Sensory Interventions for Older Adults Living with Dementia

This tool maps out existing literature on sensory interventions for people living with dementia. It allows users to select a sensory intervention that might be feasible in their context, produce outcomes that are relevant to them. It is based on a scoping review of the literature. Our scoping review identified what interventions exist to produce particular outcomes, in particular contexts. It did not address effectiveness. As such, this tool will help you identify what others have done in a particular context, and to produce particular outcomes. It will not tell you which options are most effective

Perceptions of Active Learning between Faculty and Undergraduates: Differing Views among Departments

There have been numerous calls recently to increase the use of active learning in university science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classrooms to more actively engage students and enhance student learning. However, few studies have investigated faculty and student perceptions regarding the effectiveness of active learning or the barriers to its implementation. Previous work surveying a single class in a single department has suggested that faculty and students have different perceptions of the effectiveness of active learning strategies and the barriers faculty face when implementing these teaching strategies. We expand on these previous findings by surveying a larger and more diverse sample of students and faculty in a college consisting of five departments. We find that students and faculty agree that active learning techniques are useful, effective, and should be implemented more widely, but disagree on the percentage of class time currently devoted to active learning. When we parsed the data by department, more nuanced perceptions became apparent. The perceived barriers to implementing teaching reform differed in importance by department and in some departments relatively few faculty had observed or used active learning. Our findings suggest that advocates of teaching reform must recognize that not all departments or institutions face the same barriers to implementing curricular changes

Roles matter: Graduate student perceptions of active learning in the STEM courses they take and those they teach

Despite many calls to reform undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education to incorporate active learning into classes, there has been little attention paid to graduate level classrooms or courses taught by graduate students. Here, we set out to understand if and how STEM graduate students’ perceptions of active learning change in the classes they take versus those they teach. We found that graduate students had taken relatively few graduate level classes using active learning and they felt that more time should be devoted to active learning in the courses they were taking. Teaching assistants felt that they were devoting the right amount of class time to active learning in the classes they taught. Graduate students also felt that they were using teaching methods in the classes they taught that were different from those they thought should be used when teaching undergraduates and were different from how they preferred to learn when taking classes

The persistence and evolutionary consequences of vestigial behaviours

N.W.B. and J.G.R. were supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/T0006191/1).Behavioural traits are often noted to persist after relaxation or removal of associated selection pressure, whereas it has been observed that morphological traits under similar conditions appear to decay more rapidly. Despite this, persistent non-adaptive, ‘vestigial’ behavioural variation has received little research scrutiny. Here we review published examples of vestigial behavioural traits, highlighting their surprising prevalence, and argue that their further study can reveal insights about the widely debated role of behaviour in evolution. Some vestigial behaviours incur fitness costs, so may act as a drag on adaptive evolution when that adaptation occurs via trait loss or reversal. In other cases, vestigial behaviours can contribute to future evolutionary trajectories, for example by preserving genetic and phenotypic variation which is later co-opted by selection during adaptive evolution or diversification, or through re-emergence after ancestral selection pressures are restored. We explore why vestigial behaviours appear prone to persistence. Behavioural lag may be a general phenomenon arising from relatively high levels of non-genetic variation in behavioural expression, and pleiotropic constraint. Long-term persistence of non-adaptive behavioural traits could also result when their expression is associated with morphological features which might be more rapidly lost or reduced. We propose that vestigial behaviours could provide a substrate for co-option by novel selective forces, and advocate further study of the fate of behavioural traits following relaxed and reversed selection. Vestigial behaviours have been relatively well studied in the context of antipredator behaviours, but they are far from restricted to this ecological context, and so deserve broader consideration. They also have practical importance, with mixed evidence, for example, as to whether predator/parasite-avoidance behaviours are rapidly lost in wildlife refuges and captivity. We identify important areas for future research to help determine whether vestigial behaviours essentially represent a form of evolutionary lag, or whether they have more meaningful evolutionary consequences distinct from those of other vestigial and behavioural traits.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The Impact of a Vocational Counseling Based Substance Abuse Intensive Outpatient Program upon Work and Well-Being: A Pilot Study

Even though recovery from Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) involves changes among a number of life domains, services have traditionally focused on abstinence from substances. Cursory attention is placed on holistic treatment approaches for persons with SUDs, such as vocational counseling services to address employment related concerns. In response to this need, the purpose of this study was to explore the influence of an innovative treatment approach for individuals with SUDs. Specifically, an exploration of the impact of an innovative intervention that prepares consumers in SUD treatment for gainful employment for the purpose of improving work and well-being outcomes was conducted.  Participants were consumers who received services from a Substance Abuse Intensive Outpatient Program at East Carolina University and consented to participate (N = 69). Based on Life-Course theory and previous literature on the interplay of employment and the treatment of SUDs, the following research questions and hypotheses were generated. Research question 1 explored the impact of consumer demographic factors on SAIOP participation. Research question 2 explored the impact of SAIOP participation on work and well-being outcomes, and was tested through the following five hypotheses: (1) The longer the SAIOP participation, the more likely the participants were to be employed full- or part-time; (2 - 5) As participants' SAIOP participation increased, the severity of their employment issue, alcohol use, drug use, and psychiatric issue problem severity would decrease. For research question 1, results revealed one significant association, where consumers with no high school education had more participation hours in job readiness training than those with a high school degree or GED. For research question 2, the results revealed support for hypothesis 1, that longer hours of participation was associated with an increased likelihood of employment, and hypothesis 4, that longer hours of participation was associated with a decrease in drug use problem severity. The results did not show support for hypotheses 2, 3, or 5.   The results demonstrate the interplay between work and treatment for SUDs. Further, this study shows support re-conceptualizing SUDs treatment delivery to include a more life-course, holistic approach. Thus, this study has implications for rehabilitation counselors and administrators.  Ph.D