Communities of inquiry pedagogy and consequential transitions in professional education:An action research project in an undergraduate law course

Research about practitioners’ application of the Communities of Inquiry pedagogy (‘CoI’) in professional disciplines is often unclear about: (a) how CoI contributed to the development or better understanding of practice; (b) how reflection on practice contributed to the development of the literature on how CoI is enacted in practice; and (c) the theory of professional learning adopted. This thesis reports on a three-cycle action research project in which I enacted CoI across several iterations of my undergraduate teaching practice in legal education. My analysis draws on Beach’s concept of learning as a consequential transition to examine how CoI can facilitate students’ struggle to establish themselves as lawyers. Within each research cycle I generated evidence concerning student perceptions of how I supported progress through the inquiry process and the forging of their emerging identity as lawyers. Data were generated from interviews, student survey responses and a teaching journal. Interim analysis of this material at the end of each cycle informed the design in later cycles. The core findings are that the teacher, research postgraduate students trained to act as facilitators and students need to collaborate to provide the teaching presence needed for the successful enactment of CoI. This collaboration, and the virtues it requires, are inadequately depicted in Garrison’s CoI model (Garrison, 2016). Furthermore, I argue that authentic assessments and appropriate ‘framing’ of student work as a contribution to knowledge play a key role in facilitating students’ consequential transitions. This research contributes to the CoI literature by highlighting the need for teachers to skillfully create a system of inter-locking levels of support for student inquiry as an important element of teaching presence. It contributes to the consequential transitions literature by emphasising the importance of a rich ecology of relevant social relations and of engaging students in authentic assessments and knowledge production

Improved Method for Preparation of 3-(1H-Indol-3-yl)benzofuran-2(3H)-ones

3-(1H-Indol-3-yl)benzofuran-2(3H)-ones were efficiently accessed via polyphosphoric acid-mediated condensation of 3-(2-nitrovinyl)-1H-indoles with phenols

Developing core sets for persons following amputation based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health as a way to specify functioning

Amputation is a common late stage sequel of peripheral vascular disease and diabetes or a sequel of accidental trauma, civil unrest and landmines. The functional impairments affect many facets of life including but not limited to: Mobility; activities of daily living; body image and sexuality. Classification, measurement and comparison of the consequences of amputations has been impeded by the limited availability of internationally, multiculturally standardized instruments in the amputee setting. The introduction of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) by the World Health Assembly in May 2001 provides a globally accepted framework and classification system to describe, assess and compare function and disability. In order to facilitate the use of the ICF in everyday clinical practice and research, ICF core sets have been developed that focus on specific aspects of function typically associated with a particular disability. The objective of this paper is to outline the development process for the ICF core sets for persons following amputation. The ICF core sets are designed to translate the benefits of the ICF into clinical routine. The ICF core sets will be defined at a Consensus conference which will integrate evidence from preparatory studies, namely: (a) a systematic literature review regarding the outcome measures of clinical trails and observational studies, (b) semi-structured patient interviews, (c) international experts participating in an internet-based survey, and (d) cross-sectional, multi-center studies for clinical applicability. To validate the ICF core sets field-testing will follow. Invitation for participation: The development of ICF Core Sets is an inclusive and open process. Anyone who wishes to actively participate in this process is invited to do so

Hardness of Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

We prove conditional near-quadratic running time lower bounds for approximate Bichromatic Closest Pair with Euclidean, Manhattan, Hamming, or edit distance. Specifically, unless the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) is false, for every $\delta>0$ there exists a constant $\epsilon>0$ such that computing a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation to the Bichromatic Closest Pair requires $n^{2-\delta}$ time. In particular, this implies a near-linear query time for Approximate Nearest Neighbor search with polynomial preprocessing time. Our reduction uses the Distributed PCP framework of [ARW'17], but obtains improved efficiency using Algebraic Geometry (AG) codes. Efficient PCPs from AG codes have been constructed in other settings before [BKKMS'16, BCGRS'17], but our construction is the first to yield new hardness results

Imaging the square of the correlated two-electron wave function of a hydrogen molecule

The toolbox for imaging molecules is well-equipped today. Some techniques visualize the geometrical structure, others the electron density or electron orbitals. Molecules are many-body systems for which the correlation between the constituents is decisive and the spatial and the momentum distribution of one electron depends on those of the other electrons and the nuclei. Such correlations have escaped direct observation by imaging techniques so far. Here, we implement an imaging scheme which visualizes correlations between electrons by coincident detection of the reaction fragments after high energy photofragmentation. With this technique, we examine the H2 two-electron wave function in which electron-electron correlation beyond the mean-field level is prominent. We visualize the dependence of the wave function on the internuclear distance. High energy photoelectrons are shown to be a powerful tool for molecular imaging. Our study paves the way for future time resolved correlation imaging at FELs and laser based X-ray sources.This work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the BMBF, the European Research Council under the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement 290853 XCHEM, the MINECO projects FIS2013-42002-R and FIS2016-77889-R, and the European COST Action XLIC CM1204. All calculations were performed at the CCC-UAM and Mare Nostrum Supercomputer Centers. We are grateful to the staff of PETRA III for excellent support during the beam time. K.M. and M.M. would like to thank the DFG for support via SFB925/A3. A.K. and V.S. thank the Wilhelm und Else Heraeus-Foundation for support. J.L. would like to thank the DFG for support. S.K. acknowledges support from the European Cluster of Advanced Laser Light Sources (EUCALL) project which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 654220. T.W. was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. A.P. acknowledges a Ramón y Cajal contract from the Ministerio de Economa y Competitividad. We thank M. LaraAstiaso for providing us with the Hartree–Fock wave functions

Beyond 'pivoting': Capitalising on new Knowledge and experience: in Technology and educational ‘pivoting’ in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic: A collected commentary

The present document presents 13 commentaries that address the broad topic of the special issue Technology and educational 'pivoting' in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and, in some cases, specific articles from the issue itself. Since the launch of the journal in 2020, we have been explicit about our aspiration that Studies in Technology Enhanced Learning might serve as a vehicle for scholarly conversation (Bligh & Lee, 2020).Victoria I. Marín acknowledges grant RYC2019-028398-I funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and FSE “El FSE invierte en tu futuro

A multi-stage genome-wide association study of bladder cancer identifies multiple susceptibility loci.

We conducted a multi-stage, genome-wide association study of bladder cancer with a primary scan of 591,637 SNPs in 3,532 affected individuals (cases) and 5,120 controls of European descent from five studies followed by a replication strategy, which included 8,382 cases and 48,275 controls from 16 studies. In a combined analysis, we identified three new regions associated with bladder cancer on chromosomes 22q13.1, 19q12 and 2q37.1: rs1014971, (P = 8 × 10⁻¹²) maps to a non-genic region of chromosome 22q13.1, rs8102137 (P = 2 × 10⁻¹¹) on 19q12 maps to CCNE1 and rs11892031 (P = 1 × 10⁻⁷) maps to the UGT1A cluster on 2q37.1. We confirmed four previously identified genome-wide associations on chromosomes 3q28, 4p16.3, 8q24.21 and 8q24.3, validated previous candidate associations for the GSTM1 deletion (P = 4 × 10⁻¹¹) and a tag SNP for NAT2 acetylation status (P = 4 × 10⁻¹¹), and found interactions with smoking in both regions. Our findings on common variants associated with bladder cancer risk should provide new insights into the mechanisms of carcinogenesis