Resourcefulness matters: Student patterns for coping with structural and academic challenges

There is general agreement that there are many structural constraints beyond students’ control which influence the degree of success that students can attain as they learn to participate in academic practice. Less understood are the patterns of students’ experiences of the socio-economic environment of their schooling and university, their views of the enabling and constraining conditions of learning and their perceptions of their agency in overcoming these conditions. The data for our study were collected through a questionnaire survey of 591 Bachelor of Education students across three years of the degree at a South African University. Several patterns of resourcefulness and levels of articulation emerged which reveal complex sets of experiences and strategies as students reflect on adversities and challenges they encountered at school and at university. We argue for an in depth understanding of the nature of student agency which recognises its role in shaping their engagement with material, social, academic and affective challenges

People are sensitive to hypothesis sparsity during category discrimination

Previous work has shown that the information value of requests can be manipulated by controlling the sparsity of hypotheses, the degree to which category members are rare or common in the domain under consideration when making those requests. However, the degree to which people are sensitive to expected information value is unknown. This study examined a binary sorting task where sparsity differed across conditions. In contrast to previous work using hypotheses representable as visual areas, the stimuli in this study defined hypotheses in an abstract similarity space over geometric shapes. Participants could request labels for either category members or non-members. While both request types were used in all conditions, most often evenly, the proportion of participants showing a preference for one type of request was strongly impacted by the information value of that request type. A small tendency to prefer requests from the designated target category was also observed.Steven Langsford, Andrew T. Hendrickson, Amy Perfors, Daniel J. Navarr

Nucleon charge exchange on the deuteron: A critical review

The existing experimental data on the d(n,p)nn and d(p,n)pp cross sections in the forward direction are reviewed in terms of the Dean sum rule. It is shown that the measurement of the ratio of the charge exchange on the deuteron to that on the proton might, if taken together with other experimental data, allow a direct construction of the np -> np scattering amplitude in the backward direction with few ambiguities.Comment: 7 pages with 3 figure

Exploring penetrance of clinically relevant variants in over 800,000 humans from the Genome Aggregation Database

Incomplete penetrance, or absence of disease phenotype in an individual with a disease-associated variant, is a major challenge in variant interpretation. Studying individuals with apparent incomplete penetrance can shed light on underlying drivers of altered phenotype penetrance. Here, we investigate clinically relevant variants from ClinVar in 807,162 individuals from the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD), demonstrating improved representation in gnomAD version 4. We then conduct a comprehensive case-by-case assessment of 734 predicted loss of function variants in 77 genes associated with severe, early-onset, highly penetrant haploinsufficient disease. Here, we identify explanations for the presumed lack of disease manifestation in 701 of 734 variants (95%). Individuals with unexplained lack of disease manifestation in this set of disorders are rare, underscoring the need and power of deep case-by-case assessment presented here to minimize false assignments of disease risk, particularly in unaffected individuals with higher rates of secondary properties that result in rescue

Emotional logic development profiles – validating the benefits and safety of emotional logic training

peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=ijpc2