A systematic review of interactions in pedagogical approaches with reported outcomes for the academic and social inclusion of pupils with special educational needs

From the introduction/background: The growing demand for inclusive practices within mainstream schools has resulted in classroom teachers having to take direct responsibility for the individual learning needs of all pupils within the setting, and reduced the expectation that support staff should be the primary practitioners for children with special educational needs (SEN). The belief in a need for special pedagogical approaches for these children has also been widely critiqued (e.g. Norwich and Lewis, 2001; Hart, 1996) and there has been a growing focus upon the teaching practices that can be, and are, more broadly used by mainstream practitioners. Central to all these approaches are the interactions that both create the learning context and operate within it

A systematic review of pedagogical approaches that can effectively include children with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms with a particular focus on peer group interactive approaches

The broad background to this review is a long history of concepts of special pupils and special education, and a faith in special pedagogical approaches. The rise of inclusive schools and some important critiques of special pedagogy (e.g. Hart, 1996; Norwich and Lewis, 2001; Thomas and Loxley, 2001) have raised the profile of teaching approaches that ordinary teachers can and do use to include children with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms. Inclusive education itself is increasingly conceived as being about the quality of learning and participation that goes on in inclusive schools rather than simplistic matters of where children are place

A systematic review of whole class, subject based, pedagogies with reported outcomes for the academic and social inclusion of pupils with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms

Schools across the world have responded to international and national initiatives designed to further the development of inclusive education. In England, there is a statutory requirement for all schools to provide effective learning opportunities for all pupils (QCA, 2000) and children with special educational needs (SEN) are positioned as having a right to be within mainstream classrooms accessing an appropriate curriculum (SENDA, 2001). Previous reviews which have sought to identify classroom practices that support the inclusion of children with SEN have been technically non-systematic and hence a need for a systematic review within this area has been identified (Nind et al., 2004; Rix et al., 2006). This systematic literature review is the last in a series of three

Binary Black Hole Mergers from Planet-like Migrations

If supermassive black holes (BHs) are generically present in galaxy centers, and if galaxies are built up through hierarchical merging, BH binaries are at least temporary features of most galactic bulges. Observations suggest, however, that binary BHs are rare, pointing towards a binary lifetime far shorter than the Hubble time. We show that, regardless of the detailed mechanism, all stellar-dynamical processes are insufficient to reduce significantly the orbital separation once orbital velocities in the binary exceed the virial velocity of the system. We propose that a massive gas disk surrounding a BH binary can effect its merger rapidly, in a scenario analogous to the orbital decay of super-jovian planets due to a proto-planetary disk. As in the case of planets, gas accretion onto the secondary (here a supermassive BH) is integrally connected with its inward migration. Such accretion would give rise to quasar activity. BH binary mergers could therefore be responsible for many or most quasars.Comment: 8 pages, submitted to ApJ Letter

The Extinction Distribution in the Galaxy UGC 5041

We probe the dust extinction through the foreground disk of the overlapping galaxy pair UGC 5041 by analyzing B,I, and H band images. The inclined foreground disk of this infrared-selected pair is almost opaque in B at a projected distance of ~8kpc. From the images, we estimate directly the area-weighted distribution of differential near-IR extinction: it is nearly Gaussian with =0.6 and sigma=0.27. For a homogenous dust distribution and a Milky Way extinction curve, this corresponds to a face-on distribution p(tau) with a mean of =0.34 and sigma_V=0.15. For a clumpy dust model the optical depth estimate increases to =0.41 and sigma_V=0.19. Even though the galaxy pair is subject to different selection biases and our analysis is subject to different systematics, the result is consistent with existing case studies, indicating that ~0.3 is generic for late-type spirals near their half-light radii. We outline how to estimate from p(tau) by how much background quasars are underreresented, where projected within ~10kpc of nearby spirals, such as damped Ly-alpha absorbers or gravitational lenses; from our data we derive a factor of two deficit for flux-limited, optical surveys.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures; To appear in the Astronomical Journa

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Issued as final reportUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaig

Discriminating among theories of spiral structure using Gaia DR2

We compare the distribution in position and velocity of nearby stars from the Gaia DR2 radial velocity sample with predictions of current theories for spirals in disc galaxies. Although the rich substructure in velocity space contains the same information, we find it more revealing to reproject the data into action-angle variables, and we describe why resonant scattering would be more readily identifiable in these variables. We compute the predicted changes to the phase space density, in multiple different projections, that would be caused by a simplified isolated spiral pattern, finding widely differing predictions from each theory. We conclude that the phase space structure present in the Gaia data shares many of the qualitative features expected in the transient spiral mode model. We argue that the popular picture of apparently swing-amplified spirals results from the superposition of a few underlying spiral modes.Comment: Revised version accepted to appear in MNRAS. Some significant improvements. A full resolution version of Fig 4 is available from http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~sellwood/mult_res.pd

Galaxy-Galaxy Lensing in the Hubble Deep Field: The Halo Tully-Fisher Relation at Intermediate Redshift

A tangential distortion of background source galaxies around foreground lens galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field is detected at the 99.3% confidence level. An important element of our analysis is the use of photometric redshifts to determine distances of lens and source galaxies and rest-frame B-band luminosities of the lens galaxies. The lens galaxy halos obey a Tully-Fisher relation between halo circular velocity and luminosity; the typical lens galaxy, at a redshift z = 0.6, has a circular velocity of 210 +/-40 km/s at M_B = -18.5, if q_0 = 0.5. Control tests, in which lens and source positions and source ellipticities are randomized, confirm the significance level of the detection quoted above. Furthermore, a marginal signal is also detected from an independent, fainter sample of source galaxies without photometric redshifts. Potential systematic effects, such as contamination by aligned satellite galaxies, the distortion of source shapes by the light of the foreground galaxies, PSF anisotropies, and contributions from mass distributed on the scale of galaxy groups are shown to be negligible. A comparison of our result with the local Tully-Fisher relation indicates that intermediate-redshift galaxies are fainter than local spirals by 1.0 +/- 0.6 B mag at a fixed circular velocity. This is consistent with some spectroscopic studies of the rotation curves of intermediate-redshift galaxies. This result suggests that the strong increase in the global luminosity density with redshift is dominated by evolution in the galaxy number density.Comment: Revised version with minor changes. 13 pages, 7 figures, LaTeX2e, uses emulateapj and multicol styles (included). Accepted by Ap

Dynamical Masses in Luminous Infrared Galaxies

We have studied the dynamics and masses of a sample of ten nearby luminous and ultraluminous infrared galaxies (LIRGS and ULIRGs), using 2.3 micron CO absorption line spectroscopy and near-infrared H- and Ks-band imaging. By combining velocity dispersions derived from the spectroscopy, disk scale-lengths obtained from the imaging, and a set of likely model density profiles, we calculate dynamical masses for each LIRG. For the majority of the sample, it is difficult to reconcile our mass estimates with the large amounts of gas derived from millimeter observations and from a standard conversion between CO emission and H_2 mass. Our results imply that LIRGs do not have huge amounts of molecular gas (10^10-10^11 Msolar) at their centers, and support previous indications that the standard conversion of CO to H_2 probably overestimates the gas masses and cannot be used in these environments. This in turn suggests much more modest levels of extinction in the near-infrared for LIRGs than previously predicted (A_V~10-20 versus A_V~100-1000). The lower gas mass estimates indicated by our observations imply that the star formation efficiency in these systems is very high and is triggered by cloud-cloud collisions, shocks, and winds rather than by gravitational instabilities in circumnuclear gas disks.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, accepted to Ap