Global Diffusion of Montessori Schools: A Report From the 2022 Global Montessori Census

Montessori education is distinct for its implementation in 154 countries around the world. Lacking a Montessori trademark or comprehensive overseeing body, the expansion of the Montessori approach has often been diffuse and fragmented among competing organizations. The absence of centralized, accurate, and consistent accounting has made it difficult to document the scope, growth trends, and diverse populations of students served in Montessori schools. The primary objective of this study was to gather evidence to support a robust estimate of the number of Montessori schools worldwide. This estimate relies on national and regional organizations’ broadest definitions of what constitutes a Montessori program. The study included two components: a survey of regional and national Montessori organizations and supplemental sources, including other published estimates and direct inquiries within key countries. Multiple sources allowed for triangulating data to reach a more confident estimate for the number of schools in each country and for synthesizing global perspectives on significant elements of Montessori fidelity worldwide. Through these sources, we document a total of 15,763 Montessori schools around the globe, roughly 9% of which are government funded. Countries with the largest number of Montessori schools are the United States, China, Thailand, Germany, Canada, and Tanzania; the United States, Thailand, the Netherlands, and India have the largest number of government-funded or public Montessori programs. Results of the fidelity analysis identified six practices that emerge consistently as central pillars of Montessori implementation

Global Diffusion of Montessori Schools: A Report From the 2022 Global Montessori Census

Montessori education is distinct for its implementation in 154 countries around the world. Lacking a Montessori trademark or comprehensive overseeing body, the expansion of the Montessori approach has often been diffuse and fragmented among competing organizations. The absence of centralized, accurate, and consistent accounting has made it difficult to document the scope, growth trends, and diverse populations of students served in Montessori schools. The primary objective of this study was to gather evidence to support a robust estimate of the number of Montessori schools worldwide. This estimate relies on national and regional organizations’ broadest definitions of what constitutes a Montessori program. The study included two components: a survey of regional and national Montessori organizations and supplemental sources, including other published estimates and direct inquiries within key countries. Multiple sources allowed for triangulating data to reach a more confident estimate for the number of schools in each country and for synthesizing global perspectives on significant elements of Montessori fidelity worldwide. Through these sources, we document a total of 15,763 Montessori schools around the globe, roughly 9% of which are government funded. Countries with the largest number of Montessori schools are the United States, China, Thailand, Germany, Canada, and Tanzania; the United States, Thailand, the Netherlands, and India have the largest number of government-funded or public Montessori programs. Results of the fidelity analysis identified six practices that emerge consistently as central pillars of Montessori implementation

The effect of artificial selection on phenotypic plasticity in maize

Remarkable productivity has been achieved in crop species through artificial selection and adaptation to modern agronomic practices. Whether intensive selection has changed the ability of improved cultivars to maintain high productivity across variable environments is unknown. Understanding the genetic control of phenotypic plasticity and genotype by environment (G × E) interaction will enhance crop performance predictions across diverse environments. Here we use data generated from the Genomes to Fields (G2F) Maize G × E project to assess the effect of selection on G × E variation and characterize polymorphisms associated with plasticity. Genomic regions putatively selected during modern temperate maize breeding explain less variability for yield G × E than unselected regions, indicating that improvement by breeding may have reduced G × E of modern temperate cultivars. Trends in genomic position of variants associated with stability reveal fewer genic associations and enrichment of variants 0–5000 base pairs upstream of genes, hypothetically due to control of plasticity by short-range regulatory elements

Maize Genomes to Fields: 2014 and 2015 field season genotype, phenotype, environment, and inbred ear image datasets

