Direct Payment Schemes for People with Disabilities: A New and Innovative Policy Approach to Providing Services to Disabled People in Ireland

[Excerpt] This research project commenced initially in August 2002 and was initiated by the Disability Cluster Group – a network of local disability groups and service-providers, facilitated by the Bray Partnership. The Disability Cluster Group established a Disability Research Steering Committee for the project which, in turn, employed 80:20 Educating and Acting for a Better World – a non-governmental development education organisation – to undertake the research. The core objective of the work is to explore and move forward the agenda relating to direct payments in the East Coast Area Health Board (ECAHB). This is primarily a piece of qualitative research focusing on the many elements that make up a direct payment scheme from a number of stakeholder perspectives. In terms of the cross-border comparative element of the research, 10% of the total number of direct payments users in NI were interviewed. Given low overall numbers of direct payments service users, this figure is too limited for any significant statistical analysis. Instead, they serve to highlight some of the issues, experiences and challenges associated with introducing direct payments for a number of people with disabilities in Northern Ireland and allows for a range of conclusions to be drawn out

Transforming the Field of Family Engagement: Co-designing Research Practices Measures for Ed Justice and Community Wellbeing

Our project — the Family Leadership Design Collaborative (FLDC) — is a national network of scholars, practitioners, and family and community leaders who work to center racial equity in family engagement. We do this by reimagining how families and communities can create more equitable schools and educational systems. We engage in research to develop "next" (beyond current "best")1 practices, measures, andtools to foster equitable toward community wellbeing and educational justice.The FLDC is a participatory design research project (PDR). PDR emerges from design- based research and is an iterative research process that attends to power, relationships, and histories of oppression/resilience through partnering with young people, families, and communities. PDR advances theories of human learning alongside new sets of relations, practices, and tools towardssocial justice and change-making.We do this through a practice of PDR called solidarity-driven co-design. Co- design is a process of partnering and decision- makingthat engages diverse peoples to collectively identify problems of practice and innovate solutions. raceCo- design has the potential to foster change- making that is responsive, adaptive, and equity- oriented.

Developing Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) for pre-service teachers: a study of students’ developing thinking in relation to the teaching of mathematics

The concept of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) was introduced by Ball and colleagues (Ball, Thames & Phelps, 2008), building on Shulman’s (1986) notion of Pedagogical Content Knowledge. MKT is ‘the mathematical knowledge needed to carry out the work of teaching mathematics’. In this project, a team of researchers at two Irish universities studied the development of MKT in two groups of pre-service teachers. The project aimed to help students develop their own MKT, and to develop a richer conception of the role of mathematics content knowledge in teaching, through a series of workshops designed and delivered by the authors. The students’ awareness and level of MKT was investigated using pre- and post-intervention questionnaires. We describe the intervention and present the findings from the analysis of the data collected. In particular, we describe how the group’s view of the mathematical work of a teacher changed over the course of the project

The Impact of the State Children\u27s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) on Community Health Centers

Nearly 12 million children in the United States do not have health insurance, and therefore often lack access to health care. In response, Congress enacted the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in August 1997, the largest expansion of health insurance coverage since the inception of the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The SCHIP provides states with federal matching funds for children’s insurance either by expanding the existing Medicaid program, by creating a separate state program, or a combination of both. The George Washington University’s Center for Health Services Research and Policy (CHSRP) was funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to evaluate SCHIP’s impact on the insurance status of children served by select HRSA programs, as well as its impact on HRSA grantee organizations. The research has two primary goals: 1) to document the extent of health insurance volatility experienced by users of the health centers covered by SCHIP versus Medicaid; and 2) to determine whether and how SCHIP has impacted safety net providers such as community health centers (CHCs) and Title V maternal and child health (MCH) programs. The study focused on the experience of community health centers (CHCs), and examined three groups of children: 1) children who continue using the HRSA site after enrolling in SCHIP; 2) children who are new to the HRSA sites; and 3) children who were previous users but are no longer visiting the HRSA site. Five research questions provide the analytic framework for conducting the research and data analysis: 1) What effect has SCHIP had on parents’ ability/willingness to obtain SCHIP for their children? 2) What effect has SCHIP had on children’s health insurance volatility? 3) What effect has SCHIP had on parents’ ability/willingness to seek health services for their children at a CHC site? 4) What has been SCHIP’s effect on CHC sites? and 5) What effect has SCHIP had on parents’ ability/willingness to seek health services for their children from other providers

