The 1998 Annual Meeting of the Mid-Western Educational Research Association

Conference Highlights from the Program Chai

Electronic or Paper? Comparing Submissions to MWERA–98

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Presidential Address: Future Shock: Education in the Information Age

Presidential Addres

The IRB and Classroom Research

Scholars conducting research in classrooms face a myriad of ethical issues somewhat unique to the educational setting. While the Code of Federal Regulations (45 CFR 46) generally provides that educational research be classified as exempt from review by Institutional Review Boards, those same regulations provide a host of special conditions under which classroom research must not be considered exempt. Depending on the study, classroom research may also involve issues of power and coercion (especially when the researcher is also the instructor); deception (when part or all of the nature of a study must be hidden from the subjects to avoid a bias in the results); anonymity and/or confidentiality; and compensation (including equivalent alternate assignments, when appropriate). Additional rules designed to protect the confidentiality of student information (FERPA), as well as what kinds of data might be collected and the processes used to collect that data (PPRA) also exist and must be followed. Scholars conducting research in classrooms need to navigate all of these issues as a routine part of their research activities

Correlated Phenotypic Transitions to Competence in Bacterial Colonies

Genetic competence is a phenotypic state of a bacterial cell in which it is capable of importing DNA, presumably to hasten its exploration of alternate genes in its quest for survival under stress. Recently, it was proposed that this transition is uncorrelated among different cells in the colony. Motivated by several discovered signaling mechanisms which create colony-level responses, we present a model for the influence of quorum-sensing signals on a colony of B. Subtilis cells during the transition to genetic competence. Coupling to the external signal creates an effective inhibitory mechanism, which results in anti-correlation between the cycles of adjacent cells. We show that this scenario is consistent with the specific experimental measurement, which fails to detect some underlying collective signaling mechanisms. Rather, we suggest other parameters that should be used to verify the role of a quorum-sensing signal. We also study the conditions under which phenotypic spatial patterns may emerge