English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in UK higher education: examining the impact of EAP’s position within the academy on service delivery, identity and quality.

This paper will outline a forthcoming PhD project exploring the provision of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) services in UK higher education institutions. Neoliberalism in UK universities has contributed to the extent and importance of EAP, but has also led to many challenges for staff and service delivery, including where EAP is located in HE structures. The study will examine EAP’s position, focusing on questions relating to its role, how EAP practitioners operate, the impact of the position of EAP, and improvement strategies. Three EAP units in different structural positions in higher education will be examined and data will be considered in the light of Bourdieu’s theories of ‘field’, ‘habitus’, ‘capital’ and 'symbolic violence'. It is hoped that the study will shed light on why EAP services are positioned as they are, how this impacts on quality, and how they can reposition to provide more benefit to the academy

An investigation into the impact of dialogic teaching and Socratic questioning on the development of children’s understanding of complex historical concepts

Teachers use questioning to enhance students’ learning in the subject of history for all ages. Effective teachers plan their questioning and develop precocity in dealing with students’ responses. Students demonstrate interest in dialogue and teachers report high levels of participation in classroom discussions. This pilot study investigates teacher attitudes towards questioning in general and towards Socratic questioning. Socratic questioning is a systematic and targeted approach that seeks to promote greater understanding of subject matter at a group and an individual level. Teachers report their views of a given set of dialogic approaches, they expressed strong preferences for teacher talk and extended questioning. The full study will take this forward and will develop an example of Socratic questioning to use in target schools

Contextualised Admission: Does Province-Based Quota Policy Improve Geographical HE Equity in China?

HE geographical equity is a significant societal problem in China. As the primary admission policy, Province-based Quota Policy has been implemented to ameliorate geographical disparity in HE admission. However, the contribution of this improvement is controversial. In order to evaluate this melioration, this study conducted a secondary data analysis of the latest admissions of all regular Higher Education Institutions (hereafter, HEIs) and HEIs in the World Double-First project in China through three indexes. The study found that provincial disparities in HE admission exist. Both regular HEIs and prestigious HEIs show more preferences to students from well-developed provinces, while less places in HE are prepared for those from inland, remote and under-developed provinces. The implications of this study for future policy making and implementation should be more balanced quota distributions and more educational investment in disadvantaged areas

Task-based Language Teaching in Thai Context: a Call for Robust Evidence.

The task-based language teaching (TBLT) is a learner-cantered pedagogical approach which promotes learners’ engagement in communicative tasks. TBLT has been implemented widely including in Thailand where English is used as a foreign language. However, the evidence of its effectiveness remains equivocal. This review was conducted to examine and synthesize the evidence of TBLT benefits in EFL contexts. However, it was found that most TBLT research in EFL contexts aiming to draw the effects of TBLT intervention tends to be predominated by low rigorous designs. For Thailand in particular, most studies report students’ positive perceptions about the TBLT interventions while the claims to improve language competences are vaguely proved due to the low evidence-based rigor. From such review-based findings, the paper proposes a call for design-based research to evaluate the impact of TBLT on language competences and learning skills. Adopting rigorous designs which provide counterfactuals would produce a more secure evidence for policy and practices of the TBLT implementation in the Thai EFL context

Managing violent behaviours in primary schools – A multi-agency risk assessment model

Awareness of childhood violence is growing globally. It is estimated that almost a quarter of teachers are assaulted by their pupils each week in the UK, with many of these children identified as having social, emotional, and mental health needs. These pupils are increasingly likely to be excluded from school. When compared with violence and aggression from adults, there is a poor level of awareness and multi-agency co-ordination when risk-assessing violence and aggression from children. In this article, I posit that risk models applied to adult violence and aggression, particularly multi-agency risk assessment conferences (MARAC), should be applied to childhood presentations of violence and aggression, thus expanding knowledge and providing additional resources for early identification and support. Through a child-centred MARAC, there is opportunity for schools to remove responsibility from the teachers, placing it with multi-agency units. Units which can collate information on families, and provision, directed services to holistically support families, and consequently schools

