Research findings indicate that many adolescents are struggling with reading. Although there is a great deal of research related to helping elementary age children to enhance their reading skills, there is less research regarding assistance for adolescent readers. Research findings also indicate the importance of the school principal in implementing, supporting, and supervising instruction. There is significantly less research available regarding processes that a principal can utilize to implement and support adolescent literacy practices. Five secondary school principals were interviewed in depth regarding how they implemented such practices. Seven Common Strands of implementation and support were found in a cross-case analysis. These Strands were also viewed through a sociocultural lens to determine the influence of socioculturalism on adolescent literacy.

Few studies have been conducted to take an in-depth look at the role and experience of a new middle school assistant principal. Advantageous timing provided the opportunity for the author to conduct this research study examining his experience as a first-year assistant principal. The guiding question for this autoethnography was "What can be learned from the experiences of a first-year assistant principal that can be used to improve the administrative certification program and training of future assistant principals"? Autoethnography is employed as a methodology to portray the experience and understanding of the participant/observer in comparison to his training and preparation to become the assistant principal of a middle-level school. Data were gathered from personal journal entries both verbally recorded and written by the author during this year and a half period. Other data sources included school discipline records, behavior files, and incident reports recorded during the experience as well as those leading up to this experience. This study describes the preparation experienced by the author from his time as a middle school and high school classroom teacher, through the certification process, and into his acceptance of his first administrative position at a semi rural, medium size, sixth- and seventh-grade intermediate school. This study takes a critical look at the author's perceived understanding of students, discipline, and his preparation to become an educational leader. The author's own experience forced him to question his views and readiness while bringing to light needed reforms and understandings to the world of an assistant principal.

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Thesis advisor: Martin Scanlan / This qualitative case study examined the roles autonomy played in how principals in one Massachusetts district learned to prioritize curricular goals and to support instruction during a time of crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. A Communities of Practice (CoP) theory and the concepts of boundaries and brokering served as a theoretical framework to examine principal autonomy. Findings revealed that principals, as members of both their school CoP and the district CoP, existed in a state of multi-membership between the two. Principals then reconciled competing messages and demands between the district CoP and their school CoPs through bridging and buffering. Findings further demonstrated that principals struggled to see themselves as instructional leaders during the pandemic given logistical challenges. Principals also had to adjust their instructional goals to meet changing student social emotional needs and developmental gaps. Finally, data revealed that there was a shift in the roles of autonomy over the course of the three school years of the pandemic: district leaders supported principal autonomy, and the needed improvisation it brought to the district CoP, at the onset of the pandemic and during the second school year but returned to a more centralized calibration as the pandemic continued into the third school year. This research has implications for districts seeking to prepare for crises and suggests that districts might consider principal autonomy as a strategy for innovation. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

My research makes three contributions to the literature. The first contribution is to find supportive evidence for the augmented Taylor rule model with orthogonalized bond market variables I build to more accurately describe and forecast the behavior the Federal Reserve, with improved model’s fit both in and out-of-sample. The second contribution to the existing literature is that I find supportive evidence for a macro explanation of industrial firm behavior in the United States. The third contribution of this paper is that I provide a new aspect to understand the monetary policy and the monetary policy transmission mechanism for both monetary policy practitioners and researchers. This research proceeds as the following: Essay one provides a literature review for the research in this dissertation discussing background and theories for both the empirical and theoretical applications of the Taylor rule, a tool for the setting of the federal funds rate. The second essay is designed to understand the setting of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve. I show that augment a simple Taylor rule with bond market information can significantly improve the model’s fit, both in and out-of-sample. The improvement is enough to produce lower forecast errors than those of non-linear policy models. In addition, the inclusion of these bond market variables resolves the parameter instability of the Taylor rule documented in the literature, and implies that the lagged federal funds rate plays a much smaller role than that suggested in the previous studies. The third essay examines the impact of monetary shocks on corporate cash holdings. I find evidence that small industrial firms hold onto cash when monetary policy is too tight and large industrial firms do the reverse both in the short-run and in the long-run. Further tests examine whether the long lasting loose monetary policy results in the pileup of corporate cash holdings. The evidence supports the assumption that industrial firms take the “long lasting lower interest rate” environment to hoard cash to buffer the monetary policy effectiveness.

The main contribution of this thesis is a new method of image compression based on a recently developed adaptive transform called Mixtures of Principal Components (MPC). Our multi-resolution extension of MPC-called Multi-Resolution Mixtures of Principal Components (MR-MPC) compresses and decompresses images in stages. The first stage processes the original images at very low resolution and is followed by stages that process the encoding errors of the previous stages at incrementally higher resolutions. To evaluate our multi-resolution extension of MPC we compared it with MPC and with the excellent performing wavelet based scheme called SPIHT. Fifty chest radiographs were compressed and compared to originals in two ways. First, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and five distortion factors from a perceptual distortion measure called PQS were used to demonstrate that our multi-resolution extension of MPC can achieve rate distortion performance that is 220% to 720% better than MPC and much closer to that of SPIHT. And second, in a study involving 724 radiologists' evaluations of compressed chest radiographs, we found that the impact of MR-MPC and SPIHT at 25:1, 50:1, 75:1 on subjective image quality scores was less than the difference of opinion between four radiologists. / Thesis / Master of Science (MS)

Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) possess organelles called magnetosomes which contain magnetite (Fe_3O_4) or greigite (Fe_3S_4) nanocrystals. These particles generate a magnetic moment allowing the use of external magnetic fields to control the cell orientation. MTB use this magnetic moment to reach environments with optimal oxygen concentration, a process called magnetotaxis. There are many possible technological applications for MTB, for example, they have been used as nanorobots to push beads and they can be used to remove heavy metals and radionuclides from waste water. In order to fully understand the motion of these micron-size organisms, which takes place at very low Reynolds number where friction dominates over inertia, we set out to measure their drag coefficients. As a starting point, we used a well-studied species of MTB with a corkscrew shape, Magnetospirillum magneticum AMB-1. Simulations were done to find the best external magnetic field strength at which to observe their diffusion. We then imaged non-motile cells placed in these preferred uniform magnetic fields and used automated image analysis to determine the position and orientation of the cells in each frame. This allowed calculating orientation correlation functions and mean-squared displacements, from which rotational and translational diffusion coefficients were obtained for each individual cell. We observed that the four principal drag coefficients of these cells greatly vary as a function of cell length as predicted for cylindrical or elliptical objects with comparable radius. However, we also detecting a coupling between the rotation around and translation along the long axis of the cell only observed for chiral objects. We were able for the first time to experimentally fully characterize the friction matrix for a micron-size elongated chiral object. Continuing our work on MTB, to study live cells for long periods of time, we looked to confine them in PDMS nanowells, but found that MTB were not growing well in this environment. We then turned to a device, which incorporated a PDMS microchannel to provide continuous nutrients and a gel membrane to enable cellular growth into a 2D monolayer. Hopefully, this experimental setup combined with time-lapse microscopy can in the future be used to observe cell growth and cell division, and further to determine whether the magnetosome of the mother is passed on equally between daughter cells. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of professional development of principals of schools in the rural Appalachian region of Virginia. The researcher interviewed 13 principals from public elementary, middle, and high schools regarding their professional development experiences. Principals were asked to describe their past and current professional development experiences, identify barriers to accessing professional development, and provide their opinion regarding the importance of professional development that focuses specifically on leading a school in rural Appalachia. Principals reported participation in many different types of professional development. Principals' responses were analyzed to determine the extent to which professional development was on-going, job-embedded, and connected to school improvement goals. Results indicated principals' professional development experiences were seldom on-going, often job-embedded, and somewhat connected to school or district improvement goals. Principals reported the demands of the job, lack of professional development opportunities provided by their school district, lack of knowledge of professional development available outside their district, and being geographically isolated as barriers to their professional learning. The results led to identification of areas for further research. These areas include (a) the role and influence of school division leadership on principals' professional development (b) the importance and impact of incorporating networking and other opportunities for collaboration into the design of principals' professional development, (c) the impact of designing professional development that is on-going, job-embedded, and connected to school improvement goals on initial learning and continued leadership behaviors of principals, (d) the issues relating to the use and non-use of distance technologies for principals' professional development, and (e) the efficacy of professional development designed for teachers in meeting the needs of principals or the ability of principals to translate the content of teachers professional development to knowledge and skills needed by instructional leaders. The researcher also suggested the need for additional research to compare and contrast the professional development experiences of this study's participants with other principals in rural Appalachia as well as principals from suburban and urban school districts. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this study was to describe the role that mentors played in the development of school principals. This study focused on the role of mentors as described by retired school principals on the informal mentoring process. It also identified and discussed differences the retired principals found in mentoring relationships among males and females. Qualatative methodology was used in this study. Principals who retired between 1960 and 1997 were interviewed and described the role that mentors played in their professional development and what role, if any, they played in a formal mentoring process. The mentors of the retired principals contributed significantly to their career development. During the time that they were serving as principal the nature of the mentor network was primarily informal. Most of the retired principals made no application for the principalship but were invited to serve in that position. Most participants believed that women were more likely to climb the career ladder with the help of a mentor. As their careers were nearing an end, some of the participants were involved in the development of formal mentoring programs. Whether engaged in formal or informal mentoring processes, all of the participants made contributions. Those participants who had mentors all chose to mentor others. Ultimately, the retired principals described mentoring as having made an important contribution to their development as school principals. They encouraged continued use of mentoring in both formal and informal venues. / Ed. D.

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the experiences, educational and job related, that middle school assistant principals have received to prepare, and to become principals. In order to explore and describe those experiences provided by the middle school principals a phenomenological research design was used for this study. Those participants who were interviewed work in middle schools within Region V of the Virginia School University Partnership. This research project included two steps in data collection. The first step required the assistant principals to examine the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium Standards (ISLLC), and indicate whether they had experienced those functions under each standard in one or more of three areas: principal preparation, job responsibility, and district professional development. The second parts of the study involved follow up interview questions for each in the participants. The findings of the study discuss that the standards are addressed and also how the assistant principals feel about their preparation and school district professional development. / Ed. D.