The Professional Development of Pre-K Mentor Teachers: Insights from a Face-to-Face and Online Community of Practice

Early childhood classroom mentor teachers are often left with little support and guidance as they assume the role of teacher educators. The purpose of this collective case study was to explore how a community of practice comprised of pre-K mentors and a university program coordinator supported the development of shared and individual understandings about how to effectively supervise preservice teachers. Utilizing key tenets of sociocultural theory, four pre-K mentor teachers from two public schools in the Southeast participated in an online and face-to-face community of practice facilitated by a university program coordinator. The pre-K preservice teachers (n=6) were secondary participants in this study. Across twelve weeks, the evolution of collective and individual knowledge was chronicled through interviews, online discussions, face-to-face exchanges, and classroom observations. Audio-tapes from meetings and interviews were transcribed verbatim. Data analyses involved iterative cycles of coding, moving from open coding to process and pattern coding. Through this process, data displays and conceptual memos were created and informed the analyses. Findings from this qualitative study illustrate how the mentors’ processes of coming to know were developed within a complex web of relationships from which they re-envisioned their roles as pre-K teachers. As the mentors negotiated the meaning of mentoring, they engaged in recursive cycles of reshaping their identities through questioning, hypothesizing, and sharing lived experiences. New identities as educators of both children and adults emerged as they considered the role of mentoring as a tangible object to be closely studied, negotiated, and operationalized. The mentors left this study acknowledging that while mentoring was difficult, complex work, it was worthy work

The Role of Nurses in Hospital Quality Improvement

Presents findings from interviews with hospital executives on the role nurses play in efforts to improve the quality of hospital care, factors affecting their involvement, and the challenges they face. Describes common quality improvement programs

Models for Learning (Mod4L) Final Report: Representing Learning Designs

The Mod4L Models of Practice project is part of the JISC-funded Design for Learning Programme. It ran from 1 May – 31 December 2006. The philosophy underlying the project was that a general split is evident in the e-learning community between development of e-learning tools, services and standards, and research into how teachers can use these most effectively, and is impeding uptake of new tools and methods by teachers. To help overcome this barrier and bridge the gap, a need is felt for practitioner-focused resources which describe a range of learning designs and offer guidance on how these may be chosen and applied, how they can support effective practice in design for learning, and how they can support the development of effective tools, standards and systems with a learning design capability (see, for example, Griffiths and Blat 2005, JISC 2006). Practice models, it was suggested, were such a resource. The aim of the project was to: develop a range of practice models that could be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice. We worked with two definitions of practice models. Practice models are: 1. generic approaches to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices (JISC 2006) However, however effective a learning design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation. The issue of representation of learning designs is, then, central to the concept of sharing and reuse at the heart of JISC’s Design for Learning programme. Thus practice models should be both representations of effective practice, and effective representations of practice. Hence we arrived at the project working definition of practice models as: 2. Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc).(Mod4L working definition, Falconer & Littlejohn 2006). A learning design is defined as the outcome of the process of designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme (JISC 2006). Practice models have many potential uses: they describe a range of learning designs that are found to be effective, and offer guidance on their use; they support sharing, reuse and adaptation of learning designs by teachers, and also the development of tools, standards and systems for planning, editing and running the designs. The project took a practitioner-centred approach, working in close collaboration with a focus group of 12 teachers recruited across a range of disciplines and from both FE and HE. Focus group members are listed in Appendix 1. Information was gathered from the focus group through two face to face workshops, and through their contributions to discussions on the project wiki. This was supplemented by an activity at a JISC pedagogy experts meeting in October 2006, and a part workshop at ALT-C in September 2006. The project interim report of August 2006 contained the outcomes of the first workshop (Falconer and Littlejohn, 2006). The current report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). All quotations are taken from the Mod4L wiki unless otherwise stated

The utilization of parent-child visitations for reunification and stability among children and families

The purpose of this study was to measure how effectively San Bernardino County, Department of Children\u27s Services utilizes visitations for family reunification and stability

Data Mining Temporal Work Patterns of Programming Student Populations

This paper reports the second stage of a study of the correlations between the temporal work patterns of computer programming students and their success or failure as measured by programming project assignment grades and related metrics. The first stage confirmed the importance for most students of getting an early start on a programming project, and it also uncovered the fact that some student groups perform well with late starts, suggesting the likelihood that they engage in the productive practice of active procrastination. The second most important factor for success is the average length of assignment work sessions. Session lengths from 60 to 120 minutes appear to be optimal for most students. Other contributing factors include total time spent on a project and working more day than night sessions. This second stage more than doubles the amount of data collected and analyzed. It finds that procrastination and session length remain prominent, while secondary factors become slightly less prominent. Its primary contribution is the analysis of within-student patterns for students who perform significantly better on some assignments than others, finding that for these students, starting early and maintaining appropriate work session lengths and times of day correlate with better performance

Milestones in Chloroplast Genetic Engineering: an Environmentally Friendly Era in Biotechnology

Chloroplast genomes defied the laws of Mendelian inheritance at the dawn of plant genetics, and continue to defy the mainstream approach to biotechnology, leading the field in an environmentally friendly direction. Recent success in engineering the chloroplast genome for resistance to herbicides, insects, disease and drought, and for production of biopharmaceuticals, has opened the door to a new era in biotechnology. The successful engineering of tomato chromoplasts for high-level transgene expression in fruits, coupled to hyper-expression of vaccine antigens, and the use of plant-derived antibiotic-free selectable markers, augur well for oral delivery of edible vaccines and biopharmaceuticals that are currently beyond the reach of those who need them most

