Medicaid's Future: What Might ACA Repeal Mean?

Issue: Republicans in Congress are expected to repeal portions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) using a fast-track process known as budget reconciliation.Goals: This issue brief examines how repeal legislation could affect Medicaid, the nation's health care safety net, which insured 70 million people in 2016.Findings and Conclusions: Partial-repeal legislation that passed Congress but was vetoed by President Obama in 2016 offers some insight but new legislation could go further. It could repeal the ACA's Medicaid eligibility expansions for adults and children but also roll back other provisions, such as simplified enrollment and improvements in long-term services and supports for beneficiaries with disabilities. Additionally, the Trump Administration could expand use of demonstration authority to introduce deeper structural changes into Medicaid, such as eligibility restrictions tied to work, required premium contributions and lock-out for nonpayment, annual enrollment periods, and coverage limits and exclusions. Together, these changes would have far-reaching implications for Medicaid's continued role as the nation's safety-net insurer

Study of School Gates Employment Support Initiative (Research Report No 747)

A report of research carried out by the Institute for Employment Studies on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions This report presents qualitative findings from the study of the School Gates Employment Initiative. This mostly involved qualitative research in 13 of the 25 pilot areas which included interviews with school heads, Regional Development Agency (RDA) leads, Jobcentre Plus, local authorities (LAs) and devolved administrations, parents and parent support staff in schools. It also involved two semi-structured group discussions with local partners at two practitioner events in November 2010, as well as a review of evidence presented in the Management Information (MI) and the quarterly reports from the pilot areas. The findings of this report strongly support the notion that schools, Jobcentre Plus and LA employment advisers can play a potentially important role in moving parents from low incomes towards work. School Gates’ reach to potential second earners and parents on low incomes, many of whom are not on benefits and are new customers to Jobcentre Plus, has been a key strength of the pilot. Many parents engaged in the pilot were also lone parents, some of whom were also not in receipt of benefits. In this way, many school sites have provided a critical mass of families within these target groups for Jobcentre Plus and other LA employment advisers to engage with

Learning from life: Exploring the potential of live projects in higher education

This paper introduces the educational issues surrounding live project work, exploring the potential benefits and drawbacks of these teaching projects. It draws on the findings of a University of the West of England Teaching and Learning Grant funded project to explore the potential for live project work across disciplines in Higher Education. The study drew on two case studies – one architecture design project and one information systems consultancy project – to develop a wider understanding of the educational outcomes of live projects across disciplines.In the case studies presented, students developed a range of attitudes and skills that can be seen to enrich, critique and develop those found in traditional academic work; in particular skills in communication, negotiation and professionalism which are hard to simulate within the academy. Students were actively engaged in an integrative learning process, which should result in ‘deep’ learning. In addition, students’ enthusiasm was often higher than in their university-based projects, which has the potential to impact on the quality of their learning. The projects are conceptualised as a form of transformative pedagogy, based around experiential learning, which is located between two worlds, the university and the community. It is this in-between location that affords live projects particularly powerful learning opportunities across a range of disciplines

Why is That Girl Scared?: Infants' Understanding of Older Children's Emotions

In the wake of growing interest in the development of very young children's intention, desire, and emotion understanding, the issue of children's competencies in their peer interactions has been largely ignored. Social referencing studies have suggested that by 12 months of age infants have the ability to use emotion-laden information provided by an adult to modify their behavior toward a strange or novel object. In this study, a social referencing paradigm was employed to examine whether 12- , 18-, and 24-month-old children can use an older child's positive and negative expressions towards one toy (but not toward a distracter toy) to direct their own behavior toward or away from that toy. Results indicated that when presented with an older child's affect towards a novel toy 12-month-old children performed randomly while 18-month-old children reduced their touch to the target toy in the negative condition only. Twenty-four-month-old children increased their touch to both toys regardless of the direction of the affect that they viewed. The results suggest that the developmental course of understanding and utilizing older children's emotions differs substantially from the ability to glean and use emotion information provided by adults

