A Collaborative Professional Development Approach to Improving Student Outcomes

The purpose of this article is to analyze the strategy used to develop a collaborative professional development process that focused on the implementation of the common core state standards. In addition, the author will report findings, and discuss the effectiveness of the initiative for postsecondary faculty. Faculty can verify that not every student comes to a two or four year college program prepared to succeed in credit bearing coursework. To facilitate improvement of student success, states across the country collaborated with teachers, researchers and leading experts to design and develop the common core state standards. The standards were developed to ensure that all students, regardless of where they live, are well prepared with the skills and knowledge essential to collaborate and compete with their peers (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2012). Kentucky was the first state to adopt the Common Core Standards, and beginning in 2010 a large scale effort was developed to provide faculty with information about how implementation of the standards could affect postsecondary education. To address the need for information about the Common Core Standards, representatives from Kentucky institutes of higher education (IHE) collaborated in the development and delivery of information about the Common Core Standards

Long Lasting Egocentric Disorientation Induced by Normal Sensori-Motor Spatial Interaction

Perception of the cardinal directions of the body, right-left, up-down, ahead-behind, which appears so absolute and fundamental to the organisation of behaviour can in fact, be modified. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has been shown that prolonged distorted perception of the orientation of body axes can be a consequence of disordered sensori-motor signals, including long-term prismatic adaptation and lesions of the central nervous system. We report the novel and surprising finding that a long-lasting distortion of perception of personal space can also be induced by an ecological pointing task without the artifice of distorting normal sensori-motor relationships.Twelve right-handed healthy adults performed the task of pointing with their arms, without vision, to indicate their subjective 'straight ahead', a task often used to assess the Egocentric Reference. This was performed before, immediately, and one day after a second task intended to 'modulate' perception of spatial direction. The 'modulating' task lasted 5 minutes and consisted of asking participants to point with the right finger to targets that appeared only in one (right or left) half of a computer screen. Estimates of the 'straight-ahead' during pre-test were accurate (inferior to 0.3 degrees deviation). Significantly, up to one day after performing the modulating task, the subjective 'straight-ahead' was deviated (by approximately 3.2 degrees) to the same side to which subjects had pointed to targets.These results reveal that the perception of directional axes for behaviour is readily influenced by interactions with the environment that involve no artificial distortion of normal sensori-motor-spatial relationships and does not necessarily conform to the cardinal directions as defined by the anatomy of orthostatic posture. We thus suggest that perceived space is a dynamic construction directly dependent upon our past experience about the direction and/or the localisation of our sensori-motor spatial interaction with environment