The purposes of the study were (1) to examine the relationship among pretense quality as determined by (a) the number of verbally expressed transformations and (b) the proportion of ideational transformations, imaginative predisposition as measured by the Barron's Movement Threshold Test and peer popularity as determined by sociometric rating; and (2) to compare sex-differences in pretense quality. / Thirty male and 30 female day care enrollees, age three-years-six-months to six-years, were videotaped in dyads in four 10-minute play sessions. Each subject was paired with a high and low pretense ability peer of both sexes. Video tapes were transcribed and pretense transformations enacted by each subject were coded by observers. / Ten null hypotheses were tested using a pre-set .05 Alpha. Results indicated no relationship between age and the proportion of ideational transformations. Age was related significantly to the number of verbally expressed transformations for females but not for males. High imaginative and low imaginative children did not differ according to the number of verbally expressed transformations or the proportion of ideational transformations. / No difference between males and females was found in the number of verbally expressed transformations or the proportion of ideational transformations enacted across all four pairing. When paired with opposite-sex peers, males and females did not differ according to these variables. However, when paired with same-sex peers, females used a significantly greater proportion of ideational transformations than did males. / The number of verbally expressed transformations was related significantly to popularity for boys but not for girls. When sociometric ratings was regressed on sex, age, and number of verbally expressed transformations, the model accounted for 21 percent of the variance. Sex accounted for more than half of the variance (12 percent). After sex was partialled out, the number of verbally expressed transformations accounted for an additional six percent. The proportion of ideational transformations was not related to popularity. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-09, Section: A, page: 2556. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1985.

The purposes of this study were to determine whether knowledge of a child's family's marital status (divorced home/intact home/family status unknown) and/or teacher's marital status (single/divorced) would affect the teacher's ratings of that child's personality traits and predicted behaviors. The study sought to determine whether there was any interactive effect of rater marital status and knowledge of family background upon these teacher ratings. The subjects were 27 divorced and 27 married teachers of grades preschool through grade five. / To test the hypotheses, two instruments were employed. The Personality Trait Rating Scale (PTRS) and the Predicted Behavior in School Form (PBS) were used by the teachers to rate behaviors of a five year old child observed on a videotape. / Findings were: (1) knowledge of a child's family marital status did not have any significant effect on teachers' ratings on the PTRS or on the PBS. Mean rating scores on both instruments did not differ significantly among the three treatment conditions, (2) teacher marital status had no significant effect on ratings, i.e., mean ratings on the PTRS and PBS did not differ between married and divorced teachers, and (3) no interactive effects were found, i.e., teacher ratings across treatment groups did not differ significantly according to marital status of teacher. The findings of this study were unexpected. Contrary to some earlier research, teachers were not biased in their ratings by knowledge of a child's family's marital status. Similarly, married teachers who had not experienced the divorce process themselves were no more positively or negatively biased in their ratings with the two instruments used in the study than were the divorced teachers. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-02, Section: A, page: 0380. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.

A 2-yr study using Mashona- (M, yr 1 and 2) and Tuli-sired (T, yr 2) cows produced from a three-breed diallele cow base comprised of Brahman (BB), Romosinuano (RR), and Angus (AA) was conducted to determine effects of breed type and growing strategies on growth performance and carcass characteristics in early-weaned calves. Steers and heifers used were between 90 and 200 d old at arrival. Cattle were randomly split into one of two nutritional treatment groups with sex, breed type, and age stratified across treatments. Calves were either fed a roughage diet (P) or placed immediately on a concentrate grower diet (F) for approximately x d, then finished together in the feedlot. In both years, F calves gained more (P < .01) than P calves during the growing stage. In yr 1, P calves gained more (P < .05) than F calves during the middle, late and overall finishing period. For yr 2, F calves gained more (P < .05) during the early finishing phase, but P cattle gained more (P < .05) during the middle portion. In yr 1, P calves had higher (P < .05) USDA marbling scores than F calves. Growing program had no effect on carcass characteristics during yr 2. In yr 1, MAA calves gained more (P < .05) during the overall finishing period. TAA calves gained more (P < .01) during the growing stage and TBB calves gained more (P < .05) for the overall finishing period in yr 2. In yr 1, MAA and MBB were fatter (P < .05), and MAA and MAR calves deposited more (P < .01) marbling than others. MAA calves also had less (P < .05) desirable yield grades than other cattle. In yr 2, TAA calves had more (P < .05) marbling than other calves, followed by TRR cattle that deposited more (P < .05) than remaining calves.

