Modifications of Project-Based Learning to Fit Students with Adverse Childhood Experiences

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the perception of modifications necessary as educators moved away from a traditional learning environment with little movement and high academic stress through the introduction of project-based learning activities specifically for this population of students. Data were collected from 1-1 interviews with five participants teaching within a mental health residential school in Missouri who hold Missouri teacher certification ranging from elementary to high school level working with 175 students, ranging in ages from 8 to 17. Additional data were collected from lesson reflections and lesson plans from classrooms of students with the same background as teacher participants over the last four school years, 2018-22, of teachers who have taught project-based learning units. Interviews, lesson reflections, and lesson plans were manually coded twice and then coded a third time using electronic coding via NVivo to ensure bias from myself was not present. This study supports using project-based learning activities with students across grade levels from elementary to high school who have encountered adverse childhood experiences. Findings from this study support perceived modifications to generate curriculum options that are non-traditional as well as relevant to students within a residential care facility school

Project-Based Learning and Perceived Effect on Behaviors for Students with Adverse Childhood Experiences: A Case Study

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the perception of educators transitioning from a traditional learning environment to a project-based learning activity environment. Teachers’ perceptions of student behaviors ranging in age from 8 to 17 were captured. Data were collected from 1-1 interviews with five participants with Missouri teacher certification ranging in grade levels from elementary to high school working with a total of 175 students within a mental health residential school for children and youth throughout Missouri. Additional data were collected from lesson reflections, lesson plans, behavioral logs, regulation logs, and supplemental data from critical incident reports from classrooms of students with the same background as teacher participants over the last four school years, 2018-22, of teachers who have taught project-based learning units. Study findings support the teacher's perception that project-based learning activities decrease negative behaviors for students with adverse childhood experiences while increasing engagement, academic skills, and self-regulation. Further, implications from these findings support that project-based learning activities increase student choice, allowing students within a residential mental health classroom to have control

Project-Based Learning and Perceived Overlap of Self-Regulation and Project-based Learning Techniques for Students with Adverse Childhood Experiences: A Case Study

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the perception of educators transitioning from a traditional learning environment to a project-based learning (PBL). Teachers’ perception of student self-regulation in ages from 8 to 17 were captured. Data were collected from 1-1 interviews with five participants with Missouri teacher certification ranging in grade levels from elementary to high school working with a total of 175 students within a mental health residential school throughout Missouri. Additional data were collected from daily logs, participant interviews, behavioral logs, and regulation logs from classrooms of students with the same background as teacher participants over the last four school years, 2018-22, of teachers who have taught project-based learning units. Daily logs, regulation logs, behavioral logs, and participant interview responses were manually coded twice and then coded a third time using electronic coding via NVivo to ensure bias from Dr Foster was not present. This study supports using project-based learning units with students who have a history of  adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). While study findings support the teacher perception that project-based learning activities increase self-regulation from interview responses, regulation logs, and daily logs data could not triangulate this perceived relationship. These findings support the importance of relationships with students with ACEs during PBL to increase self-regulation

Engineered Reproductively Isolated Species Drive Reversible Population Replacement

Engineered reproductive species barriers are useful for impeding gene flow and driving desirable genes into wild populations in a reversible threshold-dependent manner. However, methods to generate synthetic barriers have not been developed in advanced eukaryotes. To overcome this challenge, we engineered SPECIES (Synthetic Postzygotic barriers Exploiting CRISPR-based Incompatibilities for Engineering Species) to generate postzygotic reproductive barriers. Using this approach, we engineer multiple reproductively isolated SPECIES and demonstrate their threshold-dependent gene drive capabilities in D. melanogaster. Given the near-universal functionality of CRISPR tools, this approach should be portable to many species, including insect disease vectors in which confinable gene drives could be of great practical utility

Development of admixture mapping panels for African Americans from commercial high-density SNP arrays

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Admixture mapping is a powerful approach for identifying genetic variants involved in human disease that exploits the unique genomic structure in recently admixed populations. To use existing published panels of ancestry-informative markers (AIMs) for admixture mapping, markers have to be genotyped <it>de novo </it>for each admixed study sample and samples representing the ancestral parental populations. The increased availability of dense marker data on commercial chips has made it feasible to develop panels wherein the markers need not be predetermined.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We developed two panels of AIMs (~2,000 markers each) based on the Affymetrix Genome-Wide Human SNP Array 6.0 for admixture mapping with African American samples. These two AIM panels had good map power that was higher than that of a denser panel of ~20,000 random markers as well as other published panels of AIMs. As a test case, we applied the panels in an admixture mapping study of hypertension in African Americans in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Developing marker panels for admixture mapping from existing genome-wide genotype data offers two major advantages: (1) no <it>de novo </it>genotyping needs to be done, thereby saving costs, and (2) markers can be filtered for various quality measures and replacement markers (to minimize gaps) can be selected at no additional cost. Panels of carefully selected AIMs have two major advantages over panels of random markers: (1) the map power from sparser panels of AIMs is higher than that of ~10-fold denser panels of random markers, and (2) clusters can be labeled based on information from the parental populations. With current technology, chip-based genome-wide genotyping is less expensive than genotyping ~20,000 random markers. The major advantage of using random markers is the absence of ascertainment effects resulting from the process of selecting markers. The ability to develop marker panels informative for ancestry from SNP chip genotype data provides a fresh opportunity to conduct admixture mapping for disease genes in admixed populations when genome-wide association data exist or are planned.</p

