9,049 research outputs found
The interplay between instructional policy and its constituents: How mathematics teachers interact with and understand Principles and Standards for School Mathematics
Educational policies aimed at reforming school mathematics education have been disseminated at an increasing rate in recent years. The impact of such policies hinges on if and how constituents decide to implement the policy recommendations, and these decisions depend largely on constituents\u27 interpretations of the policy. Investigating how classroom teachers make sense of policy recommendations is particularly important, for teachers are the ones who ultimately decide what mathematics students learn, and how they learn it. This research followed a group of teachers as they studied a particular instructional policy, Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000). Fourteen middle school mathematics teachers formed a study group to read and discuss the document\u27s messages and recommendations. This study aimed to characterize the nature and content of teachers\u27 discussions, to trace the ideas teachers developed about the document, and to investigate the impact this experience had on teachers\u27 beliefs, knowledge, priorities, and classroom practice.
Data sources included audio and videotapes of sixteen study group sessions, teacher journal entries, electronic listserv discussions, interviews, and classroom observations. Analyses of the study group discussions were conducted in two phases. The first phase consisted of a turn-by-turn analysis of each teacher\u27s individual contributions to the conversations. The second phase consisted of a more global analysis in which each study group transcript was chunked into distinct conversational episodes. Coding schemes were developed to capture the major themes that emerged in the study group conversations, and to characterize the cognitive demand posed by the topic under discussion and by the group\u27s treatment of that topic.
Results indicate that teachers came to view the document from multiple lenses---as a warrant for their current beliefs or practices, a lever for effecting change, a tool for their own learning, and a curriculum map. The ways in which teachers came to view the document were related to the particular demands, priorities, and characteristics of their local school contexts. Results suggest that instructional policy documents like Principles and Standards can be generative---they can stimulate rich conversations among teachers, and such conversations are fruitful sites for teachers\u27 professional learning
Lyme disease in South Africa.
This article presents an overview of Lyme disease (LD) as it applies to neuropsychiatry and summarises research results on the epidemiology of LD in South Africa
Online Search Tool for Graphical Patterns in Electronic Band Structures
We present an online graphical pattern search tool for electronic band
structure data contained within the Organic Materials Database (OMDB) available
at https://omdb.diracmaterials.org/search/pattern. The tool is capable of
finding user-specified graphical patterns in the collection of thousands of
band structures from high-throughput ab initio calculations in the online
regime. Using this tool, it only takes a few seconds to find an arbitrary
graphical pattern within the ten electronic bands near the Fermi level for
26,739 organic crystals. The tool can be used to find realizations of
functional materials characterized by a specific pattern in their electronic
structure, for example, Dirac materials, characterized by a linear crossing of
bands; topological insulators, characterized by a "Mexican hat" pattern or an
effectively free electron gas, characterized by a parabolic dispersion. The
source code of the developed tool is freely available at
https://github.com/OrganicMaterialsDatabase/EBS-search and can be transferred
to any other electronic band structure database. The approach allows for an
automatic online analysis of a large collection of band structures where the
amount of data makes its manual inspection impracticable.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure
Biological models of mental illness: implications for therapy development
Systems approaches are needed to recognise the complexity of the biological bases of psychiatric disease
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