Monmouth University
  • West Long Branch, United States
Recent publications
Increased public scrutiny has thrust school superintendents into the spotlight, possibly exacerbating their turnover. To better understand how superintendent turnover is associated with student achievement, we collected data on school superintendent turnover in Florida and Texas spanning 2009–10 to 2017–18 school years. We conducted an event study difference-in-differences analysis to examine the dynamic relationship between superintendent turnover and student achievement. Student achievement decreases in the years after a superintendent turns over, though this relationship is small in magnitude (−0.015 standard deviation units). Superintendent turnover is most detrimental in urban school districts, districts enrolling more students, and districts with more concentrated student poverty, though these negative relationships can be partially explained by instability in the district that led to the superintendent’s departure.
Quotations are an important form of rhetorical appeals and testimony in American political discourse, and misquotations follow suit. While often invoked for the same reasons as legitimate quotations (e.g., to connect a current argument to a historical precedent or to use an opponent’s words to attack them), misquotation does so but with the sheen of fakery. The examples in this chapter include the misattribution of political beliefs to the nation’s founders and President Abraham Lincoln, the fabrication and essentializing of Martin Luther King’s views through misquotation, a spurious quotation assigned to Mahatma Gandhi invoked by American politicians across the political spectrum, a quotation associated with Governor Sarah Palin that she never said, and the controversy surrounding President Donald Trump’s comments about a white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Paramecia swim along helical trajectories propelled by the coordinated beating of the thousands of cilia covering their bodies. We have investigated how the swimming of populations of paramecium aurelia changes their swimming trajectories with varying viscosity, η, of their swimming medium to obtain their motor characteristics. The swimming speed distributions for 1 cP < η < 5.2 cP are Gaussian. The average instantaneous speed, v, and the variance, Δv, decrease monotonically with η. Simultaneously, their helical trajectories monotonically develop a greater pitch and radius. The product ηv is roughly constant over this factor of 5 change in η, indicating that paramecia aurelia swim with a constant propulsive force. Here, we present a phenomenological model of the beating cilia that produces the helical trajectory with a minimum number of swimming parameters. The model implies that the beat frequency of the body cilia decreases with increasing viscosity. The decrease can account for most of the observed decrease in swimming speed with η. We also find that the frequency of the cilia beating in the oral groove, which draws nutrients in, changes little with viscosity in sharp contrast with the body cilia responsible for propulsion.
This study examined how diversity of field placement affected White student teachers’ White racial identity(WRI) development, and the relationship between WRI and teacher efficacy. There was no change in WRIdevelopment regardless of placement; however, as the percentage of students of color in the placement increased,two subscales (instructional strategies, classroom management) of the Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES)decreased. A negative correlation existed between WRI (Pseudo-Independence and Contact subscales of theWhite Racial Consciousness Development Scale-Revised) and subscales of the TSES. Results indicate thatteacher preparation programs critically examine Whiteness and WRI as a construct.
The purpose of this mixed-method study was to examine the influence of diverse field placements on the Whiteracial identity development of White preservice teachers (n = 92) placed in schools where the student body waseither predominantly White or students of color. Using Helms’s theory (1995) of White racial identitydevelopment, we selected instruments that measured participants’ awareness of racism, as well as theirconsciousness about being White (e.g., Color-Blind Racial Attitude Scale and Psychosocial Costs of Racism toWhites Scale). Preservice teachers in nondiverse settings became less aware of racial issues at the end of thefield experience. Using pretest scores as covariates, an analysis of covariance indicated that those in morediverse settings had higher levels of White guilt at the end of their field experience. The qualitative results alsoshowed differences in perceptions based on field placements, thus supporting the quantitative findings.Participants were asked how the diversity in their fieldwork placement affected their thoughts about their ownethnic background and social status. For those placed in diverse settings, the most common theme that emergedwas the contrast between the characteristics of the students and one’s own family and personal characteristics(e.g., wealth, ethnicity). The results suggest that more than exposure to diverse students is needed to evokechanges in White racial identity in order to prepare preservice teachers to effectively teach students of color.
