Moving away from zero tolerance policies : examination of Illinois educator preparedness in addressing student behavior

In August 2016, Illinois Senate Bill 100 (SB 100) restricted the use of zero tolerance disciplinary practices within public schools when addressing student behavior. In efforts to make school discipline less exclusionary and more effective, SB 100 mandated educators exhaust all means of interventions prior to suspending or expelling a student. Additionally, SB 100 recommended faculty professional development on effective classroom management, which is critical considering the majority of exclusionary discipline cases resulted from referrals by classroom educators for subjective deportment concerns and not from student possession of contraband. Using an online survey instrument, a sample of licensed educators in northeastern Illinois were asked to self-rate their preparedness in classroom management and indicate their awareness of zero tolerance policies. Results demonstrated significant difference of self-rated preparedness between general and special educators when addressing classroom deportment behaviors, while there was no difference in more intense behaviors (e.g., verbal threats, possession of contraband). Discussion on results and suggestions for future research are offered.peer-reviewe

Context-aware Trace Contracts

The behavior of concurrent, asynchronous procedures depends in general on the call context, because of the global protocol that governs scheduling. This context cannot be specified with the state-based Hoare-style contracts common in deductive verification. Recent work generalized state-based to trace contracts, which permit to specify the internal behavior of a procedure, such as calls or state changes, but not its call context. In this article we propose a program logic of context-aware trace contracts for specifying global behavior of asynchronous programs. We also provide a sound proof system that addresses two challenges: To observe the program state not merely at the end points of a procedure, we introduce the novel concept of an observation quantifier. And to combat combinatorial explosion of possible call sequences of procedures, we transfer Liskov's principle of behavioral subtyping to the analysis of asynchronous procedures

Evaluating environmental and ecological landscape characteristics relevant to urban resilience across gradients of land-sharing-sparing and urbanity

Within urban landscape planning, debate continues around the relative merits of land-sparing (compaction) and land-sharing (sprawl) scenarios. Using part of Greater Manchester (UK) as a case-study, we present a landscape approach to mapping green infrastructure and variation in social-ecological-environmental conditions as a function of land sparing and sharing. We do so for the landscape as a whole as well as for areas of high and low urbanity. Results imply potential trade-offs between land-sparing-sharing scenarios relevant to characteristics critical to urban resilience such as landscape connectivity and diversity, air quality, surface temperature, and access to green space. These trade-offs may be particularly complex due to the parallel influence of patch attributes such as land-cover and size and imply that both ecological restoration and spatial planning have a role to play in reconciling tensions between land-sparing and sharing strategies

A next-day, brief e-survey overcomes the excessive variability seen in CAHPS-style emergency department surveys so that individual physician performance can be assessed on a regular basis

Traditional CAHPS-style emergency department (ED) surveys result in excessive variability when assessing individual physician performance. The objective of this study is to measure the variability of a brief, electronic survey (e-survey). The study team also measured the association of individual physicians to demographic data, physician and patient factors, and a physician burnout assessment tool. Data from SmartContact (SmartER, La Grange, IL) is a next-day, e-survey that takes about 30-seconds to complete. This tool was used by a hospital-employed emergency department (ED) group during calendar year 2017 across 2 EDs and 37 physicians.1,2 Variability was estimated regarding raw patient experience (PX) scores and top box scores by using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs). Pearson correlations were used to measure the interaction between PX scores, physician factors, and patient factors. Analysis of the 2017 calendar year showed statistically significant differences between physician PX performance on a bimonthly and quarterly basis. As well, there was lower PX in patients presenting at night. No correlation was found with a burnout assessment tool. This study demonstrates statistically valid performance differences among physicians using a next-day e-survey, which conforms to the recommendations of ED professional organizations for use in driving provider PX improvement, enhancing patient trust, and improving patient outcomes. Experience Framework This article is associated with the Innovation & Technology lens of The Beryl Institute Experience Framework. (http://bit.ly/ExperienceFramework) Access other PXJ articles related to this lens. Access other resources related to this len

Human Fetal Progenitor Tenocytes for Regenerative Medicine.

Tendon injuries are very frequent and affect a wide and heterogeneous population. Unfortunately, the healing process is long with outcomes that are not often satisfactory due to fibrotic tissue appearance, which leads to scar and adhesion development. Tissue engineering and cell therapies emerge as interesting alternatives to classical treatments. In this study, we evaluated human fetal progenitor tenocytes (hFPTs) as a potential cell source for treatment of tendon afflictions, as fetal cells are known to promote healing in a scarless regenerative process. hFPTs presented a rapid and stable growth up to passage 9, allowing to create a large cell bank for off-the-shelf availability. hFPTs showed a strong tenogenic phenotype with an excellent stability, even when placed in conditions normally inducing cells to differentiate. The karyotype also indicated a good stability up to passage 12, which is far beyond that necessary for clinical application (passage 6). When placed in coculture, hFPTs had the capacity to stimulate human adult tenocytes (hATs), which are responsible for the deposition of a new extracellular matrix during tendon healing. Finally, it was possible to distribute cells in porous or gel scaffolds with an excellent survival, thus permitting a large variety of applications (from simple injections to grafts acting as filling material). All of these results are encouraging in the development of an off-the-shelf cell source capable of stimulating tendon regeneration for the treatment of tendon injuries

Plasticity of fetal cartilaginous cells.

Tissue-specific stem cells found in adult tissues can participate in the repair process following injury. However, adult tissues, such as articular cartilage and intervertebral disc, have low regeneration capacity, whereas fetal tissues, such as articular cartilage, show high regeneration ability. The presence of fetal stem cells in fetal cartilaginous tissues and their involvement in the regeneration of fetal cartilage is unknown. The aim of the study was to assess the chondrogenic differentiation and the plasticity of fetal cartilaginous cells. We compared the TGF-β3-induced chondrogenic differentiation of human fetal cells isolated from spine and cartilage tissues to that of human bone marrow stromal cells (BMSC). Stem cell surface markers and adipogenic and osteogenic plasticity of the two fetal cell types were also assessed. TGF-β3 stimulation of fetal cells cultured in high cell density led to the production of aggrecan, type I and II collagens, and variable levels of type X collagen. Although fetal cells showed the same pattern of surface stem cell markers as BMSCs, both type of fetal cells had lower adipogenic and osteogenic differentiation capacity than BMSCs. Fetal cells from femoral head showed higher adipogenic differentiation than fetal cells from spine. These results show that fetal cells are already differentiated cells and may be a good compromise between stem cells and adult tissue cells for a cell-based therapy