Make Your Mark!

Welcome! Kristin Chenoweth’s song “I was here” speaks volumes when it comes to our theme for the 2016 Women’s Summit – Make Your Mark! The words struck a chord with me, especially, “You will notice me. I’ll be leaving my mark like initials carved in an old oak tree. Just wait and see. I want to do something that matters, say something different, something that sets the whole world on its ear.” Last year, our opening keynote speaker, Sallie Krawcheck, told us that women want to engage in work that allows them to find meaning and purpose in their professional lives. They are more likely to seek employment from a company if the work is meaningful and gives them a purpose for going to work every day, she noted. I find meaning and purpose in my work at Bryant University, which includes creating the Women’s Summit for the past 19 years. I believe in the Women’s Summit mission: to empower those who attend to be professionally, personally, and financially successful. The Women’s Summit Committee works hard to present nationally recognized keynote speakers and breakout sessions that are led by experts in their fields, enabling attendees to experience renewed enthusiasm and confidence that can inspire them at work and at home. The contributions you make to your profession, your family, and your community have great value. If you can help just one person, then you have made a difference in his or her life. Our goal is to provide encouragement and educationally enriching programs that motivate you to continue to succeed. Attending the conference also allows you to focus on your health and well-being by providing you with a day to step back, review your current situation, and set goals. In his book, The Road to Character, David Brooks writes: “When we think about making a difference or leading a life with purpose, we often think of achieving something external: performing some service that will have an impact on the world, creating a successful company, or doing something to benefit the community. These are not the only parameters that measure our success. We also have internal moral qualities of humility and learning that require us to confront our weaknesses,” according to Brooks. It is the combination of these qualities, plus being mindful about our health and well-being, which will help us all to make our mark! At this time I would like to thank the Women’s Summit Co-chairs and Women’s Summit Committee, as well as everyone at Bryant University who devote so much time and energy to the creation of another successful conference. The Women’s Summit would not be possible without the help of our generous sponsors who enable us to continue this educationally enriching conference each year. We appreciate their contributions and support in advancing women through their sponsorship. “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” – anne frank Sincerely, Kati Machtley Director, The Women’s Summit Bryant Universit

The Targeted Wage Subsidy: How Program Design Creates Incentives for “Creaming”

Across most developed nations, including Canada, parallel systems of social welfare and employment insurance have increasingly been replaced by programs that emphasize work as a means to achieve welfare goals within the so-called re-employment framework. Various authors have drawn attention to the tension between the goal of long-term sustainable employment, and re-employment-based strategies that emphasize short-term and stand-alone interventions. In this paper, we focus on the implementation of one such program in Canada, the Targeted Wage Subsidy. This program seeks to place the most marginal qualifying participants in employment by offering employers a financial inducement. By paying close attention to the experiences of those tasked with monitoring and implementing the program in Toronto, we identify various ways in which program design elements may systematically disadvantage the intended recipients. These program delivery mechanisms are shaped both in the practices of implementing agents, as well as by the public accountability framework that enforces rigid timelines and reporting requirements, resulting in a practice commonly referred to by employment service providers as “creaming.” Our observations lead us to question whether the target population is, in fact, the one benefiting from these return-to-work supports

Evaluation of the Impact and Implementation of Inspire Maths in Year 1 Classrooms in England: Findings from a Mixed-Method Randomised Control Trial

Background: Inspire Maths is the UK edition of My Pals Are Here! first launched in January 2015 by Oxford University Press. It consists of a textbook series and pedagogical approach that emphasises the teaching of mathematics through multiple representations of mathematical concepts – specifically the use of a Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract (CPA) approach. It is an example of the East Asian mastery-based approach to teaching mathematics that is gaining increasing international prominence in both research communities and in educational policies, and both within the UK as well as internationally. Methods: This evaluation aimed to establish the effects of Inspire Maths via a clustered Randomised Control Trial (RCT) that followed 576 Year 1 pupils (aged 5-6 years) for one school year in the first schools to implement both Inspire Maths and the 2015 English National Curriculum. The RCT used a mixed methods approach and was driven by theories from the educational research fields of teacher effectiveness and school improvement. It used researcher-administered tests of children's mathematics attainment pre- and post- the introduction of Inspire Maths, but also obtained quantitative and qualitative evidence concerning the ways that schools and teachers adopted and responded to the materials and to the pedagogical approach. Key Findings: Inspire Maths can help Year 1 pupils make significantly more progress in mathematics. We observed small but significant gains in progress after two terms’ use of the programme. In context: After two terms, the gap in mathematics attainment was twice the size of the gap found between boys and girls when they started school. Inspire Maths promotes Year 1 teaching practices that are well known to be more effective for pupil progress in the long term. Benefits to classroom practice were noted immediately following initial professional development training workshops, secondary benefits were then observed over the course of the year. Teachers were generally very positive about the Inspire Maths materials and approach. Teachers noted a number of key benefits and challenges to themselves, pupils and schools when implementing Inspire Maths. For example, teachers reported that Inspire Maths increased both their and their pupils’ confidence and subject knowledge in mathematics. These were quite consistent regardless of whether a teacher began implementing Inspire Maths in September or in JanuaryOxford University Pres

