Teacher design teams as a strategy for professional development : the role of the facilitator

The goal of the current study was to explore the role and importance of the facilitator in Teacher Design Teams. The study took place in the context of a pre-service teacher education institution in Belgium, where teacher design teams were set up to facilitate the professional development of teacher educators. The findings from focus group discussions with team members and semi-structured interviews with facilitators confirm that the perceived importance of a facilitator depends on several factors, such as team characteristics and the design phase. Moreover, we found that a facilitator can fulfil three roles in a dynamic way: 1) providing logistic support, 2) scaffolding the design process and 3) monitoring the design process. The discussion centers on how these results can be used to support facilitators for successful Teacher Design Teams

Conditions for the successful implementation of teacher educator design teams for ICT integration : a Delphi study

Teacher educators often struggle to model effective integration of technology. Several studies suggest that the involvement of teacher educators in collaborative design is effective in developing the competences necessary for integrating information and communication technology (ICT) in teaching. In a teacher educator design team (TeDT), two or more teacher educators (re-)design curriculum materials together. For the successful implementation of TeDTs, conditions at both team and institutional levels have to be taken into account. However, there is little consensus among stakeholders about which of these conditions are of highest priority. Most studies present priority or critical conditions from the viewpoint of just one group (e.g., school leaders). A Delphi study was set up aiming at synthesising the knowledge and views of various stakeholders about the conditions for the successful implementation of TeDTs for ICT integration. Consensus about the importance of ten conditions was reached in the entire sample after three rounds. These conditions include a long-term vision, trust, ownership, time and supportive institutional policies

QQ-SNV: single nucleotide variant detection at low frequency by comparing the quality quantiles

Background: Next generation sequencing enables studying heterogeneous populations of viral infections. When the sequencing is done at high coverage depth ("deep sequencing"), low frequency variants can be detected. Here we present QQ-SNV (http://sourceforge.net/projects/qqsnv), a logistic regression classifier model developed for the Illumina sequencing platforms that uses the quantiles of the quality scores, to distinguish true single nucleotide variants from sequencing errors based on the estimated SNV probability. To train the model, we created a dataset of an in silico mixture of five HIV-1 plasmids. Testing of our method in comparison to the existing methods LoFreq, ShoRAH, and V-Phaser 2 was performed on two HIV and four HCV plasmid mixture datasets and one influenza H1N1 clinical dataset. Results: For default application of QQ-SNV, variants were called using a SNV probability cutoff of 0.5 (QQ-SNVD). To improve the sensitivity we used a SNV probability cutoff of 0.0001 (QQ-SNVHS). To also increase specificity, SNVs called were overruled when their frequency was below the 80th percentile calculated on the distribution of error frequencies (QQ-SNVHS-P80). When comparing QQ-SNV versus the other methods on the plasmid mixture test sets, QQ-SNVD performed similarly to the existing approaches. QQ-SNVHS was more sensitive on all test sets but with more false positives. QQ-SNVHS-P80 was found to be the most accurate method over all test sets by balancing sensitivity and specificity. When applied to a paired-end HCV sequencing study, with lowest spiked-in true frequency of 0.5 %, QQ-SNVHS-P80 revealed a sensitivity of 100 % (vs. 40-60 % for the existing methods) and a specificity of 100 % (vs. 98.0-99.7 % for the existing methods). In addition, QQ-SNV required the least overall computation time to process the test sets. Finally, when testing on a clinical sample, four putative true variants with frequency below 0.5 % were consistently detected by QQ-SNVHS-P80 from different generations of Illumina sequencers. Conclusions: We developed and successfully evaluated a novel method, called QQ-SNV, for highly efficient single nucleotide variant calling on Illumina deep sequencing virology data

ICT-integratie in de lerarenopleiding: vier in balans?

