Matching Items (464)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Educational leadership
- Creators: Arizona State University
Description
Using experience, observations, data, current research, and writings in the field of volunteer management, it was determined there was a need to study the effects of leadership/management practices on the productivity outcomes of a volunteer construction workforce. A simple wood bench that would be tiled and painted was designed to test the areas of Time, Waste, Quality, Safety, and Satisfaction of different volunteer groups. The challenge was bolstered by giving the teams no power tools and limited available resources. A simple design of experiment model was used to test highs and lows in the three management techniques of Instruction, Help, and Encouragement. Each scenario was tested multiple times. Data was collected, normalized and analyzed using statistical analysis software. A few significant findings were discovered. The first; the research showed that there was no significant correlation between the management practices of the leader and the satisfaction of the volunteers. The second; the research also showed when further analyzed into specific realistic scenarios that the organizations would be better to focus on high amounts of Help and Encouragement in order to maximize the productivity of their volunteer construction workforce. This is significant as it allows NPO's and governments to focus their attention where best suited to produce results. The results were shared and the study was further validated as "significant" by conducting interviews with experts in the construction nonprofit sector.
ContributorsPrigge, Diedrich (Author) / Sullivan, Kenneth (Thesis advisor) / Wiezel, Avi (Committee member) / Badger, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
One of the main challenges in planetary robotics is to traverse the shortest path through a set of waypoints. The shortest distance between any two waypoints is a direct linear traversal. Often times, there are physical restrictions that prevent a rover form traversing straight to a waypoint. Thus, knowledge of the terrain is needed prior to traversal. The Digital Terrain Model (DTM) provides information about the terrain along with waypoints for the rover to traverse. However, traversing a set of waypoints linearly is burdensome, as the rovers would constantly need to modify their orientation as they successively approach waypoints. Although there are various solutions to this problem, this research paper proposes the smooth traversability of the rover using splines as a quick and easy implementation to traverse a set of waypoints. In addition, a rover was used to compare the smoothness of the linear traversal along with the spline interpolations. The data collected illustrated that spline traversals had a less rate of change in the velocity over time, indicating that the rover performed smoother than with linear paths.
ContributorsKamasamudram, Anurag (Author) / Saripalli, Srikanth (Thesis advisor) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
As the complexity of robotic systems and applications grows rapidly, development of high-performance, easy to use, and fully integrated development environments for those systems is inevitable. Model-Based Design (MBD) of dynamic systems using engineering software such as Simulink® from MathWorks®, SciCos from Metalau team and SystemModeler® from Wolfram® is quite popular nowadays. They provide tools for modeling, simulation, verification and in some cases automatic code generation for desktop applications, embedded systems and robots. For real-world implementation of models on the actual hardware, those models should be converted into compilable machine code either manually or automatically. Due to the complexity of robotic systems, manual code translation from model to code is not a feasible optimal solution so we need to move towards automated code generation for such systems. MathWorks® offers code generation facilities called Coder® products for this purpose. However in order to fully exploit the power of model-based design and code generation tools for robotic applications, we need to enhance those software systems by adding and modifying toolboxes, files and other artifacts as well as developing guidelines and procedures. In this thesis, an effort has been made to propose a guideline as well as a Simulink® library, StateFlow® interface API and a C/C++ interface API to complete this toolchain for NAO humanoid robots. Thus the model of the hierarchical control architecture can be easily and properly converted to code and built for implementation.
ContributorsRaji Kermani, Ramtin (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Committee member) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In this mixed-methods study, I examined the relationship between professional development based on the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and teacher knowledge, classroom practice, and student learning. Participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The 50-hour professional development treatment was administered to the treatment group during one semester, and then a follow-up replication treatment was administered to the control group during the subsequent semester. Results revealed significant differences in teacher knowledge as a result of the treatment using two instruments. The Learning Mathematics for Teaching scales were used to detect changes in mathematical knowledge for teaching, and an online sorting task was used to detect changes in teachers' knowledge of their standards. Results also indicated differences in classroom practice between pairs of matched teachers selected to participate in classroom observations and interviews. No statistical difference was detected between the groups' student assessment scores using the district's benchmark assessment system. This efficacy study contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it provides an evidence base for a professional development model designed to promote effective implementation of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. Second, it addresses ways to impact and measure teachers' knowledge of curriculum in addition to their mathematical content knowledge. The treatment was designed to focus on knowledge of curriculum, but it also successfully impacted teachers' specialized content knowledge, knowledge of content and students, and knowledge of content and teaching.
