Designing student learning outcomes in undergraduate architecture education: Frameworks for assessment

On the cusp of transition to the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) 2009 Conditions for Accreditation, and at the juncture of higher education's transition into a culture of assessment, this paper addressesthe rationale and frameworks for the design of student learningobjectives. The circumstances of undergraduate architectural education are the primary target here, but the same principles will apply to graduatelearning as well. The discussion is itself framed by a comparison to aset of model student learning objectives published by the American Psychology Association, and is structured within the conventionalplanning model of mission, values, goals, objectives, tactics, and strategies. For the purpose of discussion, the authors propose severalhypothetical examples

Affecting Change in Architectural Education

Architecture concerns not so much an explicit body of transmittable knowledge and protocols as it does a set of implicit understandings, sensitivities and sensibilities. The education of an architect therefore concerns the mission of endowing candidates with those implicit traits. This is not to say that architects do not possess and wield prodigious amounts of explicit cognitive knowledge, because they certainly do. But that explicit component of architectural know-how is actually vested in and deployed by the architect not so much because the knowledge has been invented, discovered, or developed by architects; but rather because they have assimilated it from other disciplines in a special way that gives architects adductive and hermeneutic insight into vast, detailed, and complex design challenges. Engineers make better machines, artists make more meaningful artifacts, and psychologists provide better human environments; but architects are trained to see the underlying opportunity and potential celebration of how those constituent menus might become a feast. In any unresolved complex of space, material and form, architects grasp a unique essence in how they perceive the "happily ever after” of what it might be and how that vision might be made whole and concrete. By the time a student of architecture is fully indoctrinated, this grasp of an underlying ideal essence is so potent that it becomes the student's identity... and the purpose of that insight becomes an irresistible intention

Implementing Good Practices Programs to Encourage Production of High-Quality, Safer Produce in Mississippi

Fifty-four growers/producers attended four 1-day good agricultural practices (GAP) and good handling practices (GHP) workshops at four locations in Mississippi. Pre- and postworkshop survey data indicated that the participants\u27 food safety knowledge increased by 15%. Furthermore, the workshops helped producers develop their own food safety plans. The workshops also trained the producers to be prepared for U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) GAP and GHP audits. To assist producers in preparing for these audits, two mock audits were conducted after the workshops. As a result of the program, several producers became ready to be audited, and at least one producer became USDA GAP certified

Self efficacy for fruit, vegetable and water intakes: Expanded and abbreviated scales from item response modeling analyses

Objective To improve an existing measure of fruit and vegetable intake self efficacy by including items that varied on levels of difficulty, and testing a corresponding measure of water intake self efficacy. Design Cross sectional assessment. Items were modified to have easy, moderate and difficult levels of self efficacy. Classical test theory and item response modeling were applied. Setting One middle school at each of seven participating sites (Houston TX, Irvine CA, Philadelphia PA, Pittsburg PA, Portland OR, rural NC, and San Antonio TX). Subjects 714 6th grade students. Results Adding items to reflect level (low, medium, high) of self efficacy for fruit and vegetable intake achieved scale reliability and validity comparable to existing scales, but the distribution of items across the latent variable did not improve. Selecting items from among clusters of items at similar levels of difficulty along the latent variable resulted in an abbreviated scale with psychometric characteristics comparable to the full scale, except for reliability. Conclusions The abbreviated scale can reduce participant burden. Additional research is necessary to generate items that better distribute across the latent variable. Additional items may need to tap confidence in overcoming more diverse barriers to dietary intake

Development of new physical activity and sedentary behavior change self-efficacy questionnaires using item response modeling

BACKGROUND: Theoretically, increased levels of physical activity self-efficacy (PASE) should lead to increased physical activity, but few studies have reported this effect among youth. This failure may be at least partially attributable to measurement limitations. In this study, Item Response Modeling (IRM) was used to develop new physical activity and sedentary behavior change self-efficacy scales. The validity of the new scales was compared with accelerometer assessments of physical activity and sedentary behavior. METHODS: New PASE and sedentary behavior change (TV viewing, computer video game use, and telephone use) self-efficacy items were developed. The scales were completed by 714, 6(th )grade students in seven US cities. A limited number of participants (83) also wore an accelerometer for five days and provided at least 3 full days of complete data. The new scales were analyzed using Classical Test Theory (CTT) and IRM; a reduced set of items was produced with IRM and correlated with accelerometer counts per minute and minutes of sedentary, light and moderate to vigorous activity per day after school. RESULTS: The PASE items discriminated between high and low levels of PASE. Full and reduced scales were weakly correlated (r = 0.18) with accelerometer counts per minute after school for boys, with comparable associations for girls. Weaker correlations were observed between PASE and minutes of moderate to vigorous activity (r = 0.09 – 0.11). The uni-dimensionality of the sedentary scales was established by both exploratory factor analysis and the fit of items to the underlying variable and reliability was assessed across the length of the underlying variable with some limitations. The reduced sedentary behavior scales had poor reliability. The full scales were moderately correlated with light intensity physical activity after school (r = 0.17 to 0.33) and sedentary behavior (r = -0.29 to -0.12) among the boys, but not for girls. CONCLUSION: New physical activity and sedentary behavior change self-efficacy scales have fewer items than classical test theory derived alternatives and have reasonable validity for boys, but more work is needed to develop comparable scales for girls. Fitting the items to a underlying variable could be useful in tailoring interventions to this scale

Plasmodium falciparum serology: A comparison of two protein production methods for analysis of antibody responses by protein microarray.

