New Releases by Michelle Lynn

The concept of school faculty collaborating as a professional learning community has garnered widespread support and is the subject of much research and discussion. This qualitative case study was designed for the purpose of providing deeper insight into the establishment of professional learning communities from the perspective of a school which had been implementing PLCs for several years. One middle school was selected for this study based on its appearance as a highly functioning PLC. Data collected included observations of small group collaborative work sessions as well as whole faculty staff development, individual interviews with the principal and select teachers, a focus group interview with department chairs, and document analysis of related artifacts. Several themes emerged from the data, specifically regarding the school as a PLC and factors that impacted the implementation process. Barrett Middle School does appear to be a highly functioning PLC, characterized by embedded teacher leadership and focused, comprehensive professional learning, and a culture based on collaboration and student success. Factors contributing to this include involvement from the district level, including ongoing support and training, as well as efficacious principal leadership and a climate which favored implementation. Implications from this study include the value of embedded teacher leadership, as well as the need to support and develop the skills of principals involved in such efforts. In addition, the value of district involvement should be given significant consideration. Finally, schools like Barrett that seek to implement PLCs should consider the range and scope of the guidance they utilize.

"The purpose of this project is to train Wells Fargo human resources call center representatives to better interpret paralanguage cues perceived through the phone which should result in increased employee and customer satisfaction. This project will be used to train Wells Fargo employees to understand and react to conflict cues as a result of paralanguage by incoming callers. Expected results of the training include increased conflict management skills, higher quality assurance numbers, and improved employee and customer satisfaction." leaves 10-11.

This thesis describes three experiments designed to compare emotional processing in young and old adults. The first experiment administered a series of general and social cognition tasks to young and old adults. Older adults performed more poorly at identifying negative emotional expressions independent of performance on general cognitive measures. It was hypothesized that differences in age-related patterns of brain activity during negative face discrimination may be responsible for this effect. Experiment 2 used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test this hypothesis. The results revealed that regions typically found to be involved in social cognition (e.g. amygdala, rostral and dorsal anterior cingulate, prefrontal cortex) responded under different conditions for the two groups. Specifically, younger adults activated the amygdala more for negative and neutral faces, while activity in this same region responded more to positive and neutral faces in older adults. The final experiment (3) was designed to directly examine the relationship between brain activity and negative and neutral face identification in young and old adults. The results of this analysis revealed a unique pattern of brain activity associated with negative faces processed in an indirect manner (i.e. while judging gender) for young adults only. In particular, activity in the amygdala for both age groups was associated with better performance for negative faces when attention was focused on the emotional content. In comparison, it was associated with poorer performance for younger adults when the negative content was not the focus of the task, suggesting that the amygdala activity may have interfered with task performance. Taken together, the results suggest that the lack of amygdala activity to negative stimuli in older adults may indicate a decreased ability to recruit the amygdala and related regions in an automatic fashion, independent of conscious awareness. However, older adults might maintain the ability to recruit these areas in a more direct manner but this seems to occur only for positive and neutral faces. This age-related difference in amygdala involvement may partially explain the poorer performance observed in Experiment 1 for older versus younger adults during negative emotional face discrimination.

"Between 1953 and 1974, 0̃.5 km3 of lava and tephra erupted from a new vent on the southwest flank of Trident volcano in Katmai National Park, Alaska, forming an edifice now known as Southwest Trident. The eruption commenced soon after mixing of dacite and andesite magmas at shallow crustal levels. The dacite lava flows contain andesitic enclaves as well as compositional banding. Dacite phenocryst melt inclusions and phase equilibria experiments on the andesite imply that the two magmas last resided at a water pressure of 90 MPa, and contained 3̃.5 wt % H2O, equivalent to 3 km depth. Diffusion profiles in phenocrysts suggest that mixing preceded eruption of the earliest lava by approximately one month. The enclaves in the dacite had experienced a complex history by the time they were erupted. Quantitative analysis of groundmass microphenocrysts in enclaves from the lava shows that the enclaves underwent a textural maturation. I have run experiments that replicate the path taken by andesite during magma mixing in which the andesite was annealed at 1000C̊, cooled at various rates to 890C̊, held for residence time t, and then quenched. The andesite experimentally cooled at the slower rates (2C̊/h and 10C̊/h) most resembles enclave groundmass. This is consistent with cooling of the andesite below an andesite-dacite interface, suggesting that pre-enclave formation crystallization caused vapor exsolution and enclave flotation. Decompression experiments on the dacite suggest an average ascent time for the eruption of 30 hours. The high silica rhyolite erupted during the June 1912 eruption of Katmai is notable both for its large volume and evolved composition. Hydrothermal, water-saturated experiments constrain the magma''s pre-eruptive storage condition to a region in P-T space between 800C̊ and 100 MPa and 850C̊ and 40 MPa. Amphibole is only present in the rhyolite of Novarupta dome, the last product of the eruption. Novarupta dome rhyolite probably was stored under the same conditions but underwent magma mixing with andesite and dacite prior to effusion"--Leaves iii-iv.