Indicators and Precipitators of Special Educator Satisfaction: The Role of Certification and Advanced Coursework

Special education teachers are leaving the education field at a higher rate than other education professionals. The annual attrition rate for special education teachers is estimated to be between 8-10% of special educators across the United States. These attrition rates are concerning, as they contribute to the shortage of quality special educators. Considering that an estimated 50% of special educators leave their positions within their first five years, researchers have conducted studies examining criteria centered on teacher retention and attrition. This study examined the findings of such studies, and explored the role of how teachers\u27 certifications and obtaining advanced degrees influence special education teachers\u27 sustainability and satisfaction levels

Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: Reliability of Concussion Testing and Effects of Multiple Concussions in Athletes

Shawna JordanAn estimated 3.8 million concussions happen every year in youth, adolescent, collegiate and professional athletes. 1 In recent years, concussions have come into the spotlight due to local and national stories about athletes collapsing after sustaining a second concussion while still suffering from a previous one and other athletes committing suicide, which seem to be linked to concussions. Concussion testing throughout the country has become a regular procedure and baseline testing is becoming more popular in high school settings. For collegiate athletics, NCAA policy requires a pre-participation assessment for all athletes that include: A brain injury/concussion history, symptom evaluation, cognitive assessment, and balance evaluation

Defining Postmortem Changes in Western Montana: The Effects of Climate and Environment on the Rate and Sequence of Decomposition Using Pig (Sus scrofa) Cadavers

The rate and sequence of human decomposition permits forensic anthropologists to estimate time since death for remains from the forensic context. Preliminary research conducted in western Montana indicates that decomposition does not follow the patterns found in other geographic locations. The purpose of this study is to better define western Montana’s unique environmental factors that affect the rate and pattern of decomposition by documenting changes in mature pigs (Sus scrofa) employed as human proxies. The pigs were deposited during the cold months of October and December and analyzed by comparing the rate and sequence of decomposition with climatological and environmental variables. The popular method of calculating accumulated degree days (ADD) to estimate time since death was tested and found to consistently underestimate the actual day of death, indicating that without alteration, this method should not be relied on for remains that have decomposed in western Montana. The results from this study confirms that Montana’s cold winter slows and eventually halts decomposition, which in turn affects how remains decompose after the spring thaw. Ultimately both specimens reached complete mummification, never achieving skeletonization by the end of the study. The overall purpose of this study is to contribute to building a baseline data set for documenting decomposition in western Montana’s highly variable and unpredictable weather

Master of Science

thesisOak savanna, a transitional ecosystem between open prairie and dense oak forest, was once widespread in central and southeastern Minnesota. As Europeans settled the area during the mid-1800s AD, much of the oak savanna ecosystem was destroyed through clearing for homesteads and agriculture, or converted into forest as a result of fire suppression practices. Since the middle of the 20th century, efforts to restore and preserve this now greatly reduced ecosystem have increased, and often include the reintroduction of fire. Though fire is known to serve an important role within oak savannas, there are currently few paleoecological studies which address issues of fire frequency, ecology, or natural range of variability on timescales longer than the last century. This research presents a fire and vegetation history spanning the last ~ 8000 years, using lake sediments collected on the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge (SNWR) in east central Minnesota. The pollen record indicates a transition from woodland to prairie vegetation ca. 7500 cal yr BP as the climate became warmer and drier, followed by a gradual transition to oak savanna as conditions became wetter beginning ca. 6500 cal yr BP. The destruction of the oak savanna upon Euro-American arrival to the region is evident in the later part of the record, followed by restoration upon the establishment of the refuge. Fire activity appears to be driven by vegetation fuel loads, and ultimately climate, and is highest at periods in the record with greater tree and fewer herb taxa. These data provide insight into the natural fire regime, development, destruction, and recovery of the oak savanna and information on the specific disturbance history of SNWR, and will be used to inform land management considerations when prescribing fire and developing restoration objectives for the refuge

Business-Based Strategies for Improved Nutrition: The Case of Grameen Danone Foods

There is increasing interest in the role that businesses can play in promoting the consumption of nutrient-dense foods as part of strategies to reduce the prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies in developing countries. To date, however, there has been little in-depth analysis of the extent to which viable business opportunities exist for nutrient-dense foods in the context of markets catering to communities. Furthermore, whether businesses can deliver sustainable improvements in the nutrition of poor populations at scale is not yet evident. This article examines the case of Grameen Danone Foods Ltd, a social enterprise that specifically aims to bring about improvements in the micronutrient status of poor children in Bangladesh through the sale of fortified yogurt. The article examines the degree to which this business has been successful at establishing a viable market for fortified yogurt amongst poor communities, and the challenges it has faced in trying to achieve this.Department for International Development (DFID

The Future of Research Is Indigenous: Culturally Grounding Our Indigenous Scholarship

Indigenous peoples are the original stewards of their Native and Ancestral lands—having maintained the balances of their ecosystems since time immemorial. However, as a result of colonization, imperialism, and the mass genocide against Indigenous peoples, environmental systems have been altered and drastically changed. Since western ideologies such as capitalism and western science were introduced, Indigenous stewardships and their knowledge systems have been invalidated and oftentimes, ignored in the environmental and ecological discourse. Their complex nature-culture nexus has been dismissed and suppressed and European men have been given the credit for their discoveries and nuances in the environmental and ecological discourse (Wildcat, D., 2009). As a result, Indigenous peoples have been left out from these conversations

Examining Young Students’ Problem Scoping in Engineering Design

Problem scoping—determining the nature and boundaries of a problem—is an essential aspect of the engineering design process. Some studies from engineering education suggest that beginning students tend to skip problem scoping or oversimplify a problem. However, the ways these studies often characterize students’ problem scoping often do not reflect the complexity found in experts’ designing and rely on the number of criteria a student mentions or the time spent problem scoping. In this paper, we argue for methodological approaches that take into account not just what students name as criteria, but also how they weigh, balance, and choose between criteria and reflect on these decisions during complex tasks. Furthermore, we discuss that these problem-scoping actions should not be considered in isolation, but also how they are connected to the pursuit of a design solution. Using data from an elementary school classroom, we show how these ways of characterizing problem-scoping can capture rich beginnings of students’ engineering

Virus-Host Co-evolution: Determining the Origin of Human Cytomegalovirus US27 and US28

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) are the largest family of cell surface proteins, found in organisms from yeast to humans. Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a widespread pathogen that is particularly skilled at evading immune detection and defense mechanisms, largely due to extensive co-evolution with its host’s immune system. One aspect of this co-evolution involves the acquisition of four virally encoded GPCR homologs: US27, US28, UL33 and UL78. In this research, phylogenetic analysis was used to investigate the origins of the US27 and US28 genes, which are adjacent in the viral genome. The results indicate that both US27 and US28 share the same common ancestor, human chemokine receptor CX3CR1, suggesting that a single human gene was captured and a viral gene duplication event occurred. While the evolutionary purpose of the gene duplication event remains unclear, experimental evidence indicates that each gene has evolved distinct, important functions during virus infection