Diagnostic Effects of an Early Mastery Activity in College Algebra and Precalculus

The purpose of this study was to investigate implementation of an early intervention mastery activity during the first two weeks of college algebra and precalculus courses at a large U.S. public university. Statistical modeling of (N = 935) students’ performance in the courses, including a logistic regression model of pass/fail course achievement with students’ high school rank, ACT Mathematics scores, and performance on the intervention as explanatory variables, suggested significant independent differences in course performance across performance levels on the early mastery activity. An evaluation of diagnostic validity for the model yielded a 19% false negative rate (predicted to fail the course, but passed) and a 7% false positive rate (students predicted to pass the course, but failed), suggesting the early mastery activity, when combined with admissions indicators of mathematics readiness, may be useful in better identifying students at risk of failing their first university mathematics course. This strategy, which also yields information for focused intervention efforts, is currently being explored through a campus-wide advising tool at the research site

Diagnostic Effects of an Early Mastery Activity in College Algebra and Precalculus

The purpose of this study was to investigate implementation of an early intervention mastery activity during the first two weeks of college algebra and precalculus courses at a large U.S. public university. Statistical modeling of (N = 935) students’ performance in the courses, including a logistic regression model of pass/fail course achievement with students’ high school rank, ACT Mathematics scores, and performance on the intervention as explanatory variables, suggested significant independent differences in course performance across performance levels on the early mastery activity. An evaluation of diagnostic validity for the model yielded a 19% false negative rate (predicted to fail the course, but passed) and a 7% false positive rate (students predicted to pass the course, but failed), suggesting the early mastery activity, when combined with admissions indicators of mathematics readiness, may be useful in better identifying students at risk of failing their first university mathematics course. This strategy, which also yields information for focused intervention efforts, is currently being explored through a campus-wide advising tool at the research site

Improving Middle Grades STEM Teacher Content Knowledge and Pedagogical Practices Through a School-University Partnership

This paper outlines a University-School District partnership with the intent to increase the number of middle grades mathematics and science teachers. This externally funded initiative includes onsite, authentically situated professional development for pre- and in-service teachers at three different urban, low-socioeconomic schools with a majority Hispanic population of students. Program objectives include increasing mathematics and science content knowledge, increasing self-efficacy in teaching math and science, building and incorporating a success-driven school culture and infrastructure to increase student performance in a well-articulated, scalable and transformable model. Program components include site based common planning times, STEM Thursdays where science and mathematics lessons are practiced and refined, authentic summer research opportunities for pre- and in-service teachers to work with scientists and university faculty, teacher certification workshops and a mentoring model that includes program graduates and pre-service teachers. First year results show that the program had a positive impact on the teachers’ self-efficacy and outcome expectancy as their scores significantly increased after participation in the project. Key elements in the model included (1) a strong partnership between a school district and institution of higher education, (2) a unique collaboration between mathematics and science educators and scientists, pre-and in-service teachers, (3) a professional development and mentoring program designed around the school district’s adopted course of study and the NSES, (4) the integration of community resources, (5) a partnership with preservice and inservice teachers and district administrators with science and mathematics higher education faculty, (6) the development of teacher leaders, and (7) a comprehensive evaluation program

Diagnostic Effects of an Early Mastery Activity in College Algebra and Precalculus

The purpose of this study was to investigate implementation of an early intervention mastery activity during the first two weeks of college algebra and precalculus courses at a large U.S. public university. Statistical modeling of (N = 935) students’ performance in the courses, including a logistic regression model of pass/fail course achievement with students’ high school rank, ACT Mathematics scores, and performance on the intervention as explanatory variables, suggested significant independent differences in course performance across performance levels on the early mastery activity. An evaluation of diagnostic validity for the model yielded a 19% false negative rate (predicted to fail the course, but passed) and a 7% false positive rate (students predicted to pass the course, but failed), suggesting the early mastery activity, when combined with admissions indicators of mathematics readiness, may be useful in better identifying students at risk of failing their first university mathematics course. This strategy, which also yields information for focused intervention efforts, is currently being explored through a campus-wide advising tool at the research site

Reclaiming Vacant Houses & Preventing Foreclosure: Lessons from LISCs New York State Vacants Initiative

