and submitted to a smooth pair potential. It is modelized by an infinite-dimensional Stochastic Differential Equation with a local time term. We prove that the set of all equilibrium measures, solution of a Detailed Balance Equation, coincides with the set of canonical Gibbs measures associated to the hard core potential added to the smooth interaction potential.

This is an introduction to Wiener measure and the Feynman-Kac formula on general Riemannian manifolds for Riemannian geometers with little or no background in stochastics. We explain the construction of Wiener measure based on the heat kernel in full detail and we prove the Feynman-Kac formula for Schrödinger operators with bounded potentials. We also consider normal Riemannian coverings and show that projecting and lifting of paths are inverse operations which respect the Wiener measure.

This work has investigated the possibility of classifying Java source code into cases for a case-based reasoning system. A Case-Based Reasoning system is a problem solving method in Artificial Intelligence that uses knowledge of previously solved problems to solve new problems. A case in case-based reasoning consists of two parts: the problem part and solution part. The problem part describes a problem that needs to be solved and the solution part describes how this problem was solved. In this work, the problem is described as a Java source file using words that describes the content in the source file and the solution is a classification of the source file along with the source code. To classify Java source code, a classification system was developed. It consists of four analyzers: type filter, documentation analyzer, syntactic analyzer and semantic analyzer. The type filter determines if a Java source file contains a class or interface. The documentation analyzer determines the level of documentation in asource file to see the usefulness of a file. The syntactic analyzer extracts statistics from the source code to be used for similarity, and the semantic analyzer extracts semantics from the source code. The finished classification system is formed as a kd-tree, where the leaf nodes contains the classified source files i.e. the cases. Furthermore, a vocabulary was developed to contain the domain knowledge about the Java language. The resulting kd-tree was found to be imbalanced when tested, as the majority of source files analyzed were placed inthe left-most leaf nodes. The conclusion from this was that using documentation as a part of the classification made the tree imbalanced and thus another way has to be found. This is due to the fact that source code is not documented to such an extent that it would be useful for this purpose.