Secondary Students\u27 Perceptions of Teacher Quality

This study examined the perceptions of secondary students and teacher quality during their years in high school. The study sought to compare responses among males and females and among ethnicities to determine if there were differences in perceptions of teacher quality with respect to student-teacher relationships, instructional methods, and justice and fairness. Surveys were given to students from eight public high schools in a southeastern region of Georgia. Demographic questions were included in the survey to delineate responses by gender and ethnicity. This study generated data from 663 students to determine student perceptions of teacher quality in the areas of justice and fairness, instructional methods, and teacher-student relationships. Data were organized and evaluated using statistical software to produce the written results. The results for student and teacher relationships and justice and fairness indicated there were no significant differences among ethnicities or genders; however, when Instructional Strategies were evaluated for ethnicity and gender differences, ANOVA results for ethnicity revealed significant differences among the four ethnic groups. High agreement was found on the items in which students indicated that they had adequate time for questions and note-taking in class, teachers provided strategies to help them retain information, teachers expected students to use a variety of resources to complete class projects, and teachers provided detailed rubrics for specific grade requirements. These findings lead one to believe that students want to know the expectations for success in the classroom and value the teachers that provide them with concrete details

Children as partners in their diabetes care: An exploratory research study September-December 2003

Can young children understand and also take an active part in managing their diabetes care? In-depth interviews were conducted with 24 children who have type I diabetes, and 29 parents, to elicit their views on these questions. The children were aged 3-12 years; they attend diabetes clinics in an inner London teaching hospital, and two large district general hospitals, one in inner London, the other in a commuter town. Two paediatricians and two specialist diabetes nurses were also interviewed. The children and parents reported: • their high levels of knowledge and skill; • high levels of satisfaction with the care from the specialist diabetes staff; • criticism that non-diabetes-specialist health practitioners often severely lacked knowledge about diabetes and were unable to provide adequate and safe care for the children; • the importance of direct experience of diabetes as a source of knowledge and skills, and therefore: the need for practitioners to recognise and learn from the wealth of knowledge amongst children and their parents to help practitioners to provide the best possible care and support, working as partners with children and parents

Ghosts of Yellowstone: Multi-Decadal Histories of Wildlife Populations Captured by Bones on a Modern Landscape

Natural accumulations of skeletal material (death assemblages) have the potential to provide historical data on species diversity and population structure for regions lacking decades of wildlife monitoring, thereby contributing valuable baseline data for conservation and management strategies. Previous studies of the ecological and temporal resolutions of death assemblages from terrestrial large-mammal communities, however, have largely focused on broad patterns of community composition in tropical settings. Here, I expand the environmental sampling of large-mammal death assemblages into a temperate biome and explore more demanding assessments of ecological fidelity by testing their capacity to record past population fluctuations of individual species in the well-studied ungulate community of Yellowstone National Park (Yellowstone). Despite dramatic ecological changes following the 1988 wildfires and 1995 wolf re-introduction, the Yellowstone death assemblage is highly faithful to the living community in species richness and community structure. These results agree with studies of tropical death assemblages and establish the broad capability of vertebrate remains to provide high-quality ecological data from disparate ecosystems and biomes. Importantly, the Yellowstone death assemblage also correctly identifies species that changed significantly in abundance over the last 20 to ∼80 years and the directions of those shifts (including local invasions and extinctions). The relative frequency of fresh versus weathered bones for individual species is also consistent with documented trends in living population sizes. Radiocarbon dating verifies the historical source of bones from Equus caballus (horse): a functionally extinct species. Bone surveys are a broadly valuable tool for obtaining population trends and baseline shifts over decadal-to-centennial timescales

Macrolide Resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae in Hong Kong

Erythromycin resistance rates among penicillin-susceptible Streptococcus pneumoniae were 38 and 92% among penicillin-intermediate and -resistant S. pneumoniae isolates from Hong Kong, respectively, and 27% (43 of 158) of the isolates showed the MLS(B) phenotype, and the majority carried the ermB gene; 73% (115 of 158) displayed the M phenotype, and all possessed the mef gene. The MLS(B) phenotype was predominant in penicillin-susceptible, macrolide-resistant isolates and in penicillin-nonsusceptible isolates of serotype 6B, whilst the M phenotype was predominant in penicillin-intermediate or -resistant isolates belonging to serotype 23F or 19F. Extensive spread of clones of drug-resistant pneumococci has led to the widespread presence of macrolide resistance in S. pneumoniae in Hong Kong

Cardiac ARIA Index: Measuring the accessibility to cardiovascular services in rural and remote Australia via applied geographic spatial technology

Clark, RA, Coffee, N, Turner, D, Eckert, K, Bamford, E, van Gaans, D, Astles, P, Milligan, M, Smail, T, Stewart, S, Coombe, D, Sutcliffe, C, Wilkinson, D, Tonkin, A. On behalf of the CARDIAC-ARIA project grou