The Voices of Graduates: Informing Faculty Practices to Establish Best Practices for Readying NCLEX-RN Applicants

Changes in the National Council of State Boards of Nursing along with other factors influence graduates’ successful completion of a nursing program and the licensing examination. Literature is scarce in the area of examining stu-dent perceptions of preparing for and taking the NCLEX-RN examination. Our study sought to fill this gap in knowledge by conducting a focus group and interviews with individuals who passed the NCLEX-RN on their first at-tempt and those who did not. This was a descriptive qualitative study which used semi-structured interviews and a focus group to examine graduates’ perceptions related to preparing for and taking the NCLEX-RN. Four themes emerged from the data: messages from faculty, preparation strategies, exam readiness, and the disconnection between pretest and intra-test experiences. Findings point towards the importance of implementing a variety of strate-gies to ensure that graduates successfully pass the NCLEX-RN

Researcher as witness : effectiveness and pedagogical and curricular decision making in race-centered professional learning

Urban School districts search for professional learning endeavors that will assist staff as they adapt to change at a rapid pace and build capacity to become in tune to the needs of the students and families. The facilitator of race-centered professional learning in urban school districts has to be pedagogically, mentally, socially and emotionally prepared for what the learner brings into the space. This research study used semi-structured interviews, observations and a researcher reflective journal to explore the definitions of effectiveness and the pedagogical and curricular decision making of ten participants who design and deliver race-centered professional learning in urban school districts across the U.S. This study employed Critical Race Theory to frame the study and analyze participant definitions of effectiveness and pedagogical and curricular decision making for race-centered professional learning. Black Feminist Thought is used to extend critical race theory centering analysis on the perspective of the researcher as participant observer. While experience of participants varied, each participant was consistent in defining effectiveness as negotiating the emotional nature of race for learners and facilitators and understanding application of learning as a long term process. Findings showed participants made pedagogical decisions to account for the complex ways race operates in a learning endeavor to establish an affirming, affective learning environment. Participants made curricular decisions drawing from counter storytelling, they chose to study or adopt existing race curricular models, and grounded learning opportunities in sociohistorical content knowledgeCurriculum and Instructio

Reading Beyond School: Literacies in a Neighbourhood Library

This ethnographic study describes family and community literacy practices in a neighbourhood public library. As an intercultural research team, we observed patterns of library use and held extended conversations with librarians and neighbourhood parents about literacy activities in the library. The neighbourhood public library was a hub of contiguous communities of practice. It has emerged as a setting with shifting boundaries between formal and informal literacies and between traditional print media and multimodal literacies. The study reveals the dynamic nature of literacy practices in a setting that supported both formal and informal literacies. Keywords: community literacy, multimodal literacies, neighbourhood libraries Les auteures présentent une étude ethnographique portant sur les pratiques de littératie familiales et communautaires mises en uvre dans une bibliothèque publique de quartier. Formant une équipe de recherche interculturelle, les auteures ont observé les habitudes quant à lutilisation de la bibliothèque et conversé longuement avec les bibliothécaires et les parents du quartier au sujet des activités de la bibliothèque en matière de littératie. La bibliothèque forme un réseau de communautés de pratiques contiguës. Elle apparaît comme un lieu présentant des frontières mobiles entre les littératies formelles et informelles et entre les médias imprimés traditionnels et les littératies multimodales. Létude révèle la nature dynamique des pratiques en matière de littératie dans un contexte qui favorise les littératies formelles et informelles. Mots clés: littératie communautaire, littératies multimodales, bibliothèques de quartier

The C/C Genotype of the C957T Polymorphism of the Dopamine D2 Receptor is Associated with Schizophrenia

The T allele of the human dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2) gene C957T polymorphism is associated with reduced mRNA translation and stability. This results in decreased dopamine induced DRD2 upregulation and decreased in-vivo D2 dopamine binding. Conversely, the C allele of the C957T polymorphism is not associated with such changes in mRNA leading to increased DRD2 expression. PET and post-mortem binding studies show that schizophrenia is often associated with increased DRD2 availability. We report that on the basis of comparing the frequencies of the C/C and T/T genotypes of 153 patients with schizophrenia and 148 controls that schizophrenia is associated with the C/C genotype. The C957T shows a population attributable risk for schizophrenia of 24% and an attributable risk in those with schizophrenia of 42%. Increased expression of D2 receptors associated with the C allele is likely to be important in the underlying pathophysiology of at least some forms of schizophrenia. Enhanced understanding of schizophrenia afforded by this finding may lead to advances in treatment and prevention

Defining Sickle Cell Disease Mortality Using a Population-Based Surveillance System, 2004 through 2008

Population-based surveillance data from California and Georgia for years 2004 through 2008 were linked to state death record files to determine the all-cause death rate among 12,143 patients identified with sickle cell disease (SCD)

Functional screening of willow alleles in Arabidopsis combined with QTL mapping in willow (Salix) identifies SxMAX4 as a coppicing response gene.

