Designing a Student Exchange Program: Facilitating Interdisciplinary, Mathematics-Focused Collaboration among College Students

Interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary for students’ professional preparation (Laird et al., 2014; Repko, 2014) and may promote effective learning transfer of course content. Such collaborations have resulted in enhanced problem-solving skills and conceptual understanding of statistics content (Dierker et al., 2012; Everett, 2016; Hammersley et al., 2019; Woodzicka et al., 2015). As a result of ongoing collaborations between faculty members in different disciplines and at different universities, we created a “Student Exchange Program” to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between undergraduate students in mathematics and social sciences. In the current paper, we describe past research that informed the design of this program, the specific steps taken to implement the program, preliminary results, and potential challenges to implementing and maintaining such an initiative

Counting on Collaboration: A Triangular Approach in the Educator Preparation Program for Teachers of Mathematics

This paper outlines the process of establishing a stronger and more reciprocal partnership for collaboration between an education preparation program and a local education agency. The essential partners identified included the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and the College of Education at Lee University and stakeholders in the local school district. First, this paper will discuss a theoretical framework that speaks to the importance of dialogue and a dialogic approach to teaching mathematics. Secondly, the processes and methods of the project involving collaboration through partnerships are described. These partnerships gave rise to the realization that coursework would be more effective if it mirrored the instructional practices of local education agencies. A detailed description of the process of changes to the coursework and initial outcomes of the project are outlined. Included are questions and recommendations for further collaboration

An Entomopathogenic Nematode Extends Its Niche by Associating with Different Symbionts

Bacterial symbionts are increasingly recognised as mediators of ecologically important traits of their animal hosts, with acquisition of new traits possible by uptake of novel symbionts. The entomopathogenic nematode Heterorhabditis downesi associates with two bacterial symbionts, Photorhabdus temperata subsp. temperata and P. temperata subsp. cinerea. At one intensively studied coastal dune site, P. temperata subsp. cinerea is consistently more frequently isolated than P. temperata subsp. temperata in H. downesi recovered from under the bare sand/Ammophila arrenaria of the front dunes (where harsh conditions, including drought, prevail). This is not the case in the more permissive closed dune grassland further from the sea. No differences were detected in ITS1 (internal transcribed spacer) sequence between nematode lines carrying either of the two symbiont subspecies, nor did they differ in their ability to utilise insects from three orders. The two symbionts could be readily swapped between lines, and both were carried in equal numbers within infective juveniles. In laboratory experiments, we tested whether the symbionts differentially affected nematode survival in insect cadavers that were allowed to dry. We assessed numbers of nematode infective juveniles emerging from insects that had been infected with H. downesi carrying either symbiont subspecies and then allowed to desiccate for up to 62 days. In moist conditions, cadavers produced similar numbers of nematodes, irrespective of the symbiont subspecies present, while under desiccating conditions, P. temperata subsp. cinerea cadavers yielded more nematode progeny than P. temperata subsp. temperata cadavers. Desiccating cadavers with the same nematode isolates, carrying either one or the other symbiont subspecies, confirmed that the symbiont was responsible for differences in nematode survival. Moreover, cadavers harbouring P. temperata subsp. cinerea had a reduced rate of drying relative to cadavers harbouring P. temperata subsp. temperata. Our experiments support the hypothesis that H. downesi can extend its niche into harsher conditions by associating with P. temperata subsp. cinerea

A Tale of Four Departments: Interdisciplinary Faculty Learning Communities Informing Mathematics Education

As a result of the Curriculum Foundations Project and the SUMMIT-P consortium, faculty from four different departments at Lee University created a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) with the goal of improving students’ attitudes toward undergraduate mathematics courses, including students’ perception of the utility of mathematics in their lives and the feelings of anxiety that they experience in these courses. The interdisciplinary collaborations resulted in introducing novel activities and manipulatives in various mathematics courses (Introduction to Statistics, Concepts of Mathematics I and II, and Algebra for Calculus). This paper first describes the efforts of creating the inter-departmental FLC. Second, it discusses the interventions that were introduced in the mathematics courses. Finally, it reflects on the lessons learned while participating in the learning community. The goal is to guide and challenge readers to consider how similar collaborative opportunities can be initiated at their own institutions

The Roles and Benefits of Using Undergraduate Student Leaders to Support the Work of SUMMIT-P

The article by Poole, Turner, and Maher-Boulis (2020) describes one way in which undergraduates have been used to support the SUMMIT-P goal of investigating examples of how mathematics and statistics are applied in partner discipline courses. Two other universities in the SUMMIT-P consortium, San Diego State University and Oregon State University, also use undergraduates in different ways to support the work of integrating science applications into math classes. In this article, we compare and contrast these three uses to further highlight this somewhat untapped resource

A computational analysis of Turkish makam music based on a probabilistic characterization of segmented phrases

This study targets automatic analysis of Turkish makam music pieces on the phrase level. While makam is most simply defined as an organization of melodic phrases, there has been very little effort to computationally study melodic structure in makam music pieces. In this work, we propose an automatic analysis algorithm that takes as input symbolic data in the form of machine-readable scores that are segmented into phrases. Using a measure of makam membership for phrases, our method outputs for each phrase the most likely makam the phrase comes from. The proposed makam membership definition is based on Bayesian classification and the algorithm is specifically designed to process the data with overlapping classes. The proposed analysis system is trained and tested on a large data set of phrases obtained by transferring phrase boundaries manually written by experts of makam music on printed scores, to machine-readable data. For the task of classifying all phrases, or only the beginning phrases to come from the main makam of the piece, the corresponding F-measures are.52 and.60 respectively.Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, TUBITAK (112E162

Protocol for a realist review of workplace learning in postgraduate medical education and training

Postgraduate medical education and training (PGMET) is a complex social process which happens predominantly during the delivery of patient care. The clinical learning environment (CLE), the context for PGMET, shapes the development of the doctors who learn and work within it, ultimately impacting the quality and safety of patient care. Clinical workplaces are complex, dynamic systems in which learning emerges from non-linear interactions within a network of related factors and activities. Those tasked with the design and delivery of postgraduate medical education and training need to understand the relationship between the processes of medical workplace learning and these contextual elements in order to optimise conditions for learning. We propose to conduct a realist synthesis of the literature to address the overarching questions; how, why and in what circumstances do doctors learn in clinical environments? This review is part of a funded projected with the overall aim of producing guidelines and recommendations for the design of high quality clinical learning environments for postgraduate medical education and training

Mutation of A DNA Repair Enzyme Causes Lupus in Mice

A replication study of a previous genome-wide association study (GWAS) suggested that a SNP linked to the POLβ gene is associated with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). This SNP is correlated with decreased expression of Pol β, a key enzyme in the base excision repair (BER) pathway. To determine whether decreased Pol β activity results in SLE, we constructed a mouse model of POLβ that encodes an enzyme with slow DNA polymerase activity. We show that mice expressing this hypomorphic POLβ allele develop an autoimmune pathology that strongly resembles SLE. Of note, the mutant mice have shorter immunoglobulin heavy-chain junctions and somatic hypermutation is dramatically increased. These results demonstrate that decreased Pol β activity during the generation of immune diversity leads to lupus-like disease in mice, and suggest that decreased expression of Pol β in humans is an underlying cause of SLE