Civic Engagement

Evaluating Program Efficacy:
The Community Engagement Quantitative Boot Camp

The “Community Organization Assessment” Boot Camp is a 3-day retreat for the Sociology Advanced Data Analysis course in which students complete an impact evaluation for a nonprofit community organization. The program, developed by Dr. Delia Deckard, completes all data analysis of test, survey and outcome information for the partner entity, at no cost. The availability of findings enriches our partner’s activities in grant-seeking, process improvement, and client assistance. In the Spring 2017 program, students used statistical and geo-spatial analysis to evaluate client service areas, demographic breakdowns, relative efficacy by client group and establish continued patterns of need. A full report was returned to the partner organization for their use.

Kindergarten Readiness: Promoting Parental Engagement

The continual immigration of diverse, multiethnic, multicultural populations has presented the U.S. with a variety of unique language opportunities and challenges. The lack of language proficiency and comfortability creates a distinct gap in opportunities and therefore social and socio economic mobility to the populations affected (Espenshade and Fu, 291). In some language minority populations, parental engagement in their child’s early English education is lacking. This can be derived from a variety of factors, a prevalent one being the lack of formal training and accessible resources to aid them in better preparing their child, particularly in low-income communities. In this project, we discuss a method for developing and providing resources and training to better aid predominantly Spanish-speaking, low-income communities in engaging with preschooler’s (ages 3-5) early English education.

Optimizing the ROTC Occupational Physical Assessment Test

The US Army is transitioning to a new physical fitness test called the Occupational Physical Assessment Test (OPAT), which all new cadets must perform in order to join. Davidson’s ROTC program, as a feeder program to the US Army, has to implement this test process. The OPAT test involves 4 stations of testing: standing long jump, seated power throw, strength deadlift, and an interval aerobic run. Each participant must complete all four of these events in a single setting and their results in each event must be recorded by a trained facilitator. The goal of this project is to mathematically model the entire testing process in order to find the most efficient process for optimizing “put-through” of the cadets within the system. “Put-through” refers to the ease of the process for both cadets and facilitators and a successful process would result in the smoothest possible flow of cadets through the system, seeing no bottlenecks at any station. A successful project would result in a more efficient testing process for Davidson’s ROTC program that faces fewer bottlenecks and less time wasted while conducting the OPAT.

Disability in Social Media

For this project, we will examine disability misrepresentation in the media–particularly social media and viral videos. Social media users share a multitude of feel-good videos that often sentimentalize the reality of disability and portray disabled people as objects of inspiration rather than full human beings. We aim to launch a digital video campaign that quantifies the variety and gauges the accuracy of disability representation as well as illustrates the range of effects of those portrayals. To accomplish this, we will perform research concerning the effects of misinformation, social media content and stereotypes on media audiences. Our poster will summarize our findings and give details about our digital video campaign.

Optimization of Community School of Davidson Afternoon Carpool System

The Community School of Davidson (CSD) is interested in improving their afternoon carpool system to establish a more optimal process. We partnered with CSD’s Director Connie Wessner, using mathematical modeling techniques in our efforts to observe the current carpool system and increase its efficiency. Queueing theory is used to model the carpool system, with each vehicle in the carpool lane representing a customer. Over multiple afternoons, the following data was collected: the arrival time of each vehicle in the carpool lane, the time when each student’s name was called, the time each student entered their respective vehicles, and each vehicle’s departure time. Subsequent modeling strategies utilize Monte Carlo simulation. These techniques allow us to make an assessment of the carpool system and determine what changes, if any, should be made to optimize afternoon carpool.

Commonalities in Teaching Methods for Second and Third Grade Students

The variability in teaching methods leaves one to question the factors of effective teaching. In this poster, observations made at Community School of Davidson of second and third grade classrooms are summarized. Teaching methods in three different classrooms are compared in order to determine what the teachers are doing best and what the children adapt to readily. Each author was assigned to one classroom to observe teachers and children for one hour in the morning. Some factors were shared by all teachers. All three used metacognition by gaining feedback from the children in order to determine what they understood and used interleaving to review the lesson concepts after the activities. We have determined that these commonalities in teaching methods seemed to correlate with methods that have shown to be effective in previous studies.

Using Modeling to Create a Photomosaic

A photomosaic is a large scale photo that is built by combining smaller photos together in a cohesive way. The team works with the Community School of Davidson to use student’s artwork and activities photos to create a banner that spelling the word “spARTans”. This poster exhibits the use of math modeling through binary integer linear programming (BILP) as a way to build this photomosaic. As we investigate in how to approximate images, we see how mathematical modeling could be utilized and applied to simple real world problem.

Ada Jenkins Center: Adopting an Earned-Income Model to Increase Financial Stability

The Ada Jenkins Center, like many other non-profit organizations, primarily rely on philanthropy and government grants as their main sources of income. The Center’s operation costs, however, continue to rise in recent years and often times, private donations and government grants alone are not sufficient enough to cover the costs. In order to generate a third main source of funding that is independent of outside support, therefore, we are designing an earned-income model that the Center can adopt and invest in. In addition to considering the sustainability of this model, we also aim to reach a break-even point within the first three years of startup. This earned-income model involves training the Center’s client partners job-specific skills, which will then qualify them for employment in a revenue-generating business run by the Ada Jenkins Center. Job training will be directed towards the areas of food service and technology.