DIAGNOSING DISABILITY THROUGH RESPONSE-TO-INTERVENTION: AN ANALYSIS OF READING RECOVERY AS A VALID PREDICTOR OF READING DISABILITIES

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, School of Education, 2005There is growing evidence that the current method of identifying students with a reading disability is ineffective. The wait-to-fail model of assessing students after second/third grade and conceptual problems using intelligence tests for identification result in students not being provided the assistance they need during the early-elementary school years (Lyon, Fletcher, Shaywitz, Shaywitz, Torgensen, Wood, Schulte, & Olson, 2001). The educational community is pursuing this discussion in terms of response-to-intervention (RTI) methods of assessment. A student can be considered for identification by an assessment of: the amount of progress demonstrated over time during a remedial intervention program, and by attaining an established cut-off score of success. Reading Recovery, a one-on-one intervention program, is a widely implemented remedial literacy program to assist struggling readers in first-grade classrooms. This program meets the criteria of response-to-intervention because of its daily assessments, which track students' progress and cut-off score of reaching book 15 by the end of the 20-week intervention. The program uses a series of story books (numbered 0-25) that increase in difficulty. By means of a discriminant function analysis, a retrospective study of second- through fifth-grade students who participated in Reading Recovery during first grade investigated assessment elements of the Reading Recovery Program (beginning text level, ending text level, and number of weeks in the Reading Recovery Program). Results indicated that Reading Recovery assessment elements are significant predictors of first-grade students who later are identified as reading disabled. Using the school districts' current reading disability definition as an 18-point difference between intelligence and reading achievement test scores rendered significant results. Significant results were also found with refined reading disability definitions based solely on students' low reading achievement scores--emphasizing the students who struggle most with reading. In all the analyses, ending text level was the largest Reading Recovery assessment predictor of students later being identified as reading disabled or not

Writing-skills Intervention Programming and Its Being a Component of Response to Intervention

For a struggling writer, step-by-step instruction can be a helpful means to manage organizing and producing elaborate text. This mixed-methods project offered four struggling writers a mnemonic strategy called Ask, Reflect, Text (ART) in 45-minute sessions over 22 days. The second- and fourth-grade students attended a public school in the US Pacific Northwest. As a parallel component to the project, the students' teachers and intervention specialist met with the author for 4 one-hour sessions to discuss: 1) the children's intervention programming and progress, and 2) the paradigm of response to intervention (RTI) and their thoughts about its feasibility in classrooms. The end-of-project assessment data demonstrated that the children made progress with writing skills, but the teachers and intervention specialist felt that support personnel would be needed to manage RTI-type intervention programming in general education classrooms

Feeling Good about Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior

In knowledge-intensive settings such as product or software development, fluid teams of individuals with different sets of experience are tasked with projects that are critical to the success of their organizations. Although building teams from individuals with diverse prior experience is increasingly necessary, prior work examining the relationship between experience and performance fails to find a consistent effect of diversity in experience on performance. The problem is that diversity in experience improves a team's information processing capacity and knowledge base, but also creates coordination challenges. We hypothesize that team familiarity - team members' prior experience working with one another - is one mechanism that helps teams leverage the benefits of diversity in team member experience by alleviating coordination problems that diversity creates. We use detailed project- and individual-level data from an Indian software services firm to examine the effects of team familiarity and diversity in experience on performance for software development projects. We find the interaction of team familiarity and diversity in experience has a complementary effect on a project being delivered on time and on budget. In team familiarity, we identify one mechanism for capturing the performance benefits of diversity in experience and provide insight into how the management of experience accumulation affects team performance.Diversity, Experience, Knowledge, Software, Team Familiarity

Higher aggression towards closer relatives by soldier larvae in a polyembryonic wasp

In the polyembryonic wasp Copidosoma floridanum, females commonly lay one male and one female egg in a lepidopteran host. Both sexes proliferate clonally within the growing host larva. Distinct larval castes develop from each wasp egg, the majority being ‘reproductives’ plus some ‘soldiers’ which sacrifice reproduction and attack competitors. Maturing mixed sex broods are usually female biased, as expected when intra-brood mating is common. Pre-mating dispersal followed by outbreeding is expected to increase sexual conflict over brood sex ratios and result in greater soldier attack rates. Owing to sexually asymmetric relatedness, intra-brood conflicts are expected to be resolved primarily via female soldier attack. We observed soldier behaviour in vitro to test whether lower intra-brood relatedness (siblings from either within-strain or between-strain crosses were presented) increased inter-sexual aggression by female as well as male soldiers. As found in prior studies, females were more aggressive than males but, contrary to expectations and previous empirical observations, soldiers of both sexes showed more aggression towards more closely related embryos. We speculate that lower intra-brood relatedness indicates maternal outbreeding and may suggest a rarity of mating opportunities for reproductives maturing from the current brood, which may enhance the value of opposite sex brood-mates, or that higher aggression towards relatives may be a side-effect of mechanisms to discriminate heterospecific competitors

