Adolescent Learning of Academic Vocabulary in Iceland

The fields of vocabulary instruction, literacy professional development, and global language issues framed this research. Situated in Iceland, the intervention consisted of professional development for 10th‐grade teachers focused on academic words in various subject materials, increasing the learners’ proficiency in using explicit strategies to detect word meanings, and offering learners multimodal ways of working with the vocabulary. There were no significant differences between the participants in the experimental schools (n = 157) and in the control schools (n = 88). There were gains from pretest to posttest in vocabulary and in comprehension, and there were some promising trends that distinguished the experimental group from the control group on the reading comprehension test. The nature, intensity, and length of the professional development offered to the high school teachers and the relatively short time of measurement of student outcomes are suggested explanations of the results.Fulbright Foundation/U.S. State DepartmentPre-prin

The Detection of a Population of Submillimeter-Bright, Strongly Lensed Galaxies

Original article can be found at : http://www.sciencemag.org/magazine Copyright AAAS. "This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science 330 (6005) pp.800 - 804, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1193420 "Gravitational lensing is a powerful astrophysical and cosmological probe and is particularly valuable at submillimeter wavelengths for the study of the statistical and individual properties of dusty star-forming galaxies. However, the identification of gravitational lenses is often time-intensive, involving the sifting of large volumes of imaging or spectroscopic data to find few candidates. We used early data from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey to demonstrate that wide-area submillimeter surveys can simply and easily detect strong gravitational lensing events, with close to 100% efficiency.Peer reviewe