Using Music in Primary Schools to Improve Learning Outcomes

My paper presents an argument that the greater involvement of music in primary schools could essentially be of great benefit to young children, both in their behavioural skills and potentially contribute to an initiative to improve academic skills generally. Moreover, there has been consistent evidence established by research that music included in schools, could contribute to a greater sense of well-being amongst pupils which is linked to a possible improvement in academic performance. My methodological approach has been an exploration of the context of music in primary schools evaluating results published in this field of study. My current research shows that there are questions to be raised regarding the lack of music in primary schools and that there is evidence that substantiates that there is a connection between children engaging with music and pupil achievement such as numeracy and literacy skills within a pedagogical context. This has implications for establishing educational policy for teaching music within primary schools

First radial velocity results from the MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA)

The MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA) is a dedicated observatory of four 0.7m robotic telescopes fiber-fed to a KiwiSpec spectrograph. The MINERVA mission is to discover super-Earths in the habitable zones of nearby stars. This can be accomplished with MINERVA's unique combination of high precision and high cadence over long time periods. In this work, we detail changes to the MINERVA facility that have occurred since our previous paper. We then describe MINERVA's robotic control software, the process by which we perform 1D spectral extraction, and our forward modeling Doppler pipeline. In the process of improving our forward modeling procedure, we found that our spectrograph's intrinsic instrumental profile is stable for at least nine months. Because of that, we characterized our instrumental profile with a time-independent, cubic spline function based on the profile in the cross dispersion direction, with which we achieved a radial velocity precision similar to using a conventional "sum-of-Gaussians" instrumental profile: 1.8 m s$^{-1}$ over 1.5 months on the RV standard star HD 122064. Therefore, we conclude that the instrumental profile need not be perfectly accurate as long as it is stable. In addition, we observed 51 Peg and our results are consistent with the literature, confirming our spectrograph and Doppler pipeline are producing accurate and precise radial velocities.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, submitted to PASP, Peer-Reviewed and Accepte

Localization of a Guanylyl Cyclase to Chemosensory Cilia Requires the Novel Ciliary MYND Domain Protein DAF-25

In harsh conditions, Caenorhabditis elegans arrests development to enter a non-aging, resistant diapause state called the dauer larva. Olfactory sensation modulates the TGF-β and insulin signaling pathways to control this developmental decision. Four mutant alleles of daf-25 (abnormal DAuer Formation) were isolated from screens for mutants exhibiting constitutive dauer formation and found to be defective in olfaction. The daf-25 dauer phenotype is suppressed by daf-10/IFT122 mutations (which disrupt ciliogenesis), but not by daf-6/PTCHD3 mutations (which prevent environmental exposure of sensory cilia), implying that DAF-25 functions in the cilia themselves. daf-25 encodes the C. elegans ortholog of mammalian Ankmy2, a MYND domain protein of unknown function. Disruption of DAF-25, which localizes to sensory cilia, produces no apparent cilia structure anomalies, as determined by light and electron microscopy. Hinting at its potential function, the dauer phenotype, epistatic order, and expression profile of daf-25 are similar to daf-11, which encodes a cilium-localized guanylyl cyclase. Indeed, we demonstrate that DAF-25 is required for proper DAF-11 ciliary localization. Furthermore, the functional interaction is evolutionarily conserved, as mouse Ankmy2 interacts with guanylyl cyclase GC1 from ciliary photoreceptors. The interaction may be specific because daf-25 mutants have normally-localized OSM-9/TRPV4, TAX-4/CNGA1, CHE-2/IFT80, CHE-11/IFT140, CHE-13/IFT57, BBS-8, OSM-5/IFT88, and XBX-1/D2LIC in the cilia. Intraflagellar transport (IFT) (required to build cilia) is not defective in daf-25 mutants, although the ciliary localization of DAF-25 itself is influenced in che-11 mutants, which are defective in retrograde IFT. In summary, we have discovered a novel ciliary protein that plays an important role in cGMP signaling by localizing a guanylyl cyclase to the sensory organelle

The state of the Martian climate

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes