Ready, Willing and Able: Kansas City Parents Talk About How to Improve Schools and What They Can Do to Help

Are parents an untapped resource in improving and reimagining K -- 12 education in Kansas City? What do they think would enhance student learning and what are they willing to do to help their children get the education they deserve? These are among the questions explored in an in-depth survey of 1,566 parents with children now in public school in the Kansas City metropolitan area. This study finds the majority of parents in the Kansas City area ready, willing and able to be more engaged in their children's education at some level. For communities to reap the most benefit from additional parental involvement, it is important to understand that different parents can be involved and seek to be involved in different ways.The results of this research, detailed in the following pages, show that nearly a third of the region's parents may be ready to take on a greater role in shaping how local schools operate and advocating for reform in K -- 12 education. These parents say they would be very comfortable serving on committees focused on teacher selection and the use of school resources. Their sense of "parental engagement" extends beyond such traditional activities as attending PTA meetings, coaching sports, volunteering for bake sales, chaperoning school trips and seeing that their children are prepared for school each day. Yet, despite their broad interest in a deeper, more substantive involvement in shaping the region's school systems, relatively few of these "potential transformers" have actually participated in policy-oriented activities in the past year. Moreover, this survey finds that even though the majority of parents seem less inclined to jump into school policy debates, many say they could do more to support local schools in the more traditional school parent roles

Neural Network Based Epileptic EEG Detection and Classification

Timely diagnosis is important for saving the life of epileptic patients. In past few years, a lot of treatment are available for epilepsy. These treatments involve use of medicines. But these are not effective in controlling frequency of seizure. There is need of removal of affected region using surgery. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a widely used technique for monitoring the brain activity and widely popular for seizure region detection. It is used before surgery for locating affected region. This manual process using EEG graphs is time consuming and requires deep expertise. In the present paper, a model has been proposed that preserves the true nature of EEG signal in form of textual one dimensional vector. The proposed model achieves a state of art performance for Bonn University dataset giving an average sensitivity, specificity of 81% and 81.4% respectively for classification among all five classes. Also for binary classification achieving 99.9%, 99.5% score value for specificity and sensitivity instead of 2D models used by other researchers. Thus developed system will significantly help neurosurgeons in increasing their performance

Maternal and perinatal outcomes in pregnancy associated with placenta previa

Background: Placenta previa is associated with increased maternal and perinatal complications like malpresentation, premature labor, higher rates of caesarean section, peripartum hysterectomies, postpartum hemorrhage, sepsis, shock and retained placenta and even death. Antepartum haemorrhage may frequently result in low birth weight babies, preterm labour or repeated small events of haemorrhage causing chronic placental insufficiency and foetal growth retardation or intrauterine fetal death.Methods: This was a prospective study conducted in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology, SMGS, hospital, Jammu over a period of 1 year. All admitted cases of placenta previa were included in the study.Results: The total numbers of deliveries in one our hospital were 18567 during the study period. 364 patients admitted with antepartum heamorrhage so the incidence of APH in our hospital was 1.96%. 157 cases out of 346 were of placenta previa. It was observed that placenta previa cases were highest in the maternal age group of 26-30 yrs, i.e. 55.42%, 71.97% were multigravidae and 26.75% with prior caesarean section. 15.92% had undergone peripartum hysterectomy due to massive PPH. The percentage of perinatal death was 18.23% and the main cause was prematurity.Conclusions: Based upon observation made during this study, it is concluded that placenta previa is a serious condition with significant maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality. Improvements in management of placenta previa have helped in improving neonatal survival and reduce maternal morbidity and mortality

Cooperative Integrated Reading Composition (Circ): Improving Achievement in English Writing Composition Among Seventh Graders

Cooperative learning strategies have occupied a prominent place among language learning methodologies. t his study quantitatively validates the effect of the Cooperative Learning approach-Cooperative Integrated Reading Composition (CIRC) on the Writing Composition achievement in English among seventh graders. Cooperative Learning was compared with conventional teaching-learning classroom structure using an experimental design. 140 students of seventh class were randomly selected out of which 70 students formed Experimental Group (E) and 70 students formed Control Group (C). Writing Composition achievement test in English and Instructional Material were developed by the investigators themselves. Whole teaching-learning process was carried out for eight weeks only. at the end of the experiment, Writing Composition achievement test in English was given to the subjects. Data were analyzed by using the t-test. the findings revealed that Experimental Group outscored significantly Control Group on post-test showing the obvious supremacy of Co-operative Learning technique (CIRC) over Conventional Method of teaching. It was concluded that co-operative learning is an effective approach which needs to be incorporated in teaching Writing Composition to improve writing skill