Effective strategies are needed to help parents become more involved in the education of their teenage children. Parent Reciprocal Teaching (PRT) is proposed as an effective strategy to increase parent involvement and help students increase academic performance. 120 students in a 10th-grade high school physics course participated in either the PRT homework assignments or traditional reciprocal teaching (TRT) assignments. The PRT homework assignments required students to teach their parents/guardians at home, while the TRT assignments required students to teach a peer during class time. Data was collected though test scores and surveys sent home to parents and students. Findings indicate that (1) PRT very comparable, and in some instances, better than TRT in its academic benefit, (2) resulted in parents feeling more involved in their child's education, (3) parents were more aware of what their child was learning and more mindful of how well their child understood the course content. It is suggested that more educators incorporate the practice of PRT so that students can benefit from the effect of increased parent involvement as found in other studies on parent involvement: stronger academic achievement, improved school attendance and behavior, more positive perceptions of school and self, and higher educational aspirations.

The present study was aimed at exploring the issues faced by previously incarcerated fathers and their children. A qualitative design utilizing face to face interviews was used to answer the question: according to previously incarcerate fathers, what are the differences between the reciprocal connectedness of fathers and their children prior to, during, and following incarceration? Interviews were conducted with 10 previously incarcerated fathers. Researchers found that all participants had positive relationships with their children at some point prior to incarceration. Furthermore, during incarceration the reciprocal connectedness of these relationships severely decreased due to limited or no contact. Following incarceration, fathers continued to have difficulty rebuilding the connection they once had with their children due to continued limited or nonexistent contact and mistrust by their children. Incarcerated fathers and their children are an underserved population in need of additional resources. The findings of the study add to the literature about the relationship between previously incarcerated fathers and their children, in hopes that further research and services will be developed.

To meet increasing competition, get products to market in the shortest possible time, and satisfy heightened customer expectations, products must be made more robust and fewer failures must be observed in a short development period. In this circumstance, assessing product reliability based on degradation data at high stress levels becomes necessary. This assessment is accomplished through accelerated degradation tests (ADT). These tests involve over stress testing in which instead of life product performance is measured as it degrades over time. Due to the role these tests play in determining proper reliability estimates for the product, it is necessary to scientifically design these test plans so as to save time and expense and provide more accurate estimates of reliability for a given number of test units and test time. In ADTs, several decision variables such as inspection frequency,the sample size, and the termination time at each stress level are important. In this research, an optimal plan is developed for the design of accelerated degradation test with a reciprocal Weibull degradation data using the mean time to failure (MTTF) as the minimizing criteria. A non linear integer programming problem is developed under the constraint that the total experimental cost does not exceed a pre-determined budget. The optimal combination of sample size, inspection frequency and the termination time at each stress level is found. A case example based on Light Emitting Diode (LED) example is used to illustrate the proposed method. Sensitivity analyses on the cost parameters and the parameters of the underlying probability distribution are performed to assess the robustness of the proposed method.

<p>Despite most parents’ good intentions to provide a warm, supportive environment in which the child can grow and develop socially appropriate behavior, they might occasionally act toward their child in a negative or even harsh way. Some do this more consistently than others. This dissertation examined the relationships between harsh or inept parenting and children’s characteristics in predicting various adjustment problems. The first aim of the dissertation was to examine if experienced harsh parental behavior is associated with adjustment problems for children from different cultures in a similar way. Study I showed that the effects of harsh parenting were very similar for children from different countries, but the magnitude of these effects differed. The second aim was to examine how parents and youths respond to each other over time. Studies II and III showed that youth characteristics influenced harsh or inept parenting and, to a lesser extent, parents’ behaviors could affect youth characteristics or behavior problems. The third aim of this dissertation concerns the role of child or youth characteristics in the link between harsh parenting and adjustment problems. Findings from Study II suggested that, youth characteristics might be responsible for both harsh parenting and problematic peer relationships, thus explaining the link between them. Studies IV and V showed that children’s early unmanageability increased the risk of having more adjustment problems later in life only for some children. The fourth aim was to examine how the early characteristics of children who experience physical punishment in the context of parenting behaviors that communicate negative emotions affect later adjustment. The findings from Studies IV and V suggest that only for some children, those who experience certain combinations of harsh parental behavior, is early unmanageability a risk factor for social adjustment problems. Overall, the studies in this dissertation provide insights into the roles of harsh or inept parenting and youth characteristics in the development of various adjustment problems. Even though parents’ negative behaviors may affect youth social adjustment, youth characteristics and behaviors can strongly contribute to their own adjustment and to harsh or inept parenting.</p>

