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1	The Structure and Climate of Size: Small Scale Schooling in an Urban District LeChasseur, Kimberly January 2009 (has links) This study explores mechanisms involved in small scale schooling and student engagement. Specifically, this study questions the validity of arguments for small scale schooling reforms that confound the promised effects of small scale schooling structures (such as smaller enrollments, schools-within-schools, and smaller class sizes) with the effects of the school climates assumed to follow from these structural changes. Data to address this issue was drawn from the Philadelphia Educational Longitudinal Study - one of the few publically-available datasets to include student-level measures of school-within-a-school participation and relative quality - and supplemented by school-level data from the National Center for Education Statistics' Common Core of Data. Regression analyses were designed to examine whether academic press and/or personalized teacher-student relationships - two aspects of school climate often associated with small scale schooling - mediate the relationships between small scale schooling structures and student engagement. The results suggest a pattern of widespread connections between small scale schooling structures and students' emotional engagement in school, but only a loose connection between these structures and students' behavioral engagement in school. Furthermore, school climate does, in fact, mediate many of the relationships between small scale schooling structures and emotional engagement; however, it does not fully mediate the relationship between small scale schooling structure and behavioral engagement. Findings relating student engagement to the quality of small learning communities relative to others in the same school suggest that comprehensive schools that are broken down into smaller within-school units may create a new mechanism for tracking students. Those who participate in relatively high quality small learning communities like school more and participate in more extracurricular activities/sports than students who participate in relatively low quality small learning communities or in no small learning community at all. These relationships are not mediated by school climate. Overall, the findings of this study suggest that the results of small scale schooling reforms are largely dependent on the school climates where they are instituted. / Urban Education Education, Sociology of Education Policy Educational Evaluation Class Size School Climate School Size Schools-within-a-school Small Learning Community Urban School Reform
2	Transparency and learning spaces Finau, Emily 08 April 2011 (has links) This thesis explores the various meanings and implications of transparency in architecture and in learning environments in particular. Architectural transparency, achieved through choice of materials and principles of formal composition, creates a diversity of relationships and can facilitate visual, conceptual, and functional clarity as well as offering simultaneous perception of different spaces. It offers a range of phenomenological qualities and so provides an opportunity to explore and complicate such dichotomies as translucency and opacity, openness and closure, and public space and private space. While celebrated throughout modern and contemporary architecture, transparency raises issues of privacy and safety even as it breaks down hierarchies and social boundaries. The research-based design of transparency in a school building necessitates careful planning to achieve a balance between the access to views, natural light, fresh air, and social interaction that transparency may bring and the continuing obligation to provide a safe, secure environment for schoolchildren. Design Expanded meshes Metal fabrics Netherlands Embassy in Berlin Polycarbonate Multi-cinema Rotterdam Koen van Velsen School size Phoenix Union Bioscience High School Oslo International School Betty H. Fairfax High School Blythewood High School Diaphanous metals Fabric Aerogel Schematic Spatial projection Classroom design Patterned carpet Carpet floor plan Rem Koolhaas OMA Plastic Glass Transparent materials School program School design Security Transparent security Two-way One-way Health Safety Activity levels Hormone patterns Attendance Visual Surface Phenomenal Learning environment Classroom Daylighting Ventilation School High school Small school Small school initiative Small learning community High school transformation Therrell High School Atlanta Public Schools Teen depression Blood pressure Transparency in architecture School facilities

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The Structure and Climate of Size: Small Scale Schooling in an Urban District

Transparency and learning spaces