Music Education in America: A Content Analysis and National Perspective of Standards-Based Outcomes for K-8 General Music

The aim of this study was explore and measure desired results that are fundamental and essential to standards-based accountability and comprehensive musicianship for students in K-8 general music classes. Using a clustered sample of state achievement standards aligned with the National Content Standards for Music Education (n = 16), an exploratory content analysis was conducted. Qualitative analysis was employed to identify desired results as fundamental, or basic, elemental, or underlying; qualitative analysis and measurement was employed to identify fundamental desired results as essential, or frequent among 50% or more of the sample. Sub-samples were also analyzed for equivalent-forms reliability. The content analysis yielded 8809 desired results distributed among 2450 printed standards. In relation to each National Content Standard, the conceptual framework of this study, fundamental desired results were found to be essential at each grade level with the exception of grade K and National Content Standard Four as well as grade one and National Content Standard Nine. Within these findings, diverse and often disjunctive grade level application was also frequent. The predominant findings include a clear emphasis on music performance and literacy with ancillary attention to creating music and all forms of responding to music. At and among all grade levels, the standards for singing, performing on instruments, improvising, and reading and notating music yielded the most desired results that were found to be essential. Also at all grade levels, there were no fundamental desired results found to be essential for understanding music in relation to history, which represents half of the intent of National Content Standard Nine. Overall, this study revealed more disagreement than consensus as more than half of all fundamental desired results for each National Content Standard were not found to be essential. The fundamental desired results found to be essential for two-thirds of the Content Standards also represented less than one third of the desired results that were applicable. The findings from this study align with far-reaching 21st century issues, including improving existing K-8 curricula and corresponding assessments, evaluating program quality, refining standards-based curricula in music teacher preparation programs, and developing future K-8 standards

A MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE GREAT GREEN WALL: THE ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL EFFECTS OF REAFFORESTATION IN SENEGAL

The north-central region of Senegal is home to the Great Green Wall (GGW)—a reafforestation project aimed at restoring decades–old, degraded land conditions by establishing tree belts and community gardens. Its presence on the ground has changed the local landscape and altered the social institutions governing the daily lives of the people it aims to protect. My study is an in-progress assessment of the GGW towards its two major goals: 1) improving the lives of the people of the Sahel and increasing their capacity to adapt to climate change and drought, and 2) improving the state of the ecosystem and increasing its resiliency to climate change and variability. Using field experiences, semi-structured interviews, and personal observations, I investigated the progress of the GGW towards its environmental and social goals in Senegal. The young trees planted as part of the GGW have begun making environmental impacts in terms of decreasing land–surface temperatures and incident solar radiation. These changes yield improving environmental conditions capable of diversifying the economic livelihoods of the Sahelian people, as proposed by the second goal of the project. The GGW goal of improving the lives of the people of the Sahel is characteristically hard to define, and the social impacts of the GGW at the village level are quite varied. The gardening and economic components seem to have made the most positive difference in the village. Problems with water and grazing areas, however, have prompted negative perspectives of the GGW by village-level stakeholders. Longer termed studies are encouraged to document the changes of these social impacts and how they infuence the efficacy of the initiative as a whole

Ambedo: Immersive Storytelling through Augmented Reality

The territory of locative media, coupled with augmented reality, offers unique opportunities to excavate and unpack rich historic events, in immersive storytelling. In September of 1943, during World War II, approximately 5,200 Italian soldiers were massacred on the Greek island of Kefalonia by Nazi troops. This massacre is credited as one of the largest ever prisoner-of-war massacres in recent history (Lamb, 1996) and left an indelible mark on the island of Kefalonia. In 2019, Configuring Kommos: Narrative, Event, Place and Memory, an interdisciplinary research project, began an investigation into the triangulation of narrative within the complexity of this tragic collection of events. This paper presents the structural formation of the augmented reality app, Ambedo, currently under development as part of the broader project. Ambedo, principally reliant on geo-referencing for navigating the nuanced terrain of the island, serves as a counter monument to those martyred while seeking to facilitate access to the ontological formation of the event(s)