Zijn onze lerarenopleidingen in staat leraren af te leveren die ICT op een adequate manier kunnen inschakelen in hun onderwijspraktijk? Dat is de initiële vraag van het onderzoek dat in deze bijdrage wordt voorgesteld. Sinds 2007 dienen leraren immers vakoverschrijdende ICT-eindtermen na te streven (in het Vlaamse basisonderwijs en de eerste graad van het secundair onderwijs). Centrale gedachte bij het beleid van de overheid is ervoor te zorgen dat alle leerlingen voldoende ICT-competenties bezitten. Meer concreet stellen we ons de vraag in welke mate de condities aanwezig zijn in de Vlaamse geïntegreerde lerarenopleiding (GLO) om onze toekomstige leraren op deze taak voor te bereiden. Hiervoor maken we gebruik van het ‘Vier in Balans’ model (Stichting Kennisnet ICT op school, 2007) waarin de voornaamste condities voor ICT-integratie worden gegroepeerd: visie, kennis, attitude & vaardigheden, software/content en de infrastructuur. In deze studie bestuderen we in welke mate deze condities aanwezig zijn in de Vlaamse GLO. Op die manier trachten we, zoals de titel suggereert, na te gaan hoe ze zich tot elkaar verhouden: zijn de verschillende condities voldoende met elkaar in balans om ICTintegratie mogelijk te maken

ViVaMBC: estimating viral sequence variation in complex populations from illumina deep-sequencing data using model-based clustering

Background: Deep-sequencing allows for an in-depth characterization of sequence variation in complex populations. However, technology associated errors may impede a powerful assessment of low-frequency mutations. Fortunately, base calls are complemented with quality scores which are derived from a quadruplet of intensities, one channel for each nucleotide type for Illumina sequencing. The highest intensity of the four channels determines the base that is called. Mismatch bases can often be corrected by the second best base, i.e. the base with the second highest intensity in the quadruplet. A virus variant model-based clustering method, ViVaMBC, is presented that explores quality scores and second best base calls for identifying and quantifying viral variants. ViVaMBC is optimized to call variants at the codon level (nucleotide triplets) which enables immediate biological interpretation of the variants with respect to their antiviral drug responses. Results: Using mixtures of HCV plasmids we show that our method accurately estimates frequencies down to 0.5%. The estimates are unbiased when average coverages of 25,000 are reached. A comparison with the SNP-callers V-Phaser2, ShoRAH, and LoFreq shows that ViVaMBC has a superb sensitivity and specificity for variants with frequencies above 0.4%. Unlike the competitors, ViVaMBC reports a higher number of false-positive findings with frequencies below 0.4% which might partially originate from picking up artificial variants introduced by errors in the sample and library preparation step. Conclusions: ViVaMBC is the first method to call viral variants directly at the codon level. The strength of the approach lies in modeling the error probabilities based on the quality scores. Although the use of second best base calls appeared very promising in our data exploration phase, their utility was limited. They provided a slight increase in sensitivity, which however does not warrant the additional computational cost of running the offline base caller. Apparently a lot of information is already contained in the quality scores enabling the model based clustering procedure to adjust the majority of the sequencing errors. Overall the sensitivity of ViVaMBC is such that technical constraints like PCR errors start to form the bottleneck for low frequency variant detection

Onderwijsvrijheid: vrijheid in, door en voor onderwijs? In R. Wouters (chair), 'Moet er nog onderwijsvrijheid zijn?'. Symposium georganiseerd op de jaarlijkse bijeenkomst van de Onderwijs Research Dagen (ORD)

status: publishe

Het opzetten en evalueren van beraadslagend onderzoek (deliberative inquiry)

Deliberatieve methoden worden zowel gebruikt om democratische processen te versterken als om collaboratief onderzoek op te zetten. Vanuit de ervaringen van een onderzoekstraject delen we inzichten over deliberative inquiry of beraadslagend onderzoek, een voorbeeld uit het brede scala van dergelijke deliberatieve methoden. Aan bod komt een fasering van een deliberative inquiry-traject met een toelichting van de verantwoordelijkheden voor facilitator en deelnemers. Aan de hand van theorievorming over legitimiteit worden een aantal ervaringen met deze methode kritisch geëvalueerd. Uitgangspunt hierbij is dat deliberatieve methoden niet alleen legitieme resultaten moeten opleveren, maar dat ook het proces om tot die resultaten te komen vanuit principes van rechtvaardigheid moet worden opgezet.status: publishe

Bestuderen + delibereren = beraadslagend onderzoeken

status: publishe

Freedom of education: A matter of thinking together within a plurality of unequal people? In M. Göhlich (chair), 'Theoretical perspectives on organizational education topics'. Symposium conducted at the annual meeting of the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER)

status: publishe