Page Length and Methodological Characteristics of Recently Published Doctoral Dissertations in Education

In this methodological review, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of a random sample of 107 education-related doctoral dissertations published in Proquest Dissertations and Theses database in 2011. Seven raters coded each article in terms of page lengths (overall and within each chapter), research method (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods), author gender, and university characteristics (online or traditional). We found that the median education dissertation length was 161 pages long, but those page lengths differed between research methods. The median page lengths of qualitative, mixed method, and quantitative dissertations were 210, 187, and 147 respectively. The median page length of education dissertations from online universities was 44 pages shorter than education dissertations from their traditional counterparts. Contrary to previous research, we found no statistically significant relationship between gender and methods choice

Inference of Relationships in Population Data Using Identity-by-Descent and Identity-by-State

It is an assumption of large, population-based datasets that samples are annotated accurately whether they correspond to known relationships or unrelated individuals. These annotations are key for a broad range of genetics applications. While many methods are available to assess relatedness that involve estimates of identity-by-descent (IBD) and/or identity-by-state (IBS) allele-sharing proportions, we developed a novel approach that estimates IBD0, 1, and 2 based on observed IBS within windows. When combined with genome-wide IBS information, it provides an intuitive and practical graphical approach with the capacity to analyze datasets with thousands of samples without prior information about relatedness between individuals or haplotypes. We applied the method to a commonly used Human Variation Panel consisting of 400 nominally unrelated individuals. Surprisingly, we identified identical, parent-child, and full-sibling relationships and reconstructed pedigrees. In two instances non-sibling pairs of individuals in these pedigrees had unexpected IBD2 levels, as well as multiple regions of homozygosity, implying inbreeding. This combined method allowed us to distinguish related individuals from those having atypical heterozygosity rates and determine which individuals were outliers with respect to their designated population. Additionally, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify distant relatedness using genome-wide IBS methods alone. However, our IBD method further identified distant relatedness between individuals within populations, supported by the presence of megabase-scale regions lacking IBS0 across individual chromosomes. We benchmarked our approach against the hidden Markov model of a leading software package (PLINK), showing improved calling of distantly related individuals, and we validated it using a known pedigree from a clinical study. The application of this approach could improve genome-wide association, linkage, heterozygosity, and other population genomics studies that rely on SNP genotype data

People, Pressures, Progress, and a Plea: Collaboration to Create a STEM Center

Please join us for a report on our journey, the progress and issues encountered as we are attempting to focus our ideas and energies toward a common goal, the development of a STEM center to support our students and to reach out to the community at large. Start with a menagerie of personalities and interests, add even more as we seek to enlarge our task force, and you get a mix that seems overly difficult to meld into a single mindset. And then, after much collaboration on a tentative proposal, we decide to switch gears and seek funding to support the hosting of a conference to bring all the interested parties together, including K-12 educators, local business leaders, and other potential community partners. Our efforts will be summarized, and our goals and issues exposed, all so that we can ask session attendees for their comments and ideas as we continue to try to frame and finish our final proposal

Academic enhancement and retention efforts in mathematics designed to support and promote enhanced STEM education for adult learners at Mercer University

Dr. Charles Roberts and Dr. Greg Baugher of Penfield College of Mercer University have for several years endeavored to support adult college students in beginning mathematics courses in an 8-week format. In order to share their completed and on-going practice and research with all college level STEM educators, they will report on progress in their efforts, which include a dissertational study of the effectiveness of an online mathematics tutorial, a combined peer tutoring and instructor based student assistant program, an extended summer algebra course, a specifically-tailored prerequisite course for introductory statistics, a collaborative effort (with non-STEM faculty) to substantially elevate students’ critical thinking, communication skills and problem solving abilities, and a comprehensive and intrusive summer-fall retention effort to insure that students’ initial academic experiences on campus are both rewarding and highly productive. Demonstrations of these efforts will include cooperative learning participant engagement strategies to facilitate an in-depth awareness of them