Neighborhood Context, Poverty, and Urban Children’s Outdoor Play

Although research consistently demonstrates a link between neighborhood conditions and physical activity for adults and adolescents, less is known about residential context and young children’s physical activity. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N=2,210), we explore whether outdoor play and television watching are associated with children’s body mass indexes (BMIs) at age five; and whether subjective and objective neighborhood measures are associated with children’s outdoor play and television watching. Hours of outdoor play and television viewing are associated with BMI. Higher maternal perceptions of neighborhood collective efficacy are associated with more hours of outdoor play, fewer hours of television viewing, and more trips to a park or playground. In addition, we find that neighborhood physical disorder is associated with more outdoor play and more television watching. Finally, we find that children living in public housing have one-third more outdoor play time than other children.residential context, physical activity, young children, body mass indexes, Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, television viewing

Church unity in the sacrament of the eucharist /

Master's thesis in Theology. School of Mission and Theology, December 201

A case study of music-making in a Ghanaian village: applications for elementary music teaching and learning

This thesis explores music teaching and learning in Ghana, West Africa from a music education standpoint. Fieldwork was conducted at the Dagbe Cultural Institute, in Kopeyia, Ghana, West Africa to investigate methods of teaching and learning, the function of music within the culture, and formulate implementation strategies for elementary classrooms in the United States. Main themes on teaching and learning that emerged within the center focused on the use of strategies like drum syllables and analogy with Western students during classes. The use of learning in context through cultural outings also provided teaching opportunities for students. The overall function of music as a daily activity for all villagers provided students at the center with many opportunities for learning. Implementation of learning processes taken from the center blend well with current teaching and learning practices in the United States, allowing many strategies to be unmodified and used in classrooms. Specific differences between the two teaching environments include large teacher to student ratio, teacher-oriented environment, teaching students as children in the culture are taught, and modeling performance before learning. Each of these provided unique learning experiences for students at the center. Through these observations, connections to teaching and learning in the United States were made to provide teachers with resources for implementing Ghanaian drumming and dancing into elementary school music curriculums to provide students with a broader world view of music and culture

Electronic Diary Assessment of the Temporal Association Between Angry Affect and Intimate Partner Violence

The proposed project examined the temporal association between three forms of angry affect and dating violence among a sample of college students using electronic daily diary assessment methodology. It was hypothesized that the odds of dating violence would be greater on days of angry affect relative to days of no angry affect. It was also hypothesized that relevant distal variables would moderate this association, although examination of the direction of such effects was exploratory in nature. Participants were 184 men and women attending a large university in Tennessee. Participants completed a baseline survey packet assessing distal variables. They were also trained to answer daily surveys indicating whether angry affect (irritable, angry, and hostile) and dating violence occurred (verbal, physical and sexual) on the prior day and whether the angry affect immediately preceded seeing their partner. Surveys were completed daily for a period of two months. Results indicated that younger age, shorter length of relationship, lower relationship satisfaction, greater psychopathology, greater past perpetration of IPV, and more favorable attitudes toward violence were associated with greater odds of IPV. In addition, findings revealed that an increase in proximal irritable affect was associated with greater odds of verbal and sexual aggression, while an increase in proximal angry affect was associated with greater odds of verbal and physical aggression. Most notably, our results demonstrated that the risk for violence increased exponentially as the amount of irritable or angry affect increased by each one-unit increment. This study also assessed the impact of a number of distal factors on the relationship between angry affect and IPV. Positive moderators included length of relationship, drug use, antisocial personality, borderline personality, and perpetration of past physical and sexual violence. Negative moderators included age, alcohol use, PTSD symptomatology, and perpetration of past verbal violence. These data are the first to provide evidence for the temporal relationship between angry affect and dating violence, as well as the role of distal variables on this relationship. These data have implications for the creation of relevant intervention programs targeting specific distal and proximal variables that increase risk for IPV in dating violence populations

Streamlining Medicaid Enrollment: The Role of the Health Insurance Marketplaces and the Impact of State Policies

In addition to expanding eligibility for Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act reformed the program's enrollment process, with the health insurance marketplaces playing a central role in the reforms. State-based marketplaces determine Medicaid eligibility, but federal regulations give states using the federal marketplace a choice either to allow the marketplace to make Medicaid eligibility determinations or to limit its role to assessing and referring applicants to the state Medicaid agency. This issue brief examines Medicaid enrollment data and finds that states that establish their own marketplaces realize higher Medicaid enrollment. In states that use the federal marketplace, Medicaid enrollment is higher when states have the marketplace determine eligibility. These findings underscore the importance of states' marketplace decisions regarding Medicaid enrollment