With the implementation of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in over forty states, teachers are putting into practice the CCSS text exemplars of text complexity. Of particular concern for the purpose of this research are the kindergarten and first grade (K-1) read aloud and independent text exemplar lists. While not intended as core reading lists, many schools are using these lists as mandated texts. A fundamental goal of primary school education is to help facilitate readers and one way is through the use of interesting and engaging books to motivate students as readers. At the initial stage of the reading process, selecting quality books for a specific group of students or an individual student constitutes an important aspect in engaging young readers. When a story provides a young reader with a material that encourages connections, their motivation to read increases. Research shows that motivation to read increases if a student identifies with elements of the story such as the characters or the setting. This research takes a close look at the kindergarten and first grade read aloud and independent texts through both a descriptive and a critical analysis to evaluate power dynamics and representations in the texts. The research questions used for this research were: (1) What are the characteristics of the CCSS K-1 text exemplars? and (2) What representations of people of color and women are present in the CCSS K-1 exemplars? The first research question was answered with information gathered from the descriptive analysis. The second question was primarily answered with information gathered from the critical analysis though the descriptive analysis also provided insight. Findings from the analyses provided data when viewed collectively that have implications for teacher educators, classroom teachers, and policy makers.

Vykstant švietimo reformai, visas bendrasis ugdymas yra orientuotas į mokinį, jo poreikius ir gebėjimus. Mokiniui reikia prisitaikyti gyventi modernioje visuomenėje, kurioje būtina mokėti ieškoti žinių ir adekva��iai jas pritaikyti. Vienas svarbiausių uždavinių įgytas žinias pritaikyti pasirenkant profesinę veiklą. Šiandieninis pasaulis reikalauja lankstumo ir prisitaikymo. Mokiniams svarbiausia adekvačiai pasirinkti profesiją. Tam įtakos turi moksleivio aplinka: tėvai, mokytojai, bendraamžiai. Mokinių pasirengimas karjerai yra sudėtingas ugdymosi procesas. Pirmiausiai moksleiviai turi pažinti save, savo gebėjimus, polinkius. Mokykloje turi būti teikiamos profesinio informavimo, konsultavimo ir orientavimo paslaugos. Profesijos pasirinkimas yra viena aktualiausių problemų, nuo kurios tinkamo sprendimo priklauso žmogaus asmeninės gerovės augimas. Todėl labai svarbu, kad jau pats pirmasis mokinio apsisprendimas būtų sąmoningas, tikslingas, kad mokinys suprast, jog adaptacija darbo pasaulyje ir asmenybės vidinė harmonija priklauso nuo tinkamo apsisprendimo. Vykdant profesinį orientavimą bendrojo lavinimo mokyklose, turėtų būti siekiama padėti jaunimui pasirinkti mokymosi profilį, profesiją, darbinę veiklą. Profilinio mokymo esmė yra mokymosi organizavimas atsižvelgiant į moksleivių siekius, polinkius, gebėjimus, sudarant jiems galimybes pasirinkti mokymosi kryptį atitinkančius dalykus bei skirtingus jų kursus. Profiliavimo kaip ugdymo sistemos tikslas yra labiau... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / During the process of educational reform, the whole general education is orientated towards the student, his/her needs and abilities. The student has to adapt for living in modern society , where it is necessary to know how to look for information and to use it adequately. One of the most important goals is to use the knowledge in choosing a professional career. Today’s world requires flexibility and adaptation. The most important for students is to choose the profession adequately. The whole environment influences it: parents, teachers, friends. The preparation for the future career is a complex educational process. First the students have to know themselves, their abilities and interests. The school has to give some service of professional orientation, consultation and information. Choosing a profession is one of the most important problems and how well you choose it, your future and your personal development depend. That is why it is very important that the first choice is logical, motivated and that the student will understand that the adaptation in the working world and personal harmony depend on the right decision. During the process of professional orientation at school it has to be important to help young people to choose the learning profile, profession and practical activities. The essence of profile education is to organize it having in mind students’ objectives, interests, abilities, giving them a chance to choose the subjects and courses which are... [to full text]

No description available.