In an experimental study the attempt was made to examine the effects of the Reciprocal Teaching method on measures of metacognition and try to identify the effective features of this method that are necessary for the learning gains to occur. Reciprocal Teaching, originally developed by Palincsar and Brown (1984), is a very successful training program which was designed to improve student's reading comprehension skills by teaching them reading strategies. In the present study the tasks and responsibilities assumed by 5thgrade elementary students (N = 55) participating in a 16-session reading strategy training were varied systematically. Not only the students who participated in the training program in one of the three experimental conditions were compared with respect to knowledge and performance measures, but there was also a comparison to their control classmates who did not participate in strategy training (N = 86). Detailed analyses of video-taped sessions provided additional information. <br><br> The strategy training was most beneficial for measures of knowledge and performance more closely related to the content of the training program, namely knowledge about specific reading strategies taught in training and application of those strategies. No significant effects were observed for more distal measures (general strategy knowledge, reading comprehension). As for the features of the program, it could be shown that students of the two experimental conditions where the students were responsible for giving each other feedback on performance (with respect to both content and strategy application) and guiding the correction of the answer outperformed both the experimental condition in which the trainer was responsible for those tasks and the control group. <br><br> It is concluded that it is not merely the application of strategies, but the combination of strategy application with concurrent teaching and learning of metacognitive acquisition procedures (analysis, monitoring, evaluation, and regulation) in an inter-individual way as the precedent of these processes occurring intra-individually that seems to be an efficient way of acquiring metacognitive knowledge and skills. It was also shown that strategy training does not necessarily have to include the precise kind of interaction that characterizes the Reciprocal Teaching method. Instead, the tasks of monitoring, evaluating, and regulating other children's learning processes - i.e., tasks associated with the "teacher role" - are the ones that promote the acquisition of metacognitive knowledge and skills. Generally, any strategy training program that not only provides children with plentiful opportunities for practice, but also prompts them to engage in these kinds of metacognitive processes, may help children to acquire metacognitive knowledge and skills. / In einer experimentellen Studie wurden die Effekte der Methode Reziprokes Lehren auf verschiedene Maße von Metakognition sowie die Frage, welche Merkmale dieses Trainingsprogramms für die Lernzuwächse verantwortlich sind, untersucht. Beim Reziproken Lehren, einem sehr erfolgreiches Trainingsprogramm das von Palincsar und Brown (1984) entwickelt wurde um das Leseverständnis von Schülern zu verbessern, erlernen die Schüler verschiedene Lesestrategien. In der vorliegenden Studie wurden die Aufgaben und Verantwortlichkeiten von Schülern der 5. Klassenstufe (N = 55) in einem 16-stündigen Training systematisch variiert. Es wurden nicht nur das Wissen und die Leistungen der Schüler, die in einer der drei experimentellen Bedingungen an dem Lesetraining teilgenommen hatten, miteinander verglichen, sondern auch mit denen ihrer Klassenkameraden, die nicht an dem Strategietraining teilgenommen hatten (Kontrollgruppe, N = 86). Detaillierte Analysen der auf Video aufgezeichneten Trainingssitzungen lieferten zusätzliche Informationen. Die größten Trainingseffekte zeigten sich vor allem bei Wissens- und Leistungsmaßen, die einen engeren Bezug zum Strategietraining haben (spezifisches Strategiewissen über die im Training erlernten Strategien und Anwendung der Strategien). Für trainingsfernere Maße wurden keine signifikanten Effekte gefunden (Allgemeines Strategiewissen, Leseverständnis). Die Schüler der beiden experimentellen Bedingungen, bei denen die Schüler sich gegenseitig Rückmeldungen sowohl auf den Inhalt als auch auf die Anwendung der jeweiligen Lesestrategie bezogen gaben und im Anschluß dann den anderen Schüler bei der Verbesserung der Antwort anleiteten, erbrachten bessere Leistungen und erwarben mehr metakognitives Wissen als Schüler der experimentellen Bedingung, in der der Trainer für diese Aufgaben zuständig war, und Schüler der Kontrollgruppe. Die vorliegenden Befunde sprechen dafür, daß nicht die bloße Anwendung der Lesestrategien, sondern erst die Kombination von Strategieanwendung und der gleichzeitigen Vermittlung und Übung von metakognitiven Erwerbsprozeduren (d.h. Analyse, Überwachung, Evaluation und Regulation) auf inter-individueller Basis als Voraussetzung für das Auftreten dieser Prozesse im Individuum selbst (intra-individuell) eine effektive Methode für den Erwerb metakognitiven Wissens und metakognitiver Kompetenzen darstellt. Es konnte auch gezeigt werden, daß in einem Strategietraining die Interaktion nicht notwendigerweise auf die spezielle Art und Weise, wie das beim Reziproken Lehren der Fall ist, gestaltet werden muß. Stattdessen scheinen die Aufgaben der Überwachung, Evaluation und Regulation der Lernprozesse anderer Schüler - d.h. die Aufgaben, die die Kinder in der "Lehrer"-Rolle erfüllen - diejenigen zu sein, die den Erwerb von Metakognition unterstützen. Generell kann jedes Strategietraining, bei dem die Schüler nicht nur ausreichend Übungsgelegenheiten zur Anwendung von Strategien haben, sondern auch angeleitet werden, metakognitive Aufgaben zu übernehmen, hilfreich beim Erwerb metakognitiven Wissens und metakognitiver Fähigkeiten sein.

