Helping English Language Learners Develop Writing Proficiency Using the Thesis Evidence Model in the High School Social Studies Classroom

English Language Learners (ELL) are struggling to develop literacy skills in social studies classes at the high school level in conjunction with the transition to Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and assessment. The researcher conducted a qualitative teacher action research study. Participants included freshman high school students in mainstream, college preparatory, World Cultures classes in an affluent, suburban, public school district in California. Through this teacher action research study, 34 high school grade students responded to a writing prompt used a pre-test evaluation. Students were then guided through a lesson sequence teaching writing strategies based in the Thesis-Evidence model. Upon completing these writing based lessons, students were evaluated again with another writing prompt, which served as the post-test. Both the pre-test and post-test were evaluated using a teacher created rubric aligned with the 9th grade CCSS for writing. Results indicated that the application of CCSS based writing strategies yielded improvement in all areas of academic writing for not only ELLs, but for the whole class as well

Ontario Hydro And Rural Electrification In Old Ontario, 1911-1958: Policies And Issues

This thesis, based mainly on provincial and federal government and Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario (HEPC) records, seeks to show how electricity was provided to the rural residents of Ontario. The first rural customers were added to the Commission\u27s lines in 1912, and Hydro\u27s engineers spent several years thereafter devising new applications of electricity for farm residents. Hydro tried, moreover, to create a rural rate schedule that conformed with its dictum of providing power at cost on an equal basis to all. By 1920, the HEPC was organizing Rural Power Districts, the administrative foundation on which its rural program would be built.;Agrarian and small town discontent over the slow progress and high cost of Hydro\u27s rural service was partially placated by the decision of E. C. Drury\u27s Farmer-Labour government in 1921 to use provincial funds to pay half of all rural primary transmission line construction costs. Three years later, the grants-in-aid were extended to include secondary lines. During the Great Depression, Hydro and the Ferguson, Henry and Hepburn governments were able to sustain the moderate growth achieved in the Rural System during the 1920s. However, changes such as service charge reductions, low interest loans, free power, and shorter service contracts produced mixed results. Then, in 1941, wartime materials and power restrictions imposed by the Dominion government brought the HEPC\u27s rural construction program to an abrupt halt.;The Commission spent the war years tinkering with rate schedules, reorganizing the Rural Power Districts, and repelling the latest in a series of flat rate agitations that dated back to 1918. In 1946, urged on by the Progressive Conservative government of George Drew, the HEPC launched a Five-Year Plan of Post-War Rural Hydro Development. The plan\u27s objective of 85% farm electrification was achieved in just four years, but rural extensions continued apace until 1958. In that year the provincial grant-in-aid was rescinded in Old Ontario, that is to say in the area of the province south of Lake Nipissing. While much of rural Ontario was not served by Ontario Hydro until after World War II, the thesis nonetheless makes the case that the publicly-owned utility was a world leader in the field of rural electrification

Single- and two-phase nitration of mononitrotoluenes

The homogeneous rates of nitration of ortho-, meta- and para-nitrotoluene in aqueous sulphuric acid have been determined over a range of temperatures. Some difficulties were experienced in measuring the rate of nitration of ortho-nitrotoluene because of competition between nitration of the latter and one or more side-reactions, the exact nature of which were not determined. Some possible explanations for this phenomenon are discussed. Combination of the experimental rate data with those published in the literature has enabled predictions to be made of values for the observed second order rate constant k2 as a function of temperature and H2SO4–H2O composition. [Continues.

Changing Terms, Not Trends: A Critical Investigation into Children’s & Young Adult Literature Publishing & Its Effect in Curriculum & Pedagogy

The central argument proposed within this article is that while recent publishing trends in children’s and adolescent literature have changed for the better (Cooperative Children’s Book Center, 2019) and research about the importance of diverse reading experiences for students has become concentrated, centered, and validated (Bishop, 1990; Adichie, 2009; Tschida, Ryan, & Ticknor, 2014; Thomas, 2016; Parker, 2020: Ebarvia, German, Parker, & Torres, 2020), many schools are still struggling with (or hesitant to) changing the texts centered in classrooms with youth. Therefore, this article provides practical steps that practicing teachers can take in order to center the voices and narratives of historically marginalized individuals within literacy classrooms

