The Importance of Linguistic Diversity Instruction within Teacher Education Programs

The United States is continuously growing, and as it grows it has become more and more diverse. As diversity increases, awareness of culture becomes a more pressing and important manner. So, while schools have often worked to include and encourage multiculturalism and diversity within their boundaries, one major section has been left out of the equation. The importance of linguistic diversity is vastly misunderstood and left out of teacher education programs, negatively impacting young students, particularly those of traditionally marginalized groups. In order to better prepare prospective teachers and to help provide a real social change in an inherently racialized society providing teachers and students with proper education about the cultural, social, and even economic ties that dialect has on people in society will help to promote learning, acceptance, and achievement within schools and society alike

Confirmative Evaluation: New CIPP Evaluation Model

Struggling trainees often require a substantial investment of time, effort, and resources from medical educators. An emergent challenge involves developing effective ways to accurately identify struggling students and better understand the primary causal factors underlying their poor performance. Identifying the potential reasons for poor performance in medical school is a key first step in developing suitable remediation plans. The SOM Modified Program is a remediation program that aims to ensure academic success for medical students. The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of modifying the CIPP evaluation model by adding a confirmative evaluation step to the model. This will be carried out by conducting a program evaluation of Wayne State University’s School of Medicine Modified Program to determine its effectiveness for student success. The key research questions for this study are 1) How effective is the Modified Program for student’s success in the SOM? 2) Do students benefit from a modified program in medical school? 3) Will the CIPP program evaluation model become more effective by adding confirmative evaluation component

Salamosa: Examining a Small-Market Newspaper Covering a Local Crisis

This paper explores crisis coverage in local, small-market newspapers. Comparing relevant theory with the practice of journalism in Alamosa, CO\u27s Valley Courier, this content analysis suggests close relationships between media, government and business in small communities, contributing to coverage that veers away from journalism\u27s best practices. The result is coverage that overlooks potentially important information about the crisis\u27 causes and eschews journalism\u27s watchdog and investigative responsibilities, while offering local elite sources significant degrees of power over the shape of the coverage. As national news coverage contracts, situations like this rise in prominence

The enemy within:designing a cell-based gameplay system for cancer education

This paper outlines the design and preliminary evaluation of The Enemy Within, a browser-based game produced to raise awareness of the nature of cancer as a progressive disease. Aimed at high school and young adult audiences, the ambition with the game is to make visible to players the myriad ways in which healthy cells can mutate and ultimately inherit hallmarks of cancer, whilst also demonstrating how both real-world behaviours and underlying genetics impact both positively and negatively on cell health

Renaissance of Bernal's random close packing and hypercritical line in the theory of liquids

We review the scientific history of random close packing (RCP) of equal spheres, advocated by J D Bernal as a more plausible alternative to the non-ideal gas or imperfect crystal as a structural model of simple liquids. After decades of neglect, computer experiments are revealing a central role for RCP in the theory of liquids. These demonstrate that the RCP amorphous state of hard spheres can be well defined, is reproducible, and has the thermodynamic status of a metastable ground state. Further evidence from simulations of square-well model liquids indicates an extended role of RCP as an amorphous ground state that terminates a supercooled liquid coexistence line, suggesting likewise for real liquids. A phase diagram involving percolation boundaries has been proposed in which there is no merging of liquid and gas phases, and no critical singularity as assumed by van der Waals. Rather, the liquid phase continuously spans all temperatures, but above a critical dividing line on the Gibbs density surface, it is bounded by a percolation transition and separated from the gas phase by a colloidal supercritical mesophase. The colloidal-like inversion in the mesophase as it changes from gas-in-liquid to liquid-in-gas can be identified with the hypercritical line of Bernal. We therefore argue that the statistical theory of simple liquids should start from the RCP reference state rather than the ideal gas. Future experimental priorities are to (i) find evidence for an amorphous ground state in real supercooled liquids, (ii) explore the microscopic structures of the supercritical mesophase, and (iii) determine how these change from gas to liquid, especially across Bernal's hypercritical line. The theoretical priority is a statistical geometrical theory of RCP. Only then might we explain the coincident values of the RCP packing fraction with Buffon's constant, and the RCP residual entropy with Boltzmann's ideal gas constant.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The packing of granular polymer chains

Rigid particles pack into structures, such as sand dunes on the beach, whose overall stability is determined by the average number of contacts between particles. However, when packing spatially extended objects with flexible shapes, additional concepts must be invoked to understand the stability of the resulting structure. Here we study the disordered packing of chains constructed out of flexibly-connected hard spheres. Using X-ray tomography, we find long chains pack into a low-density structure whose mechanical rigidity is mainly provided by the backbone. On compaction, randomly-oriented, semi-rigid loops form along the chain, and the packing of chains can be understood as the jamming of these elements. Finally we uncover close similarities between the packing of chains and the glass transition in polymers.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure