Cultivating the Strategy of Summarizing Sequential Expository Text: Scaffolds and Supports for the Intermediate Grades

Fourth-grade students in the United States have notoriously experienced a fourth-grade slump in reading. This persistent trend has led researchers, school leaders, and teachers to seek ways to improve comprehension of expository text. Summarizing is a complex strategy that requires students to analyze, condense, and express information in their own words. This action research project explored the impact of three techniques (cloze summaries, graphic organizers, and paraphrasing) on students’ ability to summarize sequential text in writing. Explicit instruction led to marked growth in students’ ability to write summaries of expository text

The Phenomenon of Teacher Leadership and Cross-Cultural Confusions: What Teachers\u27 Narratives Reveal about School Leadership and Intergroup Communication

English Language Learners (ELLs) comprise the largest growing subgroup of students in the United States, yet for decades this special population has persistently underachieved as compared to White non-Hispanic students in the public school system. Throughout the nation, ELLs receive an array of services from English as a second language pull-out to sheltered content instruction to dual language education. Much debate has centered on instructional programs for ELLs and the language of instructional delivery. The purpose of this study was to explore the phenomenon of teacher leadership during the adoption and implementation of a one-way dual language education program at a central Kentucky elementary school. This program, designed to develop and maintain literacy in Spanish and English, was the first of its kind for ELLs in the state. In an effort to understand the factors that influenced the teachers ‘ thinking, behavior, and interactions as they designed and implemented the program, an exploratory qualitative approach that incorporated heuristic inquiry and narrative analysis was used. Data were collected primarily through interviews and a focus group session along with documents and observation. Analysis of the transcripts involved the identification and interpretation of multiple categories that related to theoretical and emergent themes. Teachers’ stories illuminated the influence of streams of school leadership (relationships, moral purpose, and collective action) throughout the adoption and implementation process. Emergent themes from the data pointed to cross-cultural communication issues that had an impact on the teachers’ relationships and subsequently, the program’s development. Findings in the study point to the need for K-12 schools and teacher education programs to develop curricula that promotes understanding of teacher leadership theory. More importantly, however, the data showed that attention must also be paid to promoting cultural responsivity in educators, not only as relates to students, but also to colleagues

Corporate Torts: International Human Rights and Superior Officers

Recent decisions by U.S. courts have attacked the ability of human rights victims to hold corporations accountable for their complicity in atrocities around the world. This Article argues that in the face of this attack, advocates and scholars have given insufficient attention to a potent strategy—holding corporate officers liable. It examines the corporate officer liability question through the lens of tort liability, focusing on those officers with superior responsibility over their subordinates who physically commit the violations. It is the first to provide a systematic analysis of how superior officer liability under tort and international law approaches to superior responsibility and criminal liability might provide a basis for greater accountability for corporate officers. This Article examines the historical origins of military and state civilian command responsibility, the trials of civilian corporate officials in Nuremberg and Tokyo jurisprudence following World War II, the special international and hybrid criminal tribunals first established in the 1990s, and tort cases in the U.S. and other jurisdictions. In so doing, this Article complements important parallel efforts to hold corporations liable. This Article considers options for officer liability in situations when governments cannot or will not bring criminal charges, or when bringing claims against the officer may be the most efficient means of changing corporate behavior. It concludes that human rights law, international criminal law, and domestic tort and related liability standards all provide liability for corporate officers under a theory of superior responsibility for human rights violations. This common core standard provides an important tool for compensating victims of past abuses and deterring ongoing or future human rights violations

Stealth Coronal Mass Ejections from Active Regions

Stealth coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are eruptions from the Sun that have no obvious low coronal signature. These CMEs are characteristically slower events, but can still be geoeffective and affect space weather at Earth. Therefore, understanding the science underpinning these eruptions will greatly improve our ability to detect and, eventually, forecast them. We present a study of two stealth CMEs analysed using advanced image processing techniques that reveal their faint signatures in observations from the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) imagers onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), and Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft. The different viewpoints given by these spacecraft provide the opportunity to study each eruption from above and the side contemporaneously. For each event, EUV and magnetogram observations were combined to reveal the coronal structure that erupted. For one event, the observations indicate the presence of a magnetic flux rope before the CME's fast rise phase. We found that both events originated in active regions and are likely to be sympathetic CMEs triggered by a nearby eruption. We discuss the physical processes that occurred in the time leading up to the onset of each stealth CME and conclude that these eruptions are part of the low-energy and velocity tail of a distribution of CME events, and are not a distinct phenomenon.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Cytolytic T Lymphocytes Specific for Tumors and Infected Cells from Mice with a Retrovirus-induced Immunodeficiency Syndrome.

LP-BM5 retrovirus complex-infected C57BL/6 mice develop immunodeficiency, somewhat analogous to AIDS, termed murine AIDS (MAIDS). After secondary stimulation with syngeneic B-cell lymphomas from LP-BM5-infected mice, C57BL/6 mice produced vigorous CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes specific for MAIDS-associated tumors. An anti-LP-BM5 specificity was suggested because spleen and lymph node cells from LP-BM5-infected mice served as target cells in competition assays, and cells from LP-BM5, but not ecotropic, virus-infected mice functioned as secondary in vitro stimulators to generate cytotoxic T lymphocytes to MAIDS tumors

The norovirus NS3 protein is a dynamic lipid- and microtubule-associated protein involved in viral RNA replication

Norovirus (NoV) infections are a significant health burden to society, yet the lack of reliable tissue culture systems has hampered the development of appropriate antiviral therapies. Here we show that the NoV NS3 protein, derived from murine NoV (MNV), is intimately associated with the MNV replication complex and the viral replication intermediate double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). We observed that when expressed individually, MNV NS3 and NS3 encoded by human Norwalk virus (NV) induced the formation of distinct vesicle-like structures that did not colocalize with any particular protein markers to cellular organelles but localized to cellular membranes, in particular those with a high cholesterol content. Both proteins also showed some degree of colocalization with the cytoskeleton marker β-tubulin. Although the distribution of MNV and NV NS3s were similar, NV NS3 displayed a higher level of colocalization with the Golgi apparatus and the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). However, we observed that although both proteins colocalized in membranes counterstained with filipin, an indicator of cholesterol content, MNV NS3 displayed a greater association with flotillin and stomatin, proteins known to associate with sphingolipid- and cholesterol-rich microdomains. Utilizing time-lapse epifluorescence microscopy, we observed that the membrane-derived vesicular structures induced by MNV NS3 were highly motile and dynamic in nature, and their movement was dependent on intact microtubules. These results begin to interrogate the functions of NoV proteins during virus replication and highlight the conserved properties of the NoV NS3 proteins among the seven Norovirus genogroups