Objectives: Crop improvement relies on analysis of phenotypic, genotypic, and environmental data. Given large, well-integrated, multi-year datasets, diverse queries can be made: Which lines perform best in hot, dry environments? Which alleles of specific genes are required for optimal performance in each environment? Such datasets also can be leveraged to predict cultivar performance, even in uncharacterized environments. The maize Genomes to Fields (G2F) Initiative is a multi-institutional organization of scientists working to generate and analyze such datasets from existing, publicly available inbred lines and hybrids. G2F’s genotype by environment project has released 2014 and 2015 datasets to the public, with 2016 and 2017 collected and soon to be made available. Data description: Datasets include DNA sequences; traditional phenotype descriptions, as well as detailed ear, cob, and kernel phenotypes quantified by image analysis; weather station measurements; and soil characterizations by site. Data are released as comma separated value spreadsheets accompanied by extensive README text descriptions. For genotypic and phenotypic data, both raw data and a version with outliers removed are reported. For weather data, two versions are reported: a full dataset calibrated against nearby National Weather Service sites and a second calibrated set with outliers and apparent artifacts removed

Franchises lost and gained: post-coloniality and the development of women’s rights in Canada

The Canadian constitution is to some extent characterised by its focus on equality, and in particular gender equality. This development of women’s rights in Canada and the greater engagement of women as political actors is often presented as a steady linear process, moving forwards from post-enlightenment modernity. This article seeks to disturb this ‘discourse of the continuous,’ by using an analysis of the pre-confederation history of suffrage in Canada to both refute a simplistic linear view of women’s rights development and to argue for recognition of the Indigenous contribution to the history of women’s rights in Canada. The gain of franchise and suffrage movements in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are, rightly, the focus of considerable study (Pauker 2015), This article takes an alternative perspective. Instead, it examines the exercise of earlier franchises in pre-confederation Canada. In particular it analyses why franchise was exercised more widely in Lower Canada and relates this to the context of the removal of franchises from women prior to confederation

Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium: Accelerating Evidence-Based Practice of Genomic Medicine

Despite rapid technical progress and demonstrable effectiveness for some types of diagnosis and therapy, much remains to be learned about clinical genome and exome sequencing (CGES) and its role within the practice of medicine. The Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research (CSER) consortium includes 18 extramural research projects, one National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) intramural project, and a coordinating center funded by the NHGRI and National Cancer Institute. The consortium is exploring analytic and clinical validity and utility, as well as the ethical, legal, and social implications of sequencing via multidisciplinary approaches; it has thus far recruited 5,577 participants across a spectrum of symptomatic and healthy children and adults by utilizing both germline and cancer sequencing. The CSER consortium is analyzing data and creating publically available procedures and tools related to participant preferences and consent, variant classification, disclosure and management of primary and secondary findings, health outcomes, and integration with electronic health records. Future research directions will refine measures of clinical utility of CGES in both germline and somatic testing, evaluate the use of CGES for screening in healthy individuals, explore the penetrance of pathogenic variants through extensive phenotyping, reduce discordances in public databases of genes and variants, examine social and ethnic disparities in the provision of genomics services, explore regulatory issues, and estimate the value and downstream costs of sequencing. The CSER consortium has established a shared community of research sites by using diverse approaches to pursue the evidence-based development of best practices in genomic medicine

Opportunity for verbalization does not improve visual change detection performance:A state trace analysis

Evidence suggests that there is a tendency to verbally recode visually-presented information, and that in some cases verbal recoding can boost memory performance. According to multi-component models of working memory, memory performance is increased because task-relevant information is simultaneously maintained in two codes. The possibility of dual encoding is problematic if the goal is to measure capacity for visual information exclusively. To counteract this possibility, articulatory suppression is frequently used with visual change detection tasks specifically to prevent verbalization of visual stimuli. But is this precaution always necessary? There is little reason to believe that concurrent articulation affects performance in typical visual change detection tasks, suggesting that verbal recoding might not be likely to occur in this paradigm, and if not, precautionary articulatory suppression would not always be necessary. We present evidence confirming that articulatory suppression has no discernible effect on performance in a typical visual change-detection task in which abstract patterns are briefly presented. A comprehensive analysis using both descriptive statistics and Bayesian state-trace analysis revealed no evidence for any complex relationship between articulatory suppression and performance that would be consistent with a verbal recoding explanation. Instead, the evidence favors the simpler explanation that verbal strategies were either not deployed in the task or, if they were, were not effective in improving performance, and thus have no influence on visual working memory as measured during visual change detection. We conclude that in visual change detection experiments in which abstract visual stimuli are briefly presented, pre-cautionary articulatory suppression is unnecessary