79 research outputs found

    Families, culture and supervision

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    The accommodation of contested identities: The impact of participation in a practice-based Masters Programme on Beginning Teachers’ professional identity and sense of agency.

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    Abstract Teachers’ professional training and development has been the focus of intense academic and political debate. This paper contributes to this by considering Beginning Teachers’ (BTs’) self-views of their professional identity. The findings are derived from a mixed methods study with questionnaires (n=886) and focus groups and interviews (n= 60) with BTs in Wales. Drawing on a socio-cultural approach, the findings illustrate how BTs’ integration of competing professional identities bolstered their sense of professional agency. These findings have salience within a policy context where both teacher education and professional development are increasingly aligned with the narrow organizational objectives of the school. Keywords: teacher professionalism; sociology of professions; socio-cultural theory; Beginning Teachers; professional development; professional identity; teacher agency

    Developing the capacity to support beginning teachers in Wales: Lessons learnt from the Masters in Educational Practice

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    One of the key requirements for any system level reform to be effective is to ensure that ‘at the point of delivery’ the necessary capacity is available to those responsible for its implementation (Mourshed, 2010; Robinson et al., 2011). The Masters in Educational Practice (MEP) was a key element of the Welsh Government’s strategy for professional development and school improvement. The paper does not seek to evaluate the MEP programme’s effectiveness (forthcoming) but, instead, considers its design and ‘enactment’ (Ball, Maguire & Braun, 2012). The paper approached the issues of the enactment of the MEP: how the programme was shaped by the interaction of individual and collective agency in overlapping contexts, from the theoretical perspective of capacity building at a system level (Hadfield and Chapman, 2009). The analytical focus of the paper is on the nature of the temporary intermediate organisation (Asheim, 2002) constructed to lead the implementation of the MEP and the challenges it faced in accessing, cohering and aligning sufficient capacity from within, and external to, the Welsh education system

    Image analysis as an adjunct to manual HER-2 immunohistochemical review: a diagnostic tool to standardize interpretation

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    Dobson L, Conway C, Hanley A, Johnson A, Costello S, O’Grady A, Connolly Y, Magee H, O’Shea D, Jeffers M & Kay E (2010) Histopathology57, 27–38 Image analysis as an adjunct to manual HER-2 immunohistochemical review: a diagnostic tool to standardize interpretatio

    An Integrated Mass-Spectrometry Pipeline Identifies Novel Protein Coding-Regions in the Human Genome

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    Background: Most protein mass spectrometry (MS) experiments rely on searches against a database of known or predicted proteins, limiting their ability as a gene discovery tool.Results: Using a search against an in silico translation of the entire human genome, combined with a series of annotation filters, we identified 346 putative novel peptides [False Discovery Rate (FDR), <5%] in a MS dataset derived from two human breast epithelial cell lines. A subset of these were then successfully validated by a different MS technique. Two of these correspond to novel isoforms of Heterogeneous Ribonuclear Proteins, while the rest correspond to novel loci.Conclusions: MS technology can be used for ab initio gene discovery in human data, which, since it is based on different underlying assumptions, identifies protein-coding genes not found by other techniques. As MS technology continues to evolve, such approaches will become increasingly powerful

    Let’s not forget tautomers

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    A compound exhibits tautomerism if it can be represented by two structures that are related by an intramolecular movement of hydrogen from one atom to another. The different tautomers of a molecule usually have different molecular fingerprints, hydrophobicities and pKa’s as well as different 3D shape and electrostatic properties; additionally, proteins frequently preferentially bind a tautomer that is present in low abundance in water. As a result, the proper treatment of molecules that can tautomerize, ~25% of a database, is a challenge for every aspect of computer-aided molecular design. Library design that focuses on molecular similarity or diversity might inadvertently include similar molecules that happen to be encoded as different tautomers. Physical property measurements might not establish the properties of individual tautomers with the result that algorithms based on these measurements may be less accurate for molecules that can tautomerize—this problem influences the accuracy of filtering for library design and also traditional QSAR. Any 2D or 3D QSAR analysis must involve the decision of if or how to adjust the observed Ki or IC50 for the tautomerization equilibria. QSARs and recursive partitioning methods also involve the decision as to which tautomer(s) to use to calculate the molecular descriptors. Docking virtual screening must involve the decision as to which tautomers to include in the docking and how to account for tautomerization in the scoring. All of these decisions are more difficult because there is no extensive database of measured tautomeric ratios in both water and non-aqueous solvents and there is no consensus as to the best computational method to calculate tautomeric ratios in different environments

    The phenotype of floating-harbor syndrome:clinical characterization of 52 individuals with mutations in exon 34 of SRCAP

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    Background\ud Floating-Harbor syndrome (FHS) is a rare condition characterized by short stature, delays in expressive language, and a distinctive facial appearance. Recently, heterozygous truncating mutations in SRCAP were determined to be disease-causing. With the availability of a DNA based confirmatory test, we set forth to define the clinical features of this syndrome.\ud \ud Methods and results\ud Clinical information on fifty-two individuals with SRCAP mutations was collected using standardized questionnaires. Twenty-four males and twenty-eight females were studied with ages ranging from 2 to 52 years. The facial phenotype and expressive language impairments were defining features within the group. Height measurements were typically between minus two and minus four standard deviations, with occipitofrontal circumferences usually within the average range. Thirty-three of the subjects (63%) had at least one major anomaly requiring medical intervention. We did not observe any specific phenotype-genotype correlations.\ud \ud Conclusions\ud This large cohort of individuals with molecularly confirmed FHS has allowed us to better delineate the clinical features of this rare but classic genetic syndrome, thereby facilitating the development of management protocols.The authors would like to thank the families for their cooperation and permission to publish these findings. SdM would like to thank Barto Otten. Funding was provided by the Government of Canada through Genome Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Ontario Genomics Institute (OGI-049), by Genome Québec and Genome British Columbia, and the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research at Children’s Hospital Boston. KMB is supported by a Clinical Investigatorship Award from the CIHR Institute of Genetics. AD is supported by NIH grant K23HD073351. BBAdV and HGB were financially supported by the AnEUploidy project (LSHG-CT-2006-37627). This work was selected for study by the FORGE Canada Steering Committee, which consists of K. Boycott (University of Ottawa), J. Friedman (University of British Columbia), J. Michaud (University of Montreal), F. Bernier (University of Calgary), M. Brudno (University of Toronto), B. Fernandez (Memorial University), B. Knoppers (McGill University), M. Samuels (Université de Montréal), and S. Scherer (University of Toronto). We thank the Galliera Genetic Bank - “Telethon Genetic Biobank Network” supported by Italian Telethon grants (project no. GTB07001) for providing us with specimens

    Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

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    The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead
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