The Title of This Paper Is ༛༾༶༙༑༒ On Asemic Writing and the Absence of Meaning

Asemic writing is a wordless form of textual communication, with semantically open content left to the reader’s interpretation. By contrast, graphic designers are taught to conceive of text as image in order to compound meaning through graphic representation and typographic nuance. Graphic designers consider the linguistic container beyond its semantic substance, in effect, and attempt to expand the sematic load of language with visual modulation. Analogously, in Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes contemplates Japanese culture as a series of signs that exist in relative ataraxia with their signifying instance, where the alliance of sign and signification mingle as meditative components in a relative yin-yang balance as exemplified by the society within which they exit as philosophical constants. For Barthes, this notion confronts a Western temperament wherein a Platonic ideal seems to foment a continual search for the existence of pre-eminent signs that function as pinnacles of signification. However, when signs are devoid of intentional meaning, what can we glean from the mechanics of sign operations that attempt to establish and create, especially with regards to visual narrative and the heterotopic and temporal devices used by writers, artists and designers, a sense of “otherness?” This paper examines the heterotopic relationship of asemic writing as a mediated agent of narrative in our post-literate society

Archives by Degree: Personal Perspectives on Academic Preparation for the Archival Profession

The consideration of the question of the appropriate level and type of education and training for professional archivists is not an issue new to archival literature nor to the agendas of meetings of archival organizations. Articles published in national and regional journals and papers presented at national and regional gatherings have addressed this question many times over the years, but as yet no definite and bonding answers or agenda for action have emerged

Performance evaluation of commercial short-oligonucleotide microarrays and the impact of noise in making cross-platform correlations

BACKGROUND: Despite the widespread use of microarrays, much ambiguity regarding data analysis, interpretation and correlation of the different technologies exists. There is a considerable amount of interest in correlating results obtained between different microarray platforms. To date, only a few cross-platform evaluations have been published and unfortunately, no guidelines have been established on the best methods of making such correlations. To address this issue we conducted a thorough evaluation of two commercial microarray platforms to determine an appropriate methodology for making cross-platform correlations. RESULTS: In this study, expression measurements for 10,763 genes uniquely represented on Affymetrix U133A/B GeneChips(® )and Amersham CodeLink™ UniSet Human 20 K microarrays were compared. For each microarray platform, five technical replicates, derived from the same total RNA samples, were labeled, hybridized, and quantified according to each manufacturers' standard protocols. The correlation coefficient (r) of differential expression ratios for the entire set of 10,763 overlapping genes was 0.62 between platforms. However, the correlation improved significantly (r = 0.79) when genes within noise were excluded. In addition to levels of inter-platform correlation, we evaluated precision, statistical-significance profiles, power, and noise levels for each microarray platform. Accuracy of differential expression was measured against real-time PCR for 25 genes and both platforms correlated well with r values of 0.92 and 0.79 for CodeLink and GeneChip, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: As a result of this study, we recommend using only genes called 'present' in cross-platform correlations. However, as in this study, a large number of genes may be lost from the correlation due to differing levels of noise between platforms. This is an important consideration given the apparent difference in sensitivity of the two platforms. Data from microarray analysis need to be interpreted cautiously and therefore, we provide guidelines for making cross-platform correlations. In all, this study represents the most comprehensive and specifically designed comparison of short-oligonucleotide microarray platforms to date using the largest set of overlapping genes

Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions: A Mixed-Methods Twitter Study

This article examines the design of a course that utilized the real-time information network Twitter to spark reflective thinking and communication based on classroom topics

Heritability of Obsessive-Compulsive symptom dimensions.

Recent research has shown that obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) differ remarkably among patients and can be divided into several symptom dimensions. OCS are influenced by genetic components, but it is unknown to what extent these symptom dimensions are heritable. The phenotypic heterogeneity also raises the question to what extent the symptom dimensions are influenced by specific or shared genetic factors. We studied a population sample of 1,383 female twins from the Virginia Twin Registry. OCS was measured by a questionnaire with 20 items from the Padua Inventory. After factor analysis, three reliable OC symptom dimensions were retained: Rumination, Contamination, and Checking. These OC dimensions were analyzed with multivariate genetic models to investigate both the overlap and uniqueness of genetic and environmental contributions underlying OC symptom dimensions. The multivariate common pathway model provided the best description of the data. All symptom dimensions share variation with a latent common factor, that is, OC behavior. Variation in this common factor was explained by both genes (36%) and environmental factors (64%). Only the Contamination dimension was influenced by specific genes and seemed to be a relatively independent dimension. The results suggest that a broad OC behavioral phenotype exists, influenced by both genes and nonshared environment. In addition, we found evidence for specific genetic and environmental factors underlying the Contamination dimension. Use of the Contamination dimension could therefore provide a powerful approach for the detection of genetic susceptibility loci that contribute to OCS. © 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc