Advancing Reading and Math through Art

This is a federally granted project pertaining to the program arts in education model development and dissemination grant. Its goal is to increase student achievement in Literacy and Math through a project-based curriculum centered on Studio Thinking Habits of Mind and art into Reading, Language Arts and Math subject areas. The project site is Bruce-Guadalupe Community School (BGCS), a K3-8th grade University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee charter school located in the near south side of Green Bay, WI. The project has five objectives:

  1. Improve students performance in Math and Language through art
  2. Improve students studio practice
  3. Improve teachers skills on curriculum integration
  4. Improve students’ understanding of cultural arts
  5. The project follows a pseudo-experimental methodology that includes retracing and interpreting existing data of MAP tests, clinic observations of instruction and student work directed by rubrics, and teachers’ journal

Tasks and Responsibilities

  • Students will participate in teacher-clinics and will participate with teachers at BGCS in parallel curriculum planning
  • Students will provide instructional support to BGCS teachers during the implementation of project during Fall 2011
  • Students will help in the preparation of lessons
  • Students will participate in the process of reflection by taking fieldnotes in a journal
  • Students will help in the assessment of BGCS

An Examination of the Physiological, Psychological, and Behavioral Correlates of Body Weight Monitoring

Body weight monitoring, or the measurement of body weight by the self or others using a scale, is a technique used in numerous popular weight management programs. However, weight monitoring behavior (particularly self-weighing) is relatively understudied and poorly understood, and a controversy has erupted regarding its use as a tool for weight control. To elucidate this issue, the objective of this project is to quantitatively examine the physiological, psychological, and behavioral factors associated with weight monitoring behavior.

In the Spring of 2009, sample of UWM undergraduates completed series of survey instruments assessing demographics, weight monitoring behavior (e.g., self-weighing frequency), dietary intake, disordered eating, physical activity, body image, and self-esteem. Multivariate statistical methods will be used to examine associations between weight monitoring behavior and body weight status, psychological factors, and healthy and unhealthy eating and activity behaviors.

This project will provide foundational knowledge about the individual-level factors associated with weight monitoring among adults, and inform health researchers, clinicians, and educators about weight monitoring for the prevention and treatment of eating disorders and overweight and obesity.

Tasks and Responsibilities

  • Entering survey data into Excel for future analysis.
  • Conducting literature searches on the topic (with faculty guidance).
  • Reading and summarizing relevant research articles on the topic (with faculty guidance).
  • Assistance with research poster preparation for conference presentation(s) (as needed).
  • Other tasks may be assigned based on student skill and interest.

Art Cycle Green Bay

The 2 main objectives of the Art Cycle Milwaukee project are to:

  1. Design and build a mobile art making platform that is bicycle-based.
  2. Develop appropriate performance programming to take this art making into public space in Milwaukee

We have already branded the project and have an initial website up and running at www.artcyclemke.com. .

Tasks and Responsibilities

  1. Research of modified bicycles, specifically richshaws and other 3-wheeled bicycles
  2. Designing the modular art stations for metal work, ceramics and print-making that will attach to this bicycle
  3. Welding and construction of the bicycle and the 3 modular work stations
  4. Researching the Milwaukee bicycle culture and the community art events scene
  5. Develop branding materials for the Art Cycle project including a logo and mission statement
  6. Building a social network for the Art Cycle project to schedule public performances
  7. Participate in public interactive events riding and creating art in the city of Milwaukee

Contract Effect & Consumer Perceptions

My laboratory is dedicated to understanding the neural bases of health and pathological emotional processing and also understanding dysregulated responses to emotional stimuli among people prone to depression and anxiety, and the differences in brain activity associated with dysregrulation.

Tasks and Responsibilities

Data collection and analysis. Other duties as assigned within the research.

