Collaborating With Colleagues To Improve Student Learning Using The Connected Mathematics Project

I am a teacher of mathematics at Millburn Middle School, Millburn, New Jersey. During my nine years at Millburn, I have taught using the Connected Mathematics Program (CMP) for seven years to eighth graders and before that, I taught CMP in it\u27s pilot stage to sixth graders. This guide is a result of my thinking and learning during my time at Bank Street College. The guide is based on a journey through my learning as a professional developer. It is a tool which, I hope, will be of some use to other CMP leaders. It is hoped that if such a tool proves useful, that leaders will pass the torch to future leaders so they too may facilitate professional development opportunities for CMP for other new users. This guide is in the public domain, and copies may be freely distributed among teachers and teacher leaders using CMP

Community-Campus Partnerships for Health: Making a Positive Impact

Offers pragmatic insights from diverse community-campus partnerships, service-learning initiatives, and workforce diversity efforts across the country, including communities from the foundation's Community Voices initiative

Service-Learning in Nursing: A Bibliography with Published Abstracts

The following list of books and peer-reviewed publications will provide direction and useful information for developing service-learning programs in nursing. The list is not intended to be exhaustive, but reflects a compilation of materials recommended by the Partners in Caring and CommW1ity Program, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health. Resources authored by PCC team members, mentors or advisors are denoted with a *. The PCC program is funded by the Helene Fuld Trust, HSBC, Trustee. Resources authored by participants in the Health Professions Schools in Service to the Nation Program (HPSISN), a national demonstration program of service-learning in the health professions that preceded the PCC program, are denoted with a †. HPSISN received funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Corporation for National Service

The Effects of Voice Pitch on Perceptions of Robots

While previous research in human-robot interaction (HRI) has shown people respond similarly to vocal cues in robot speech as they do with human speech, there has been minimal research into the effects of voice pitch. This study investigates whether vocal pitch in robot speech will evoke stereotypical evaluations of the robot speaker. To explore this, multiple voices were synthesized from various text-to-speech applications and then manipulated to have a raised or lowered pitch. Participants will be asked to rate these voices on various scales such as competence, trustworthiness, and likeability. We expect our results to conform with the current literature on human voice pitch and encourage further research on the effects of the voice on HRI

Rethinking Peer Review: Expanding the Boundaries for Community-Engaged Scholarship

Peer review in the academic arena is the evaluation of a scholar or a scholarly work by peers— typically, qualified members of the scholar’s discipline or profession with similar or greater competence, expertise, or rank. Peer review serves as a mechanism of self-regulation within a field or an institution in order to assure quality and may be applied to a product of scholarship, to scholars and their bodies of work, or to programs and organizations. Special considerations arise when peer review is undertaken in the context of community-engaged scholarship (CES), since CES generally involves partners outside the academy, and the typical concerns of peer review (such as rigorous methods, participant risks and benefits, and significance of findings for the field) are complemented by equivalent and sometimes greater concerns for the quality of the engagement process, community- level ethical considerations, and benefit to the community. This article, authored by some of the founding members of the Working Group on Rethinking Peer Review, explores these issues and invites readers to contribute to this discussion by considering questions about the appropriateness of conventional peer review mechanisms and who should be considered “peers” in reviewing products of CES and the work of community-engaged scholars. The Working Group hopes others will initiate discussions within their own institutions, professional associations, journals, and other settings to debate the notion of peer review and determine if expanded concepts are feasible. Through these various activities, the authors hope to begin seeing changes in the peer review process that embrace community expertise and enhance the quality and impact of CES.

A Pilot Study with a Novel Setup for Collaborative Play of the Humanoid Robot KASPAR with children with autism