Impacts of Technological Support and College on Returning Female Veterans’ Well-being

Drawing on social justice as a foundation, this study explored governmental, private and non-profit responses and assistance made available to female military veterans returning from active duty. The study determined how technology and college have helped provide solutions and support for female veterans, who have experienced deployment, to reintegrate positively into society and to improve their psychological wellbeing. Given that many female veterans now returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are technologically well-informed, an assessment of available technological support was made to ascertain which of them were beneficial as these women sought to regain a sense of normality in their lives. The role of college in helping bolster veterans’ confidence and reintegration was also examined in terms of its constructiveness. The research focused on female veterans who had experienced military emotional stress but were able to prevail over that stress to a state of mental well-being. This mental well-being was the research’s dependent variable. The research’s two independent variables were (1) technological support and (2) college. Military emotional stress \u3e\u3e Technological support and/or college \u3e\u3e Mental well-being outcome Based on this thesis’ quantitative and qualitative research data, it was evident that technological support and college have helped female veterans handle emotional distress from military service and cope with returning to civilian life

Prosocial Spending and Happiness: Using Money to Benefit Others Pays Off

While a great deal of research has shown that people with more money are somewhat happier than people with less money, our research demonstrates that how people spend their money also matters for their happiness. In particular, both correlational and experimental studies show that people who spend money on others report greater happiness. The benefits of such prosocial spending emerge among adults around the world, and the warm glow of giving can be detected even in toddlers. These benefits are most likely to emerge when giving satisfies one or more core human needs (relatedness, competence, and autonomy). The rewards of prosocial spending are observable in both the brain and the body and can potentially be harnessed by organizations and governments

The association of preoperative cardiac stress testing with 30-day death and myocardial infarction among patients undergoing kidney transplantation

BACKGROUND:Although periodic cardiac stress testing is commonly used to screen patients on the waiting list for kidney transplantation for ischemic heart disease, there is little evidence to support this practice. We hypothesized that cardiac stress testing in the 18 months prior to kidney transplantation would not reduce postoperative death, total myocardial infarction (MI) or fatal MI. METHODS:Using the United States Renal Data System, we identified ESRD patients ≥40 years old with primary Medicare insurance who received their first kidney transplant between 7/1/2006 and 11/31/2013. Propensity matching created a 1:1 matched sample of patients with and without stress testing in the 18 months prior to kidney transplantation. The outcomes of interest were death, total (fatal and nonfatal) MI or fatal MI within 30 days of kidney transplantation. RESULTS:In the propensity-matched cohort of 17,304 patients, death within 30 days occurred in 72 of 8,652 (0.83%) patients who underwent stress testing and in 65 of 8,652 (0.75%) patients who did not (OR 1.07; 95% CI: 0.79-1.45; P = 0.66). MI within 30 days occurred in 339 (3.9%) patients who had a stress test and in 333 (3.8%) patients who did not (OR 1.03; 95% CI: 0.89-1.21; P = 0.68). Fatal MI occurred in 17 (0.20%) patients who underwent stress testing and 15 (0.17%) patients who did not (OR 0.97; 95% CI: 0.71-1.32; P = 0.84). CONCLUSION:Stress testing in the 18 months prior to kidney transplantation is not associated with a reduction in death, total MI or fatal MI within 30 days of kidney transplantation

Deep Tissue Fluorescent Imaging in Scattering Specimens Using Confocal Microscopy

In scattering specimens, multiphoton excitation and nondescanned detection improve imaging depth by a factor of 2 or more over confocal microscopy; however, imaging depth is still limited by scattering. We applied the concept of clearing to deep tissue imaging of highly scattering specimens. Clearing is a remarkably effective approach to improving image quality at depth using either confocal or multiphoton microscopy. Tissue clearing appears to eliminate the need for multiphoton excitation for deep tissue imaging