ContributorsRimbey, Kimberly A (Author) / Middleton, James A. (Thesis advisor) / Sloane, Finbarr (Committee member) / Atkinson, Robert K (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
An integral part of teacher development are teacher observations. Many teachers are observed once or twice a year to evaluate their performance and hold them accountable for meeting standards. Instructional coaches, however, observe and work with teachers to help them reflect on their performance, with the goal of improving their practice. Video-based evidence has long been used in connection with teacher reflection and as the technology necessary to record video has become more readily available, video recordings have found an increasing presence in teacher observations. In addition, more and more schools are turning to mobile technology to help record evidence during teacher observations. Several mobile applications have been developed, which are designed to help instructional coaches, administrators, and teachers make the most of teacher observations. This study looked at the use of the DataCapture mobile application to record video-based evidence in teacher observations as part of an instructional coaching program in a large public school district in the Southwestern United States. Six instructional coaches and two teachers participated in interviews at the end of the study period. Additional data was collected from the DataCapture mobile application and from a survey of instructional coaches conducted by the school district in connection with its Title I programs. Results show that instructional coaches feel that using video-based evidence for teacher reflection is effective in a number of ways. Teachers who have experienced seeing themselves on video also felt that video-based evidence is effective at improving teacher reflection, while teachers who have not yet experienced seeing themselves on video displayed extreme apprehensiveness about being video recorded in the classroom. Instructional coaches felt the DataCapture mobile application was beneficial in teacher evaluation, but there were several issues that impacted the use of the mobile application and video-based evidence, including logistics, time requirements, and administrative support. The discussion focuses on recommendations for successfully using video-based evidence in an instructional coaching context, as well as some suggestions for other researchers attempting to study how video-based evidence impacts teachers' ability to reflect on their own teaching.
ContributorsShewell, Justin Reed (Author) / Bitter, Gary (Thesis advisor) / Dawson, Edwin (Committee member) / Blair, Heidi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The development of advanced, anthropomorphic artificial hands aims to provide upper extremity amputees with improved functionality for activities of daily living. However, many state-of-the-art hands have a large number of degrees of freedom that can be challenging to control in an intuitive manner. Automated grip responses could be built into artificial hands in order to enhance grasp stability and reduce the cognitive burden on the user. To this end, three studies were conducted to understand how human hands respond, passively and actively, to unexpected perturbations of a grasped object along and about different axes relative to the hand. The first study investigated the effect of magnitude, direction, and axis of rotation on precision grip responses to unexpected rotational perturbations of a grasped object. A robust "catch-up response" (a rapid, pulse-like increase in grip force rate previously reported only for translational perturbations) was observed whose strength scaled with the axis of rotation. Using two haptic robots, we then investigated the effects of grip surface friction, axis, and direction of perturbation on precision grip responses for unexpected translational and rotational perturbations for three different hand-centric axes. A robust catch-up response was observed for all axes and directions for both translational and rotational perturbations. Grip surface friction had no effect on the stereotypical catch-up response. Finally, we characterized the passive properties of the precision grip-object system via robot-imposed impulse perturbations. The hand-centric axis associated with the greatest translational stiffness was different than that for rotational stiffness. This work expands our understanding of the passive and active features of precision grip, a hallmark of human dexterous manipulation. Biological insights such as these could be used to enhance the functionality of artificial hands and the quality of life for upper extremity amputees.
ContributorsDe Gregorio, Michael (Author) / Santos, Veronica J. (Thesis advisor) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis K. (Committee member) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Sugar, Thomas (Committee member) / Helms Tillery, Stephen I. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Human fingertips contain thousands of specialized mechanoreceptors that enable effortless physical interactions with the environment. Haptic perception capabilities enable grasp and manipulation in the absence of visual feedback, as when reaching into one's pocket or wrapping a belt around oneself. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art artificial tactile sensors and processing algorithms are no match for their biological counterparts. Tactile sensors must not only meet stringent practical specifications for everyday use, but their signals must be processed and interpreted within hundreds of milliseconds. Control of artificial manipulators, ranging from prosthetic hands to bomb defusal robots, requires a constant reliance on visual feedback that is not entirely practical. To address this, we conducted three studies aimed at advancing artificial haptic intelligence. First, we developed a novel, robust, microfluidic tactile sensor skin capable of measuring normal forces on flat or curved surfaces, such as a fingertip. The sensor consists of microchannels in an elastomer filled with a liquid metal alloy. The fluid serves as both electrical interconnects and tunable capacitive sensing units, and enables functionality despite substantial deformation. The second study investigated the use of a commercially-available, multimodal tactile sensor (BioTac sensor, SynTouch) to characterize edge orientation with respect to a body fixed reference frame, such as a fingertip. Trained on data from a robot testbed, a support vector regression model was developed to relate haptic exploration actions to perception of edge orientation. The model performed comparably to humans for estimating edge orientation. Finally, the robot testbed was used to perceive small, finger-sized geometric features. The efficiency and accuracy of different haptic exploratory procedures and supervised learning models were assessed for estimating feature properties such as type (bump, pit), order of curvature (flat, conical, spherical), and size. This study highlights the importance of tactile sensing in situations where other modalities fail, such as when the finger itself blocks line of sight. Insights from this work could be used to advance tactile sensor technology and haptic intelligence for artificial manipulators that improve quality of life, such as prosthetic hands and wheelchair-mounted robotic hands.