In this paper, we consider families of time Markov fields (or reciprocal classes) which have the same bridges as a Brownian diffusion. We characterize each class as the set of solutions of an integration by parts formula on the space of continuous paths C[0; 1]; R-d) Our techniques provide a characterization of gradient diffusions by a duality formula and, in case of reversibility, a generalization of a result of Kolmogorov.

In this work we are concerned with the characterization of certain classes of stochastic processes via duality formulae. First, we introduce a new formulation of a characterization of processes with independent increments, which is based on an integration by parts formula satisfied by infinitely divisible random vectors. Then we focus on the study of the reciprocal classes of Markov processes. These classes contain all stochastic processes having the same bridges, and thus similar dynamics, as a reference Markov process. We start with a resume of some existing results concerning the reciprocal classes of Brownian diffusions as solutions of duality formulae. As a new contribution, we show that the duality formula satisfied by elements of the reciprocal class of a Brownian diffusion has a physical interpretation as a stochastic Newton equation of motion. In the context of pure jump processes we derive the following new results. We will analyze the reciprocal classes of Markov counting processes and characterize them as a group of stochastic processes satisfying a duality formula. This result is applied to time-reversal of counting processes. We are able to extend some of these results to pure jump processes with different jump-sizes, in particular we are able to compare the reciprocal classes of Markov pure jump processes through a functional equation between the jump-intensities.

Cereals are the basis of global agriculture providing more than half of the human food consumption. In Spain, barley is the main crop in terms of growing area, mostly in the poorest agricultural areas. In semiarid areas crop productivity is not only limited by drought, but also by high temperatures at the end of the growth cycle. An increased use of ‘local’ germplasm could lead to the selection of varieties adapted to specific regional conditions. The use of a barley variety like ‘Albacete’, with its proven adaptation to semiarid conditions, can be an excellent option. It has been hypothesized that the high popularity of ‘Albacete’ with farmers particularly in semi-arid areas where barley is grown under rain fed conditions, may be due to the presence of a special form of chromosomal interchange, a reciprocal translocation. This thesis provides a cytological, genetic and agronomic characterization of this reciprocal translocation.

I denna uppsats jämförs och diskuteras gynnsamma faktorer för elevers läs- och skrivutveckling. Jag lyfter fram tre olika forskares syn på vad som kan ha en positiv inverkan för elevers utveckling på området och sätter det i relation till gynnsamma faktorer för lärande i stort. Frågeställningarna berör likheter i forskarnas metoder, lärarrollen samt lärande utifrån individ- och grupperspektiv.   Som jag skrev ovan så fokuseras arbetets kring tre huvudtexter. Dessa texter är Judith Langers Effective Literacy Instruction (2002), Palincsar och Browns Reciprocal Teaching (1984) och Graham, Harris och Santangelos Self-Regulated Strategy Development (2008). Dessa tre texter ger tillsammans en bild av faktorer som kan vara av betydelse för både läs- och skrivutveckling.   I resultaten av studien kommer bland annat vikten av att eleverna lär sig strategier fram. En lustfylld och trygg miljö är något som visat sig vara ytterst viktigt för både lärare och elev. Av resultatet går också att konstatera att både individanpassat lärande och lärande i grupp har sina fördelar.

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