KIPP Middle Schools: Impacts on Achievement and Other Outcomes

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is a rapidly expanding network of public charter schools whose mission is to improve the education of low-income children. As of the 2012 -- 2013 school year, 125 KIPP schools are in operation in 20 different states and the District of Columbia (DC). Ultimately, KIPP's goal is to prepare students to enroll and succeed in college.Prior research has suggested that KIPP schools have positive impacts on student achievement, but most of the studies have included only a few KIPP schools or have had methodological limitations. This is the second report of a national evaluation of KIPP middle schools being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research. The evaluation uses experimental and quasi-experimental methods to produce rigorous and comprehensive evidence on the effects of KIPP middle schools across the country.The study's first report, released in 2010, described strong positive achievement impacts in math and reading for the 22 KIPP middle schools for which data were available at the time. For this phase of the study, we nearly doubled the size of the sample, to 43 KIPP middle schools, including all KIPP middle schools that were open at the start of the study in 2010 for which we were able to acquire relevant data from local districts or states. This report estimates achievement impacts for these 43 KIPP middle schools, and includes science and social studies in addition to math and reading. This report also examines additional student outcomes beyond state test scores, including student performance on a nationally norm-referenced test and survey-based measures of student attitudes and behavior

Snapshot of KIPP Leadership Practices through 2010 -- 2011

As part of the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) grant, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Foundation commissioned Mathematica to document leadership practices at KIPP schools. This issue brief summarizes notable findings from the study, which focused on identifying leadership practices across diverse areas: leadership structure and transitions, and the selection, development, and evaluation of leaders. Among other notable findings, KIPP combines a tiered sequence of leadership roles at the local level with national staff development programs to generate a pipeline of school leaders. The study also found that KIPP's Leadership Competency Model defines the skills school leaders need and guides development and evaluation

De Novo Mutations in SIK1 Cause a Spectrum of Developmental Epilepsies

Developmental epilepsies are age-dependent seizure disorders for which genetic causes have been increasingly identified. Here we report six unrelated individuals with mutations in salt-inducible kinase 1 (SIK1) in a series of 101 persons with early myoclonic encephalopathy, Ohtahara syndrome, and infantile spasms. Individuals with SIK1 mutations had short survival in cases with neonatal epilepsy onset, and an autism plus developmental syndrome after infantile spasms in others. All six mutations occurred outside the kinase domain of SIK1 and each of the mutants displayed autophosphorylation and kinase activity toward HDAC5. Three mutations generated truncated forms of SIK1 that were resistant to degradation and also showed changes in sub-cellular localization compared to wild-type SIK1. We also report the human neuropathologic examination of SIK1-related developmental epilepsy, with normal neuronal morphology and lamination but abnormal SIK1 protein cellular localization. Therefore, these results expand the genetic etiologies of developmental epilepsies by demonstrating SIK1 mutations as a cause of severe developmental epilepsy

Developing Metadata Categories as a Strategy to Mobilize Computable Biomedical Knowledge

A work by a group of volunteer members drawn from the Mobilizing Computable Biomedical Knowledge community's Standards Workgroup. See mobilizecbk.org for more information about this community and workgroup.Computable biomedical knowledge artifacts (CBKs) are digital objects or entities representing biomedical knowledge as machine-independent data structures that can be parsed and processed by different information systems. The breadth of content represented in CBKs spans all biomedical knowledge related to human health and so it includes knowledge about molecules, cells, organs, individual people, human populations, and the environment. CBKs vary in their scope, purpose, and audience. Some CBKs support biomedical research. Other CBKs help improve health outcomes by enabling clinical decision support, health education, health promotion, and population health analytics. In some instances, CBKs have multiple uses that span research, education, clinical care, or population health. As the number of CBKs grows large, producers must describe them with structured, searchable metadata so that consumers can find, deploy, and use them properly. This report delineates categories of metadata for describing CBKs sufficiently to enable CBKs to be mobilized for various purposes.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155655/1/MCBK.Metadata.Paper.June2020.f.pdfDescription of MCBK.Metadata.Paper.June2020.f.pdf : MCBK 2020 Virtual Meeting version of Standards Workgroup's Working Paper on CBK Metadat

Stromal Down-Regulation of Macrophage CD4/CCR5 Expression and NF-κB Activation Mediates HIV-1 Non-Permissiveness in Intestinal Macrophages