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.This article describes a pilot study in which a novel experimental setup, involving an autonomous humanoid robot, KASPAR, participating in a collaborative, dyadic video game, was implemented and tested with children with autism, all of whom had impairments in playing socially and communicating with others. The children alternated between playing the collaborative video game with a neurotypical adult and playing the same game with the humanoid robot, being exposed to each condition twice. The equipment and experimental setup were designed to observe whether the children would engage in more collaborative behaviours while playing the video game and interacting with the adult than performing the same activities with the humanoid robot. The article describes the development of the experimental setup and its first evaluation in a small-scale exploratory pilot study. The purpose of the study was to gain experience with the operational limits of the robot as well as the dyadic video game, to determine what changes should be made to the systems, and to gain experience with analyzing the data from this study in order to conduct a more extensive evaluation in the future. Based on our observations of the childrens’ experiences in playing the cooperative game, we determined that while the children enjoyed both playing the game and interacting with the robot, the game should be made simpler to play as well as more explicitly collaborative in its mechanics. Also, the robot should be more explicit in its speech as well as more structured in its interactions. Results show that the children found the activity to be more entertaining, appeared more engaged in playing, and displayed better collaborative behaviours with their partners (For the purposes of this article, ‘partner’ refers to the human/robotic agent which interacts with the children with autism. We are not using the term’s other meanings that refer to specific relationships or emotional involvement between two individuals.) in the second sessions of playing with human adults than during their first sessions. One way of explaining these findings is that the children’s intermediary play session with the humanoid robot impacted their subsequent play session with the human adult. However, another longer and more thorough study would have to be conducted in order to better re-interpret these findings. Furthermore, although the children with autism were more interested in and entertained by the robotic partner, the children showed more examples of collaborative play and cooperation while playing with the human adult.Peer reviewe

Increased Risk of Hypertension After Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Findings from a large prospective cohort study

OBJECTIVE: Whether a history of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is associated with an increased risk of hypertension after the index pregnancy is not well established. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We investigated the association between GDM and subsequent risk of hypertension after the index pregnancy among 25,305 women who reported at least one singleton pregnancy between 1991 and 2007 in the Nurses’ Health Study II. RESULTS: During 16 years of follow-up, GDM developed in 1,414 women (5.6%) and hypertension developed in 3,138. A multivariable Cox proportional hazards model showed women with a history of GDM had a 26% increased risk of developing hypertension compared with those without a history of GDM (hazard ratio 1.26 [95% CI 1.11–1.43]; P = 0.0004). These results were independent of pregnancy hypertension or subsequent type 2 diabetes. CONCLUSIONS: These results indicate that women with GDM are at a significant increased risk of developing hypertension after the index pregnancy

Maternal age effect and severe germ-line bottleneck in the inheritance of human mitochondrial DNA

The manifestation of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diseases depends on the frequency of heteroplasmy (the presence of several alleles in an individual), yet its transmission across generations cannot be readily predicted owing to a lack of data on the size of the mtDNA bottleneck during oogenesis. For deleterious heteroplasmies, a severe bottleneck may abruptly transform a benign (low) frequency in a mother into a disease-causing (high) frequency in her child. Here we present a high-resolution study of heteroplasmy transmission conducted on blood and buccal mtDNA of 39 healthy mother–child pairs of European ancestry (a total of 156 samples, each sequenced at ∼20,000× per site). On average, each individual carried one heteroplasmy, and one in eight individuals carried a disease-associated heteroplasmy, with minor allele frequency ≥1%. We observed frequent drastic heteroplasmy frequency shifts between generations and estimated the effective size of the germ-line mtDNA bottleneck at only ∼30–35 (interquartile range from 9 to 141). Accounting for heteroplasmies, we estimated the mtDNA germ-line mutation rate at 1.3 × 10−8 (interquartile range from 4.2 × 10−9 to 4.1 × 10−8) mutations per site per year, an order of magnitude higher than for nuclear DNA. Notably, we found a positive association between the number of heteroplasmies in a child and maternal age at fertilization, likely attributable to oocyte aging. This study also took advantage of droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) to validate heteroplasmies and confirm a de novo mutation. Our results can be used to predict the transmission of disease-causing mtDNA variants and illuminate evolutionary dynamics of the mitochondrial genome

Socially assistive robotics for post-stroke rehabilitation

BACKGROUND: Although there is a great deal of success in rehabilitative robotics applied to patient recovery post stroke, most of the research to date has dealt with providing physical assistance. However, new rehabilitation studies support the theory that not all therapy need be hands-on. We describe a new area, called socially assistive robotics, that focuses on non-contact patient/user assistance. We demonstrate the approach with an implemented and tested post-stroke recovery robot and discuss its potential for effectiveness. RESULTS: We describe a pilot study involving an autonomous assistive mobile robot that aids stroke patient rehabilitation by providing monitoring, encouragement, and reminders. The robot navigates autonomously, monitors the patient's arm activity, and helps the patient remember to follow a rehabilitation program. We also show preliminary results from a follow-up study that focused on the role of robot physical embodiment in a rehabilitation context. CONCLUSION: We outline and discuss future experimental designs and factors toward the development of effective socially assistive post-stroke rehabilitation robots