Open data standardization has many known benefits, including the availability of tools for standard encoding formats, interoperability among systems and long term preservation of data. Mark-up languages and their use on the World Wide Web have implied further ease for data sharing. The Extensible Markup Language (XML), in particular, has succeeded due to its simplicity and ease of use. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different information systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet. Whether open and standardized or not, organizations generate data daily. Offline exchange of documents and data is undertaken using existing formats that are typically defined by the organizations that generate the data in the documents. With the Internet, the realization of data exchange has had a direct implication on the need for interoperability and comparability. As much as standardization is the accepted approach for online data exchange, little is understood about how a specific organization’s data “fits” a given data standard. This dissertation develops data metrics that represent the extent to which data standards can be applied to an organization’s data. The research identified key issues that affect data interoperability or the feasibility of a move towards interoperability. This research tested the unwritten rule that organizational setups tend to regard and design data requirements more from internal needs than interoperability needs. Essentially, by generating metrics that affect a number of data attributes, the research quantified the extent of the gap that exists between organizational data and data standards. Key data attributes, i.e. completeness, concise representation, relevance and complexity, were selected and used as the basis for metric generation. Additional to the generation of attribute-based metrics, hybrid metrics representing a measure of the “goodness of fit” of the source data to standard data were generated. Regarding the completeness attribute, it was found that most Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) head office data clusters had lower than desired metrics to match the gap highlighted above. The same applied to the concise representation attribute. Most data clusters had more concise representation for the COMESA data than the data standard. The complexity metrics generated confirmed the fact that the number of data elements is a key determinant in any move towards the adoption of data standards. This fact was also borne out by the magnitude of the hybrid metrics which to some extent depended on the complexity metrics. An additional contribution of the research was the inclusion of expert users’ weights to the data elements and recalculation of all metrics. A comparison with the unweighted metrics yielded a mixed picture. Among the completeness metrics and for the data retention rate in particular, increases were recorded for data clusters for which greater weight was allocated to mapped elements than to those that were not mapped. The same applied to the relative elements ratio. The complexity metrics showed general declines when user-weighted elements were used in the computation as opposed to the unweighted elements. This again was due to the fact that these metrics are dependent on the number of elements. Hence for the former case, the weights were evenly distributed while for the latter case, some elements were given lower weights by the expert users, hence leading to an overall decline in the metric. A number of implications emerged for COMESA. COMESA would have to determine the extent to which its source data rely on data sources for which international standards are being promoted. Secondly, an inventory of users and collectors of the data COMESA uses is necessary in order to determine who would be the beneficiary of a standards-based information system. Thirdly, and from an organizational perspective, COMESA needs to designate a team to guide the process of creation of such a standards-based information system. Lastly there is need for involvement in consortia that are responsible for these data standards. This has an implication on organizational resources. In totality, this research provided a methodology for determination of the feasibility of a move towards standardization and hence makes it possible to answer the critical first stage questions such a move begs answers to.

This thesis is devoted to a problem in the representation theory of the symmetric group over C (the field of the complex numbers). Let d be a positive integer, and let S_d denote the symmetric group on d letters. Given a partition k of d, the Specht module V_k is a finite dimensional vector space over C which admits a natural basis indexed by all standard tableaux of shape k with entries in {1, 2, ..., d}. It affords an irreducible representation of the symmetric group S_d, and conversely every irreducible representation of S_d is isomorphic to V_k for some partition k. Given two Specht modules V_k, V_t their tensor product representation is in general reducible, and hence it splits into a direct sum of irreducibles. This raises the problem of describing the S_d equivariant projection morphisms (alternately called S_d-homomorphisms) in terms of the standard tableaux basis. In this work we give explicit formulae describing this morphism in the following cases: k=(d-1, 1), (d-2, 1,1), (2, 1,... ,1). Finally, we present a conjecture formula for the q-morphism in the case k=(d-r, 1, ..., 1).

No description available.

