Getting Practice Right: Using the Strengths and Limits of Research Findings to Bridge the Gap Between Practice and Research

This session explores how gaps between research and practice can be bridged. In the first part of the session, Karen Zilberstein and Sally Popper will identify areas in which research has provided useful guides for practice and areas in which research and standardized interventions do not yet completely address the experiences and needs of individual children and families. The second contribution will be from Beth Neil who will outline the “Contact after Adoption Change Project” from the UK. This project brings together an adoption researcher with experienced adoption professionals with the aim of coproducing online resources to help make research-informed, case sensitive decisions about post adoption contact for children adopted from foster care

Focus 2016

A magazine for alumnae, alumni and friends of the Boston University School of Theology community

Opening the Door of the Computer Science Classroom: The Disciplinary Commons

... document and share knowledge about teaching and student learning in Computer Science (CS) classrooms, and to establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use and development by other educators. The mechanism for achieving these goals was through a series of monthly meetings involving Computer Science faculty, one cohort of ten CS faculty in the US and one cohort of twenty in the UK. Meetings were focused on the teaching and learning within participants’ classrooms, with each person documenting their teaching in a course portfolio. Surveyed on completing the project, participants discussed the value of the Disciplinary Commons in providing the time and structure to systematically reflect upon their practice, to exchange concrete ideas for teaching their courses with other CS educators in the discipline, to learn skills that apply directly to course and program evaluation, and to meet colleagues teaching CS at other institutions

A comparison of auditory brainstem responses across diving bird species

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. There is little biological data available for diving birds because many live in hard-to-study, remote habitats. Only one species of diving bird, the black-footed penguin (Spheniscusdemersus), has been studied in respect to auditory capabilities (Wever et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 63:676–680, 1969). We, therefore, measured in-air auditory threshold in ten species of diving birds, using the auditory brainstem response (ABR). The average audiogram obtained for each species followed the U-shape typical of birds and many other animals. All species tested shared a common region of the greatest sensitivity, from 1000 to 3000 Hz, although audiograms differed significantly across species. Thresholds of all duck species tested were more similar to each other than to the two non-duck species tested. The red-throated loon (Gavia stellata) and northern gannet (Morus bassanus) exhibited the highest thresholds while the lowest thresholds belonged to the duck species, specifically the lesser scaup (Aythyaaffinis) and ruddy duck (Oxyurajamaicensis). Vocalization parameters were also measured for each species, and showed that with the exception of the common eider (Somateriamollisima), the peak frequency, i.e., frequency at the greatest intensity, of all species’ vocalizations measured here fell between 1000 and 3000 Hz, matching the bandwidth of the most sensitive hearing range