Legal Review Concerning the Use of Health Impact Assessments in Non-Health Sectors

Examines laws supporting the use of health impact assessments in the areas of environment and energy, transportation, agriculture, and waste disposal and recycling, and issues regarding authority to conduct HIAs in these sectors. Makes recommendations

Future Water Stewardship and Fact-Based Water Policy: An Aquatic Science Education Pathway Model

Texas Aquatic Science originated from a project seeking better ways to educate students about water because of concern that current education was failing to promote good decisions about water by adult citizens and political leaders.A comprehensive water education curriculum was developed to engage learners from middle school through universityusing an education pathway to create water-savvy citizens of tomorrow who will take personal action to ensure effective stewardship of water and support evidence-based waterpolicies. This paper will describe the pathway and present results of research on the pathway’s effectiveness withmiddle and high school students and teachers

Aquatic Science Education Pathway from Headwaters to Ocean is a Model for Place-Based Experiential Learning for Protecting and Stewarding Gulf States\u27 Freshwater and Marine Resources

Teachers, students and parents today have a bewildering and fast-moving array of technology innovations that purportedly will help students learn and teachers teach. Unfortunately, it is hard for anyone to grasp what works, let alone what works best. Texas Aquatic Science has become a model for enhanced water education that has rapidly risen to the top of search engine rankings for aquatic science. The project was conceived in the course of developing means to integrate use of various new mobile and interactive technologies into middle and high school curricula about water from headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico. The researchers heard that to effectively use new technology and materials regularly, there needed to be a context for their use. Led by educators and researchers from the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment (Texas State University), Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi), and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the initiative expanded through support from over 20 partners and multiple funders to develop that context. This resulted in a comprehensive STEM pathway to engage learners from middle school through adulthood on an educational journey to create water savvy citizens of tomorrow who will ensure effective stewardship of water in the Gulf states and beyond. Project partners published a comprehensive textbook available in print and on-line versions, assembled a teacher guide with instructional and assessment materials that allowed integration of technology enhancements, produced videos and enhancement materials, and developed a field site program connecting aquatic science in the classroom with educators and outdoor place-based experiential learning in the field. This provided a comprehensive context for instruction of middle and high school students and served as a basis for aquatic science instruction at the college level for non-science majors, in the home-school environment, and to anyone wanting to learn about nature and water. Curricula met Texas teaching standards for relevant principles of geology, geography, chemistry, physics, ecology, and biology in the text and associated teaching materials. Experience and results of research to-date demonstrate integrating education enhancements into comprehensive curricula enhance student learning and teacher ability to provide meaningful instruction. We believe the model can be used for developing science education curricula in other areas of environmental sustainability, such as for watershed science, land conservation, or coastal areas management

Understanding Student Computational Thinking with Computational Modeling

Recently, the National Research Council's framework for next generation science standards highlighted "computational thinking" as one of its "fundamental practices". 9th Grade students taking a physics course that employed the Modeling Instruction curriculum were taught to construct computational models of physical systems. Student computational thinking was assessed using a proctored programming assignment, written essay, and a series of think-aloud interviews, where the students produced and discussed a computational model of a baseball in motion via a high-level programming environment (VPython). Roughly a third of the students in the study were successful in completing the programming assignment. Student success on this assessment was tied to how students synthesized their knowledge of physics and computation. On the essay and interview assessments, students displayed unique views of the relationship between force and motion; those who spoke of this relationship in causal (rather than observational) terms tended to have more success in the programming exercise.Comment: preprint to submit to PERC proceedings 201

Intrinsic Quantum Correlations of Weak Coherent States for Quantum Communication

Intrinsic quantum correlations of weak coherent states are observed between two parties through a novel detection scheme, which can be used as a supplement to the existence decoy-state BB84 and differential phase-shift quantum key distribution (DPS-QKD) protocols. In a proof-of-principle experiment, we generate bi-partite correlations of weak coherent states using weak local oscillator fields in two spatially separated balanced homodyne detections. We employ nonlinearity of post-measurement method to obtain the bi-partite correlations from two single-field interferences at individual homodyne measurement. This scheme is then used to demonstrate bits correlations between two parties over a distance of 10 km through a transmission fiber. We believe that the scheme can add another physical layer of security to these protocols for quantum key distribution.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Hidden walls: STEM course barriers identified by students with disabilities

Historically, non-disabled individuals have viewed disability as a personal deficit requiring change to the disabled individual. However, models have emerged from disability activists and disabled intellectuals that emphasize the role of disabling social structures in preventing or hindering equal access across the ability continuum. We used the social relational proposition, which situates disability within the interaction of impairments and particular social structures, to identify disabling structures in introductory STEM courses. We conducted interviews with nine students who identified with a range of impairments about their experiences in introductory STEM courses. We assembled a diverse research team and analyzed the interviews through phenomenological analysis. Participants reported course barriers that prevented effective engagement with course content. These barriers resulted in challenges with time management as well as feelings of stress and anxiety. We discuss recommendations for supporting students to more effectively engage with introductory STEM courses

They Choose to Attend Academic Summer Camps? A Mixed Methods Study Exploring the Impact of a NASA Academic Summer Pre-Engineering Camp On Middle School Students in a Latino Community

Early exposure to engineering and mathematics career opportunities has been indicated to influence students’ decisions regarding their academic majors and career goals. This study utilized mixed methods to analyze how changes in middle school students’ affective characteristics might be linked to their future career decision-making, following participation in an integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics summer camp. As part of the summer camp, rising sixth- through eighth-grade students attended a weeklong learning experience based on a specific engineering context. Each grade level cohort participated with their same grade peers in a 36-hour, 6-day event focused on sparking their interest in engineering careers and developing their content knowledge in select science and mathematics content areas. Pre-post testing was conducted with 65 students of diverse backgrounds in grades six through eight to measure their self-reported engineering-related self-efficacy, knowledge of engineering careers, and motivation to pursue future engineering classes and careers. In addition, interviews were conducted to examine any changes in middle school camp participants’ affective characteristics of motivation, self-efficacy, and self-determination