A Review of \u3cem\u3eListening to and Learning from Students\u3c/em\u3e

A review of the book Listening to and Learning from Students, edited by Brian Schultz (Information Age Publishing, 2011)

Is This What Democracy Looks Like? A Personal Retrospective

I sometimes feel I’m stuck in an Alice-in-Wonderland world. Other times I feel that someone has created this bewilderment on purpose and I start looking for the Red Queen. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan\u27s National Commission on Excellence in Education submitted a report titled, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Since the publication of that report, we have suffered continual attempts at reform, having now arrived at a time when bureaucrats and politicians far removed from local community schools can use standardized test results to establish criteria for disciplining schools, removing principals and teachers, and defining school curricula. Reforms based on claims that our public schools do a terrible job and are a cause of America\u27s weakened world position are not being driven by parents, local citizens, teachers, or local school boards

Schooling of and for Democracy

The author asserts that it’s time for us to “measure” schools by the values we believe in for public life in general, and to “measure” our students, then, by the long-term impact they will have on our larger society and the vitality of our democracy

Beyond dyadic coupling: The method of multivariate Surrogate Synchrony (mv-SUSY)

Measuring interpersonal synchrony is a promising approach to assess the complexity of social interaction, which however has been mostly limited to dyads. In this study, we introduce multivariate Surrogate Synchrony (mv-SUSY) to extend the current set of computational methods. Methods: mv-SUSY was applied to eight datasets consisting of 10 time series each, all with n = 9600 observations. Datasets 1 to 5 consist of simulated time series with the following characteristics: white noise (dataset 1), non-stationarity with linear time trends (dataset 2), autocorrelation (dataset 3), oscillation (dataset 4), and multivariate correlation (dataset 5). Datasets 6 to 8 comprise empirical multivariate movement data of two individuals (datasets 6 and 7) and between members of a group discussion (dataset 8.) Results: As hypothesized, findings of mv-SUSY revealed absence of synchrony in datasets 1 to 4 and presence of synchrony in dataset 5. In the empirical datasets, mv-SUSY indicated significant movement synchrony. These results were predominantly replicated by two well-established dyadic synchrony approaches, Surrogate Synchrony (SUSY) and Surrogate Concordance (SUCO). Conclusions: The study applied and evaluated a novel synchrony approach, mv-SUSY. We demonstrated the feasibility and validity of estimating multivariate nonverbal synchrony within and between individuals by mv-SUSY

Under-Savers Anonymous: Evidence on Self-Help Groups and Peer Pressure as a Savings Commitment Device

We test the effectiveness of self-help peer groups as a commitment device for precautionary savings, through two randomized field experiments among 2,687 Chilean micro-entrepreneurs. The first experiment finds that self-help peer groups are a powerful tool to increase savings (the number of deposits grows 3.7-fold and the average savings balance almost doubles). In contrast, a more classical measure, a substantially increased interest rate, has no effect for most participants. A second experiment tests an alternative delivery mechanism and shows that effects of similar size can be achieved by holding people accountable through feedback text messages, without meetings or peer pressure

Growth curves of common factors in psychotherapy: Multilevel growth modelling and outcome analysis.

OBJECTIVE A large body of literature discusses change mechanisms underlying psychotherapy with an emphasis on common factors. The present study examined how different comprehensive common factors change over the course of therapy and whether this change was associated with clinical outcome at discharge. METHOD Three hundred forty-eight adults (mean age = 32.1, SD = 10.6; 64% female) attended a standardized 14-week day-clinic psychotherapy program. They provided longitudinal data on common factors based on weekly assessments. Additionally, pre- and post-assessment questionnaires on clinical outcome were completed. Using multilevel modelling, we predicted common factors by time (week in therapy). Multiple linear regression models tested the association between changes in common factors and clinical outcome. RESULTS The common factor 'Therapeutic Alliance' was best fitted by linear growth models, whereas models for the common factors 'Coping', 'Cognitive Integration' and 'Affective Processing' indicated logarithmic changes over time. 'Coping', that is change in patients' ability to cope with their individual problems, was most closely linked with outcome. CONCLUSIONS The present study provides evidence for the changeability of common factors over the course of therapy as well as their specific contributions to psychotherapeutic progress

