DBAE and CLAE: Relevance for Minority and Multicultural Students

The importance of art programming which reflects, and is responsive to the diverse needs of students in a multicultural society is examined. It is argued that the DBAE fails to consider the increasing diversity among the population of our schools in the prescription of standardized and achievement oriented curricula. It is further claimed that CLAE offers an alternative to DBAE which promotes sensitivity to the cultural make-up of our classrooms

The Pervasiveness of Culture: Significance for Art Education

Much of what we learn, we are not aware of -- it is at a taken-for-granted level. This learning is so embedded in our thinking and behavior that even as educators we are often unable to work with or examine these cultural beliefs and assumptions in our teaching and social interactions. In this paper, it is proposed that art educators identify the pervasiveness of culture particularly within educational settings and how cultural attitudes related to art are internalized with in society and affect the teaching/learning process

Introducing a Writing Skills Intervention into an Undergraduate Financial Accounting Course

This paper describes how integrating a research project into an undergraduate business school core accounting course provides opportunities to develop critical writing skills while reinforcing ethics as part of the business school curriculum. The paper discusses an end-to-end process from the overall goals and details of the assignment to assess student skills. After researching an ethical topic in business, students are challenged to complete a research paper examining the issue and stating and supporting their opinion and views of the issue. While writing courses or assignments are not unusual in business program, the unique approach described in this paper includes an intervention early in the student’s academic career and a summary of the measurable learning outcomes and criteria for meeting performance expectations. The program addresses the both the instructional tools used for the assignment and assurance of learning for faculty interested in implementing a similar program

Modelling students' effort using behavioral data

International audienceStudents' effort is often considered a key factor for students' success. It has several related definitions, none of which is widely adopted. In this paper, we define students' effort as the experienced cognitive load, which is the total amount of cognitive resources used during the execution of a given task. We propose an effort model to quantify students' effort based on this construct. Our approach uses behavioral measures (i.e., interaction and eye gaze data). Our preliminary results show that the eye gaze measures have an intermediary relationship with effort, while the interaction measures have a weak relationship with effort and seem slightly complementary to eye gaze measures

Reciprocal mentoring across generations: sustaining professional development for english teachers

This article draws on a collaborative research project entitled Teachers Investigate Unequal Literacy Outcomes: Cross-generational Perspectives, funded by the Australian Research Council 2002-2004 and awarded to Barbara Comber, University of South Australia and Barbara Kamler, Deakin University. The university researchers invited early career teachers in their first five years of teaching, and late career teachers with at least twenty-five years experience, to collaboratively explore the problem of unequal outcomes in literacy. Over a period of three years, the teacher researchers conducted audits of their classroom literacy programs and the effects on different children; case studies of students they were most concerned about; and redesigns of their literacy curriculum and pedagogy.&nbsp; Bev Maney and Ivan Boyer collaborated as research partners in the context of their work together as English teachers at Portland Secondary College, Victoria. This paper is based on transcripts of their many conversations with one other and the research team and is represented as an interrupted conversation with the university researchers. Here they critique current models of professional development and the effects of standardised testing and argue for the importance of serious teacher conversations and ongoing school-based research.<br /

Dust Production and Mass Loss in the Galactic Globular Cluster NGC 362

We investigate dust production and stellar mass loss in the Galactic globular cluster NGC 362. Due to its close proximity to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), NGC 362 was imaged with the IRAC and MIPS cameras onboard the Spitzer Space Telescope as part of the Surveying the Agents of Galaxy Evolution (SAGE-SMC) Spitzer Legacy program. We detect several cluster members near the tip of the Red Giant Branch that exhibit infrared excesses indicative of circumstellar dust and find that dust is not present in measurable quantities in stars below the tip of the Red Giant Branch. We modeled the spectral energy distribution (SED) of the stars with the strongest IR excess and find a total cluster dust mass-loss rate of 3.0(+2.0/-1.2) x 10^-9 solar masses per year, corresponding to a gas mass-loss rate of 8.6(+5.6/-3.4) x 10^-6 solar masses per year, assuming [Fe/H] = -1.16. This mass loss is in addition to any dust-less mass loss that is certainly occurring within the cluster. The two most extreme stars, variables V2 and V16, contribute up to 45% of the total cluster dust-traced mass loss. The SEDs of the more moderate stars indicate the presence of silicate dust, as expected for low-mass, low-metallicity stars. Surprisingly, the SED shapes of the stars with the strongest mass-loss rates appear to require the presence of amorphous carbon dust, possibly in combination with silicate dust, despite their oxygen-rich nature. These results corroborate our previous findings in omega Centauri.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures. Accepted to Ap

Building a student effort dataset: what can we learn from behavioral and physiological data

