The Impact of a Design-Based Engineering Curriculum on High School Biology: Evaluating Academic Achievement and Student Perceptions of Epistemology, Self-Efficacy, and Self-Determination in Life Science

Integration of the engineering design process (EDP) into the high school biology classroom may improve academic achievement, alter epistemological beliefs about learning science, and positively influence student perceptions of science self-efficacy and self-determination. This quasi-experimental research study tested these claims by implementing an EDP curriculum within two honors biology classes (n=36) at an independent high school in a large urban city in the Southeastern United States. Two additional honors biology courses at the school (n=34) were instructed using the department\u27s traditional curricular resources. Achievement data were collected from both groups and compared for statically significant differences using independent t-tests and one-way MANOVA. Students in both groups also participated in Likert-type surveys pre-and post-intervention, evaluating changes in perceptions of scientific confidence, motivation, self-efficacy, self-determination, and epistemological beliefs through paired t-tests. Results of this study showed no significant difference in overall achievement scores or final grade averages between the experimental and control groups, however, students in the experimental group scored significantly higher on all assessment questions that measured higher-order thinking skills, including critical thinking, problem-solving, and application. Analysis of survey results demonstrated that the intervention positively influenced students’ perceptions of all constructs tested, as well as epistemological beliefs about the characteristics of successful students. Together, these data indicate the integration of the engineering design process into the life science classroom should be further explored by teacher leaders for its ability to positively impact educational change within the discipline

Legitimizing Lies

Lies are everywhere today. This scourge of misinformation raises difficult questions about how the law can and should respond to falsehoods. Legal discourse has traditionally focused on the law’s choice between penalizing and tolerating lying. But this traditional framing vastly oversimplifies the law’s actual and potential responses. Using trade secrets as a case study, this Article shows that the law sometimes accepts lies as a legitimate option for fulfilling legal requirements and may even require lies in increasingly common circumstances. Commonly supposed legal and moral commitments against lying do not undermine this reality. To the contrary, the Article reveals that the interplay between lying and the law is much more descriptively and normatively complex than the contemporary discourse generally acknowledges. And it provides support for the law remaining neutral with respect to the normative valence of lying at a time when the main argument favoring neutrality and against an anti-lying perspective—that the remedy for false speech is more speech—has been called into question. Moreover, in legitimizing certain lies, the law takes lying seriously as a dual-use technology, one that can be put to good ends as well as bad. This raises important practical questions about how to lie, legally and morally, with implications in areas ranging from privacy to procedure to professional responsibility. Making this shift, from questions of justification—of when and whether lying is permitted—to questions of practicality, is increasingly urgent in the shadow of mass surveillance. This Article does not answer all questions raised by law’s legitimization of lying, but by reframing the debate, it takes a critical step for clarifying the value of truth and the law’s role in promoting it

Student-Athlete Undergraduate Degree and Career Alignment

Little research has been done on student-athletes after graduation. The question driving this study was do athletes use their degree after graduation in lieu of academic clustering, fraud, emphasis on winning and athletic identity. The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not student-athletes undergraduate degree and career alignment was greater, less, or similar to the average collegiate body. Data was collected from 65 former male student-athletes from a Midwest Division I Mid-Major University over the 2009 through 2015 athletic seasons. Two sports were evaluated, Football (n= 54) and Men’s Basketball (n= 14). Degree fields were determined by Roster and Media Guides found on the institutions athletic website. Various social media tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and other business websites were used to determine the career of each individual. Degree and career alignment was determined by comparing the career to the institutions Career Center, Career Exploration tool, “What can I do with this major” to each individuals degree. This document contains information about the types of areas and employers specific to that major. Results gathered suggests that student-athletes degree and career alignment scores less than the general bachelor degree achieving population. A unique aspect to this study is the focus on the revenue sports of football and men’s basketball

