Yes, You Can!: Course Collaboration for a Richer Learning Experience and Institutional Change

poster abstractThe authors’ poster will report on their collaboration efforts, using experiential learning to enrich their respective curriculums and their respective students’ learning experiences. This collaboration is a major step towards effecting critically needed institutional change. For decades law school faculty have been engaged in an ongoing debate about whether theoretical, casebook courses are more important than clinical skills-building courses. Even within the clinical ranks we hear debates about the relative importance of clinical/experiential courses versus legal writing/simulated drafting courses. The fact is that all these experiences are essential to a law student’s education. Many, if not most, law faculty see the merit for each type of learning experience. However, because faculty are concerned that collaboration might infringe on their academic freedom or perhaps adversely affect their faculty status, their teaching efforts remain highly individualized. Students, though, are suffering from this compartmentalized approach to learning. First, they can encounter difficulties transferring the lessons learned in a course to either a real world situation or even another course. For example, students often have a difficult time transferring the motion or brief writing skills learned in a legal writing course to a clinical experience where they are drafting motions and briefs on behalf of clients. Second, because clinical skills-building courses are expensive, there is a tendency to offer fewer of these courses or fewer experiences. The more law schools can provide clinical skills-building opportunities to students and the more schools can provide different settings to reinforce these skills, the more prepared our law students will be for law practice upon graduation. The way to provide these additional experiences without breaking the budget is to provide collaborative experiences between courses. The authors have discovered that you can create a relatively low-key, low-prep collaboration while still respecting each collaborator’s autonomy and academic freedom. There are numerous benefits to this type of collaboration. The collaborators gain a new level of understanding and appreciation for what is going on in other courses. Also, collaborators can come away from the experience with fresh ideas for their own curriculum and inject new life in their courses. But, most importantly, the students benefit from the additional experience. The authors have joined together to create collaborative opportunities between their law school’s civil practice clinic and a brief drafting course. Prior to collaboration, both authors met to discuss their students’ respective needs and shared the pedagogy, goals, syllabi, and lesson plans for the respective courses. By sharing this information, the authors developed ways to incorporate new experiential learning opportunities for both sets of students in different contexts. For example, the brief-writing students work on issues commonly faced by the clinic students (e.g., child custody modification); the brief-writing students will also visit courts to observe proceedings. This experience gives the brief-writing students a sense of how issues addressed in their briefs have real world application. In turn, the clinic students will be judging the brief-writing students’ oral arguments. This experience, giving clinic students an opportunity to experience the other side of the bench gives them insight into ways to effectively advocate their own clients’ cases. The two best briefs from the brief-writing course that focus on issues often addressed in clinic cases will be placed on file in the clinic so that future clinic students will have access to these briefs to help jump-start their understanding of these issues and the law. The poster will illustrate the steps to partnering, report on the authors’ own collaborative experience, include recommendations on implementing this approach in other courses, and show how this type of collaboration can create positive outcomes for faculty and students, and facilitate institutional change

Internet Use, Perceived Social Support, and Obesity Among African American Young Adults

African Americans are disproportionately affected by obesity. Public health practitioners have an incomplete understanding of the social-environmental risk factors and how they affect obesity. The purpose of this quantitative, cross-sectional study was to explore whether internet use and perceived social support predicted obesity among African American young adults. The social cognitive theory guided this study. Secondary data were analyzed from the 2017 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey. The sample consisted of 6,765 African American young adults age 18 to 34 and represented the U.S. population using weighted estimates. A Bonferroni correction was performed to reduce Type I error due to multiple comparisons; the criteria for significance was p \u3c .01. Controlling for gender, education, and employment status, a binary logistic regression analysis indicated that internet use inversely predicted obesity (OR = .862); however, when internet use was analyzed to include perceived social support in the full multivariate model, it directly predicted obesity (OR = 4.69). In addition, the analysis indicated that perceived social support predicted obesity (OR = 3.934), yet when included in the full multivariate model, the likelihood of obesity decreased (OR = 2.765). The findings may be used to develop a media campaign emphasizing social-environmental risk factors to improve obesity-related health outcomes, such as heart disease, stroke, and hypertension. These findings may lead to positive social change through the development and pilot of weight-loss interventions that incorporate social support while using the internet as a platform to sustain accountability for maintaining a healthy weight

African American Women Teachers’ Motivation to Stay in the Profession

Teacher attrition contributes to teacher shortages in public school systems throughout the United States. Some teachers leave the profession because of low salary, job dissatisfaction, lack of administrative support, and infrequent professional autonomy. Researchers have focused on attrition from the perspective of why teachers leave the profession. However, in current literature little is known about what motivates teachers to remain in the profession, including their race and gender. The purpose of this study was to explore African American women middle school teachers’ motivation to stay in the profession. In this study, self-determination theory was used as the theoretical framework to address motivation and its various components. Ten African American women teachers at public middle schools in North Carolina voluntarily participated in this study. Participants’ voice and perspectives were sought in individual face-to-face interviews to understand their lived teaching experience. This phenomenological investigation explicates the experiences of African American women teachers using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). IPA was used to aid in explaining and describing African American women teachers’ motivation. A thematic analysis was used to analyze data. The themes that emerged were motivation, inspired by others, support, and challenges. This indicated that African American women middle school teachers were motivated by their self-determination to be a teacher. The implication for positive social change is the development of policies that support teachers professionally and financially to remain in educatio