International audienceDecades of studies have shown that student's success is strongly dependent on their effort. Recently, this concept made its way into the domain of Learning Analytics. One of the major difficulties of these works is to correctly define the effort and to find relevant means of measuring it. Our approach is based on the Cognitive Load Theory, which provides a theoretical background issued from Learning Sciences, desired by the Learning Analytics domain. The cognitive load is a multidimensional construct that represents the load that performing a given task imposes on the cognitive system, and is often considered by researchers as being equivalent to mental effort. The cognitive load has long been studied in educational sciences, and several types of measures have been proposed that can be classified into four categories: (1) subjective measures, i.e., students' perceived effort, (2) performance measures, e.g., the outcome of student work assessments, (3) physiological measures, such as pupil dilation and heart rate, and (4) behavioral measures, such as points of fixations, and keyboard and mouse usage. In an exploratory work, we proposed a new cognitive load measurement model based on behavioral data. Our data consisted in keyboard and mouse usage, as well as page views and fixation points from an eye tracker, and were collected in the context of an online Esperanto course. Our results showed that eye tracking data provided a better indication of effort than keyboard, mouse and page view data, and that a slight complementarity exists between these two types of information. In the same spirit, Larmuseau et al. (2019) investigated the correlation between the cognitive load and two physiological measures from smart watches: skin conductance and skin temperature. The participants were future school teachers taking a course as part of their training. One of their main findings is a moderate correlation between effort and skin conductance. However, both these last approaches are preliminary and only focused on small samples (less than 20 participants)

Narrations and practices of mobility and immobility in the maintenance of gender dualisms

This paper analyses the role of practices and representations of mobility in supporting particular kinds of gender orders. While scholarship has shown the various ways women are materially and symbolically ‘fixed’ in place, less attention has been paid to how discourses and practices of mobility interface with systems of gender differentiation more broadly. This work is based on a robust empirical base of 55 interviews, 90 hours of participant observation and an analysis of museum displays in Kalgoorile, Western Australia, an iconic frontier mining town selected for this investigation as a site of strongly bifurcated gender discourses. Analysing our field data through the lens of feminist theory which problematizes gender binaries (Braidotti 2002; Coole and Frost 2010; Haraway 1991), we argue that while some narrations of gender mobilities serve to reinforce gender binaries, lived practices of movement can also destabilise (idealised) notions of gendered movement. This paper extends conceptual work by advancing understanding about the role of mobility within systems of gender differentiation, showing how lived practices of mobility are just as likely to challenge idealised patterns of gendered movement as they are to reinforce these patterns

Identifying Young Stellar Objects in the Outer Galaxy: l = 224 deg Region in Canis Major

We study a very young star-forming region in the outer Galaxy that is the most concentrated source of outflows in the Spitzer Space Telescope GLIMPSE360 survey. This region, dubbed CMa-l224, is located in the Canis Major OB1 association. CMa-l224 is relatively faint in the mid-infrared, but it shines brightly at the far-infrared wavelengths as revealed by the Herschel Space Observatory data from the Hi-GAL survey. Using the 3.6 and 4.5 $\mu$m data from the Spitzer/GLIMPSE360 survey, combined with the JHK$_s$ 2MASS and the 70-500 $\mu$m Herschel/Hi-GAL data, we develop a young stellar object (YSO) selection criteria based on color-color cuts and fitting of the YSO candidates' spectral energy distributions with YSO 2D radiative transfer models. We identify 293 YSO candidates and estimate physical parameters for 210 sources well-fit with YSO models. We select an additional 47 sources with GLIMPSE360-only photometry as `possible YSO candidates'. The vast majority of these sources are associated with high H$_2$ column density regions and are good targets for follow-up studies. The distribution of YSO candidates at different evolutionary stages with respect to Herschel filaments supports the idea that stars are formed in the filaments and become more dispersed with time. Both the supernova-induced and spontaneous star formation scenarios are plausible in the environmental context of CMa-l224. However, our results indicate that a spontaneous gravitational collapse of filaments is a more likely scenario. The methods developed for CMa-l224 can be used for larger regions in the Galactic plane where the same set of photometry is available.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series; 54 pages including appendice

Sumoylation delays the ATF7 transcription factor subcellular localization and inhibits its transcriptional activity

Over the past few years, small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) modification has emerged as an important regulator of diverse pathways and activities including protein localization and transcriptional regulation. We identified a consensus sumoylation motif (IKEE), located within the N-terminal activation domain of the ATF7 transcription factor and thus investigated the role of this modification. ATF7 is a ubiquitously expressed transcription factor, homologous to ATF2, that binds to CRE elements within specific promoters. This protein is able to heterodimerize with Jun or Fos proteins and its transcriptional activity is mediated by interaction with TAF12, a subunit of the general transcription factor TFIID. In the present article, we demonstrate that ATF7 is sumoylated in vitro (using RanBP2 as a E3-specific ligase) and in vivo. Moreover, we show that ATF7 sumoylation affects its intranuclear localization by delaying its entry into the nucleus. Furthermore, SUMO conjugation inhibits ATF7 transactivation activity by (i) impairing its association with TAF12 and (ii) blocking its binding-to-specific sequences within target promoters