Tissue macrophages are derived exclusively from blood monocytes, which as monocyte-derived macrophages support HIV-1 replication. However, among human tissue macrophages only intestinal macrophages are non-permissive to HIV-1, suggesting that the unique microenvironment in human intestinal mucosa renders lamina propria macrophages non-permissive to HIV-1. We investigated this hypothesis using blood monocytes and intestinal extracellular matrix (stroma)-conditioned media (S-CM) to model the exposure of newly recruited monocytes and resident macrophages to lamina propria stroma, where the cells take up residence in the intestinal mucosa. Exposure of monocytes to S-CM blocked up-regulation of CD4 and CCR5 expression during monocyte differentiation into macrophages and inhibited productive HIV-1 infection in differentiated macrophages. Importantly, exposure of monocyte-derived macrophages simultaneously to S-CM and HIV-1 also inhibited viral replication, and sorted CD4+ intestinal macrophages, a proportion of which expressed CCR5+, did not support HIV-1 replication, indicating that the non-permissiveness to HIV-1 was not due to reduced receptor expression alone. Consistent with this conclusion, S-CM also potently inhibited replication of HIV-1 pseudotyped with vesicular stomatitis virus glycoprotein, which provides CD4/CCR5-independent entry. Neutralization of TGF-β in S-CM and recombinant TGF-β studies showed that stromal TGF-β inhibited macrophage nuclear translocation of NF-κB and HIV-1 replication. Thus, the profound inability of intestinal macrophages to support productive HIV-1 infection is likely the consequence of microenvironmental down-regulation of macrophage HIV-1 receptor/coreceptor expression and NF-κB activation

Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Adult Study Protocol: Rationale, Objectives, and Design

IMPORTANCE: SARS-CoV-2 infection can result in ongoing, relapsing, or new symptoms or other health effects after the acute phase of infection; termed post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC), or long COVID. The characteristics, prevalence, trajectory and mechanisms of PASC are ill-defined. The objectives of the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Multi-site Observational Study of PASC in Adults (RECOVER-Adult) are to: (1) characterize PASC prevalence; (2) characterize the symptoms, organ dysfunction, natural history, and distinct phenotypes of PASC; (3) identify demographic, social and clinical risk factors for PASC onset and recovery; and (4) define the biological mechanisms underlying PASC pathogenesis. METHODS: RECOVER-Adult is a combined prospective/retrospective cohort currently planned to enroll 14,880 adults aged ≥18 years. Eligible participants either must meet WHO criteria for suspected, probable, or confirmed infection; or must have evidence of no prior infection. Recruitment occurs at 86 sites in 33 U.S. states, Washington, DC and Puerto Rico, via facility- and community-based outreach. Participants complete quarterly questionnaires about symptoms, social determinants, vaccination status, and interim SARS-CoV-2 infections. In addition, participants contribute biospecimens and undergo physical and laboratory examinations at approximately 0, 90 and 180 days from infection or negative test date, and yearly thereafter. Some participants undergo additional testing based on specific criteria or random sampling. Patient representatives provide input on all study processes. The primary study outcome is onset of PASC, measured by signs and symptoms. A paradigm for identifying PASC cases will be defined and updated using supervised and unsupervised learning approaches with cross-validation. Logistic regression and proportional hazards regression will be conducted to investigate associations between risk factors, onset, and resolution of PASC symptoms. DISCUSSION: RECOVER-Adult is the first national, prospective, longitudinal cohort of PASC among US adults. Results of this study are intended to inform public health, spur clinical trials, and expand treatment options

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Environmental Scan of Childhood Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes in New Mexico Native American Communities

To address the alarming rates of childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes among American Indian children and youth, the NB3 Foundation, in conjunction with Bluestone Strategy Group, has conducted an environmental scan of New Mexico's pueblos, tribes, and off-reservation Native communities in an effort to obtain a comprehensive picture of the obesity and diabetes epidemic in New Mexico.The following report contains the findings of the scan, including rates of childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes; barriers and risk factors; trends in at-risk behaviors; impact of policy at the federal, state, and tribal levels; existing and opportunities for collaborations; pertinent academic research and community-specific innovations and promising practices. This report also contains actionable recommendations, which through collaboration can have a positive impact on the prevalence of obesity and diabetes facing Native communities within New Mexico