The purpose of the study was to identify student summer activities and determine whether a relationship exists between the activities and mathematics testing change scores measured from spring to fall. This current effort built upon research conducted by Heyns (1978), Burkam et al. (2004), Downey et al. (2004), and Alexander et al. (2007). The commonality in findings that existed among all of these efforts was that learning loss occurred in the absence of instruction such as that experienced during the normal school term. A quantitative, correlational study was conducted using a survey method which requested that parents answer questions concerning the nature of activities and daily structure experienced by their children during the summer break. The Group Mathematics Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation (GMADE) testing platform was used to generate quantitative measurements of mathematics skills for exiting second graders in the spring of 2010 and for these same students as entering third graders in the fall of 2010. A voluntary sample of 57 students from elementary schools in a suburban school district in Southwestern Virginia participated in the testing process. At the conclusion of all testing and at the point at which all surveys were completed, student scoring differentials from spring to fall were compared to the activity and daily structure components reported in the survey for potential correlations between that information and mean gain test results. This study sought potential correlations between types of summer activities and documented change between mathematics spring and fall test scores. Results of data analysis from this research will assist leaders in understanding whether activities bear a relationship to mathematics score changes. Should those relationships be established, the findings would assist leaders in determining which activities should be encouraged or discouraged during the summer break to avoid score declines. The findings indicated that though summer mathematics learning loss did occur for the participants, no correlation between activities and test score change could be established. Implications of these findings and suggestions for the future are presented in the final chapter. / Ed. D.

Spatial ability represents our ability to mentally arrange, rotate, and explore objects in multiple dimensions. This ability has been found to be important for engineers and engineering students. Past research has shown that many interventions can be created to boost an individual’s spatial ability. In fact, past research has indicated that engineering students significantly increase in spatial ability without an intervention while they are enrolled in certain engineering courses. Some researchers have claimed that the spatial ability boosts are permanent after an intervention. However, most researchers do not check the validity of that claim with continued assessment after more than a week past the end of an intervention. Additionally, if engineering education researchers are trying to measure the impact of their separate spatial ability intervention while the participating engineering students are actively enrolled in engineering courses, a confounding variable is introduced as the courses can impact students’ spatial ability. To resolve this, the work presented in this paper reflects research on engineering students’ spatial ability maintenance during the winter break between semesters. It was found that newer students exhibit spatial ability improvement during the break, while older students maintain their spatial ability at the same level. A deeper statistical analysis revealed that there are other factors that play a role in spatial ability changes over the break that are more significant than how far students had progressed in their studies. Those factors include with academic performance, the sex of the students, playing music during the break, and prior life experiences.

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The Corona pandemic and Covid-19 has affected the entire globe where we had to adapt to a new way of living and a new standard of doing things. For the universities in Sweden and around the world this generally meant that the universities had to switch to online teaching and digital examinations to the largest extent possible. Even though we have lived in this new kind of every day we know barely anything about how this has affected the grades of the students, and what we can learn about it to do things more effectively in the future. In this paper, I examine the possible effects on grades for students at the university level by using newly collected data from Linnaeus University’s department of economics and statistics. Results show that the grades after the decision to switch to online teaching and digital exams in March of 2020, overall became higher for both males and females but no significant difference between the genders were found.

In this thesis inhibition as a means for competition among neurons in an unsupervised learning system is studied. In the first part of the thesis, the role of inhibition in robustness against loss of information in the form of occlusion in visual data is investigated. In the second part, inhibition as a reason for loss of information in the mathematical models of neural system is addressed. In that part, a learning rule for modeling inhibition with lowered loss of information and also a dis-inhibitory system which induces a winner-take-all mechanism are introduced. The models used in this work are unsupervised feature extractors made of biologically plausible neural networks which simulate the V1 layer of the visual cortex.