Getting Down to Dollars and Cents: What Do School Districts Spend to Deliver Student-Centered Learning?

Student-centered learning (SCL) is an approach to learning that emphasizes authentic instruction, mastery-based assessment, and engaging students in real-life experiences that take their learning beyond the school walls and school day -- all in an effort to connect students' learning to their experiences, strengths, and interests. This report offers the first detailed look into how districts and schools deal with funding issues when they adopt the SCL approach. Researchers examined district spending on SCL by comparing spending at SCL high schools to traditional high schools with similar characteristics. The researchers also performed a statistical analysis using New York City's high schools, which included 79 SCL schools. The report finds that districts don't need to spend more on these schools if they fund all schools fairly, and then allow schools to make choices about how they use their resources. The report's policy recommendations include encouraging SCL school leaders to think about spending tradeoffs to keep budgets in balance and supporting principals' efforts to secure resources from the community

The temporal expression of fast skeletal muscle myosin heavy chain isoforms related to muscle growth in poultry

In all animals, fast skeletal muscle grows during development by completing a series of temporal expression of muscle proteins and myosin heavy chain (MyHC) isoforms. During development, the muscle is populated with ventricular MyHC, then by embryonic 1, 2, 3, (Cemb1, Cemb2, Cemb3), followed by neonatal (Cneo) and finally an adult (Cadult) MyHC isoform. The functional roles of the MyHC isoforms are unknown. In order to identify the roles of MyHC isoforms during development, we investigated MyHC expression in broiler and layer chickens at the RNA level. Total RNA was extracted from Pectoralis major (PM) muscle samples taken from broiler chickens, layer chickens and quail and run with isoform-specific primers in semi-quantitative reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reactions (RT-PCR). The broiler chickens were found to start developing the adult isoform sooner, chronologically, than the layers. The neonatal isoform concentration was also showed to peak sooner in the broilers than the layers. The quail samples were run with the embryonic isoforms and only have preliminary results showing differences between three different strains and their isoform transition rates. This information can be used as a base to develop a method to study muscle development at similar cellular times for comparative studies of temporal events.Jaap Poultry Endowment Fund awarded to JMR and the Undergraduate CFAES Honors Scholarship and Small Project GrantNo embarg

The Hip in Hip Hop: Toward a Discipline of Hip Hop Studies

Editorial

Lopsided, Scarred, and Squint-Eyed: Ugly Women in the Work of Southern Women Writers

The ubiquity of ugly female characters in the work of southern women calls into question what W. J. Cash termed “gyneolatry,” the worship of the beautiful white woman upon which so much of southern ideology has been based. If the South functions as an internal other for the nation, then examining this fiction’s multiplicity of ugly women illuminates the ways in which women defy not only the norms of southern gender but also those of the larger American culture, in which the southern woman often acts as a representation of the South in general. By considering ugliness as a category separate from others with which it has heretofore been conflated, my project illuminates the ways in which characters who fail to live up to the rigid expectations of their gender reveal the productive potential of such failure. Though Flannery O’Connor wrote that southern literature is rife with freaks because only southerners were able to recognize the freakish, I maintain that writers such as O’Connor created so many ugly women as their own way of “being ugly.” These authors utilize the “ugly plot” instead of the expected courtship or marriage plots to imagine alternative futures for southern women who fall out of the marriage market. As American culture often relies upon regionalism in order to bolster national identity, viewing the southern novel through the lens of the ugly plot reveals that texts written by southern women not only speak back to southern ideologies, but call into question national paradigms of femininity

Assessment of Intercultural Learning within an Interdisciplinary Empathy Course within an Honors College

Objective: The objective was to assess the intercultural learning of students enrolled in an interdisciplinary, active learning course with a focus on empathy and healthcare within an Honors College. Methods: This 2-credit course met twice weekly for active-learning session for 16 weeks. Topics covered included cultural dimensions, mindfulness, learning styles and four intercultural core competencies. Assignments included an intercultural development plan, on-line discussion board reflections for three required service-learning activities and completion of a Cultural Competence Badge. Students assessed their empathy using several different scales and completed the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) assessment at the beginning and end of the course. Results: Seventeen students with 11 different designated majors participated in the course. The majority of students (82.4%) were female and all were at least classified as a sophomore. The average baseline IDI Perceived Orientation (PO) was 121.49 compared to 126.61 at the course end. The class IDI Developmental Orientation (DO) average at course onset was 94.96 compared to an average of 104.01 upon course completion. Fourteen (82.4%) students demonstrated an increase in IDI DO. The range of positive increase in IDI DO was 0.54-22.59 points with the average change being 11.3 points. Implications: The majority of students demonstrated intercultural growth after course completion. The IDI assessment results demonstrate it is possible to help students grow their intercultural skills which include empathy in a classroom setting. Future plans include offering this content as a pharmacy elective and integrating the intercultural learning activities across the pharmacy curriculum