Preparing for Employment: On the Home Front

Work-based learning during the school years leads to better postschool employment outcomes (Hughes, Moore, & Bailey, 1999). Volunteer experiences and unpaid internships, in addition to paid employment, can be steppingstones to future employment. Youth and their families need not rely solely on school programs to pursue such opportunities. They can do much on their own to launch the youth's career search. Recent studies demonstrate the effectiveness of using personal networks as a job search strategy (Timmons, Hamner, & Boes, 2003), and highlight the fact that families make key contributions to successful employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities (26th Institute on Rehabilitation Issues, 2000).There are creative ways to combine community relationships, a young person's interests, and family or personal networks to help a young person effectively explore work-based learning outside of school settings. Parents may seek opportunities through co-workers, relatives, and neighbors. Moreover, parents often know their children better than professionals do and can help their sons and daughters explore their unique abilities, strengths, and interests -- all of which may lead to an appropriate career path

The Ups and Downs in Women's Employment: Shifting Composition or Behavior from 1970 to 2010?

This paper tracks factors contributing to the ups and downs in women’s employment from 1970 to 2010 using regression decompositions focusing on whether changes are due to shifts in the means (composition of women) or due to shifts in coefficients (inclinations of women to work for pay). Compositional shifts in education exerted a positive effect on women’s employment across all decades, while shifts in the composition of other family income, particularly at the highest deciles, depressed married women’s employment over the 1990s contributing to the slowdown in this decade. A positive coefficient effect of education was found in all decades, except the 1990s, when the effect was negative, depressing women’s employment. Further, positive coefficient results for other family income at the highest deciles bolstered married women’s employment over the 1990s. Models are run separately for married and single women demonstrating the varying results of other family income by marital status. This research was supported in part by an Upjohn Institute Early Career Research Award

Universal Design for Learning and the Transition to a More Challenging Academic Curriculum: Making it in Middle School and Beyond (NCSET Parent Brief)

A brief describing universal design, a process for creating environments that support the learning of students with diverse abilities, styles, and needs. In universal design, versatility is built into the environment from the start. Further resources are also provided. Produced by PACER Center in collaboration with the Institute's National Center on Secondary Education and Transition (NCSET).This report was supported in whole or in part by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, (Cooperative Agreement No. H326J000005). Although the U.S. Department of Education has reviewed this document for consistency with the IDEA, the contents of this document do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Department of Education, nor does mention of other organizations imply endorsement by those organizations or the U.S. Government

Noncanonical outcomes of break-induced replication produce complex, extremely long-tract gene conversion events in yeast

Long-tract gene conversions (LTGC) can result from the repair of collapsed replication forks, and several mechanisms have been proposed to explain how the repair process produces this outcome. We studied LTGC events produced from repair collapsed forks at yeast fragile site FS2. Our analysis included chromosome sizing by contour-clamped homogeneous electric field electrophoresis, next-generation whole-genome sequencing, and Sanger sequencing across repair event junctions. We compared the sequence and structure of LTGC events in our cells to the expected qualities of LTGC events generated by proposed mechanisms. Our evidence indicates that some LTGC events arise from half-crossover during BIR, some LTGC events arise from gap repair, and some LTGC events can be explained by either gap repair or “late” template switch during BIR. Also based on our data, we propose that models of collapsed replication forks be revised to show not a one-end double-strand break (DSB), but rather a two-end DSB in which the ends are separated in time and subject to gap repair

The ‘Tea Test’ - A mobile phone based spectrophotometer protocol to introduce biochemical methods independent of the laboratory

Providing hands-on practical education without access to laboratories during the Covid-19 pandemic has required creativity and innovation. In this paper, co-authored by academic staff and students, we describe an at-home mobile phone based ‘spectrophotometer’ experiment used in an introductory undergraduate biology course. Using colour picker apps, a smartphone can be used to quantify concentration, which we used to compare the strengths of different brands of tea. The protocol is designed to be low-cost and safe to perform outside of a laboratory. It teaches students important biochemical methods such as preparing dilutions, constructing calibration curves, normalising data and testing a hypothesis. We reflect on the experience of developing and using the protocol from a staff and student perspective, which highlights the advantages of this approach in terms of student independence and inclusivity. We also suggest alternative experiments that could be performed using the protocol. We encourage biology educators to think creatively about the possibilities for using mobile phones or at-home experiments in their teaching. Our experience suggests that at-home experiments like this protocol will have value even after the pandemic is over, particularly in terms of inclusivity