The evaluation of protein antigens as putative serologic biomarkers of infection has increasingly shifted to high-throughput, multiplex approaches such as the protein microarray. In vitro transcription/translation (IVTT) systems-a similarly high-throughput protein expression method-are already widely utilised in the production of protein microarrays, though purified recombinant proteins derived from more traditional whole cell based expression systems also play an important role in biomarker characterisation. Here we have performed a side-by-side comparison of antigen-matched protein targets from an IVTT and purified recombinant system, on the same protein microarray. The magnitude and range of antibody responses to purified recombinants was found to be greater than that of IVTT proteins, and responses between targets from different expression systems did not clearly correlate. However, responses between amino acid sequence-matched targets from each expression system were more closely correlated. Despite the lack of a clear correlation between antigen-matched targets produced in each expression system, our data indicate that protein microarrays produced using either method can be used confidently, in a context dependent manner, though care should be taken when comparing data derived from contrasting approaches

Fully-automated patient-level malaria assessment on field-prepared thin blood film microscopy images, including Supplementary Information

Malaria is a life-threatening disease affecting millions. Microscopy-based assessment of thin blood films is a standard method to (i) determine malaria species and (ii) quantitate high-parasitemia infections. Full automation of malaria microscopy by machine learning (ML) is a challenging task because field-prepared slides vary widely in quality and presentation, and artifacts often heavily outnumber relatively rare parasites. In this work, we describe a complete, fully-automated framework for thin film malaria analysis that applies ML methods, including convolutional neural nets (CNNs), trained on a large and diverse dataset of field-prepared thin blood films. Quantitation and species identification results are close to sufficiently accurate for the concrete needs of drug resistance monitoring and clinical use-cases on field-prepared samples. We focus our methods and our performance metrics on the field use-case requirements. We discuss key issues and important metrics for the application of ML methods to malaria microscopy.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figure

Performance of a fully‐automated system on a WHO malaria microscopy evaluation slide set

Background: Manual microscopy remains a widely-used tool for malaria diagnosis and clinical studies, but it has inconsistent quality in the field due to variability in training and field practices. Automated diagnostic systems based on machine learning hold promise to improve quality and reproducibility of field microscopy. The World Health Organization (WHO) has designed a 55-slide set (WHO 55) for their External Competence Assessment of Malaria Microscopists (ECAMM) programme, which can also serve as a valuable benchmark for automated systems. The performance of a fully-automated malaria diagnostic system, EasyScan GO, on a WHO 55 slide set was evaluated. Methods: The WHO 55 slide set is designed to evaluate microscopist competence in three areas of malaria diagnosis using Giemsa-stained blood films, focused on crucial field needs: malaria parasite detection, malaria parasite species identification (ID), and malaria parasite quantitation. The EasyScan GO is a fully-automated system that combines scanning of Giemsa-stained blood films with assessment algorithms to deliver malaria diagnoses. This system was tested on a WHO 55 slide set. Results: The EasyScan GO achieved 94.3 % detection accuracy, 82.9 % species ID accuracy, and 50 % quantitation accuracy, corresponding to WHO microscopy competence Levels 1, 2, and 1, respectively. This is, to our knowledge, the best performance of a fully-automated system on a WHO 55 set. Conclusions: EasyScan GO’s expert ratings in detection and quantitation on the WHO 55 slide set point towards its potential value in drug efficacy use-cases, as well as in some case management situations with less stringent species ID needs. Improved runtime may enable use in general case management settings

A plasmid locus associated with Klebsiella clinical infections encodes a microbiome-dependent gut fitness factor.

Klebsiella pneumoniae (Kp) is an important cause of healthcare-associated infections, which increases patient morbidity, mortality, and hospitalization costs. Gut colonization by Kp is consistently associated with subsequent Kp disease, and patients are predominantly infected with their colonizing strain. Our previous comparative genomics study, between disease-causing and asymptomatically colonizing Kp isolates, identified a plasmid-encoded tellurite (TeO3-2)-resistance (ter) operon as strongly associated with infection. However, TeO3-2 is extremely rare and toxic to humans. Thus, we used a multidisciplinary approach to determine the biological link between ter and Kp infection. First, we used a genomic and bioinformatic approach to extensively characterize Kp plasmids encoding the ter locus. These plasmids displayed substantial variation in plasmid incompatibility type and gene content. Moreover, the ter operon was genetically independent of other plasmid-encoded virulence and antibiotic resistance loci, both in our original patient cohort and in a large set (n = 88) of publicly available ter operon-encoding Kp plasmids, indicating that the ter operon is likely playing a direct, but yet undescribed role in Kp disease. Next, we employed multiple mouse models of infection and colonization to show that 1) the ter operon is dispensable during bacteremia, 2) the ter operon enhances fitness in the gut, 3) this phenotype is dependent on the colony of origin of mice, and 4) antibiotic disruption of the gut microbiota eliminates the requirement for ter. Furthermore, using 16S rRNA gene sequencing, we show that the ter operon enhances Kp fitness in the gut in the presence of specific indigenous microbiota, including those predicted to produce short chain fatty acids. Finally, administration of exogenous short-chain fatty acids in our mouse model of colonization was sufficient to reduce fitness of a ter mutant. These findings indicate that the ter operon, strongly associated with human infection, encodes factors that resist stress induced by the indigenous gut microbiota during colonization. This work represents a substantial advancement in our molecular understanding of Kp pathogenesis and gut colonization, directly relevant to Kp disease in healthcare settings