A Review and Synthesis of the Outcomes from Low Carbon Networks Fund Projects

The Low Carbon Networks Fund (LCNF) was established by Ofgem in 2009 with an objective to “help Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) understand how they provide security of supply at value for money and facilitate transition to the low carbon economy”. The £500m fund operated in a tiered format, funding small scale projects as Tier 1 and running a Tier 2 annual competitive process to fund a smaller number of large projects. By 31st March 2015, forty Tier 1 projects and twenty-three Tier 2 projects had been approved with project budgets totalling £29.5m and £220.3m respectively. The LCNF governance arrangements state that projects should focus on the trialling of: new equipment (more specifically, that unproven in GB), novel arrangements or applications of existing equipment, novel operational practices, or novel commercial arrangements. The requirement that learning gained from projects could be disseminated was a key feature of the LCNF. The motivation for the review reported here was a recognition that significant learning and data had been generated from a large volume of project activity but, with so many individual reports published, that it was difficult for outside observers to identify clear messages with respect to the innovations investigated under the programme. This review is therefore intended to identify, categorise and synthesise the learning outcomes published by LCNF projects up to December 2015

The evidence for automated grading in diabetic retinopathy screening

Peer reviewedPostprin

Anthropogenic nutrients and harmful algae in coastal waters

© The Author(s), 2014. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Journal of Environmental Management 146 (2014): 206-216, doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2014.07.002.Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are thought to be increasing in coastal waters worldwide. Anthropogenic nutrient enrichment has been proposed as a principal causative factor of this increase through elevated inorganic and/or organic nutrient concentrations and modified nutrient ratios. We assess: 1) the level of understanding of the link between the amount, form and ratio of anthropogenic nutrients and HABs; 2) the evidence for a link between anthropogenically generated HABs and negative impacts on human health; and 3) the economic implications of anthropogenic nutrient/HAB interactions. We demonstrate that an anthropogenic nutrient-HAB link is far from universal, and where it has been demonstrated, it is most frequently associated with high biomass rather than low biomass (biotoxin producing) HABs. While organic nutrients have been shown to support the growth of a range of HAB species, insufficient evidence exists to clearly establish if these nutrients specifically promote the growth of harmful species in preference to benign ones, or if/how they influence toxicity of harmful species. We conclude that the role of anthropogenic nutrients in promoting HABs is site-specific, with hydrodynamic processes often determining whether blooms occur. We also find a lack of evidence of widespread significant adverse health impacts from anthropogenic nutrient-generated HABs, although this may be partly due to a lack of human/animal health and HAB monitoring. Detailed economic evaluation and cost/benefit analysis of the impact of anthropogenically generated HABs, or nutrient reduction schemes to alleviate them, is also frequently lacking.The work described here is based in part on a project ‘Harmful Algae, Nuisance Blooms and Anthropogenic Nutrient Enrichment’ funded by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (contract ME2208). In addition KD was supported by the FP7 project Asimuth and funding from the NERC Shelf Seas Biogeochemistry and PURE Associates programmes. PJH was supported by University Grants Council of Hong Kong AoE project (AoE/P-04/0401). PH and LEF were funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Award 1009106; LEF was funded in part by the European Regional Development Fund and European Social Fund (University of Exeter, Truro, Cornwall, UK). GM was supported by a NERC PhD studentship

Sharing and visualizing environmental data using Virtual Globes

Virtual globe technology holds many exciting possibilities for environmental science. These easy-to-use, intuitive systems provide means for simultaneously visualizing four-dimensional environmental data from many different sources, enabling the generation of new hypotheses and driving greater understanding of the Earth system. Through the use of simple markup languages, scientists can publish and consume data in interoperable formats without the need for technical assistance. In this paper we give, with examples from our own work, a number of scientific uses for virtual globes, demonstrating their particular advantages. We explain how we have used Web Services to connect virtual globes with diverse data sources and enable more sophisticated usage such as data analysis and collaborative visualization. We also discuss the current limitations of the technology, with particular regard to the visualization of subsurface data and vertical sections

Training Underrepresented High School Students as a Strategy to Increase Diversity in the Biomedical Research and Health Professions Workforce

This manuscript introduces the abstracts from the University of California, Los Angeles Coordinating Center