The purpose of this study was to examine if verve had any impact on the academic achievement of African American middle school students. The three guiding questions of this research were: 1. Is there a significant difference in the verve levels between African American and European American students? 2. Is there a significant difference in verve levels of African American male and African American female students in middle school? 3. Is there a significant difference in the academic achievement of African American and European American students who possess high and low verve in the areas of reading and math? A 24-item questionnaire was administered to 211 middle school students to determine if any verve levels were present, and if so, to what degree did the verve levels impact academic performance? The findings were: 1. The verve levels were different between the African American and the European American students. The African American students in this study possessed higher amounts of verve. 2. The verve levels were different between the African American males and the African American females. The African American females in this study had higher amounts of verve than the African American males. 3. There was no relationship between the higher verve levels among the African American and European American students and their academic achievement in reading and math.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T18:15:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Giancarlo Martins.pdf: 9816916 bytes, checksum: b4a396da42ac4d1ed91e23ce1a3a0232 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-09-25 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / In the last ten years, actions developed in dance, live and in the media, left the focus in Rio-São Paulo. Spread through several places in the country had taken a new geography of ideas that understand dance as a communication process of the body, organized as a thought that questions power structures, artistic procedures and boundaries between languages. This masters essay selects, as investigation corpus, some of these experiences employed in the education, in the circuit (festivals, shows and meetings), and in the research and creation in dance that, as survival strategy, creates decentralized cultural polar regions. The intend is to demonstrate that these experiences have propose new communication actions to dance. They push punctual changes in the dance market and in the development of public politics of cultural motivation and reconfigure, not only the esthetic system in which they are in, but the whole cultural system, contributing, in this way, for the dance survival and your effective insertion in the social fabric. As methodology, it was used a data analysis in a systematic way, that being, understanding the articulations between the investigated elements, based in the evolution theories proposed by the evolutionist scientist Richard Dawkins (2000-2001), in the concept of body and media proposed by the researchers Helena Katz and Christine Greiner (2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005) and in the cultural and political studies such as the ones developed by Bauman (1999), Agamben (2002), Bhabha (1998) and Foucault (1979 and 1996). Both, the bibliographic research and the field investigation (interviews and case studies) show that the strategies have been developed to recommend new ways of understanding and event organization, information flow and company conception and educational projects in dance. Actions that exist in the relation body and environment, in a contaminator flow, co evolutional, and non-determinist. / Nos últimos dez anos, ações desenvolvidas no campo da dança, em contextos presenciais e na mídia, deixaram de se concentrar no eixo Rio-São Paulo. Espraiadas por diversas regiões do país, têm desenhado uma nova geografia de idéias que entende a dança como um processo comunicacional do corpo, organizado como um pensamento que questiona estruturas de poder, procedimentos artísticos e as fronteiras entre as linguagens. Esta Dissertação de Mestrado foca, como corpus de investigação algumas destas experiências empreendidas na área de educação, de circulação (festivais, mostras e encontros) e de pesquisa e criação em dança que, como estratégia de sobrevivência, criam pólos culturais descentralizados. O objetivo é demonstrar que essas experiências têm proposto novas ações comunicativas para a dança. Impulsionam transformações pontuais no mercado da dança e no desenvolvimento de políticas públicas de incentivo à cultura e reconfiguram não apenas o sistema estético em que estão inseridas, mas todo o sistema cultural contribuindo, dessa maneira, para a sobrevivência da dança e sua efetiva inserção no tecido social. Como metodologia, trabalhamos a análise dos dados de maneira sistêmica, ou seja, entendendo as articulações entre os elementos investigados, a partir das teorias evolutivas propostas pelo cientista evolucionista Richard Dawkins (2000, 2001), do conceito de corpomídia proposto pelas pesquisadoras Helena Katz e Christine Greiner (2000, 2001, 2003, 2005) e dos estudos culturais e políticos tais como os desenvolvidos por Bauman (1999), Agamben (2002), Bhabha (1998) e Foucault (1979, 1996). Tanto a pesquisa bibliográfica, quanto a investigação de campo (entrevistas e estudos de casos) evidenciaram que estratégias vêm sendo desenvolvida para propor novos modos de entendimento e organização de eventos, circulação de informação e concepção de companhias e projetos educativos em dança. Ações que se dão na relação corpo e ambiente, num fluxo contaminatório, coevolutivo e não determinista

Black youth are diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) at a higher rate than their White peers. The process of diagnosing young students with ADHD relies heavily on teacher recommendations that are frequently based on perceptions of behavior, to which the assessment of may be influenced by racial bias. A child’s ethnicity has been shown to have an impact on teacher descriptions of ADHD-related behavior (Epstein, Willoughby, Valencia, Tonev, Abikoff, Arnold, Hinshaw, 2005) such that in this study African American students were perceived by their teachers as more likely to have ADHD than their Caucasian peers. Research has also shown that the typical fifth-grade classroom is a low verve setting that is restrictive to communal learning (Johnson, 1982), while high verve settings have been shown to improve the academic functioning for many Black students (Bailey & Boykin, 2001; Carter, Hawkins, & Natesan, 2008; Young, 2017). By measuring the difference in teachers’ likelihood to recommend a described student for ADHD in both a traditional and high-verve classrooms, this study aims to investigate the role of verve in how teachers perceive Black students in relation to ADHD characteristics. The primary aim is to examine how increased task variability and a high verve classroom can shift teacher ratings of Black students’ abilities and lessen the degree of racialized difference of behavior-dependent diagnoses of ADHD. It is predicted that in the high verve setting these recommendations for Black students will drop significantly so that they will be equal to that of White students, reflecting the accurate prevalence of this learning disability.