NiCE Teacher Workshop: Engaging K-12 Teachers in the Development of Curricular Materials That Utilize Complex Networks Concepts

Our educational systems must prepare students for an increasingly interconnected future, and teachers require equipping with modern tools, such as network science, to achieve this. We held a Networks in Classroom Education (NiCE) workshop for a group of 21 K-12 teachers with various disciplinary backgrounds. The explicit aim of this was to introduce them to concepts in network science, show them how these concepts can be utilized in the classroom, and empower them to develop resources, in the form of lesson plans, for themselves and the wider community. Here we detail the nature of the workshop and present its outcomes - including an innovative set of publicly available lesson plans. We discuss the future for successful integration of network science in K-12 education, and the importance of inspiring and enabling our teachers.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

A School Nurse-Delivered Intervention for Overweight and Obese Adolescents: Lessons Learned

Dr. Pbert will present work from an academic and community partnership between UMMS and the School Health Unit of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to design and test a brief intervention for school nurses to provide weight management assistance to overweight and obese adolescents in the school health setting. She will discuss why the school nurse and school health setting are promising venues for addressing adolescent overweight, present results from their pilot study, and discuss facilitators, barriers and strategies to implementing this treatment model

Proceedings of NetSciEd 2018

NetSciEd 2018: The NetSci Satellite Symposium on Network Science and Education was held as a full-day satellite symposium at NetSci 2018 in Paris, France, on 12 June 2018. This edition followed the previous NetSciEd satellites held in 2012--2017. NetSciEd is an excellent venue to discuss all topics related to network science and education, including educational activities to teach/learn network science as well as applications of network science to understand, model, and improve educational systems and practices. This booklet gathers the abstracts of the presentations from NetSciEd 2018. The authors have enriched them with external links and references of potential relevance to any readers who want to become involved in network science and education

Proceedings of NetSciEd 2018

NetSciEd 2018: The NetSci Satellite Symposium on Network Science and Education was held as a full-day satellite symposium at NetSci 2018 in Paris, France, on 12 June 2018. This edition followed the previous NetSciEd satellites held in 2012--2017. NetSciEd is an excellent venue to discuss all topics related to network science and education, including educational activities to teach/learn network science as well as applications of network science to understand, model, and improve educational systems and practices. This booklet gathers the abstracts of the presentations from NetSciEd 2018. The authors have enriched them with external links and references of potential relevance to any readers who want to become involved in network science and education

A school nurse-delivered adolescent smoking cessation intervention: a randomized controlled trial

BACKGROUND: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the efficacy of a school nurse-delivered smoking cessation intervention to improve abstinence rates among adolescents interested in quitting. METHODS: Seventy-one high schools in Massachusetts were randomized to either a four-session one-on-one school nurse-delivered smoking cessation intervention (37 schools, n = 571) or usual smoking cessation care control condition (34 schools, n = 577). Adolescents in grades 9-12 who smoked in the past 30 days completed surveys at baseline, 6 weeks and 3 months. The study was conducted during the 2002-2003 school year. RESULTS: Thirty-day self-reported abstinence rates were significantly greater in students in the intervention compared to control condition at 6 weeks (18% vs. 2%, respectively) and 3 months (24% vs. 5%, respectively). After adjusting for school and potential confounders, students in the intervention schools had odds of quitting 8 times greater than students in the control schools at 6 weeks (OR = 8.4; 95% CI 3.7, 20.6) and 6 times greater at 3 months (OR = 6.4; 95% CI 3.4, 11.4). School nurses delivered intervention with a high degree of fidelity. CONCLUSIONS: A four-session smoking cessation intervention can feasibly be delivered by school nurses and increase self-reported short-term abstinence rates among students interested in quitting smoking