This paper examines the underappreciated differences between the effectiveness and measurement of current technical advances in business management methods and how aspects of transformational leadership, as exhibited by the prophet Moses, can more broadly and deeply contribute to an organization’s success over the long term than these more easily defined procedures. These leadership issues tend to arise most acutely when a company’s management comes under severe scrutiny during times of business scandals and related ethical crises. Using Warren Bennis’s definition of charismatic leadership as a framework, we show how Moses exhibited the qualities of humility, tenacity, integrity, strength, creativity, and innovation, particularly in the field of succession planning, in completing his mission, transforming the ‘organization’ he led, and inspiring future generations. The conclusions here are supported not only by biblical passages but also by relevant business, management, and general literature.
Parental involvement in children’s education has benefits throughout a child’s academic career. Researchers and educators have developed parental involvement programs, the most effective being those that teach parents to understand open-ended mathematics problems, allowing time for children to think, share their mathematical understanding, and reflect on reasoning processes. The use of literacy strategies for mathematical understanding develops students’ communication skills. Having the same objective, we implemented a five-session intervention in our study with four parents and their children, during which we utilized literacy strategies to support parental involvement and children’s mathematical development. In each session, parent-child dyads were provided with a smart pen and smart notebook to record their interactions around the mathematical topics focused on during the session. Our findings showed improvements in parents’ level of assistance throughout our intervention. Additionally, our program contributed to students’ mathematical skills. We share implications for mathematics teacher educators and provide recommendations for further research.
While existing literature has addressed teachers’ translanguaging practices in diverse educational settings, its integration into assessments remains limited. Adopting a participatory research design in the form of a teacher-research collaboration, the present study examined in detail how a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) teacher integrated translanguaging into a summative assessment in a Chinese immersion setting. I also delved into the perceptions of the teacher and her students regarding the assessment. The data were triangulated and included co-design notes, in-class and post-observation field notes, as well as transcripts of one-on-one interviews with the teacher and students. The findings show that the teacher skillfully integrated translanguaging, including using planned strategies and leveraging students’ full linguistic repertoires into the summative assessment. The concept of juntos (García, Ofelia, Susana I. Johnson & Kate Seltzer. 2017. The Translanguaging classroom: Leveraging student bilingualism for learning . Philadelphia, PA: Carlson), a collaborative dynamic among teachers and students appeared to play a major role in the assessment. Integrating translanguaging into the assessment appeared to render complex topics more comprehensible and relevant to the students’ lived experiences. Additionally, it is evident that the teacher–researcher collaboration deepened the teacher’s pedagogical practices in translanguaging and garnered positive feedback from students, indicating an increase in confidence, engagement, and the strengthening of their multilingual identities. I conclude with a call for assessments integrated with translanguaging, transmodalities, and co-learning practices, aiming to transform evaluations into affirmations of students’ funds of knowledge in today’s socio-cultural-political context.
Rapid global expansion of offshore wind farms, tidal, and wave technologies signifies a new era of renewable energy development. While a promising means to combat the impacts of climate change, such developments necessitate fine-scale monitoring of biological communities to determine impacts associated with construction, operation, and eventual decommission. Here, we evaluate the performance of a gridded, Innovasea Systems, Inc. fine-scale acoustic telemetry positioning system (FSPS, n = 20 acoustic receivers) for tracking behaviors of diverse, temperate fish assemblages in relation to a subsea cable route supporting the Ørsted offshore wind development in coastal New York. We examined array performance through positioning error derived from receiver reference transmitters and tracked animals (n = 260) comprising 17 species of teleost and elasmobranch. We evaluated the effects of environmental variables (temperature, tilt, noise, and depth), transmitter power, individual movement rates, and receiver loss on horizontal positioning error (HPE) and route mean squared error (RMSE). Across a 16-month deployment period, many positions were derived for Atlantic sturgeon (n = 2,612), black sea bass (n = 9,175), clearnose skate (n = 10,306), summer flounder (n = 13,304), and little skate (n = 15,186), suggesting that these species may serve as sentinel candidates for assessing behavioral changes following construction, operation, and decommission. We found that receivers placed at the boundary of the grid exhibited higher HPE and RMSE, however these errors did not significantly change despite large receiver losses (25%). Generalized Linear Models revealed that temperature, noise, tilt, and depth were often significant predictors of HPE and RMSE, however, a substantial amount of variance was not explained by the models (~ 70%). Average movement rates ranged from 1.1 m s⁻¹ (common thresher shark) to 0.03 m s⁻¹ (little skate and summer flounder) but had minimal effects on positioning error. Finally, we observed that higher transmitter powers (158 dB) may lead to higher and more variable HPE values. Overall, these findings provide new insight into the drivers of FSPS array performance and illustrate their broad utility for monitoring fish behavior associated with offshore marine developments.
