A Novel Approach to Measuring Teacher Engagement with Resources: Using Social Network Analysis to Understand Teacher Satisfaction and Retention

The purpose of this quantitative survey study was to investigate how teacher engagement with resources at the school-site and district-level predicted teacher satisfaction and intention to stay in the profession. Teachers in Miami-Dade County Public Schools need support as educators in the fourth largest district in the nation. To better understand how teachers engage with resource networks, three measures of interaction were captured, (1) engagement or use of the resource; (2) frequency of interaction with the resources within the network; and (3) the quality of supportiveness of resources within the network. A survey was sent to 967 math (n=523) and social studies (n= 444) teachers at the secondary level in M-DCPS. The survey consisted of validated instruments used to measure teachers’ intent to stay in M-DCPS, a school staffing survey used to measure working conditions, school climate and teacher attitudes and a section that I developed to measure the frequency of participant interaction with resources with a subsequent section that measured the supportiveness of that interaction. I also included basic demographic questions and a section on the impact of COVID- 19 on intention to stay in M-DCPS. Social Network Analysis was utilized to construct four networks (1) school-site collegial resource network; (2) school-site administrative resource network; (3) district collegial resource network; and (4) district administrative network. Permutated t-tests highlighted differences in engagement, frequency of engagement, as well as the reported quality of engagement dependent on the respective network. Mediation analysis was used to determine whether the association between teachers’ engagement with resources and intention to stay is due wholly to satisfaction or in part to satisfaction. The results revealed nine valid mediated models where satisfaction mediated the relationship between teacher centrality or engagement with resources with intention to stay. In my study, it was found that teacher\u27s engagement with resources indirectly predicts intention to stay when mediated through satisfaction. In every model, satisfaction was predictive of intention to stay in M-DCPS (β=.26, p. = .001**). Other findings reveal that school site resource networks are the densest (collegial = 83%, administrative = 97%) and the more that teachers engage with school site resources their level of satisfaction increased and indirectly they are more likely to stay in M-DCPS

The West Point History of the Civil War

An Impressive New Narrative from the United States Military Academy Established in 1802 by President Thomas Jefferson, the United States Military Academy, in West Point, New York, stands among the world’s preeminent educational and military institutions. A proud, distinguished institution...

Gettysburg Contested:150 Years of Preserving America’s Cherished Landscape

Civil War historians have produced no fewer than 6,000 books on the Gettysburg Campaign, saturating the Gettysburg historiography and feeding our seemingly endless fascination with the three-day battle. Recent scholarship has focused on Gettysburg in memory, including an exploration of the process of preserving and interpreting America’s most popular battlefield. In Gettysburg Contested, Brian Black, an environmental historian at Penn State University’s campus in Altoona, focuses on the process of preserving the battlefield from 1863 to the battle’s sesquicentennial in 2013. As Black states, the vision for the book came from “a personal need to understand the ongoing effort to re-create the Battlefield of Gettysburg landscape of 1863” (10)

Engineering Polymer Informatics

The poster describes a strategy of for the development of polymer informatics. In particular, the development of polymer markup language, a polymer ontology and natural language processing tools for polymer literature

Bupropion Attenuates Methamphetamine Self-Administration in Adult Male Rats

Bupropion is a promising candidate medication for methamphetamine use disorder. As such, we used a preclinical model of drug-taking to determine the effects of bupropion on the reinforcing effects of methamphetamine (0.025, 0.05 or 0.1 mg/kg/infusion). Specificity was determined by investigating the effects of bupropion on responding maintained by sucrose. In the selfadministration study, rats were surgically prepared with indwelling jugular catheters and trained to self-administer methamphetamine under an FR5 schedule. A separate group of rats was trained to press a lever for sucrose. Once responding stabilized, rats were pretreated with bupropion (0, 10, 30 and 60 mg/kg IP) 5 min before chamber placement in a unique testing order. Following acute testing, rats were then repeatedly pretreated with 30 and 60 mg/kg bupropion. Acute treatments of bupropion dose dependently reduced drug intake for 0.025 to 0.1 mg/kg methamphetamine; sucrose deliveries were only reduced with the high bupropion dose. Repeated exposure to 60 mg/ kg bupropion before the session resulted in a consistent decrease in methamphetamine intake (0.05 and 0.1 mg/kg) and sucrose deliveries. Considered together, this pattern of findings demonstrates that bupropion decreases responding for methamphetamine, but the effects are only somewhat specific

Extinction with varenicline and nornicotine, but not ABT-418, weakens conditioned responding evoked by the interoceptive stimulus effects of nicotine

