Customized course advising: investigating engineering student success with incoming profiles and patterns of concurrent course enrollment

Every college student registers for courses from a catalog of numerous offerings each term. Selecting the courses in which to enroll, and in what combinations, can dramatically impact each student's chances for academic success. Taking inspiration from the STEM Academy, we wanted to identify the characteristics of engineering students who graduate with 3.0 or above grade point average. The overall goal of the Customized Course Advising project is to determine the optimal term-by-term course selections for all engineering students based on their incoming characteristics and previous course history and performance, paying particular attention to concurrent enrollment. We found that ACT Math, SAT Math, and Advanced Placement exam can be effective measures to measure the students' academic preparation level. Also, we found that some concurrent course-enrollment patterns are highly predictive of first-term and overall academic success.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110782/1/Customized Course Advising Investigating Engineering Student Success with Incoming Profiles and Patterns of Concurrent Course Enrollment.pdfDescription of Customized Course Advising Investigating Engineering Student Success with Incoming Profiles and Patterns of Concurrent Course Enrollment.pdf : Proceeding pd

ChickGCE: A novel germ cell EST database for studying the early developmental stage in chickens

We established a database to study germ cells during the early developmental stage in the chicken. The ChickGCE database provides integrated expressed sequence tag (EST) data from chicken testis, ovary, embryonic gonads, and primordial germ cells. We gathered data on 10,294 ESTs from approximately 1000 embryonic gonads, and we experimentally determined 10,851 ESTs from primordial germ cells purified from 7955 embryonic gonads by magnetically activated cell sorting. The EST testis and ovary datasets were retrieved from the public database of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). The EST data were clustered and assembled into unique sequences, contigs, and singletons. The ChickGCE database provides functional annotation, identification, and putative embryonic germ-cell-specific novel transcripts based on the Gene Ontology database, as well as statistical analyses of expression patterns and pair-wise comparisons of two types of tissue- and germ-cell-specific alternative splicing events in the chicken. The new database is accessible online and queries can be answered using several search options, including tissue database searches, keywords, clone IDs, expected values, and BLAST search scores

MPSS profiling of embryonic gonad and primordial germ cells in chicken

The massively parallel signature sequencing (MPSS) provides a greater depth of coverage than expressed sequence tag scan or microarray and provides a comprehensive expression profile. We used the MPSS technology to uncover gene expression profiling in the early embryonic gonads and primordial germ cells (PGCs) in the chicken. Total numbers of sequenced signatures were 1,012,533 and 995,676 for the PGCs and gonad, respectively. Using a noise distribution model, we found that 1.67% of all signatures are expressed at a higher level in PCGs and 2.81% of all signatures are expressed at a higher level in the gonad. The MPSS data are presented via an interactive web interface available at http://snugenome.snu.ac.kr/MPSS. The MPSS data have been submitted to the Gene Expression Omnibus of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (accession number GSM137300 and GSM137301 for PGCs and gonad, respectively). massively parallel signature sequencin