Women, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Related Mutual Aid Groups: Review and Recommendations for Research

Recent literature reviews and meta-analyses have supported the effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in helping members stop drinking and maintain sobriety. Despite the extensive body of research on AA, less attention has focused on differences in the efficacy of the program for and experiences of women as compared to men. Such a focus is warranted given that there are significant gender differences in the development and progression of alcoholism, impact of drinking, and response to treatment. This review synthesizes results of extant research on women in AA and similar mutual aid groups focused on problem drinking to describe the state of knowledge and make suggestions for future research. Critiques of the ability of AA and 12-step programs to address women’s needs are also reviewed, as are attempts to respond to those critiques. Understudied issues, including the role of victimization histories (which are more prevalent in women who abuse alcohol), are also discussed

Simon Says (Spring 2009)

In this issue: CSU Archives Launches 50th Anniversary Oral History Project \ Graduating Seniors Book Dedication Ceremony LIBRA Award Presented to Dr. Sandra Stratford CSU Libraries 8th Annual University-Wide Faculty Research Forum Series Georgia’s Oldest Hardware Store: The Singer Company CSU Libraries By The Numbers Libraries Host Rite of Passage Convocations Teaching LIBR 1105 Online: Whine & Cheese CSU Libraries Staff Development Day 2009: Teamwork and the Library Experience Department Spotlight: Circulation CSU Librarians in Leadership Roles New Reporting Structure for CSU Librarieshttps://csuepress.columbusstate.edu/library_newsletters/1012/thumbnail.jp

Weight Loss and Illness Severity in Adolescents With Atypical Anorexia Nervosa.

BACKGROUND:Lower weight has historically been equated with more severe illness in anorexia nervosa (AN). Reliance on admission weight to guide clinical concern is challenged by the rise in patients with atypical anorexia nervosa (AAN) requiring hospitalization at normal weight. METHODS:We examined weight history and illness severity in 12- to 24-year-olds with AN (n = 66) and AAN (n = 50) in a randomized clinical trial, the Study of Refeeding to Optimize Inpatient Gains (www.clinicaltrials.gov; NCT02488109). Amount of weight loss was the difference between the highest historical percentage median BMI and admission; rate was the amount divided by duration (months). Unpaired t tests compared AAN and AN; multiple variable regressions examined associations between weight history variables and markers of illness severity at admission. Stepwise regression examined the explanatory value of weight and menstrual history on selected markers. RESULTS:Participants were 16.5 ± 2.6 years old, and 91% were of female sex. Groups did not differ by weight history or admission heart rate (HR). Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire global scores were higher in AAN (mean 3.80 [SD 1.66] vs mean 3.00 [SD 1.66]; P = .02). Independent of admission weight, lower HR (β = -0.492 [confidence interval (CI) -0.883 to -0.100]; P = .01) was associated with faster loss; lower serum phosphorus was associated with a greater amount (β = -0.005 [CI -0.010 to 0.000]; P = .04) and longer duration (β = -0.011 [CI -0.017 to 0.005]; P = .001). Weight and menstrual history explained 28% of the variance in HR and 36% of the variance in serum phosphorus. CONCLUSIONS:Weight history was independently associated with markers of malnutrition in inpatients with restrictive eating disorders across a range of body weights and should be considered when assessing illness severity on hospital admission

Simon Says (Fall 2008)

Inside this issue: Addressing Student Needs: Circulating Laptops and a New Décor Information Commons Workshop Digital Microfilm Reader/Printer SHHHHH: You Are Entering the QUIET ZONE Access Ingenta: A CSU Faculty Development Initiative LIBR 1105 Online The Robert Hardaway Diary: A Piece of Historical Treasure Faculty Media Production Services Available at ITS Department Spotlight: Interlibrary Loan Milestone CSU Library Service Anniversaries Welcome Aboard Library Budgethttps://csuepress.columbusstate.edu/library_newsletters/1011/thumbnail.jp

Humanoid robots: A new kind of tool

s lab must address many of the same motor-control, perception, and machine-learning problems. The principles behind our methodology The real divergence between groups stems from radically different research agendas and underlying assumptions. At the MIT AI Lab, three basic principles guide our research . We design humanoid robots to act autonomously and safely, without human control or supervision, in natural work environments and to interact with people. We do not design them as solutions for specific robotic needs (as with welding robots on assembly lines). Our goal is to build robots that function in many different real-world environments in essentially the same way. . Social robots must be able to detect and understand natural human cuesthe low-level social conventions that people understand and use everyday, such as head nods or eye contactso that anyone can interact with them without special training or instruction. They mus