Professional Development of Head Start Teachers in Emotional and Instructional Support

In the southwest region of Tennessee, a local Head Start program classroom assessment scoring system\u27s (CLASS) scores fell in the lowest 10% among national Head Start programs in emotional and instructional support. Since 2012, the Office of Head Start has released reports showing that the average Head Start program has low performance CLASS emotional and instructional support scores. The purpose of this exploratory case study was to investigate the professional development of local Head Start teachers with low CLASS scores in emotional and instructional support. Knowles\u27s adult learning theory of andragogy was the overall conceptual framework and the concentrated theory of this study was Mezirow\u27s transformative learning theory. The key research question focused on how the professional development of Head Start teachers contributed to successful CLASS scores in emotional and instructional support as perceived by Head Start education specialists and teachers. Data collection methods included observations, previous CLASS scores, 2 focus group interviews of 5 teachers, and 1 focus group interview of 4 education specialists. NVivo 10 was used in detecting trends, ideas, and displaying connections from which the themes of coaching, mentoring, individual learning plans, and observations emerged. Findings showed that although viable professional development strategies were used, learning transfer activities were unsubstantiated. A professional development program was created to increase learning transfer into the classroom. An implication for positive social change could result in achieving maximum emotional and instructional CLASS scores in the Head Start community, providing the highest quality of services recognized by the Head Start Office

Adjusting Learning Parameters to Increase Cognitive Resource Allocation in Persons with Alcoholism Risk

Parental history of alcoholism is associated with increased alcoholism risk in their children. One factor increasing alcoholism risk is the presence of attention and information encoding disruptions in adult children of alcoholics (ACOA) compared to persons who are not ACOAs (NACOA). Alcohol ingestion reduces these disruptions in ACOAs. This study examined whether alterations of information processing parameters can function like alcohol and reduce processing disruptions experienced by the ACOA. Participants were 80 ACOAs and 80 NACOAs, partitioned into four groups of 20 participants. During learning, subjects studied presentations of stimulus items followed by the presentation of associated response items. The task was to learn which stimulus was associated with which response item. Based on information processing parameters, the study used a 2.5 second learning response period and either a short (3.0 second) or a long (5.0 second) period for evaluating whether the response was or was not correct. Within each group, one-half of the subjects received a short and one-half received a long response evaluation period. In addition to learning performance, information processing was evaluated using psychophysiological-indices of resource allocation in the central nervous system. Whereas the learning performance of the ACOAs during the short review periods was significantly below the performance of the NACOAs, the groups did not significantly differ during long review period conditions. The findings support the implementation of “tuning” information processing parameters to compensate for processing disruptions related to ACOA-status. This outcome could allow development of focused preventive strategies for persons at higher risk for alcoholism

Generalizability of Deep Adult Lung Segmentation Models to the Pediatric Population: A Retrospective Study

Lung segmentation in chest X-rays (CXRs) is an important prerequisite for improving the specificity of diagnoses of cardiopulmonary diseases in a clinical decision support system. Current deep learning (DL) models for lung segmentation are trained and evaluated on CXR datasets in which the radiographic projections are captured predominantly from the adult population. However, the shape of the lungs is reported to be significantly different for pediatrics across the developmental stages from infancy to adulthood. This might result in age-related data domain shifts that would adversely impact lung segmentation performance when the models trained on the adult population are deployed for pediatric lung segmentation. In this work, our goal is to analyze the generalizability of deep adult lung segmentation models to the pediatric population and improve performance through a systematic combinatorial approach consisting of CXR modality-specific weight initializations, stacked generalization, and an ensemble of the stacked generalization models. Novel evaluation metrics consisting of Mean Lung Contour Distance and Average Hash Score are proposed in addition to the Multi-scale Structural Similarity Index Measure, Intersection of Union, and Dice metrics to evaluate segmentation performance. We observed a significant improvement (p < 0.05) in cross-domain generalization through our combinatorial approach. This study could serve as a paradigm to analyze the cross-domain generalizability of deep segmentation models for other medical imaging modalities and applications.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, and 8 table

Workforce Development Through Online Experiential Learning for STEM Education

The U.S. workforce is increasingly comprised of older adults, women, and minorities who lack basic skills and are unable to acquire these skills through traditional educational and training programs. New approaches are needed to provide effective training to the adult learner and flexible support for nontraditional students who must balance work-life demands with limited educational opportunities. Contextualized teaching and learning (CTL) is a form of experiential learning that blends both basic skills and occupational training together in environments that allow students to relate subject matter to real-world situations. Virtual CTL environments can be created to better engage students, provide immediate performance feedback, reduce training time, and improve accessibility. To determine the effectiveness of CTL, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Tooling U curriculum and learning management system (LMS) was studied. This intervention consisted of online modules with basic skills remediation blended with interactive labs and virtual reality exercises. A nonrandom population of 342 participants was chosen for study, including 75 exposed to the CTL intervention (experimental group) and 267 not exposed to the CTL intervention (control group). Learning outcomes such as test scores, completed credit hours, course completions, and earned credentials, were compared between CTL and non-CTL groups and between demographic subsets within the CTL group. Underrepresented groups, including older adults, women, and minorities, were 2 to 3 times greater in the CTL group compared with the non- CTL group. Overall, students exposed to CTL achieved higher rates of credentialing (55%) when compared with students not exposed to contextualized instruction (20%)

Co-investment in the skills of the future : a report to Ministers in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The key recommendations of this Review will lead to the replacement of the current system with one founded on the following principles: · Government funding supporting individual and employer choice, with the Government contribution to the cost of training following the individual and/or employer contribution where appropriate. · Individuals and employers driving the system, their participation being protected and their involvement central. · Transparency on co-investment contributions and total prices, and on the quality of provision. · Government funding increasing the capacity of financial support, to facilitate individuals co-investing. · Flexibility and a fair system for all colleges and training providers, to promote choice and improve quality and efficiency and responsiveness to the needs of individuals and employers