Evaluating the impact of peer coaching through teachers' teaching principles

The English language programme of the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST) has a pressing need for a continuing professional development (CPD) programme. Peer coaching is identified as the type of CPD that is potentially suitable for the English programme. It also serves as a catalyst for building a learning community. The main purpose of this study is to examine the impact of a peer coaching programme on the teachers’ beliefs and practice. To do so, I investigate the difference in teachers’ teaching principles (please see Section 5 of Chapter 2 for details) in direct relation to their actual classroom practice before and after the peer coaching programme in one school term. By comparing how the teachers make sense of their actual classroom practices before and after the programme, this study can address the impact of the peer coaching programme on the teachers’ theories-in-use and has important implications for understanding and improving teaching. This study also attempts to investigate to what extent peer coaching helps to build a learning community. This study found that peer coaching could help to change the teachers' beliefs and perceptions in various extents, which led to changes in teachers' practice. Trust is found to be an important element in a successful peer coaching relationship. This study also found that peer coaching can help to promote an articulate, reflective, and collaborative work culture, which should facilitate and sustain teachers’ professional development, promote teacher leadership and contribute to educational improvement

Targeted gene sanger sequencing should remain the first-tier genetic test for children suspected to have the five common X-linked inborn errors of immunity

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT : The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary Material. Further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.To address inborn errors of immunity (IEI) which were underdiagnosed in resource-limited regions, our centre developed and offered free genetic testing for the most common IEI by Sanger sequencing (SS) since 2001. With the establishment of The Asian Primary Immunodeficiency (APID) Network in 2009, the awareness and definitive diagnosis of IEI were further improved with collaboration among centres caring for IEI patients from East and Southeast Asia. We also started to use whole exome sequencing (WES) for undiagnosed cases and further extended our collaboration with centres from South Asia and Africa. With the increased use of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), we have shifted our diagnostic practice from SS to WES. However, SS was still one of the key diagnostic tools for IEI for the past two decades. Our centre has performed 2,024 IEI SS genetic tests, with in-house protocol designed specifically for 84 genes, in 1,376 patients with 744 identified to have disease-causing mutations (54.1%). The high diagnostic rate after just one round of targeted gene SS for each of the 5 common IEI (X-linked agammaglobulinemia (XLA) 77.4%, Wiskott–Aldrich syndrome (WAS) 69.2%, X-linked chronic granulomatous disease (XCGD) 59.5%, X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (XSCID) 51.1%, and X-linked hyper-IgM syndrome (HIGM1) 58.1%) demonstrated targeted gene SS should remain the first-tier genetic test for the 5 common X-linked IEI.The Hong Kong Society for Relief of Disabled Children and Jeffrey Modell Foundation.http://www.frontiersin.org/Immunologyam2023Paediatrics and Child Healt

Evaluating the impact of peer coaching through teachers' teaching principles

The English language programme of the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST) has a pressing need for a continuing professional development (CPD) programme. Peer coaching is identified as the type of CPD that is potentially suitable for the English programme. It also serves as a catalyst for building a learning community. The main purpose of this study is to examine the impact of a peer coaching programme on the teachers’ beliefs and practice. To do so, I investigate the difference in teachers’ teaching principles (please see Section 5 of Chapter 2 for details) in direct relation to their actual classroom practice before and after the peer coaching programme in one school term. By comparing how the teachers make sense of their actual classroom practices before and after the programme, this study can address the impact of the peer coaching programme on the teachers’ theories-in-use and has important implications for understanding and improving teaching. This study also attempts to investigate to what extent peer coaching helps to build a learning community. This study found that peer coaching could help to change the teachers' beliefs and perceptions in various extents, which led to changes in teachers' practice. Trust is found to be an important element in a successful peer coaching relationship. This study also found that peer coaching can help to promote an articulate, reflective, and collaborative work culture, which should facilitate and sustain teachers’ professional development, promote teacher leadership and contribute to educational improvement

Fibroblast growth factor receptor 4 (FGF4) and fibroblast growth factor 19 (FGFR19) autocrine enhance brest cancer cells survival