The Uncertain Judge

The intellectually honest judge faces a very serious problem about which little has been said. It is this: What should a judge do when she knows all the relevant facts, laws, and theories of adjudication, but still remains uncertain about what she ought to do? Such occasions will arise, for whatever her preferred theory about how she ought to decide a given case—what I will call her preferred “jurisprudence”— she may harbor lingering doubts that a competing jurisprudence is correct instead. And sometimes, these competing jurisprudences provide conflicting guidance. When that happens, what should she do? Drawing on emerging debates in moral theory, I call this problem the problem of “normative uncertainty.” It is often overlooked because the common answer is that the judge should just swallow her doubts and do what she thinks is right. But that obvious solution turns out to be wrong. Sometimes, she should not follow her preferred jurisprudence, but do what a different jurisprudence suggests instead. Developing a full solution will be difficult, and I do not attempt one here. Instead, I sketch a solution based on the familiar example of expected utility and use it to illustrate why developing a solution to normative uncertainty is considerably more difficult than developing solutions to other kinds of uncertainty. By the end, I hope to have convinced you only that there is a problem and that it is hard. But even without a solution, just seeing the problem will change how you think about judging

Synthesizing Bismuth Nanoparticles

Gold nanoparticles (AuNP) have become the face of modern medicine, with promising future applications as dual-purpose diagnostic and radiation therapy (theragnostic) agents. Contrarily, bismuth nanoparticles (BiNPs) have been proposed as a cost-efficient, biodegradable alternative to AuNPs. However, BiNP research is in its infancy. This proposal aims to develop methods for the size, shape-controlled, and neutral and positively charged synthesis of BiNPs with amphiphilic ligands. Overall, this project is to provide fundamental research into BiNP synthesis with therapeutically valuable ligands and to eventually see how BiNPs interact with biomolecules, as none have been studied with proteins

The Uncertain Judge

The intellectually honest judge faces a very serious problem about which little has been said. It is this: What should a judge do when she knows all the relevant facts, laws, and theories of adjudication, but still remains uncertain about what she ought to do? Such occasions will arise, for whatever her preferred theory about how she ought to decide a given case—what I will call her preferred “jurisprudence”— she may harbor lingering doubts that a competing jurisprudence is correct instead. And sometimes, these competing jurisprudences provide conflicting guidance. When that happens, what should she do? Drawing on emerging debates in moral theory, I call this problem the problem of “normative uncertainty.” It is often overlooked because the common answer is that the judge should just swallow her doubts and do what she thinks is right. But that obvious solution turns out to be wrong. Sometimes, she should not follow her preferred jurisprudence, but do what a different jurisprudence suggests instead. Developing a full solution will be difficult, and I do not attempt one here. Instead, I sketch a solution based on the familiar example of expected utility and use it to illustrate why developing a solution to normative uncertainty is considerably more difficult than developing solutions to other kinds of uncertainty. By the end, I hope to have convinced you only that there is a problem and that it is hard. But even without a solution, just seeing the problem will change how you think about judging

Whole genome metagenomic analysis of the gut microbiome of differently fed infants identifies differences in microbial composition and functional genes, including an absent CRISPR/Cas9 gene in the formula-fed cohort

Background: Advancements in sequencing capabilities have enhanced the study of the human microbiome. There are limited studies focused on the gastro-intestinal (gut) microbiome of infants, particularly the impact of diet between breast-fed (BF) versus formula-fed (FF). It is unclear what effect, if any, early feeding has on short- term or long-term composition and function of the gut microbiome. Results: Using a shotgun metagenomics approach, differences in the gut microbiome between BF (n = 10) and FF (n = 5) infants were detected. A Jaccard distance principle coordinate analysis was able to cluster BF versus FF infants based on the presence or absence of species identified in their gut microbiome. Thirty-two genera were identified as statistically different in the gut microbiome sequenced between BF and FF infants. Furthermore, the computational workflow identified 371 bacterial genes that were statistically different between the BF and FF cohorts in abundance. Only seven genes were lower in abundance (or absent) in the FF cohort compared to the BF cohort, including CRISPR/Cas9; whereas, the remaining candidates, including autotransporter adhesins, were higher in abundance in the FF cohort compared to BF cohort. Conclusions: These studies demonstrated that FF infants have, at an early age, a significantly different gut microbiome with potential implications for function of the fecal microbiota. Interactions between the fecal microbiota and host hinted at here have been linked to numerous diseases. Determining whether these non- abundant or more abundant genes have biological consequence related to infant feeding may aid in under- standing the adult gut microbiome, and the pathogenesis of obesity