Al-ghazal al-‘udhri emerged as a remarkable literary genre in Arabic literature during the Umayyad period (7th-8th centuries CE). The leaders of this genre are famous poet-lovers who were known for their dramatic love stories and unique poetry, such as Majnun Layla, Qays Lubna and Jamil Buthaynah. There is a common presumption of the absence of the concept of the body in al-ghazal al-‘udhri; most scholars to date have only reproduced commonly- held ideas about the purity of ‘udhri love without doubting its supposed chastity. This thesis, however, argues that the body has a privileged position in al-ghazal al-‘udhri. It shows that the body’s presence is represented, realistically or allegorically, in various ways, both in anecdotes ascribed to ‘udhri poets as well as in their poetry. Although some critics have discussed the theme of the ‘depiction of the beloved’s body’, it is the contribution of this study to illuminate the ‘ethereal nature of beauty’ in this depiction. Moreover, this thesis provides a discussion about the symbolic body in ‘udhri poetry. It provides a departure from the prevailing views on the ‘udhri phenomenon in studies of classical Arabic literature. It opens the door to new discussions on the relationship between love poetry and Arab society in the classical age. It is also a contribution to literary studies of representations of the body.

Action representation is fundamental to many aspects of cognition, including language. Theories of situated cognition suggest that the form of such representation is distinctively determined by grounding in the real world. This thesis tackles the question of how to ground action representations, and proposes an approach for learning action models in noisy, partially observable domains, using deictic representations and kernel perceptrons. Agents operating in real-world settings often require domain models to support planning and decision-making. To operate effectively in the world, an agent must be able to accurately predict when its actions will be successful, and what the effects of its actions will be. Only when a reliable action model is acquired can the agent usefully combine sequences of actions into plans, in order to achieve wider goals. However, learning the dynamics of a domain can be a challenging problem: agents’ observations may be noisy, or incomplete; actions may be non-deterministic; the world itself may be noisy; or the world may contain many objects and relations which are irrelevant. In this thesis, I first show that voted perceptrons, equipped with the DNF family of kernels, easily learn action models in STRIPS domains, even when subject to noise and partial observability. Key to the learning process is, firstly, the implicit exploration of the space of conjunctions of possible fluents (the space of potential action preconditions) enabled by the DNF kernels; secondly, the identification of objects playing similar roles in different states, enabled by a simple deictic representation; and lastly, the use of an attribute-value representation for world states. Next, I extend the model to more complex domains by generalising both the kernel and the deictic representation to a relational setting, where world states are represented as graphs. Finally, I propose a method to extract STRIPS-like rules from the learnt models. I give preliminary results for STRIPS domains and discuss how the method can be extended to more complex domains. As such, the model is both appropriate for learning data generated by robot explorations as well as suitable for use by automated planning systems. This combination is essential for the development of autonomous agents which can learn action models from their environment and use them to generate successful plans.

This thesis is devoted to a problem in the representation theory of the symmetric group over C (the field of the complex numbers). Let d be a positive integer, and let S_d denote the symmetric group on d letters. Given a partition k of d, the Specht module V_k is a finite dimensional vector space over C which admits a natural basis indexed by all standard tableaux of shape k with entries in {1, 2, ..., d}. It affords an irreducible representation of the symmetric group S_d, and conversely every irreducible representation of S_d is isomorphic to V_k for some partition k. Given two Specht modules V_k, V_t their tensor product representation is in general reducible, and hence it splits into a direct sum of irreducibles. This raises the problem of describing the S_d equivariant projection morphisms (alternately called S_d-homomorphisms) in terms of the standard tableaux basis. In this work we give explicit formulae describing this morphism in the following cases: k=(d-1, 1), (d-2, 1,1), (2, 1,... ,1). Finally, we present a conjecture formula for the q-morphism in the case k=(d-r, 1, ..., 1).

A novel framework based on cluster co-occurrence and graph theory for structure discovery is applied to audio to find new types of audio objects which enable the compression of an input signal. These new objects differ from those found in current object coding schemes as their shape is not restricted by any a priori psychoacoustic knowledge. The framework is novel from an application perspective, as it marks the first time that graph theory is applied to audio, and with regards to theoretical developments, as it involves new extensions to the areas of unsupervised learning algorithms and frequent subgraph mining methods. Tests are performed using a corpus of audio files spanning a wide range of sounds. Results show that the framework discovers new types of audio objects which yield average respective overall and relative compression gains of 15.90% and 23.53% while maintaining a very good average audio quality with imperceptible changes.