Basal-like breast cancer is an aggressive tumor subtype with poor prognosis. The discovery of underlying mechanisms mediating tumor cell survival, and the development of novel agents to target these pathways, is a priority for patients with basal-like breast cancer. From a functional screen to identify key drivers of basal-like breast cancer cell growth, we identified fibroblast growth factor receptor 4 (FGFR4) as a potential mediator of cell survival. We found that FGFR4 mediates cancer cell survival predominantly via activation of PI3K/AKT. Importantly, a subset of basal-like breast cancer cells also secrete fibroblast growth factor 19 (FGF19), a canonical ligand specific for FGFR4. siRNA-mediated silencing of FGF19 or neutralization of extracellular FGF19 by anti-FGF19 antibody (1A6) decreases AKT phosphorylation, suppresses cancer cell growth and enhances doxorubicin sensitivity only in the FGFR4+/FGF19+ breast cancer cells. Consistently, FGFR4/FGF19 co-expression was also observed in 82 out of 287 (28.6%) primary breast tumors, and their expression is strongly associated with AKT phosphorylation, Ki-67 staining, higher tumor stage and basal-like phenotype. In summary, our results demonstrated the presence of an FGFR4/FGF19 autocrine signaling that mediates the survival of a subset of basal-like breast cancer cells and suggest that inactivation of this autocrine loop may potentially serve as a novel therapeutic intervention for future treatment of breast cancers

Independent Mobility Achieved through a Wireless Brain-Machine Interface

<div><p>Individuals with tetraplegia lack independent mobility, making them highly dependent on others to move from one place to another. Here, we describe how two macaques were able to use a wireless integrated system to control a robotic platform, over which they were sitting, to achieve independent mobility using the neuronal activity in their motor cortices. The activity of populations of single neurons was recorded using multiple electrode arrays implanted in the arm region of primary motor cortex, and decoded to achieve brain control of the platform. We found that free-running brain control of the platform (which was not equipped with any machine intelligence) was fast and accurate, resembling the performance achieved using joystick control. The decoding algorithms can be trained in the absence of joystick movements, as would be required for use by tetraplegic individuals, demonstrating that the non-human primate model is a good pre-clinical model for developing such a cortically-controlled movement prosthetic. Interestingly, we found that the response properties of some neurons differed greatly depending on the mode of control (joystick or brain control), suggesting different roles for these neurons in encoding movement intention and movement execution. These results demonstrate that independent mobility can be achieved without first training on prescribed motor movements, opening the door for the implementation of this technology in persons with tetraplegia.</p></div

Linear discriminant space for a sample session.

<p>Projection of the firing rates onto two largest components of the linear space for the population of neurons collected during a sample BMI Control session (see detailed <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0165773#sec003" target="_blank">Methods</a>).</p

Neurons exhibited selectivity for movement direction and mode of control.

<p><b>(</b>Pie chart) percentage of cells with different response profiles. Cells were categorized as selective based on the activity 500–1500 ms after the trial-start cue (left, forward, right, or stop; one-way ANOVA p<0.01). In our sample, 25% of cells showed no selectivity (red), 22% showed selectivity during BMI Control only (orange), and 9% showed selectivity during Joystick (motor) Control only (green). The rest of the cells (45%) showed selectivity during both modes of control. This last group was further subdivided into cells where activity during Joystick and BMI Control showed no significant differences (24%, purple) and cells where at least one category of movement was significantly different between Joystick and BMI Control (21%, light blue). (Bar plots) (A–E): Mean firing rates of example cells with different response profiles. Colored bars represent the activity during Joystick Control and gray bars during BMI Control. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean across trials.</p

Performance under different modes of control.

<p>(A) Accuracy of decoder, defined as the proportion of decoded directions that matched the target location, in the single-movement task (chance performance 25%). (B) Success rate, defined as the percentage of trials in which the animals reached the reward location within 15 seconds, in the single-movement task (chance performance ~0%). (C) Average time that the animals took to reach the target during correct trials in the single-movement task. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean, and asterisks denote results that were significantly different from those of the Joystick Control task (blue bars, t-test, p<0.01). (D) Platform trajectories during Joystick Control (blue lines) and BMI Control using the <i>Recalibrated Decoder</i> (red lines) in the free-movement task that required the monkeys to move sequentially through a series of targets. The gray circles represent target locations. Animals controlled the platform continuously from the start until the end point. Trajectories were collected during a single experimental session.</p

Setup Description and Electrode Locations.

<p>Animals were trained to move a robotic platform (right) using a joystick. The joystick was spring-loaded, returning to the center position when released. Movement of the joystick was restricted to left, right, and forward movements, while not allowing for diagonal movements. The robotic platform rotated in place in the counter-clockwise and clockwise directions with left and right joystick movements, respectively, and moved forward with forward joystick movements (bottom-middle inset). Movement commands from the joystick reached the platform serially, so at any point in time only one command was executed. Joystick movements were translated to platform movements in discrete states, such that if the joystick moved past a threshold, the platform would move with a fixed speed after initial acceleration. Multiple microelectrode arrays were implanted in the arm and hand areas of primary motor cortex (top middle).</p