To better understand the operating mode of the deep oceans during fundamentally warm climate intervals, we present new Nd isotope data from Deep Sea Drilling Project and Ocean Drilling Program sites in the North Pacific to expand the reconstruction of water mass composition and structure during the early Cenozoic. Fossil fish debris from Sites 192, 464, 465, 883, 884 and 1208 (paleowater depths spanning 900 to 4000 m) were used to reconstruct the water mass composition from ~85 to 30 Ma. The fish debris is shown to not be overprinted as there was no systematic offset between the detrital silicate and the fish debris composition. Cleaned and uncleaned fish debris were both included in the reconstruction of water mass composition as they were found to record the same Nd isotope composition. North Pacific deep water convection occurred from ~67 to 45 Ma, the peak in production is recorded by broadly coincident trends at Sites 192, 464 and 883. Further support for North Pacific deep-water convection during the early Paleogene are the geographic trends in detrital silicate versus fish debris composition, greater separation at the more northerly Emperor Seamount sites, and the location of the most radiogenic detrital values at the Emperor Seamount sites. The Emperor Seamount chain likely played a major role in the flow of the North Pacific deep-water mass as it acted as a physical barrier to flow at deep-water sites compared to shallow depths (albeit still deep-water). εNd values indicate the timing of the cessation of major, deep convection in the North Pacific occurred much earlier, ~52 Ma than the timing obtained from shallower Shatsky Rise sites, ~45 Ma. Convection in the North Pacific likely produced a dense water mass that influenced the deeper sites in this study more than the shallower sites until ~52 Ma when convection was not as intense or the waters were not sufficiently dense to impact the deeper sites. Deep water convection was most intense during the relatively “cool” portion of the Late Cretaceous and Early Paleocene.

The Behavior Assessment System for Children, Second Edition (BASC-2; Reynolds & Kamphaus 2004) is a behavior rating scale commonly used in preschool settings. In addition to measuring behavioral constructs such as hyperactivity, social skills, and adaptive functioning, the BASC-2 includes a Developmental Social Disorders (DSD) content scale that evaluates the presence of behaviors commonly associated with pervasive developmental disorders, including items related to self-stimulation, withdrawal and poor socialization. This study compared the T-scores of toddler and preschool-aged children diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to children diagnosed with other developmental delays, and typically developing children using the BASC-2 Parent Rating Scales, Preschool form. Participants from the ASD group obtained significantly higher T-scores than the typically developing group on the Hyperactivity, Atypicality, Withdrawal, and Attention Problems scales, and obtained significantly lower T-scores on the Adaptability, Social Skills, Activities of Daily Living, and and Functional Communication scales. Significant differences were not observed between participants in the ASD group and those diagnosed with other developmental delays. However, the DSD scale was effective in distinguishing between groups, with participants in the ASD group obtaining significantly higher T-scores on the DSD scale than those diagnosed with other developmental delays and typically developing children.

