Culturally Sustaining Math Word Problem Instruction with Hip-Hop Story Schemas

On August 11, 2023, Hip-Hop celebrated its 50th anniversary. In honor of this milestone, we share an activity that is designed to harness the power and art of Hip-Hop to support learning in mathematics for students with and without exceptionalities. Using a vignette, we examine why culturally sustaining practices are pivotal to learning and how teachers can collaborate with middle-school students to strengthen an evidence-based practice such as schema-based instruction by honoring the funds of knowledge that students possess. The activity includes (a) the creation of culturally relevant word problems in mathematics, (b) schema-based instruction for solving additive-type word problems, and (c) the development of Hip-Hop rhymes to communicate problem-solving math schemas. Schema-based instruction supports students’ mathematical reasoning and word-problem solving by teaching students to identify underlying problem structures and reasons for addition/subtraction or multiplication/division and is an evidence-based practice for supporting word problem solving skills for students with exceptionalities. Herein we provide a practitioner-ready guide for implementing these activities so that educators may replicate or adapt them to meet their students’ needs. Although we focus on schema-based instruction, the Hip-Hop pedagogical tools shared could be applied to enhance instruction in other academic areas

Plasma Epstein-Barr virus DNA predicts outcome in advanced Hodgkin lymphoma: Correlative analysis from a large North American cooperative group trial

10.1182/blood-2012-09-454694Blood121183547-3553BLOO

MUSCLE COMPOSITION IN RESPIRATORY ACIDOSIS

Plant-parasitic nematodes are major agricultural pests worldwide and novel approaches to control them are sorely needed. We report the draft genome sequence of the root-knot nematode Meloidogyne incognita, a biotrophic parasite of many crops, including tomato, cotton and coffee. Most of the assembled sequence of this asexually reproducing nematode, totaling 86 Mb, exists in pairs of homologous but divergent segments. This suggests that ancient allelic regions in M. incognita are evolving toward effective haploidy, permitting new mechanisms of adaptation. The number and diversity of plant cell wall-degrading enzymes in M. incognita is unprecedented in any animal for which a genome sequence is available, and may derive from multiple horizontal gene transfers from bacterial sources. Our results provide insights into the adaptations required by metazoans to successfully parasitize immunocompetent plants, and open the way for discovering new antiparasitic strategie