Processfolio: uniting Academic Literacies and Critical Emancipatory Action Research for practitioner-led inquiry into EAP writing assessment

This paper reports on the design and implementation of an alternative form of writing assessment on a UK English for Academic Purposes (EAP) presessional course. The assessment, termed processfolio, was a response to research inquiry into how writing assessment in a local context negated student agency and inculcated disempowering models of teaching and learning academic writing. The project merged an Academic Literacies approach to writing (Lea and Street, 1998) with a Critical Emancipatory Action Research (Carr and Kemmis, 1986) framework and a Critical Realist(Bhaskar, 1989) perspective. Data collected from the folios and interviews with students and teachers on their experiences of the processfolio found that a small scale intervention has potential for agency to be exercised within the highly constrained context of a UK EAP pre-sessional. New directions in research are proposed which can engage students and teachers to work for change in UK EAP assessment within their internal and external constraints

WriteSim TCExam - An open source text simulation environment for training novice researchers in scientific writing

BACKGROUND: The ability to write clearly and effectively is of central importance to the scientific enterprise. Encouraged by the success of simulation environments in other biomedical sciences, we developed WriteSim TCExam, an open-source, Web-based, textual simulation environment for teaching effective writing techniques to novice researchers. We shortlisted and modified an existing open source application - TCExam to serve as a textual simulation environment. After testing usability internally in our team, we conducted formal field usability studies with novice researchers. These were followed by formal surveys with researchers fitting the role of administrators and users (novice researchers) RESULTS: The development process was guided by feedback from usability tests within our research team. Online surveys and formal studies, involving members of the Research on Research group and selected novice researchers, show that the application is user-friendly. Additionally it has been used to train 25 novice researchers in scientific writing to date and has generated encouraging results. CONCLUSION: WriteSim TCExam is the first Web-based, open-source textual simulation environment designed to complement traditional scientific writing instruction. While initial reviews by students and educators have been positive, a formal study is needed to measure its benefits in comparison to standard instructional methods

Glutamate and Synaptic Plasticity Systems and Smoking Behavior: Results from a Genetic Association Study

Smoking behavior is a multifactorial phenotype with significant heritability. Identifying the specific loci that influence smoking behavior could provide important etiological insights and facilitate the development of treatments to further reduce smoking related mortality. Although several studies pointed to different candidate genes for smoking, there is still a need for replication especially in samples from different countries. In the present study, we investigated whether 21 positive signals for smoking behavior from these studies are replicated in a sample of 531 blood donors from the Brazilian population. The polymorphisms were chosen based on their representativeness of different candidate biologic systems, strength of previous evidence, location and allele frequencies. By genotyping with the Sequenom MassARRAY iPLEX platform and subsequent statistical analysis using Plink software, we show that two of the SNPs studied, in the SLC1A2 (rs1083658) and ACTN1 (rs2268983) genes, were associated with smoking behavior in our study population. These genes are involved in crucial aspects of nicotine dependence, glutamate system and synaptic plasticity, and as such, are biologically plausible candidates that merit further molecular analyses so as to clarify their potential role in smoking behavior