Research shows that effective teachers are the most important factor contributing to student achievement. Although curricula, reduced class size, funding, family, and community involvement all contribute to school improvement and student achievement, the most influential factor in the classroom is the teacher. Yet it has become clear that the professional development needed to support teachers and how effectively they function within classrooms is often lacking or ineffective. In many parts of the globe, teachers who need the most professional development (e.g. new or underqualified) often receive the least. Internationally, there is also a recognized need for improved instruments and methodologies to gauge elements of classroom quality and effective teaching. Particularly in low-income and fragile contexts, where many teaching personnel are underprepared and under resourced, more rigorously developed and culturally attuned observation tools have the potential to provide much needed feedback to teachers in a continuous cycle of improvement. In our previous RLO grant (Toward the Development of a Rigorous and Practical Classroom Observation Tool: The Uganda secondary school project), we developed and validated the Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPPS) with learning outcomes in secondary schools in Uganda. Using this observational tool, we examined the quality of teaching practices and classroom processes through live observations. Subsequently, we developed a pre-school version of the TIPPS in Ghana that was found to have meaningful associations with both learning and socio-emotional outcomes. We also piloted a primary school version of the TIPPS in India, where an NGO is using the TIPPS as a guide to provide teacher feedback. To date, we have not had the opportunity to systematically employ TIPPS as a feedback tool in a supportive fashion to improve teaching practices, student learning and teacher outcomes. Creating this cycle of continuous improvement is the goal of the present investigation, albeit in a new cultural context. To test this in the Honduran context is an idea that grew organically, thanks in large part to the yearly gatherings of RLO colleagues that allowed for cross-pollination of ideas and discussions on topics of interest. Since our first RLO meeting in London, we have been speaking with Erin Murphy-Graham and her team about how we could join forces to augment the impact of the Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial program (Tutorial Learning System or SAT) in Honduras. The current proposal represents one-half of two parallel, collaborative but separate investigations. Murphy-Graham's proposal seeks a deeper understanding of which SAT pedagogical practices are effective (as assessed by the TIPPS) in impacting student learning and social and emotional outcomes, as well as how pedagogical practices effect teacher motivation by examining an intensive SAT condition without the addition of feedback. In this way, she hopes to recommend improvements to her partners in the SAT program. Our parallel proposal, which would operate in tandem with her existing intervention work, serves to further our objectives to both extend TIPPS' cross-cultural reach and systematically test its use as a feedback tool in the context of an optimally supportive structure. Using the SAT programming, we seek to develop an empirically-based, robust feedback mechanism that cultivates improvement in a continuous cycle of change

Children in conflict-affected countries (CACs) experience profound constraints on their academic learning and socioemotional well-being. Children exposed to violence and poverty come to "school" (formal or non-formal education settings) with poor executive function skills (e.g. working memory, inhibition, attention), emotional/behavioral regulation skills and social-information-processing skills. And the formal and non-formal "schools" they attend rarely use effective strategies to advance their academic and socioemotional skills. What can be done? This project aims to develop both scientific and practical knowledge about how to lift these constraints on children in CACs like Niger. First, we propose to adapt and test novel, low-cost, targeted interventions (LCTs) like Mindfulness (MI) and Brain Games (BG) designed to improve children's executive function, emotional/behavioral regulation and social information-processing skills and, subsequently, their literacy and numeracy skills and socioemotional well-being. Second, even when interventions like MI and BG work, they often work better for some children, in some classrooms and schools, and under some conditions than for others. So this study will examine whether variability in the quality of implementation (e.g. dosage, fidelity) of MI and BG results in the variability in their impacts on children's learning and development in Niger. Third and finally, these types of complex interactions among students, teachers, "schools" and program interventions (like remedial support programs) are embedded in larger systems and broader contexts that may constrain or enable quality implementation of program strategies (such as MI and BG). But there is very little high-quality, rigorous research, grounded in social and systems theories, available in CACs to understand how these higher-level systems influence the dynamic interactions of schools, programs, classrooms, teachers and students. So we will conduct a theory-building qualitative study embedded in the school cluster-randomized field test of MI and BG and their implementation. Through this project, we hope to (a) achieve a dynamic, multi-level understanding of efforts to improve learning processes and outcomes for refugee, IDP, and local children in Niger and other CACs; (b) contribute to the synthesis of the developmental, educational, prevention and social sciences in theory and method; and (c) have a catalytic effect on the education in emergencies sector by identifying effective, scalable strategies that improve children's learning and development.