Audience synchronies in live concerts illustrate the embodiment of music experience

A study of 132 audience members of three classical public concerts (all three staged the same chamber music pieces by Ludwig van Beethoven, Brett Dean, and Johannes Brahms) had the goal of analyzing the physiological and motor responses of audiences. It was assumed that the music would induce synchronous physiology and movement in listeners (induction synchrony). In addition to hypothesizing that such synchronies would be present, we expected that they were linked to participants' aesthetic experiences, their affect and personality traits, which were assessed by questionnaires before and after the concerts. Clear evidence was found of physiological synchrony (heart rate, respiration rate, skin conductance response) as well as movement synchrony of the audiences, whereas breathing behavior was not synchronized. Thus the audiences of the three concerts resonated with the music, their music perception was embodied. There were links between the bodily synchrony and aesthetic experiences: synchrony, especially heart-rate synchrony, was higher when listeners felt moved emotionally and inspired by a piece, and were immersed in the music. Personality traits were also associated with the individual contributions to induction synchrony

Fear avoidance beliefs are associated with reduced lumbar spine flexion during object lifting in pain-free adults

There is a long-held belief that physical activities such as lifting with a flexed spine is generally harmful for the back and can cause low back pain (LBP), potentially reinforcing fear avoidance beliefs underlying pain-related fear. In chronic LBP patients, pain-related fear has been shown to be associated with reduced lumbar range of motion during lifting, suggesting a protective response to pain. However, despite short term beneficial effects for tissue health, recent evidence suggests that maintaining a protective trunk movement strategy may also pose a risk for (persistent) LBP due to possible pro-nociceptive consequences of altered spinal motion, potentially leading to increased loading on lumbar tissues. Yet, it is unknown if similar protective movement strategies already exist in pain-free individuals which would yield potential insights into the role of fear avoidance beliefs in motor behavior in the absence of pain. Therefore, the aim of this study is to test whether fear avoidance beliefs influence spinal motion during lifting in a healthy cohort of pain-free adults without a history of chronic pain. The study subjects (N=57) filled out several pain-related fear questionnaires and were asked to perform a lifting task (5kg-box). High-resolution spinal kinematics were assessed using an optical motion capturing system. Time-sensitive analyses were performed based on statistical parametric mapping. The results demonstrated time-specific and negative relationships between self-report measures of pain-related fear and lumbar spine flexion angles during lifting, indicating potential unfavorable interactions between psychological factors and spinal motion during lifting in pain-free subjects

Earthquake Early Warning ShakeAlert System: Testing and Certification Platform

Earthquake early warning systems provide warnings to end users of incoming moderate to strong ground shaking from earthquakes. An earthquake early warning system, ShakeAlert, is providing alerts to beta end users in the western United States, specifically California, Oregon, and Washington. An essential aspect of the earthquake early warning system is the development of a framework to test modifications to code to ensure functionality and assess performance. In 2016, a Testing and Certification Platform (TCP) was included in the development of the Production Prototype version of ShakeAlert. The purpose of the TCP is to evaluate the robustness of candidate code that is proposed for deployment on ShakeAlert Production Prototype servers. TCP consists of two main components: a real‐time in situ test that replicates the real‐time production system and an offline playback system to replay test suites. The real‐time tests of system performance assess code optimization and stability. The offline tests comprise a stress test of candidate code to assess if the code is production ready. The test suite includes over 120 events including local, regional, and teleseismic historic earthquakes, recentering and calibration events, and other anomalous and potentially problematic signals. Two assessments of alert performance are conducted. First, point‐source assessments are undertaken to compare magnitude, epicentral location, and origin time with the Advanced National Seismic System Comprehensive Catalog, as well as to evaluate alert latency. Second, we describe assessment of the quality of ground‐motion predictions at end‐user sites by comparing predicted shaking intensities to ShakeMaps for historic events and implement a threshold‐based approach that assesses how often end users initiate the appropriate action, based on their ground‐shaking threshold. TCP has been developed to be a convenient streamlined procedure for objectively testing algorithms, and it has been designed with flexibility to accommodate significant changes in development of new or modified system code. It is expected that the TCP will continue to evolve along with the ShakeAlert system, and the framework we describe here provides one example of how earthquake early warning systems can be evaluated