This report describes the development and application of a dispatch optimization algorithm for integrated energy systems (IES) comprised of on-site cogeneration of heat and electricity, energy storage devices, and demand response opportunities. This work is intended to aid commercial and industrial sites in making use of modern computing power and optimization algorithms to make informed, near-optimal decisions under significant uncertainty and complex objective functions. The optimization algorithm uses a finite set of randomly generated future scenarios to approximate the true, stochastic future; constraints are included that prevent solutions to this approximate problem from deviating from solutions to the actual problem. The algorithm is then expressed as a mixed integer linear program, to which a powerful commercial solver is applied. A case study of United States Postal Service Processing and Distribution Centers (P&DC) in four cities and under three different electricity tariff structures is conducted to (1) determine the added value of optimal control to a cogeneration system over current, heuristic control strategies; (2) determine the value of limited electric load curtailment opportunities, with and without cogeneration; and (3) determine the trade-off between least-cost and least-carbon operations of a cogeneration system. Key results for the P&DC sites studied include (1) in …

Reciprocal teaching comprehension-monitoring is a reading comprehension instructional procedure that combines four instructional strategies: predicting, summarizing, questioning, and clarifying to enhance students' comprehension of text. The procedure is a dialogue between the teacher and the students. During reciprocal teaching instruction, the teacher and students take turns leading the dialogue in order to enhance the students' comprehension-monitoring skills. The research on reciprocal teaching has included meta-analyses, group designs, qualitative designs, and single-subject research designs. These studies have identified gaps in the literature to include the measurement of treatment fidelity and treatment acceptability, as well as the psychometric properties of the instruments used to measure daily reading comprehension growth. These gaps were investigated in this study. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of reciprocal teaching comprehension-monitoring with a group of fifteen 3rd grade students reading at grade level. Specifically, this study investigated the use of curriculum-based measurement maze probes (CBM-maze probes) to formatively assess the reading comprehension growth of the students. Additionally, this study implemented treatment integrity procedures and investigated the acceptability of reciprocal teaching and the CBM-maze probes through a treatment acceptability rating scale. A multiple baseline across groups with three phases (baseline, intervention, follow-up) was employed. …

Application of multisource feedback (MSF) increased dramatically and became widespread globally in the past two decades, but there was little conceptual work regarding self-other agreement and few empirical studies investigated self-other agreement in other cultural settings. This study developed a new conceptual framework of self-other agreement and used three samples to illustrate how national culture affected self-other agreement. These three samples included 428 participants from China, 818 participants from the US, and 871 participants from globally dispersed teams (GDTs). An EQS procedure and a polynomial regression procedure were used to examine whether the covariance matrices were equal across samples and whether the relationships between self-other agreement and performance would be different across cultures, respectively. The results indicated MSF could be applied to China and GDTs, but the pattern of relationships between self-other agreement and performance was different across samples, suggesting that the results found in the U.S. sample were the exception rather than rule. Demographics also affected self-other agreement disparately across perspectives and cultures, indicating self-concept was susceptible to cultural influences. The proposed framework only received partial support but showed great promise to guide future studies. This study contributed to the literature by: (a) developing a new framework of self-other …