Inferring infection hazard in wildlife populations by linking data across individual and population scales

Our ability to infer unobservable disease-dynamic processes such as force of infection (infection hazard for susceptible hosts) has transformed our understanding of disease transmission mechanisms and capacity to predict disease dynamics. Conventional methods for inferring FOI estimate a time-averaged value and are based on population-level processes. Because many pathogens exhibit epidemic cycling and FOI is the result of processes acting across the scales of individuals and populations, a flexible framework that extends to epidemic dynamics and links within-host processes to FOI is needed. Specifically, within-host antibody kinetics in wildlife hosts can be short-lived and produce patterns that are repeatable across individuals, suggesting individual-level antibody concentrations could be used to infer time since infection and hence FOI. Using simulations and case studies (influenza A in lesser snow geese and Yersinia pestis in coyotes), we argue that with careful experimental and surveillance design, the population-level FOI signal can be recovered from individual-level antibody kinetics, despite substantial individual-level variation. In addition to improving inference, the cross-scale quantitative antibody approach we describe can reveal insights into drivers of individual-based variation in disease response, and the role of poorly understood processes such as secondary infections, in population-level dynamics of disease

Genetic Drift of HIV Populations in Culture

Populations of Human Immunodeficiency Virus type 1 (HIV-1) undergo a surprisingly large amount of genetic drift in infected patients despite very large population sizes, which are predicted to be mostly deterministic. Several models have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, but all of them implicitly assume that the process of virus replication itself does not contribute to genetic drift. We developed an assay to measure the amount of genetic drift for HIV populations replicating in cell culture. The assay relies on creation of HIV populations of known size and measurements of variation in frequency of a neutral allele. Using this assay, we show that HIV undergoes approximately ten times more genetic drift than would be expected from its population size, which we defined as the number of infected cells in the culture. We showed that a large portion of the increase in genetic drift is due to non-synchronous infection of target cells. When infections are synchronized, genetic drift for the virus is only 3-fold higher than expected from its population size. Thus, the stochastic nature of biological processes involved in viral replication contributes to increased genetic drift in HIV populations. We propose that appreciation of these effects will allow better understanding of the evolutionary forces acting on HIV in infected patients

Additive genetic variation in schizophrenia risk is shared by populations of African and European descent

Previous studies have emphasized ethnically heterogeneous human leukocyte antigen (HLA) classical allele associations to rheumatoid arthritis (RA) risk. We fine-mapped RA risk alleles within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) in 2782 seropositive RA cases and 4315 controls of Asian descent. We applied imputation to determine genotypes for eight class I and II HLA genes to Asian populations for the first time using a newly constructed pan-Asian reference panel. First, we empirically measured high imputation accuracy in Asian samples. Then we observed the most significant association in HLA-DRβ1 at amino acid position 13, located outside the classical shared epitope (Pomnibus = 6.9 × 10(-135)). The individual residues at position 13 have relative effects that are consistent with published effects in European populations (His > Phe > Arg > Tyr ≅ Gly > Ser)--but the observed effects in Asians are generally smaller. Applying stepwise conditional analysis, we identified additional independent associations at positions 57 (conditional Pomnibus = 2.2 × 10(-33)) and 74 (conditional Pomnibus = 1.1 × 10(-8)). Outside of HLA-DRβ1, we observed independent effects for amino acid polymorphisms within HLA-B (Asp9, conditional P = 3.8 × 10(-6)) and HLA-DPβ1 (Phe9, conditional P = 3.0 × 10(-5)) concordant with European populations. Our trans-ethnic HLA fine-mapping study reveals that (i) a common set of amino acid residues confer shared effects in European and Asian populations and (ii) these same effects can explain ethnically heterogeneous classical allelic associations (e.g. HLA-DRB1*09:01) due to allele frequency differences between populations. Our study illustrates the value of high-resolution imputation for fine-mapping causal variants in the MHC