SUBMITTED AS A DOCTORAL DISSERTATION IN COMPLETION OF REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF ED.D THROUGH WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY. The overall purpose of this action research study was to explore the experiences of ten middle school science teachers involved in a three-year partnership program between scientists and teachers at a Department of Energy national laboratory, including the impact of the program on their professional development, and to improve the partnership program by developing a set of recommendations based on the study’s findings. This action research study relied on qualitative data including field notes recorded at the summer academies and data from two focus groups with teachers and scientists. Additionally, the participating teachers submitted written reflections in science notebooks, participated in open-ended telephone interviews that were transcribed verbatim, and wrote journal summaries to the Department of Energy at the end of the summer academy. The analysis of the data, collaboratively examined by the teachers, the scientists, and the science education specialist acting as co-researchers on the project, revealed five elements critical to the success of the professional development of science teachers. First, scientist-teacher partnerships are a unique contribution to the professional development of teachers of science that is not replicated in other …

This work is the result of the researchers carried out during a three years Ph.D. period in the BABAR experiment. The first chapter consists in an introduction to the theoretical aspects of the D{sup 0} meson lifetime determination and CP violation parameters, as well as an overview of the CP violation in the B sector, which is the main topic of the experiment. The description of the experimental apparatus follows with particular attention to the Silicon Vertex Tracker detector, the most critical detector for the determination of decay vertices and thus of lifetimes and time dependent CP violation asymmetries. In the fourth chapter the operation and running of the vertex detector is described, as a result from the experience as Operation Manager of the SVT, with particular attention to the safety of the device and the data quality assurance. The last chapter is dedicated to the determination of the D{sup 0} meson lifetime with the BABAR detector, which is the main data analysis carried out by the candidate. The analysis is characterized by the selection of an extremely pure sample of D{sup 0} mesons for which the decay flight length and proper time is reconstructed. The description of the unbinned …

Presented is a precise measurement of the {bar B}{sup 0} {yields} D*{sup +}{ell}{sup -}{bar {nu}}{sub {ell}} branching fraction using 81.47 fb{sup -1} of data collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II e{sup +}e{sup -} storage ring at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The measurement was performed by partially reconstructing the D*{sup +} meson from {bar B}{sup 0} {yields} D*{sup +}{ell}{sup -}{bar {nu}}{sub {ell}} decays using only the soft pion of the D*{sup +} {yields} D{sup 0}{pi}{sup +} decay to reconstruct its four vector. The branching fraction was measured to be {Beta}({bar B}{sup 0} {yields} D*{sup +}{ell}{sup -}{bar {nu}}{sub {ell}}) = (4.91 {+-} 0.01{sub stat} {+-} 0.15{sub syst})%.