Right at the start : a research and development agenda for teacher induction

Recent developments in teacher induction in both England and Scotland are bringing long overdue improvements, but there is a range of issues in need of further exploration if policy is to be developed. Current evaluations have begun to reveal the absence of some important conceptual aspects of induction in the somewhat hasty implementation. Some of these have been well rehearsed in the literature over the years but have generally failed to make any impact hitherto in induction policy. This paper picks up and discusses some of the conceptual tensions and weaknesses that have, or are likely to, become practical issues of quality, in both Scottish and English induction policies. These include the use of competence-based descriptions, the non-formal dimension of learning to teach, open narrative and focused approaches to classroom observation and feedback, individualism and a pupil perspective. The array of concepts is organised into a constructive, topical agenda which, it is argued, bring a much needed formative dimension to research and development in this crucial area of professional learning

Exploratory Mediation Analysis with Many Potential Mediators

Social and behavioral scientists are increasingly employing technologies such as fMRI, smartphones, and gene sequencing, which yield 'high-dimensional' datasets with more columns than rows. There is increasing interest, but little substantive theory, in the role the variables in these data play in known processes. This necessitates exploratory mediation analysis, for which structural equation modeling is the benchmark method. However, this method cannot perform mediation analysis with more variables than observations. One option is to run a series of univariate mediation models, which incorrectly assumes independence of the mediators. Another option is regularization, but the available implementations may lead to high false positive rates. In this paper, we develop a hybrid approach which uses components of both filter and regularization: the 'Coordinate-wise Mediation Filter'. It performs filtering conditional on the other selected mediators. We show through simulation that it improves performance over existing methods. Finally, we provide an empirical example, showing how our method may be used for epigenetic research.Comment: R code and package are available online as supplementary material at https://github.com/vankesteren/cmfilter and https://github.com/vankesteren/ema_simulation

Ever-Present

This series is a contemporary interpretation of post-mortem photography, depicting the relationship between the physical and metaphysical remnants of life. The scenes are absent of a resident, showing only what remains, while the fabric portraits represent the ethereal vestige, the intangible memory friends and family hold on to. The corresponding paper reviews my photographic journey and details my processes necessary to create this body of work. Death is not always an easy subject to confront; with this project, I ask viewers to examine their own mortality and accept death’s inevitability

Dynamics of grooming and grooming reciprocation in a group of captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

Grooming relationships between adult male chimpanzees are often reciprocal, i.e. individuals receive grooming from those they groom. Grooming may be reciprocated at the same time it is received (mutual grooming), or later within the same grooming session. Alternatively, it can be reciprocated at a much later stage, in another session. An analysis of individual grooming sessions at the dyadic level was used to investigate how chimpanzees reciprocate grooming within these sessions. This study describes the grooming and reciprocation of grooming by male chimpanzees, living in a multi-male, multi-female group at the Edinburgh Zoo, Scotland. A method for the analysis of dyadic grooming relationships was based on the presence or absence of mutual and unilateral grooming in a session, which allows seven types of grooming session to be distinguished. Grooming session was defined empirically, and the duration of the bout criterion interval (BCl) depended on the presence or absence of oestrous females. For comparison, however, the same BCI was used throughout. Without oestrous females, grooming was primarily reciprocated in sessions with mutual grooming and unilateral grooming by both participants. This kind of session proved highly cooperative and each male adjusted the duration of his unilateral grooming to that of mutual grooming, rather than to the duration of unilateral grooming by the other male. Mutual grooming was less important to dyads which had a strong grooming relationship. It is suggested that mutual grooming serves as an indication of the motivation to groom unilaterally. There was no indication that males reciprocated on the basis of TIT-FOR-TAT within these sessions, or between sessions in general. Alternative hypotheses of mutual grooming were only partly confirmed in that some dyads used mutual grooming to reduce the (already very short) time they spent in grooming. However, mutual grooming did not arise from the accidental overlap in the grooming of two partners. In the presence of oestrous females, grooming cooperation between the males broke down, and this was the result of heightened aggression as well as the presence of oestrous females itself. The balance in grooming given and received shifted in the direction of dominants (i.e. dominants received more) under the influence of oestrous females, but in the opposite direction under the influence of aggression. Feeding had no effect on the reciprocity of groormng. There was considerable dyadic variation. Some dyads groomed more when there were oestrous females, others groomed less. Some dyads had proportionally less mutual grooming with increasing numbers of oestrous females, others had more. There were generally no clear patterns of grooming reciprocation over longer time-spans than the session, but the overall degree of reciprocity of a dyad was frequently reached at the end of each day. Tracing the degree of reciprocation over a few weeks indicated that some dyads' grooming was governed by dominance, whereas that of others by cooperation