Evaluation of children's centres in England (ECCE) : strand 1: first survey of children's centre leaders in the most deprived areas

This report is the first output from the Evaluation of Children's Centres in England (ECCE), a six year study commissioned by the Department for Education and undertaken by NatCen Social Research, the University of Oxford and Frontier Economics. The aim of ECCE is to provide an in-depth understanding of children's centre services, including their effectiveness in relation to different management and delivery approaches and the cost of delivering different types of services. The aim of Strand 1 is to profile children’s centres in the most disadvantaged areas, providing estimates on different aspects of provision with which to select centres for subsequent stages of the evaluation and to explore different models of provision. The findings below relate to 500 children's centres that are representative of all phase 1 and 2 centres (i.e. those in the 30percent most deprived areas).</p

The impact of read/write web approaches on the curriculum priorities of PG Cert HE participants

Whether the read/write web, or Web 2.0, can enhance learner engagement within higher education is a central focus of current e-learning research. The implications of the read/write web, for: the personalisation of learning; student motivation and participation with the learning process; and, the relationship between informal and formal learning contexts; are particular foci. In order to develop institutional understanding of these issues, one of the strands of the DMU e-Learning Pathfinder project focused upon the possibilities for extending dialogue with PG Cert HE participants and by extension, undergraduate and postgraduate learners. This paper scopes some of the emergent outcomes from the use of read/write tools and approaches with this cohort of learners. The voices of both learners and tutors are evaluated, drawing upon a triangulation of datasets, including questionnaires, focus groups and wiki-based action plans. The authors investigate ways in which these approaches can be used to enhance: the personalisation of learning; student motivation and participation with the learning process; and, the relationship between informal and formal learning contexts. These headline outcomes underpin recommendations for the development of PG Cert HE curricula, and highlight how read/write approaches open-up dialogues about curriculum design. A critical element of future work is, therefore, whether this strategy empowers those participants to be better placed to engage with their own learner

Lesions of the basolateral amygdala disrupt selective aspects of reinforcer representation in rats

The amygdala is known to play a role in learning about motivationally significant events. We investigated this role further by examining the effects of excitotoxic lesions of the basolateral amygdala on the ability of rats to use instrumental outcomes to direct responding (the differential outcomes effect) and on the ability of Pavlovian cues to modulate instrumental performance based on shared outcomes (reinforcer–selective Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer). We found that basolateral amygdala (BLA) lesions did not affect the ability of rats to learn a basic instrumental conditional discrimination, but did disrupt the ability of differential outcomes to facilitate acquisition. In Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer, BLA lesions did not disrupt the basic enhancement of instrumental performance but did abolish the reinforcer specificity of that enhancement. These results suggest that the BLA is involved in the representation of the sensory aspects of motivationally significant events

The role of pre-school quality in promoting resilience in the cognitive development of young children

The study reported here investigates the role of pre-school education as a protective factor in the development of children who are at risk due to environmental and individual factors. This investigation builds upon earlier research by examining different kinds of 'quality' in early education and tests the hypothesis that pre-schools of high quality can moderate the impacts of risks upon cognitive development. Cognitive development was measured in 2857 English pre-schoolers at 36 and 58 months of age, together with 22 individual risks to children's development, and assessments were made of the quality of their pre-school provision. Multilevel Structural Equation Modelling revealed that: the global quality of pre-school can moderate the effects of familial risk (such as poverty); the relationships between staff and children can moderate the effects of child level risk (such as low birth weight); and the specific quality of curricular provision can moderate the effects of both. Policy makers need to take quality into account in their efforts to promote resilience in young 'at risk' children through early childhood services