Age-related Changes in Grip Control

The significance of this research is that pinch grip is used in many daily activities, such as picking up small objects, tying shoelaces, and writing. The age related changes in pinch grip make daily activities challenging limiting the full potential of an individual The objective of this study is to gain further understanding of how pinch force generation changes with age. The methodology will include investigation of how pinch force generation differs for stroke survivors and for age-matched neurologically healthy individuals. Instrumented pinch devices are used to measure 3-dimensional pinch force profiles. Data collection and analysis involve age groups of young and old utilizing three different surfaces including rubber, wood, and paper. The impact of this research is that the results from this study can be used to better understand pinch grip generation, which will ultimately be used to create and evaluate training protocols for effective pinch force generation.

Tasks and Responsibilities

Students will be getting exposed to multiple projects while being responsible for one primary project. The project is about how people grip differently as they age. Students are currently analyzing the data collected from the pilot and control subjects and gaining further knowledge with Minitab and statistical analysis.

Ambient Intervention for Mealtime Study

The primary aim of this study is to determine if sound levels and duration of resident exposure to sound during meals can be reduced with the AIM intervention protocol in a nursing home environment.

Tasks and Responsibilities

Student will be responsible for data entry for this study. Role includes:

  1. Handle and protect all confidential and sensitive data with integrity.
  2. Download sound data from data source, transfer data from sound software to excel and SPSS files.
  3. Manage data collected on paper form. Transcribe into excel file.
  4. Create tables and graphs from data.

Art & Ecology

This project will explore designing, testing, making and using ceramic vessels as underground and above-ground water retention and dispersal devices. To be applied for use in urban gardens where water conservation is a concern and water application and dispersal could be regulated to gain better results for food production.

The ultimate goal would be to devise a system of making and teaching in order to be able to deliver these skills to urban farmers to build and utilize these water conservation devices using local clays and making and firing on site.

Tasks and Responsibilities

Students would be asked to:

  1. Design, develop, and test clay bodies for use in producing in project.
  2. Design and test forms for vessels that would best meet criteria of water retention/dispersal.
  3. Design and develop methods of production of vessels that can be customized to fit specific needs of gardens needs and crops desired to be grown.
  4. Design and develop methods and tools to measure and test devices efficacy in the field.
  5. Develop ideas and strategies for on-site production methods.
  6. Develop format and structure to teach community participants how to produce their own systems

Adaptation to Novel Sensory-Motor Environment during Visually-Guided Reaching

The overall purpose of this project is to understand how the brain controls reaching movement under various sensorimotor environments.

The specific objectives are:

  1. To investigate how individuals adapt to novel environments in which their sensory-motor relationship is altered by the presence of visual rotations or virtual force fields.
  2. To investigate how sensorimotor adaptation is generalized across different conditions (e.g., transfer of motor learning from one arm to the other).
  3. To understand the effect of handedness on sensorimotor adaptation and its transfer across the arms.

Tasks and Responsibilities

  1. Students will recruit subjects.
  2. Students will help, and learn how, to collect movement data using 2-D movement data acquisition systems.
  3. Students will be exposed to data processing and analysis procedures.
  4. Students will learn to search and review relevant literature.
  5. Students involved in a project for an extended time period may be encouraged to present research findings at UWM/national conferences, and invited to be an author on a research manuscript.

“Loyalty and the Making of the Modern:” British Victorian Cultural Research Project

The project examines three overlapping areas upon which notions of loyalty were articulated: that of the state (patriotism), the family (conjugal loyalty), and the economy (consumer loyalty). In studying various narratives — literary, cultural, economic, and political — that circulated across the imperial circuit, I consider how such narratives mediate the paradoxical conjunction of loyalty with modernity.

A Quantitative History of Chile: 1800-2009

I am in the advanced stages of this Internet article for an Internet Encyclopedia of quantitative economic histories of most countries of the world. Even though the article can not exist without a statistical component, it is more than that:it also contains a descriptive-qualitative economic history segment.

Tasks and Responsibilities

A student could benefit through participation in this research of linking quantitative with qualitative aspects of this project. A student would be exposed to the multiple, challenging aspects of (inter)disciplinary research, always anchored in broadly defined economics.