As a mathematician working in the field of statistical mechanics, I am pursuing research problems that concern mathematical models that exemplify some important aspect of the physical world. The aim is find the simplest viable description of the typical large scale behaviour of such systems. For example, there are huge number of air molecules in a room, so that, microscopically, the behaviour of the air in the room is described by all of the positions and velocities of those molecules. This is a vast amount of information. In the large, however, what effectively describes the air is a few parameters, such as the temperature and the pressure, that are specified by averages of particles over small regions of space (that nonetheless contain very many particles). In the rigorous theory of statistical mechanics, we choose a suitable mathematical model of a physical system, and prove how the behaviour of such macroscopic quantities as temperature and pressure arises from the microscopic structure of the system.In this proposal, I am undertaking three related research projects, each of which reflects in some way this theme:I. Phase boundary fluctuation. If oil is injected into still water, it forms into a droplet that makes the total surface tension at the boundary as small as possible. On a finer scale, however, the boundary between the two substances may be random. In a recent series of papers, I have investigated, for a natural mathematical model of two such substances, the geometry of this random boundary. I am proposing to investigate what is universal about this random fluctuation: that is, which elements of this behaviour are shared with a diverse range of other systems. II. Trapping in disordered media.If a charged particle in an electric field moves in an environment populated by occasional obstacles, its progress is liable to be frustrated by traps formed by the obstacles. What is the geometry of the traps that waylay the particle, and to what degree do these traps slow down the walk? Alexander Fribergh and I are carrying out an extensive investigation of a mathematical model of this problem, in which a walker jumps generally in a preferred direction, but makes other random moves as well, on a grid in which some edges are impassible.III. Spatial random permutations.At very low temperatures, helium condenses into a remarkable substance that flows with extreme ease. A mathematical model of repelling random particles is naturally associated to such low-temperature gases. I am planning to investigate how these particles behave in a fashion that, while random, has large scale order, and how this order is related to the special properties of very cool gases.

Nowhere is access to and quality of education more urgent than in low-resourced states afflicted by ongoing conflict. Of the over 75 million children around the world who are currently out of school, over half live in conflict-affected countries (CACs). Of children in conflict-affected areas who are in school, children are not learning. For example, our own research in three eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) indicates that 91 percent of primary school children in grades 2-4 could not correctly respond to one reading comprehension question of the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA), a test designed specifically for use in low- and middle-income countries. We take the position that the provision of quality education can mitigate some of the most severe consequences of conflict for children - and potentially help break the intergenerational transmission of poverty and violence - through the effective provision of safe and supportive spaces that promote children's academic and socioemotional development. But as an international community, we are currently failing in our efforts to do so due to the "stunning lack of evidence" as to what works to promote children's learning in the context of conflict and crisis. The current project aims to generate, communicate, and incorporate into practice rigorous evidence as to how to promote effective teaching and improve children's academic and socioemotional learning in conflict-affected contexts. We will achieve these objectives using three primary strategies. First, we will generate evidence via original analyses of data from a large-scale, cluster-randomized, school-based intervention program ("Healing Classrooms") undertaken by the International Rescue Committee, New York University, and other partners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) between 2011 and 2014. To our knowledge, this is the only experimental evaluation of an integrated teacher training/curricular development intervention to promote academic and socioemotional learning in a CAC that has ever been undertaken. We will use the rigorous evidence generated from these analyses to: (1) communicate with policymakers, practitioners, and the academic community cutting-edge social science approaches to the design and implementation of future education strategies in CACs; and (2) work with partner organizations to incorporate the evidence into school-based interventions around the world. In generating evidence, we will move beyond assessing whether a school-based intervention works to promote effective teaching and children's learning outcomes: We will use sophisticated statistical methods to consider both the mechanisms by and the contexts in which the intervention worked. Such evidence is essential for: (1) strengthening and replicating the mechanisms of the intervention that do work; (2) and tailoring the intervention to different school- and community-contexts. Given that Healing Classrooms intervention is currently being implemented by the IRC in 12 countries (including the DRC, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, and Chad), the evidence generated by the proposed project - in conjunction with our communication and incorporation activities - has the potential to improve the learning outcomes of millions of children around the world.