The housing instability caused by COVID has continued into 2022, even as foreclosure moratoria end at federal and state levels around the country. This report, Reclaiming Vacant Houses & Preventing Foreclosure: Lessons from LISC's New York State Vacants Initiative, a collaboration of LISC and the Urban Institute, provides lessons and evidence of outcomes of a path-breaking law and LISC initiative in reducing vacant houses and preventing foreclosures in jurisdictions across New York State

Statistics as Unbiased Estimators: Exploring the Teaching of Standard Deviation

This manuscript presents findings from a study about the knowledge for and planned teaching of standard deviation. We investigate how understanding variance as an unbiased (inferential) estimator – not just a descriptive statistic for the variation (spread) in data – is related to teachers’ instruction regarding standard deviation, particularly around the issue of division by n-1. In this regard, the study contributes to our understanding about how knowledge of mathematics beyond the current instructional level, what we refer to as nonlocal mathematics, becomes important for teaching. The findings indicate that acquired knowledge of nonlocal mathematics can play a role in altering teachers’ planned instructional approaches in terms of student activity and cognitive demand in their instruction

Secondary Mathematics Teachers’ Planned Approaches For Teaching Standard Deviation

Research-based guidelines for learning variation exist (e.g., Franklin et al., 2007; Garfield, delMas, & Chance, 2007), but little is known about how teachers plan to teach standard deviation, or how these plans align with recent recommendations. In this article, we survey lesson plans designed by inservice and preservice secondary mathematical teachers. We report on the accuracy, technology usage, and visual representations in the lesson plans. We consider how many elements are used, the level of conceptual development, and the mathematical nature. Findings support differences between preservice and master’s level students in education, as well as a tendency by in-service teachers to teach in alignment with prior learning experiences, despite professional development. Implications for teacher education and curricular development are offered

Using Literature to Engage Students Mathematically

In this article, the authors share two lessons that incorporate children’s literature with the Pythagorean theorem and area to engage preservice teachers (PSTs) mathematically. Sample responses, example texts, and future work are discussed

Glucose transporter-1 deficiency syndrome: the expanding clinical and genetic spectrum of a treatable disorder

Glucose transporter-1 deficiency syndrome is caused by mutations in the SLC2A1 gene in the majority of patients and results in impaired glucose transport into the brain. From 2004-2008, 132 requests for mutational analysis of the SLC2A1 gene were studied by automated Sanger sequencing and multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification. Mutations in the SLC2A1 gene were detected in 54 patients (41%) and subsequently in three clinically affected family members. In these 57 patients we identified 49 different mutations, including six multiple exon deletions, six known mutations and 37 novel mutations (13 missense, five nonsense, 13 frame shift, four splice site and two translation initiation mutations). Clinical data were retrospectively collected from referring physicians by means of a questionnaire. Three different phenotypes were recognized: (i) the classical phenotype (84%), subdivided into early-onset (<2 years) (65%) and late-onset (18%); (ii) a non-classical phenotype, with mental retardation and movement disorder, without epilepsy (15%); and (iii) one adult case of glucose transporter-1 deficiency syndrome with minimal symptoms. Recognizing glucose transporter-1 deficiency syndrome is important, since a ketogenic diet was effective in most of the patients with epilepsy (86%) and also reduced movement disorders in 48% of the patients with a classical phenotype and 71% of the patients with a non-classical phenotype. The average delay in diagnosing classical glucose transporter-1 deficiency syndrome was 6.6 years (range 1 month-16 years). Cerebrospinal fluid glucose was below 2.5 mmol/l (range 0.9-2.4 mmol/l) in all patients and cerebrospinal fluid : blood glucose ratio was below 0.50 in all but one patient (range 0.19-0.52). Cerebrospinal fluid lactate was low to normal in all patients. Our relatively large series of 57 patients with glucose transporter-1 deficiency syndrome allowed us to identify correlations between genotype, phenotype and biochemical data. Type of mutation was related to the severity of mental retardation and the presence of complex movement disorders. Cerebrospinal fluid : blood glucose ratio was related to type of mutation and phenotype. In conclusion, a substantial number of the patients with glucose transporter-1 deficiency syndrome do not have epilepsy. Our study demonstrates that a lumbar puncture provides the diagnostic clue to glucose transporter-1 deficiency syndrome and can thereby dramatically reduce diagnostic delay to allow early start of the ketogenic die

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe