Investigating a redesigned physics course for future elementary teachers

Doctor of PhilosophyCurriculum and InstructionJacqueline D. SpearsThere is a growing concern that the number of students graduating with a STEM major in the U.S. is insufficient to fill the growing demand in STEM careers.  In order to fulfill that demand, it is important to increase student retention in STEM majors and also to attract more students to pursue careers in those areas.  Previous research has indicated that children start losing interest in science at the elementary level because science is taught with a focus on learning vocabulary and ideas rather than learning through inquiry-based techniques.  A factor that affects the quality of science education at the elementary level is the preparation of elementary teachers. Many elementary teachers feel unprepared to teach science because they lack adequate content knowledge as well as the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for teaching the subject.  Previous studies of teacher preparation in science identified some areas with which pre-service teachers need assistance.  One of these areas is understanding children’s ideas of science. To address that issue, this dissertation investigates whether the use of an instructional approach that teaches physics phenomena along with an understanding of how children think about the physical phenomena promotes changes in students’ knowledge of children’s ideas and use of those ideas in instructional and assessment strategies.  Results indicated that students who were explicitly exposed to knowledge of children’s ideas more often incorporated those ideas into their own microteaching and demonstrated higher levels of sophistication of knowledge of children’s ideas, instructional strategies, and assessment strategies that incorporated those ideas.  This research explores an instructional model for blending physics content and pedagogical content knowledge

Motivation and needs of informal physics practitioners

Physicists engage with the public to varying degrees at different stages of their careers. However, their public engagement covers many activities, events, and audiences, making their motivations and professional development needs not well understood. As part of ongoing efforts to build and support community in the informal physics space, we conducted interviews with physicists with a range of different experiences in public engagement. We use personas methodology and self-determination theory to articulate their public engagement motivation, challenges, and needs. We present our set of three personas: the physicist who engages in informal physics for self-reflection, the physicist who wants to spark interest and understanding in physics, and the physicist who wants to provide diverse role models to younger students and inspire them to pursue a STEM career. Needs covered a range of resources including science communication training, community building among informal physics practitioners, and mechanisms to recognize, elevate and value informal physics. By bringing user-centered design methodology to a new topical area of physics education research, we expand our understanding of motivations and needs of practitioners in physics public engagement. Therefore, departments, organizations and institutions could draw upon the personas developed to consider the ways to better support physicists in their respective environment.Comment: 9 pages; preliminary portions of some of this analysis appeared in PERC 2022; submitted to PhysRevPE

Assessing the virucidal activity of essential oils against feline calicivirus, a non-enveloped virus used as surrogate of norovirus

Norovirus (NoV) causes serious gastrointestinal disease worldwide and is regarded as an important foodborne pathogen. Due the difficulties of in vitro cultivation for human NoV, alternative caliciviruses (i.e., feline calicivirus, FCV, or murine NoV) have long been used as surrogates for in vitro assessment of the efficacy of antivirals. Essential oils (EOs) are natural compounds that have displayed antimicrobial and antioxidant properties. We report in vitro the virucidal efficacy of four EOs, Melissa officinalis L. EO (MEO), Thymus vulgaris L. EO (TEO), Rosmarinus officinalis L. EO (REO), and Salvia officinalis L. EO (SEO) against FCV at different time contacts (10, 30 min, 1, 4 and 8 h). At the maximum non-cytotoxic concentration and at 10- and 100- fold concentrations over the cytotoxic threshold, the EOs did not decrease significantly FCV viral titers. However, MEO at 12,302.70 mu g/mL exhibited a significant efficacy decreasing the viral titer by 0.75 log10 Tissue Culture Infectious Dose (TCID50)/50 mu l after 10 min as compared to virus control. In this study, virucidal activity of four EOs against FCV, was investigated. A lack of virucidal efficacy of TEO, REO and SEO at different compound concentrations and time contacts against FCV was observed whilst MEO was able to significantly decrease FCV titer

Real World Incidence and Etiology of Infectious Complications in Adults With Ph‐Negative Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Treated With the Pediatric‐Inspired GIMEMA LAL1913 Program. A Campus All Study

Infections often complicate pediatric-inspired treatments for adult Philadelphia-negative acute lymphoblastic leukemia (Ph- ALL). Literature data on these complications are difficult to interpret due to the heterogeneity of types of infections analyzed or patients and treatment characteristics. A deeper insight on the infections occurring in the real life in uniformly treated ALL patients is lacking. This study investigated infectious complications in 240 newly diagnosed adult Ph- ALL patients treated in the real life according to the GIMEMA LAL1913 protocol by 18 Italian centers participating in the Campus ALL network. Incidence, etiology of microbiologically documented infections and invasive fungal infections (IFI) and mortality for infection were determined. Potential risk factors and the prophylactic strategies used during the first chemotherapy course (C1) were analyzed. Of 240 patients, 145 (60%) experienced at least one infectious episode, with bacterial infections being the most common (74.3%), followed by viral (13.9%), fungal (10.1%), and Pneumocystis jirovecii (1.7%) infections. The blood stream was the most involved site, pneumonia occurred in 14.6% of cases, half of which being fungal. Infections were prevalent during C1, affecting 40.5% of patients; IFI occurred in 12.5% of patients, most of them in C1. Risk factors for infections included older age (≥ 55 years and particularly > 65 years) and comorbidities only for IFI. The mortality rate for infection was 3.3%. Antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, and anti-PJ prophylaxis were variably administered and did not associate with a significant reduced infection rate. In conclusion, the rate of infectious complications in the real life of adult Ph- ALL patients treated with a pediatric-inspired intensive regimen is high, mainly during induction and mostly bacterial, particularly in the bloodstream, with a high IFI rate. Older age, mainly over 65 years, is a risk factor for all types of infection. The antimicrobial prophylaxis was not associated to a reduced risk of infection

Multicenter Observational Retrospective Study on Febrile Events in Patients with Acute Myeloid Leukemia Treated with Cpx-351 in "Real-Life": The SEIFEM Experience

: In the present study, we aimed to evaluate the absolute risk of infection in the real-life setting of AML patients treated with CPX-351. The study included all patients with AML from 30 Italian hematology centers of the SEIFEM group who received CPX-351 from July 2018 to June 2021. There were 200 patients included. Overall, 336 CPX-351 courses were counted: all 200 patients received the first induction cycle, 18 patients (5%) received a second CPX-351 induction, while 86 patients (26%) proceeded with the first CPX-351 consolidation cycle, and 32 patients (10%) received a second CPX-351 consolidation. A total of 249 febrile events were recorded: 193 during the first or second induction, and 56 after the first or second consolidation. After the diagnostic work-up, 92 events (37%) were classified as febrile neutropenia of unknown origin (FUO), 118 (47%) were classifiable as microbiologically documented infections, and 39 (17%) were classifiable as clinically documented infections. The overall 30-day mortality rate was 14% (28/200). The attributable mortality-infection rate was 6% (15/249). A lack of response to the CPX-351 treatment was the only factor significantly associated with mortality in the multivariate analysis [p-value: 0.004, OR 0.05, 95% CI 0.01-0.39]. Our study confirms the good safety profile of CPX-351 in a real-life setting, with an incidence of infectious complications comparable to that of the pivotal studies; despite prolonged neutropenia, the incidence of fungal infections was low, as was infection-related mortality

Ponatinib alone or with chemo-immunotherapy in heavily pre-treated Philadelphia-like acute lymphoblastic leukemia: a CAMPUS ALL real-life study

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