The interoceptive stimulus effects of nicotine acquire control over behavior. This observation, among others, suggests that the stimulus effects of nicotine are important in the development and tenacity of tobacco dependence. Despite this importance, there has been little research examining whether non-reinforced presentations (extinction) of a ligand that share stimulus effects of nicotine will weaken responding controlled by nicotine. Rats were trained to discriminate nicotine (0.4 mg/kg) from saline using a discriminated goal-tracking task in which nicotine signaled intermittent access to sucrose; sucrose was withheld on saline sessions. Experiment 1 examined substitution for nicotine by ABT-418, nornicotine, epibatidine, varenicline, or cytisine in 4-min extinction tests. Experiments 2 to 5 [low dose nicotine (0.05 mg/kg), ABT-418, nornicotine, or varenicline, respectively] examined whether substitution for nicotine would persist if extinction tests were increased to 20 min and repeated daily for 6 days. Finally, generalization of this extinction back to the nicotine training stimulus was assessed. Full substitution in brief 4-min extinction tests was seen for ABT-418, nornicotine, epibatidine, varenicline, and cytisine. Low-dose nicotine, ABT-418, nornicotine, and varenicline, evoked only a partial ‘nicotine-like’ response in the first 20-min extinction test. With repeated extinction, only low-dose nicotine, nornicotine, and varenicline continued to substitute. Extinction with nornicotine and varenicline transferred back to nicotine as indicated by a partial conditioned response to the training stimulus. Interpretations regarding ‘nicotine-like’ effects of a ligand depend on the nature of the test. Understanding the processes mediating transfer of extinction learning with potential pharmacotherapies may reveal new treatment targets

Engineering three-dimensional bone macro-tissues by guided fusion of cell spheroids

Introduction: Bioassembly techniques for the application of scaffold-freetissue engineering approaches have evolved in recent years towardproducing larger tissue equivalents that structurally and functionally mimicnative tissues. This study aims to upscale a 3-dimensional bone in-vitromodel through bioassembly of differentiated rat osteoblast (dROb) spheroidswith the potential to develop and mature into a bone macrotissue.Methods: dROb spheroids in control and mineralization media at differentseeding densities (1 × 104, 5 × 104, and 1 × 105 cells) were assessed for cellproliferation and viability by trypan blue staining, for necrotic core byhematoxylin and eosin staining, and for extracellular calcium by Alizarin redand Von Kossa staining. Then, a novel approach was developed tobioassemble dROb spheroids in pillar array supports using a customizedbioassembly system. Pillar array supports were custom-designed and printedusing Formlabs Clear Resin® by Formlabs Form2 printer. These supports wereused as temporary frameworks for spheroid bioassembly until fusionoccurred. Supports were then removed to allow scaffold-free growth andmaturation of fused spheroids. Morphological and molecular analyses wereperformed to understand their structural and functional aspects.Results: Spheroids of all seeding densities proliferated till day 14, andmineralization began with the cessation of proliferation. Necrotic core sizeincreased over time with increased spheroid size. After the bioassembly ofspheroids, the morphological assessment revealed the fusion of spheroidsover time into a single macrotissue of more than 2.5 mm in size with mineralformation. Molecular assessment at different time points revealed osteogenicmaturation based on the presence of osteocalcin, downregulation of Runx2(p < 0.001), and upregulated alkaline phosphatase (p < 0.01).Discussion: With the novel bioassembly approach used here, 3D bonemacrotissues were successfully fabricated which mimicked physiological osteogenesis both morphologically and molecularly. This biofabricationapproach has potential applications in bone tissue engineering,contributing to research related to osteoporosis and other recurrentbone ailments

Extinction with varenicline and nornicotine, but not ABT-418, weakens conditioned responding evoked by the interoceptive stimulus effects of nicotine

The interoceptive stimulus effects of nicotine acquire control over behavior. This observation, among others, suggests that the stimulus effects of nicotine are important in the development and tenacity of tobacco dependence. Despite this importance, there has been little research examining whether non-reinforced presentations (extinction) of a ligand that share stimulus effects of nicotine will weaken responding controlled by nicotine. Rats were trained to discriminate nicotine (0.4 mg/kg) from saline using a discriminated goal-tracking task in which nicotine signaled intermittent access to sucrose; sucrose was withheld on saline sessions. Experiment 1 examined substitution for nicotine by ABT-418, nornicotine, epibatidine, varenicline, or cytisine in 4-min extinction tests. Experiments 2 to 5 [low dose nicotine (0.05 mg/kg), ABT-418, nornicotine, or varenicline, respectively] examined whether substitution for nicotine would persist if extinction tests were increased to 20 min and repeated daily for 6 days. Finally, generalization of this extinction back to the nicotine training stimulus was assessed. Full substitution in brief 4-min extinction tests was seen for ABT-418, nornicotine, epibatidine, varenicline, and cytisine. Low-dose nicotine, ABT-418, nornicotine, and varenicline, evoked only a partial ‘nicotine-like’ response in the first 20-min extinction test. With repeated extinction, only low-dose nicotine, nornicotine, and varenicline continued to substitute. Extinction with nornicotine and varenicline transferred back to nicotine as indicated by a partial conditioned response to the training stimulus. Interpretations regarding ‘nicotine-like’ effects of a ligand depend on the nature of the test. Understanding the processes mediating transfer of extinction learning with potential pharmacotherapies may reveal new treatment targets

Cluster-mining: An approach for determining core structures of metallic nanoparticles from atomic pair distribution function data

We present a novel approach for finding and evaluating structural models of small metallic nanoparticles. Rather than fitting a single model with many degrees of freedom, the approach algorithmically builds libraries of nanoparticle clusters from multiple structural motifs, and individually fits them to experimental PDFs. Each cluster-fit is highly constrained. The approach, called cluster-mining, returns all candidate structure models that are consistent with the data as measured by a goodness of fit. It is highly automated, easy to use, and yields models that are more physically realistic and result in better agreement to the data than models based on cubic close-packed crystallographic cores, often reported in the literature for metallic nanoparticles