ContributorsPonce Wong, Ruben Dario (Author) / Santos, Veronica J (Thesis advisor) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis K (Committee member) / Helms Tillery, Stephen I (Committee member) / Posner, Jonathan D (Committee member) / Runger, George C. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Growing popularity of alternatively certifying teachers has created challenges for teacher preparation programs. Many non-traditional routes into classroom include no full-time mentor teacher. Absence of a mentor teacher in the classroom leaves teachers with a deficit. This study follows ten teachers on the intern certificate enrolled in both an alternative certification teacher preparation program and the Teach for America organization as they pursue a master's degree in education and state teaching certification from a large southwestern university. The five randomly chosen for the treatment group and the control group contained 1 male and 4 female teachers, some of whom teach at public schools and others at charter schools. All were secondary education language arts teachers ranging in age from 22- 29. The treatment used in this study is a job-embedded, professional development, software tool designed to help teachers track their classroom practices called MyiLOGS. The purpose of this action research project was to study the effect using MyiLOGS had on six of the nine areas evaluated by a modified version of the Teacher Advancement Program evaluation rubric, alignment with Opportunity To Learn constructs, and the tool's influence on the efficacy of these first year teachers. The data generated from this study indicate that the MyiLOGS tool did have a positive effect on the teachers' TAP evaluation performances. Also, the MyiLOGS tool had a large impact on the teachers' instruction as measured by the constructs of Opportunity to Learn and their teaching self-efficacy. Implications suggested the tool was an asset to these teachers because they tracked their data, became more reflective, and self-sufficient.
ContributorsRoggeman, Pamela (Author) / Puckett, Kathleen (Thesis advisor) / Kurz, Alexander (Committee member) / Mathur, Sarup (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Electromyogram (EMG)-based control interfaces are increasingly used in robot teleoperation, prosthetic devices control and also in controlling robotic exoskeletons. Over the last two decades researchers have come up with a plethora of decoding functions to map myoelectric signals to robot motions. However, this requires a lot of training and validation data sets, while the parameters of the decoding function are specific for each subject. In this thesis we propose a new methodology that doesn't require training and is not user-specific. The main idea is to supplement the decoding functional error with the human ability to learn inverse model of an arbitrary mapping function. We have shown that the subjects gradually learned the control strategy and their learning rates improved. We also worked on identifying an optimized control scheme that would be even more effective and easy to learn for the subjects. Optimization was done by taking into account that muscles act in synergies while performing a motion task. The low-dimensional representation of the neural activity was used to control a two-dimensional task. Results showed that in the case of reduced dimensionality mapping, the subjects were able to learn to control the device in a slower pace, however they were able to reach and retain the same level of controllability. To summarize, we were able to build an EMG-based controller for robot devices that would work for any subject, without any training or decoding function, suggesting human-embedded controllers for robotic devices.
ContributorsAntuvan, Chris Wilson (Author) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis (Thesis advisor) / Muthuswamy, Jitendran (Committee member) / Santos, Veronica J (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Linear Temporal Logic is gaining increasing popularity as a high level specification language for robot motion planning due to its expressive power and scalability of LTL control synthesis algorithms. This formalism, however, requires expert knowledge and makes it inaccessible to non-expert users. This thesis introduces a graphical specification environment to create high level motion plans to control robots in the field by converting a visual representation of the motion/task plan into a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) specification. The visual interface is built on the Android tablet platform and provides functionality to create task plans through a set of well defined gestures and on screen controls. It uses the notion of waypoints to quickly and efficiently describe the motion plan and enables a variety of complex Linear Temporal Logic specifications to be described succinctly and intuitively by the user without the need for the knowledge and understanding of LTL specification. Thus, it opens avenues for its use by personnel in military, warehouse management, and search and rescue missions. This thesis describes the construction of LTL for various scenarios used for robot navigation using the visual interface developed and leverages the use of existing LTL based motion planners to carry out the task plan by a robot.
ContributorsSrinivas, Shashank (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Burleson, Winslow (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013