The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) patrol inspection has become an efficient method to ensure the operation condition of transmission lines. The detection of key components with defects in transmission lines is a critical task in maintaining a power system’s stability. However, the complex inspection environment and the imbalance between the number of normal component samples and that of defect samples significantly affect the detection accuracy. In this article, we present a novel method for defect detection in UAV patrol images, based on a hierarchical convolutional vision transformer (HC-ViT) and a simple contrastive masked autoencoder (SC-MAE). The HC-ViT backbone integrates the advantages of vision transformer and convolution, while the SC-MAE is a self-supervised learning method that extracts useful features from normal samples. By introducing the normal features into the backbone, we enhance the performance of the defect detection task. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through experiments, and show that it can leverage a large amount of unlabeled normal images, reducing the need for manual annotation. Our method offers a new way to exploit the potential features of patrol inspection images.
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated significant potential in industrial manufacturing domains such as workshop scheduling and energy system management. However, due to the model's inherent uncertainty, rigorous validation is requisite for its application in real-world tasks. Specific tests may reveal inadequacies in the performance of pre-trained DRL models, while the “black-box” nature of DRL poses a challenge for testing model behavior. We propose a novel performance improvement framework based on probabilistic automata, which aims to proactively identify and correct critical vulnerabilities of DRL systems, so that the performance of DRL models in real tasks can be improved with minimal model modifications. First, a probabilistic automaton is constructed from the historical trajectory of the DRL system by abstracting the state to generate probabilistic decision-making units (PDMUs), and a reverse breadth-first search (BFS) method is used to identify the key PDMU-action pairs that have the greatest impact on adverse outcomes. This process relies only on the state-action sequence and final result of each trajectory. Then, under the key PDMU, we search for the new action that has the greatest impact on favorable results. Finally, the key PDMU, undesirable action and new action are encapsulated as monitors to guide the DRL system to obtain more favorable results through real-time monitoring and correction mechanisms. Evaluations in two standard reinforcement learning environments and three actual job scheduling scenarios confirmed the effectiveness of the method, providing certain guarantees for the deployment of DRL models in real-world applications.
Dear Editor, This letter presents a new transfer learning framework for the deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (DMARL) to reduce the convergence difficulty and training time when applying DMARL to a new scenario [1], [2]. The proposed transfer learning framework includes the design of neural network architecture, curriculum transfer learning (CTL) and strategy distillation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables DMARL models to converge faster while improving the final performance.
Recent theory and data suggest that inaccurate ( poor-pitch or poor) singing may be based on impoverished sensorimotor mapping between auditory perceptual representations and motor plans. One of the symptoms of poor singing is a restriction of vocal pitch range during pitch matching tasks that is not reducible to physical vocal limitations. We here test the hypothesis that remediation of poor singing may be best achieved by incorporating a wide pitch range during training. Two treatment groups underwent singing training using a procedure found to be effective in recent research. One group matched pitches from a wider range of one octave, whereas the other matched pitches from a narrower range of seven semitones (a perfect fifth). A third group completed visual imagery tasks for the same period of time and served as a control group. All three groups completed the Seattle Singing Accuracy Protocol (SSAP) before and after training, with all phases completed in a single session. The only significant improvement was found in the wide-range training group, for matching of single pitches from the SSAP, rather than four-note melodies. Results thus offer partial support for the hypothesis and suggest that successful remediation of singing accuracy may benefit from adopting a wide range of pitches.
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1,722 members
Glenn E. King
  • Department of History and Anthropology
Martin J Hicks
  • Department of Biology
Sharon W Stark
  • School of Nursing and Health Studies
Jennifer M. Brill
  • Transformative Learning
Tina R Paone
  • Educational Counseling & Leadership
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