Willows (Salix spp.) are important biomass crops due to their ability to grow rapidly with low fertilizer inputs and ease of cultivation in short-rotation coppice cycles. They are relatively undomesticated and highly diverse, but functional testing to identify useful allelic variation is time-consuming in trees and transformation is not yet possible in willow. Arabidopsis is heralded as a model plant from which knowledge can be transferred to advance the improvement of less tractable species. Here, knowledge and methodologies from Arabidopsis were successfully used to identify a gene influencing stem number in coppiced willows, a complex trait of key biological and industrial relevance. The strigolactone-related More AXillary growth (MAX) genes were considered candidates due to their role in shoot branching. We previously demonstrated that willow and Arabidopsis show similar response to strigolactone and that transformation rescue of Arabidopsis max mutants with willow genes could be used to detect allelic differences. Here, this approach was used to screen 45 SxMAX1, SxMAX2, SxMAX3 and SxMAX4 alleles cloned from 15 parents of 11 mapping populations varying in shoot-branching traits. Single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) frequencies were locus dependent, ranging from 29.2 to 74.3 polymorphic sites per kb. SxMAX alleles were 98%-99% conserved at the amino acid level, but different protein products varying in their ability to rescue Arabidopsis max mutants were identified. One poor rescuing allele, SxMAX4D, segregated in a willow mapping population where its presence was associated with increased shoot resprouting after coppicing and colocated with a QTL for this trait

The Relationship Between Alcohol-Related Content on Social Media and Alcohol Outcomes in Young Adults: A Scoping Review Protocol

This scoping review will examine the association between alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems with alcohol-related social media engagement in young adults

The Tagliamento River: A model ecosystem of European importance

In NE Italy is a remarkable floodplain river that retains the dynamic nature and morphological complexity that must have characterized most Alpine rivers in the pristine stage. This river system, the Fiume Tagliamento, constitutes an invaluable resource not only as a reference site for the Alps, but as a model ecosystem for large European rivers. The Tagliamento has a number of attributes that have not been given due consideration in river ecology: (i) an immense corridor of more than 150 km2 that connects the land and the sea and two biomes, the Alps and the Mediterranean; (ii) unconstrained floodplain segments characterised by a dynamic mosaic of aquatic/terrestrial habitats; and (iii) a large number of vegetated islands (ca. 700). We believe it is critical to understand the functional roles of these endangered attributes in order to effectively engage in river conservation and management programmes. The Tagliamento River in Italy offers the rare opportunity to investigate natural processes at a scale that can be studied almost nowhere else in Europ

Gesture Facilitates the Syntactic Analysis of Speech

Recent research suggests that the brain routinely binds together information from gesture and speech. However, most of this research focused on the integration of representational gestures with the semantic content of speech. Much less is known about how other aspects of gesture, such as emphasis, influence the interpretation of the syntactic relations in a spoken message. Here, we investigated whether beat gestures alter which syntactic structure is assigned to ambiguous spoken German sentences. The P600 component of the Event Related Brain Potential indicated that the more complex syntactic structure is easier to process when the speaker emphasizes the subject of a sentence with a beat. Thus, a simple flick of the hand can change our interpretation of who has been doing what to whom in a spoken sentence. We conclude that gestures and speech are integrated systems. Unlike previous studies, which have shown that the brain effortlessly integrates semantic information from gesture and speech, our study is the first to demonstrate that this integration also occurs for syntactic information. Moreover, the effect appears to be gesture-specific and was not found for other stimuli that draw attention to certain parts of speech, including prosodic emphasis, or a moving visual stimulus with the same trajectory as the gesture. This suggests that only visual emphasis produced with a communicative intention in mind (that is, beat gestures) influences language comprehension, but not a simple visual movement lacking such an intention