Since the early twentieth century, Italian culture has been dominated by polemics against conventional form and calls for an abolition of boundaries between the arts. Italy's most influential artistic movements favoured multiple, reversible, "open" structures, a trend that can be found throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. Interdisciplinarity has been driven by a desire for transgression and emancipation from obsolete artistic conventions, but also by a belief in the deep-rooted affinity between literature, music and the visual arts. Critics like Bonaddio and Butler have argued that such border-crossings are fundamental to understanding creativity during this period. Yet, so far, no one has attempted to study the developments across the period to assess the complex social makeup of the groups that defied established boundaries, or to explore the implications of their theoretical ideas for the teaching and study of modern Italian culture. Research on interdisciplinarity in the arts in the 21st century is very fragmented and has not been adequately theorised. In addition to fostering dialogue about interdisciplinarity in the arts, the network will use questions that arise to explore issues relating to the development of the discipline of Languages and Area Studies: what are the implications of border-crossing in 20th and 21st century culture in Italy on the way Italian culture is researched and taught in the academy? How could interdisciplinarity enable Italian Studies to improve its public engagement profile? This project promotes the creation of instruments, such as a database, website, workshops and panel discussion, that will enable easier communication between academics and non-academics. Policy issues arising from our findings will be discussed with the SIS, and more broadly with Language subject bodies for schools and universities (UCML, LLAS, ALL and CILT) and will be introduced to the US Italian Studies associations (AAIS) as our research will have implications there too. The network will run three workshops in London (UCL), New York (NYU), and Rome (RomaTre), and a panel at the Society for Italian Studies conference in 2013. Each of the workshops is dedicated to a separate period: (1) Modernism, (2) Postmodernism and (3) the Internet age. The steering group (Brook, Mussgnug, Pieri) will create and maintain a website and a searchable database, the first of its kind, of academics, museum curators, members of conservatoires and the media with interests in Italian culture. The group will also disseminate results through journal articles and a website. The steering committee will be supported by an advisory panel of experts from within and outside academia. This project focuses on the following questions: 1) Causes: Where do the roots of modern and contemporary interdisciplinarity lie? Why has it taken place in Italy during this period and what contributed to these developments? What is the place of technology, artistic milieus, journals, cafés, printing, Internet etc. in the development of cross-fertilisation? 2) Change and development: Can one map developments across the whole period? Does the idea of working between artistic genres and disciplines change over time? 3) Philosophical and ideological underpinnings: How do metaphors of borders enable us to understand interdisciplinarity better? What does interdisciplinarity tell us about concepts of facilitating, policing, transgressing? How does the border crossing relate to fragmentation? How do ideas of emancipation and freedom fit in? 4) Policy Implications: how can interdisciplinarity inspire new patterns of research, teaching, and exhibition organisation in Italian Studies and more broadly in Languages? These questions will be addressed by a network that brings together academics, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers, museum curators, members of conservatoires, and cultural practitioners currently working in Italy.