The suitability of coal gasification in India's energy sector

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-86).Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC), an advanced coal-based power generation technology, may be an important technology to help India meet its future power needs. It has the potential to provide higher generating efficiency, can be adapted to efficiently burn India's high-ash coal, and has the potential to do so with greatly reduced emissions and offers the longer term potential to assist India to manage its C02 emissions. Efficient gasification technology also offers India the potential to produce a variety of fuels, particularly transportation fuels, and chemicals. These potential benefits would be useful in a country that has coal shortages, runs inefficient power plants, and imports the majority of its transportation fuels. Driven by these potential benefits the Central Government-owned power generating equipment manufacturing company (BHEL) is developing a fluid-bed gasifier designed for Indian coals, but has not yet demonstrated it at a size larger than 6 MW. Outside of BHEL, there are many factors holding this technology back. First, the technology is projected to be more expensive than pulverized coal (PC) power generation. In the Indian environment, the capital costs are estimated to be 1.5 times higher, and the levelized cost of electricity is estimated to be 33 % higher than for PC power generation.(cont.) Further, there are other technology options, such as super-critical pulverized coal technology, which are cheaper, more proven, and can provide immediate higher generating efficiency. The first supercritical PC plant is currently being built in India. To overcome these barriers will take further research and development, as well as demonstration at a commercial scale. This all needs to occur at a greater speed and with a greater urgency than is now apparent. The demonstration and commercialization will require significant subsidies, which may come in different forms. The Central Government may wish to subsidize the technology development for the pollution control benefits that it offers and do so via its linkages to BHEL. Foreign governments and institutions may choose to subsidize the costs for the carbon dioxide reduction credits that it can produce. In the end, the challenges facing IGCC in India are great. The cost and generating efficiency will have to at least rival those for other advanced coal technologies, and coal production and mining policies will have to be effectively enacted to increase the supply of coal available for new coal plants.by Lori Allison Simpson.S.M

Reporting Expertise in Agricultural Communications, Education, Extension, and Leadership Research: The Development of an Expertise Rubric

This exploratory quantitative study assessed 149 behaviors, characteristics, and techniques considered indicative of expertise to determine what social scientists in Agricultural Communications, Education, Extension, and Leadership (ACEEL) disciplines value. A total of 731 social scientists from 25 land-grant universities across the United States surveyed in the fall of 2018 served as the population for this study. Using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), 10 constructs describing expertise were identified. A list of the 10 constructs was presented to faculty representing the ACEEL disciplines who helped determine what the constructs collectively measured, resulting in a label for each construct. The behaviors, characteristics, and techniques of the highest scoring constructs were used to create a rubric to assist social scientists in the systematic and intentional selection and description of the qualifications and expertise of individuals asked to serve as coders (Content Analysis), expert panelists (the Delphi method), and any contributor to social science studies in ACEEL disciplines. Use of the rubric would improve the overall consistency and transparency in how qualifications of expertise are reported in academic publications

The divergent effects of cdppb and cannabidiol on fear extinction and anxiety in a predator scent stress model of ptsd in rats

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) currently has no FDA-approved treatments that reduce symptoms in the majority of patients. The ability to extinguish fear memory associations is impaired in PTSD individuals. As such, the development of extinction-enhancing pharmacological agents to be used in combination with exposure therapies may benefit the treatment of PTSD. Both mGlu5 and CB1 receptors have been implicated in contextual fear extinction. Thus, here we tested the ability of the mGlu5 positive allosteric modulator 3-Cyano-N-(1,3-diphenyl-1H-pyrazol-5-yl)benzamide (CDPPB) and cannabidiol (CBD) to reduce both conditioned and unconditioned fear. We used a predator-threat animal model of PTSD which we and others have previously shown to capture the heterogeneity of anxiety responses observed in humans exposed to trauma. Here, 1 week following a 10-min exposure to predator scent stress, rats were classified into stress-Susceptible and stress-Resilient phenotypes using behavioral criteria for elevated plus maze and acoustic startle response performance. Two weeks after classification, rats underwent 3 days of contextual fear extinction and were treated with vehicle, CDPPB or CBD prior to each session. Finally, the light-dark box test was employed to assess phenotypic differences and the effects of CDPPB and CBD on unconditioned anxiety. CDPBB but not CBD, reduced freezing in Susceptible rats relative to vehicle. In the light-dark box test for unconditioned anxiety, CBD, but not CDPPB, reduced anxiety in Susceptible rats. Resilient rats displayed reduced anxiety in the light-dark box relative to Susceptible rats. Taken together, the present data indicate that enhancement of mGlu5 receptor signaling in populations vulnerable to stress may serve to offset a resistance to fear memory extinction without producing anxiogenic effects. Furthermore, in a susceptible population, CBD attenuates unconditioned but not conditioned fear. Taken together, these findings support the use of predator-threat stress exposure in combination with stress-susceptibility phenotype classification as a model for examining the unique drug response profiles and altered neuronal function that emerge as a consequence of the heterogeneity of psychophysiological response to stress. © 2019 Shallcross, Hámor, Bechard, Romano, Knackstedt and Schwendt