Parents' Impact on Their Young Children's Literacy Achievement

A 2-yr study using Mashona- (M, yr 1 and 2) and Tuli-sired (T, yr 2) cows produced from a three-breed diallele cow base comprised of Brahman (BB), Romosinuano (RR), and Angus (AA) was conducted to determine effects of breed type and growing strategies on growth performance and carcass characteristics in early-weaned calves. Steers and heifers used were between 90 and 200 d old at arrival. Cattle were randomly split into one of two nutritional treatment groups with sex, breed type, and age stratified across treatments. Calves were either fed a roughage diet (P) or placed immediately on a concentrate grower diet (F) for approximately x d, then finished together in the feedlot. In both years, F calves gained more (P < .01) than P calves during the growing stage. In yr 1, P calves gained more (P < .05) than F calves during the middle, late and overall finishing period. For yr 2, F calves gained more (P < .05) during the early finishing phase, but P cattle gained more (P < .05) during the middle portion. In yr 1, P calves had higher (P < .05) USDA marbling scores than F calves. Growing program had no effect on carcass characteristics during yr 2. In yr 1, MAA calves gained more (P < .05) during the overall finishing period. TAA calves gained more (P < .01) during the growing stage and TBB calves gained more (P < .05) for the overall finishing period in yr 2. In yr 1, MAA and MBB were fatter (P < .05), and MAA and MAR calves deposited more (P < .01) marbling than others. MAA calves also had less (P < .05) desirable yield grades than other cattle. In yr 2, TAA calves had more (P < .05) marbling than other calves, followed by TRR cattle that deposited more (P < .05) than remaining calves.

Early Reading First is a federal initiative that seeks to buffer against the detrimental effects of poverty on children‟s academic outcomes by incorporating all of the elements supported by scientifically-based reading research to address the present and future reading gaps of high-risk preschool children. The tenets of ERF are teacher professional development, high quality language and print-rich environments, the teaching of emergent instruction of emergent literacy skills based on scientifically based reading research (SBRR) and the early identification of reading problems through the informed use of appropriate assessment measures. The present study was designed to assess the effectiveness of ERF enriched preschool classrooms located in a small city in a Southwestern state on both short- and mid-term early literacy outcomes of high risk preschoolers in a treatment condition and a comparison group. A total of 239 children participated in the study; 110 children in the ERF treatment group and 129 children in the "practice as usual" contrast group. The longitudinal effect of the ERF intervention on participating students (from pre-kindergarten through the middle of first grade) was investigated via multilevel modeling. Four multilevel models were developed for two subtests of the Tejas Lee (Francis, Carlson, and Cardenas-Hagan, 2006): Spanish alphabet knowledge (i.e, identificación de las letras) and Spanish story comprehension (i.e., comprensión auditiva); and two subtests of the Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI; Center for Academic and Reading Skills, 2004): English Alphabet Knowledge and English Story Comprehension. Results of the present study support the findings reported by similar prior studies, indicating that while ERF effectively increases students' alphabet knowledge, greater effort is necessary toward programming for increasing student outcomes on story comprehension.

Concurrent programming can improve performance. However, it comes with two drawbacks. First, concurrent programs can be more difficult to design and reason about than their sequential counterparts. Second, error conditions that do not exist in sequential programs, such as data race conditions and deadlock, can make concurrent programs more unreliable. To make concurrent programming simpler and more reliable, while still providing sufficient performance gains, we present a concurrency framework based on an existing concurrency initiation mechanism called “Early-Reply”. Early-Reply is based on the idea that some functions can produce final return values long before they terminate. Concurrent execution begins when return value of a function is returned to the caller, allowing the rest of the work of the function to be done on an auxiliary thread. The simpler sequential programming model can be used by the caller, because the concurrency is initiated and hidden within the function body. Pike and Sridhar recognized Early-Reply as a way for sequential programs to get the benefits of concurrent execution. They also discussed using object-oriented programming to serialize access to data that needs synchronization. Our work expands on their approach and provides an actual C++ implementation of an Early-Reply based framework. Our framework simplifies concurrent programming for both users and implementers by allowing developers to use sequential reasoning, and by providing a minimal framework interface. Concurrent programming is made more reliable by combining the concurrency synchronization and initiation into one mechanism within the framework, which isolates where race conditions and deadlock can occur. Furthermore, this isolation facilitates the development of a simple set of coding guidelines that can be used by developers (through inspection) or static analysis tools (through verification) to eliminate race conditions and deadlocks. As a motivating example, we parallelize an instructional compiler that processes multiple input source files. For each input file; the parsing and semantic analysis execute on the calling thread, while the code optimization and object code generation execute on an auxiliary thread. Speedups of 1.5 to 1.7 were observed on a dual processor confirming that sufficient performance gains are possible.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-265). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.