An analysis of the opportunities for creative reasoning in undergraduate calculus courses

We report here on a study of the opportunities for creative reasoning afforded to first year undergraduate students. This work uses the framework developed by Lithner (2008) which distinguishes between imitative reasoning (which is related to rote learning and mimicry of algorithms) and creative reasoning (which involves plausible mathematically-founded arguments). The analysis involves the examination of notes, assignments and examinations used in first year calculus courses in DCU and NUI Maynooth with the view to classifying the types of reasoning expected of students. As well as describing our use of Lithner’s framework, we discuss its suitability as a tool for classifying reasoning opportunities in undergraduate mathematics cours

‘Turning the Rights Lens Inwards’: The Case for Child Rights-Consistent Strategic Litigation Practice

The last three decades have seen an explosion of academic, advocacy and policy-maker interest in both the theory and the practice of children’s rights. There is a growing global body of strategic litigation focused on the advancement of those rights through positive legal and/or social change.In this context, child rights have primarily played an ‘outward-facing’ role: used as a schema that should constrain or mandate the actions of external decision-makers that are the targets of litigation. However, children’s rights have not generally been used as a framework by which to assess, and as necessary, critique strategic litigation practice—i.e. as a lens to be turned inwards by litigators to consider the extent to which their practice is consistent with child rights standards.This article considers the case for child rights strategic litigation (CRSL) practice that is child rights consistent. In doing so, it identifies CRSL-relevant rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and outlines how such rights arise in the litigation process. It ultimately posits that child rights can serve as a clear, multi-faceted framework that enables litigators to strengthen their existing practice in a legitimate, unified and coherent way

An analysis of the opportunities for creative reasoning in undergraduate calculus courses

We report here on a study of the opportunities for creative reasoning afforded to first year undergraduate students. This work uses the framework developed by Lithner (2008) which distinguishes between imitative reasoning (which is related to rote learning and mimicry of algorithms) and creative reasoning (which involves plausible mathematically-founded arguments). The analysis involves the examination of notes, assignments and examinations used in first year calculus courses in DCU and NUI Maynooth with the view to classifying the types of reasoning expected of students. As well as describing our use of Lithner’s framework, we discuss its suitability as a tool for classifying reasoning opportunities in undergraduate mathematics cours

Escherichia coli Isolates That Carry vat, fyuA, chuA, and yfcV Efficiently Colonize the Urinary Tract

Extraintestinal Escherichia coli (ExPEC), a heterogeneous group of pathogens, encompasses avian, neonatal meningitis, and uropathogenic E. coli strains. While several virulence factors are associated with ExPEC, there is no core set of virulence factors that can be used to definitively differentiate these pathotypes. Here we describe a multiplex of four virulence factor-encoding genes, yfcV, vat,fyuA, and chuA, highly associated with uropathogenic E. coli strains that can distinguish three groups of E. coli: diarrheagenic and animal-associated E. colistrains, human commensal and avian pathogenic E. coli strains, and uropathogenic and neonatal meningitis E. coli strains. Furthermore, human intestinal isolates that encode all four predictor genes express them during exponential growth in human urine and colonize the bladder in the mouse model of ascending urinary tract infection in higher numbers than human commensal strains that do not encode the four predictor genes (P = 0.02), suggesting that the presence of the predictors correlates with uropathogenic potential