Meeting NCATE Standard 4: One University’s Plan to Help Preservice Teachers Develop Knowledge, Skills, and Professional Dispositions to Ensure that All Students Learn

Standard 4-Diversity of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) requires that preservice teachers, or candidates, demonstrate and apply proficiencies related to diversity

How Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected the Way We Access and Interact with the Countryside and the Animals within It?

SIMPLE SUMMARY: In March 2020, the UK entered its first mandatory lockdown to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The restrictions associated with the lockdown led to changes in human behaviour, particularly in relation to exercise and accessing the outdoors. This study used an online survey of UK residents to explore these changes and to understand how people interacted with the natural world while they were outside, including interactions with wildlife and domestic animals. There was an increase in how often respondents went for walks outside during lockdown, compared to pre-lockdown levels, and this increase lasted beyond the end of the first lockdown. Interacting with animals was a common feature of walks. This most commonly involved watching wildlife or domestic animals, such as livestock or horses, but sometimes also involved physically interacting with them and/or feeding them which may have implications for their welfare, for example, if inappropriate food is provided. There is also a risk of humans transferring disease between the animals they have contact with or zoonotic disease transmission between the humans and animals. While is it positive that people are interacting with the natural world, it is important that this does not compromise animal wellbeing. ABSTRACT: There is growing evidence that the changes in human behaviour resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic have had positive and negative impacts on the natural world. This study used an online survey to explore how the first UK lockdown affected human exercising behaviour, with particular focus on the role of wild and domestic animals. The survey was completed by 308 respondents. There was a significant increase in the frequency that respondents went for walks outdoors during lockdown, in comparison to pre-lockdown levels (p ≤ 0.001), and this was sustained (albeit to a lesser extent) once lockdown ended (p = 0.005). Engaging with the natural world was an important feature of walks outside for 81% of respondents. A small proportion of respondents reported physically interacting with the animals they encountered and/or feeding them, which may have implications for their welfare. The findings suggest that those who value animal encounters during their time outside always seek these interactions, while those who do not, did not tend to change this behaviour following lockdown. Should the changes in human exercising behaviour be sustained, it is important to balance the benefits of walking outdoors for human health and wellbeing with the health and welfare of the animals they encounter

A Professional Development Program to Improve Math Skills Among Preschool Children in Head Start

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of providing early educators professional development experiences and activities to improve the mathematical skills of preschool children in Head Start around four domains of mathematics. Because of the need to provide necessary mathematical experiences to young children to improve their early understanding and skills and provide the foundation for future success in mathematics, we provided the treatment group of early educators with professional development and center-based activities to promote four critical areas in mathematics. By randomly selecting Head Start centers to participate as the treatment group or control group, we were able to examine the effects of the professional development and set of activities on preschool children’s knowledge over a six-month period. We found children in the treatment group were more fluent and flexible with number concepts, were better at solving contextual problems, and had better measurement and spatial abilities than children in the control group

A Content Analysis and Comparison of Two Peaks of Newspaper Reporting During a Suicide Cluster to Examine Implications for Imitation, Suggestion, and Prevention

Background: During 2007–2008, media attention focused on a cluster of youth suicides in the UK. There were two peaks (P1, P2) in the volume of newspaper reporting of the deaths. The number of possible suicides was greater than expected at the time of the first peak but not at the time of the second. Aims: To explore any differences in the content of the reporting peaks and to consider implications for imitation and prevention. Method: A content analysis of two peaks of newspaper reporting was conducted. Results: There were 204 articles in P1 (December 27, 2007 to February 19, 2008) and 157 in P2 (February 20, 2008 to March 15, 2008). Four main themes were identified: individual stories; possible causes; features of reporting of the cluster; and educating and informing the public. P1 articles more frequently contained: explicit details of method; photographs of the deceased, and contained more characterization of individuals. Limitations: The focus was on print media, future studies should incorporate online and social media content. Conclusion: The findings provide some support for the hypothesis of a process of suggestion initiated by sensationalist reporting in P1. This contributes to the evidence base of the role of the press in suicide imitation and prevention, highlighting the importance of care when reporting suicides

Release of cell wall phenolic esters during hydrothermal pretreatment of rice husk and rice straw

Background: Rice husk and rice straw represent promising sources of biomass for production of renewable fuels and chemicals. For efficient utilisation, lignocellulosic components must first be pretreated to enable efficient enzymatic saccharification and subsequent fermentation. Existing pretreatments create breakdown products such as sugar-derived furans, and lignin-derived phenolics that inhibit enzymes and fermenting organisms. Alkali pretreatments have also been shown to release significant levels of simple, free phenolics such as ferulic acid that are normally esterified to cell wall polysaccharides in the intact plant. These phenolics have recently been found to have considerable inhibitory properties. The aim of this research has been to establish the extent to which such free phenolic acids are also released during hydrothermal pretreatment of rice straw (RS) and rice husk (RH). Results: RS and RH were subjected to hydrothermal pretreatments over a wide range of severities (1.57–5.45). FTIR analysis showed that the pretreatments hydrolysed and solubilised hemicellulosic moieties, leading to an enrichment of lignin and crystalline cellulose in the insoluble residue. The residues also lost the capacity for UV autofluorescence at pH 7 or pH 10, indicating the breakdown or release of cell wall phenolics. Saponification of raw RS and RH enabled identification and quantification of substantial levels of simple phenolics including ferulic acid (tFA), coumaric acid (pCA) and several diferulic acids (DiFAs) including 8-O-4′-DiFA, 8,5′-DiFA and 5,5′-DiFA. RH had higher levels of pCA and lower levels of tFA and DiFAs compared with RS. Assessment of the pretreatment liquors revealed that pretreatment-liberated phenolics present were not free but remained as phenolic esters (at mM concentrations) that could be readily freed by saponification. Many were lost, presumably through degradation, at the higher severities. Conclusion: Differences in lignin, tFA, DiFAs and pCA between RS and RH reflect differences in cell wall physiology, and probably contribute to the higher recalcitrance of RH compared with RS. Hydrothermal pretreatments, unlike alkali pretreatments, release cinnamic acid components as esters. The potential for pretreatment-liberated phenolic esters to be inhibitory to fermenting microorganisms is not known. However, the present study shows that they are found at concentrations that could be significantly inhibitory if released as free forms by enzyme activity

Infrastructure for Semantic Annotation in the Genomics Domain

We describe a novel super-infrastructure for biomedical text mining which incorporates an end-to-end pipeline for the collection, annotation, storage, retrieval and analysis of biomedical and life sciences literature, combining NLP and corpus linguistics methods. The infrastructure permits extreme-scale research on the open access PubMed Central archive. It combines an updatable Gene Ontology Semantic Tagger (GOST) for entity identification and semantic markup in the literature, with a NLP pipeline scheduler (Buster) to collect and process the corpus, and a bespoke columnar corpus database (LexiDB) for indexing. The corpus database is distributed to permit fast indexing, and provides a simple web front-end with corpus linguistics methods for sub-corpus comparison and retrieval. GOST is also connected as a service in the Language Application (LAPPS) Grid, in which context it is interoperable with other NLP tools and data in the Grid and can be combined with them in more complex workflows. In a literature based discovery setting, we have created an annotated corpus of 9,776 papers with 5,481,543 words