B495: Breakfasts of Maine Teen-Agers

This study was undertaken to determine the nutritive value of the breakfasts of Maine teenagers and the contribution of the breakfasts to their day\u27s food intake.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/aes_bulletin/1080/thumbnail.jp

Earth rotation and core topography

The NASA Geodynamics program has as one of its missions highly accurate monitoring of polar motion, including changes in length of day (LOD). These observations place fundamental constraints on processes occurring in the atmosphere, in the mantle, and in the core of the planet. Short-timescale (t less than or approx 1 yr) variations in LOD are mainly the result of interaction between the atmosphere and the solid earth, while variations in LOD on decade timescales result from the exchange of angular momentum between the mantle and the fluid core. One mechanism for this exchange of angular momentum is through topographic coupling between pressure variations associated with flow in the core interacting with topography at the core-mantel boundary (CMB). Work done under another NASA grant addressing the origin of long-wavelength geoid anomalies as well as evidence from seismology, resulted in several models of CMB topography. The purpose of work supported by NAG5-819 was to study further the problem of CMB topography, using geodesy, fluid mechanics, geomagnetics, and seismology. This is a final report

NURSE-DELIVERED SHOE-LACING INTERVENTION: EFFECT ON COMFORT AND TOE PRESSURES FOR ACTIVE COMMUNITY-DWELLING ADULTS (AGE 65+)

Significance: Problems with shoe fit are endemic, affect gait and balance and lead to falls. Falls are physically, emotionally, and economically costly. Low-cost, easily implemented interventions, that reduce pain and improve balance meet the “triple aim” of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Purpose: Evaluate the impact on community-dwelling adults (65+) of two nursing interventions involving foot repositioning and shoe relacing. Outcome measures: Toe pressures, experiences of pain and comfort. Method: Repeated-measures, mixed-methods lab-based study. Walk #1 Control. Intervention #1, participant’s heel secured to back of shoe, the participant’s chosen lacing pattern snugged. Intervention #2, heel secured to back of shoe, specific lacing pattern snugged. Results: 19 participants, aged 65-91(Av 74.7), 14 women, 5 men. When the participant’s heel was secured to back of shoe, and their chosen lacing was snugged (Intervention #1), there were 129/190 (68%) decreases in average peak toe pressures and 57% (11/19) stated there was an improvement in comfort. When the heel was secured to back of shoe, and a specific lacing pattern snugged. (Intervention #2) there were 148/190 (78%) decreases in average toe pressures and 133/190 (70%) decreases of Intervention #2 over Intervention #1. 63% (12/19) experienced greater comfort over Intervention #1. Orders of magnitude of the changes varied. ANOVA and two sample t-tests resulted in statistical significance on the 2nd and 4th left toes. This study was fueled by observations of nurses operating in the field doing foot care, who are trying to enhance mobility and quality of life for older people desiring to remain in their communities. The strength is the simplicity of the intervention and the focus on older adults and combination of qualitative and quantitative data that offset many of the weaknesses of each method. Limitations of this study were the sample was small, not diverse and the lab based nature of this study excluded those less able who are make up a large segment of the older adult population. Conclusion: Results supported the initial hypotheses that changing the foot position in a shoe and the lacing pattern can positively impact experiences of comfort/pain and reduce toe pressures

Sixty original plays for primary grades

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Growing Into Inquiry: Stories of Secondary School Teachers Using Inquiry for Themselves and Their Students

This study examines cases of teacher leaders in a professional development program that employed teacher inquiry to promote student inquiry. Program documents, observations, and interviews were examined to create three cases of high school science and math teachers learning to inquire in tandem. Guided by Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (2009) “inquiry stance,” the study shows how commitment to student inquiry comes through learning gained through teacher inquiry. While conceptual understandings of teacher and student inquiry reinforced the learning of both, the parallel development of practical skills for both inquiry processes was not observed. Such conceptual growth was neither steady nor linear and characterized by some backward movement followed by significant shifts in thinking. Growth was grounded in increased experience with the process over time that deepened the teachers’ trust in their students’ ability to create their own knowledge – an understanding of the learning process that was made more visible by the program’s requirements for teachers to evaluate student inquiry as a focus of their teacher inquiry. The study confirms the need for ongoing professional development in the more complex forms of student learning embedded in newer national standards while suggesting that approaches towards professional learning must holds similar high expectations for teachers and attention to the equally complex learning required of teachers if we truly aim to create such possibilities for student learning at higher levels

Partnerships in Service Learning and Civic Engagement

Developing campus-community partnerships is a core element of well-designed and effective civic engagement, including service learning and participatory action research. A structural model, SOFAR, is presented that differentiates campus into administrators, faculty, and students, and that differentiates community into organizational staff and residents (or clients, consumers, advocates). Partnerships are presented as being a subset of relationships between persons. The quality of these dyadic relationships is analyzed in terms of the degree to which the interactions possess closeness, equity, and integrity, and the degree to which the outcomes of those interactions are exploitive, transactional, or transformational. Implications are then offered for how this analysis can improve practice and research

The developmental assessment of deaf children using the development assessment of young children and the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (third edition).

The various aspects of early childhood development are closely interwoven, and thus a delay in any area of development may impact other areas of development. For young deaf or hard-of-hearing children, a difficulty in communication may potentially result in delays in other areas of development, namely cognitive, motor, social-emotional and adaptive behaviour. Early intervention programmes, such as HI HOPES, thus need to conduct regular holistic developmental assessments on children in the programmes to pinpoint areas of weakness so that these can be purposefully addressed so that the child may reach their developmental potential. Two such assessments are the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development – Third Edition (BSID) and the Developmental Assessment of Young Children (DAYC). HI HOPES had been utilizing the BSID, but hoped to substitute it with the DAYC in the hopes that it would better meet their assessment needs. This research study examines the use, advantages and disadvantages of both of these developmental meausres within the HI HOPES context, in order to determine whether they meet the programme’s needs. This was achieved through a series of individual interviews with the Parent Advisors, which considered various aspects of these assessments. Further, the researcher investigated whether the DAYC would be a suitable substitute for the BSID by determining whether the two measures produce similar results for the same group of young deaf children through running correlations and matched-pairs statistical tests. Both the DAYC and the BSID were seen to elicit valuable, detailed information that provides guidance for HI HOPES, and thus perceived to useful and applicable for HI HOPES. Finally, it was found that the DAYC could serve as a suitable substitute of the BSID when used with deaf in infants and children, although there was variability in what the Social-Emotional and Adaptive Behaviour scales measured as they were not subject to objective scoring procedures