Sistemas de responsabilidade multi-perspectiva: Uma perspectiva de Vermont

In response to Bae’s (2018) Redesigning systems of school accountability: A multiple measures approach to accountability and support, this commentary expands on some key considerations for states and school districts as they seek different ways to support school improvement while also addressing the competing demands of educators, policymakers, and the public. Using examples from Vermont, the author highlights the need for: (1) states and districts to make accountability part of their core statement of values, with a focus on why certain measures are selected, not what measures are selected; and (2) reciprocal accountability through better collaborations between federal, state and local actors to identify and fund the best investments for education.En respuesta a Bae’s (2018) “Rediseñando los Sistemas de Responsabilidad Escolar,” este comentario amplía algunas consideraciones clave para los estados y distritos escolares que buscan diferentes formas de apoyar la mejora escolar mientras que también abordan la competencia las demandas de los educadores, los políticos y el público. Usando ejemplos de Vermont, el autor destaca la necesidad de: (1) que los estados y distritos hagan que la rendición de cuentas sea parte de su declaración de valores central, con un enfoque en por qué se seleccionan ciertas medidas, no qué medidas se seleccionan; y (2) responsabilidad recíproca a través de mejores colaboraciones entre los actores federales, estatales y locales para identificar y financiar las mejores inversiones para la educación.Em resposta aos “Redesenhando Sistemas de Responsabilidade Escolar” de Bae (2018), este comentário amplia algumas considerações importantes para estados e distritos escolares que procuram diferentes maneiras de apoiar a melhoria escolar, ao mesmo tempo em que abordam as demandas dos educadores , políticos e público. Usando exemplos de Vermont, o autor destaca a necessidade de: (1) que os estados e os distritos tornem a responsabilidade parte da sua declaração básica de valores, com foco em por que certas medidas são selecionadas, e não o que medidas selecione; e (2) responsabilidade recíproca através de melhores colaborações entre atores federais, estaduais e locais para identificar e financiar os melhores investimentos para a educação

Comparison of open-source software for producing directed acyclic graphs

Many software have been developed to assist researchers in drawing directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), with each providing different functionalities and varying usability. We examine four of the most common software to generate DAGs: TikZ, DAGitty, ggdag, and dagR. For each method we provide a general description of the package's background, analysis and visualization capabilities, and user-friendliness. To additionally compare methods, we produce two DAGs in each software, the first featuring a simple confounding structure, while the latter includes one more complex structure with three confounders and a mediator. We provide recommendations for when to use each software depending on the user's needs

Factors and Motivations Behind Volunteering at Domestic Violence Emergency Shelters

Volunteerism is a commonly researched topic however, much scarcer is research into the factors or motivations behind volunteering at domestic violence emergency shelters. Knowing the motivating factors that lead people to dedicate their time to different organizations is important because it gives us an understanding of what can be done in order to get other people involved in pro-social activities that benefit society as a whole. Just as there are different types of individuals who volunteer their time, there are different factors and motivators that compel those individuals to do so. Research to date has identified some common motivators. One of these is altruism. Altruism is essentially a motivation or drive to help another solely for that person\u27s benefit or for the benefit of society as a whole. Other motivators that have been identified include: to gain understanding about a particular social issue, to strengthen social relationships and satisfy normative expectations; to aid in career advancement or to develop job prospects; to reduce negative feelings about oneself or address personal problems; and, to grow and develop psychologically and increase self-esteem. My research specifically examines the motivations among volunteers of local domestic violence emergency shelters. In my review of literature to date, I have been unable to find any research involving volunteers of domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, victim advocacy organizations, or anything along these lines. Only one study was found that has examined motivations among the volunteers for these organizations. This study was a very small (n=8), qualitative investigation with volunteers who occupied a specific position within an organization. This study examines motivations quantitatively of a larger sample of volunteers from two area domestic violence emergency shelters. To acquire this sample, all volunteers in the agency databases were emailed a link to the survey and asked to participate. The survey questionnaire included questions about the factors influencing their decision to volunteer and also why they chose to volunteer specifically at a domestic violence shelter. Demographic differences in motivations among the sample are also statistically determined. This study is important as it is the first to quantitatively assess the motivations of volunteers at a domestic violence agency. Motivations for volunteering at such an agency can differ significantly from motivations for volunteering at other types of organizations (like soup kitchens, day care centers, hospices and the like). The role of personal experience as well as knowing someone who has been personally impacted by domestic violence is measured as a unique motivation for this population. These findings are useful in providing domestic violence agencies with information that can assist in identifying potential volunteers from the larger community as well as a better understanding of their current volunteers. In addition, it contributes to the larger literature by examining a volunteer group that has largely been absent from the literature to date

Reproductive Justice

https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/feminist_zines/1057/thumbnail.jp

Improved Continuation Rate of Depot-Medroxyprogesterone Acetate in Adolescent Mothers

Poor compliance and high discontinuation rates of Depot-Medroxyprogesterone Acetate (DMPA) and other contraceptive methods are major factors in the continuing problem of adolescent pregnancy. In this study we attempted to determine if providing comprehensive health care for teen mothers and their babies would improve continuation rates of DMPA. Patients who started DMPA between 1/1/96 and 1/1/99 were included. Teen mothers and their babies received all their health care in this clinic, supported by State funding. Key elements regarding DMPA in this clinic were continuity of care, phone and mail reminders of appointments, free DMPA for patients without insurance, counseling at each visit and available evening clinic. In the study period a total of 299 (age 13-22 years) patients were started on DMPA. Fifty-one percent were white, 47% black and 2% others. Sixty-three percent were single, 20% married, 3% cohabitating and 14% undetermined (missing data). Seventy-eight percent had one baby and 22% more than one. A total of 189 patients (63.2%) continued to be compliant after one year of use and 101 patients (33.8% of total) continued beyond the second year. The most common side effect reported was bleeding or spotting (32%), However only seven patients (2.3%) discontinued use because of it. It is concluded that continuity of care (same staff and providers on each visit), regular counseling, flexible hours (evening appointments), financial ease (free DMPA and no visit charge for those without insurance), combined Teen-Tot health visits and regular reminders of appointments may help improve compliance and continuation rates in teen mothers leading to better success in preventing repeat teen pregnancy

Vanguard, Volume I

https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/vanguard/1000/thumbnail.jp

Self-monitoring in stroke patients and healthy individuals: predictive factors and methodological challenges

The phenomenon whereby people suffering from an illness or disability seem to be unaware of their symptoms was termed anosognosia, by Joseph Babinksi in 1914 (Langer & Levine, 2014). Originally described as a specific inability to recognise or acknowledge left-sided hemiplegia after lesions to the right hemisphere of the brain, the term now incorporates unawareness of a range of post-stroke impairments, such as hemianopia (Bisiach, Vallar, Perani, Papagno & Berti, 1986), hemianaesthesia (Pia et al., 2014), aphasia (Cocchini, Gregg, Beschin, Dean & Della Sala, 2010) and unilateral neglect (Jehkonen, Ahonen, Dastidar, Laippala & Vilkki, 2000). Anosognosia has also been observed in association with several other disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease (Agnew & Morris, 1998) and traumatic brain injury (Prigatano, 2010a). While advances have been made in understanding anosognosia, there are still many contradictory findings in relation to the nature and expression of impaired self-awareness (Prigatano, 2010a), which are partly attributable to diverse methodological approaches. Furthermore, research into anosognosia frequently rests on the assumption that neurologically intact individuals have accurate insight into their own abilities, particularly in regard to motor skill. The experiments reported in this thesis highlight that this may be a false assumption. Through a series of interrelated studies, I demonstrate that the type of questions typically asked of anosognosic patients may be inappropriate to elicit the manifestations of chronic stage unawareness after a stroke, that underestimation may be just as prevalent as overestimation, and that healthy individuals are not always able to monitor whether their executed movements match their intended movements. Moreover, those with poorer motor skills are less able to judge movement successes and failures than their more skilled counterparts, suggesting a mechanism analogous to the anosognosia observed in clinical populations. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the main neuropsychological models that have been proposed to account for anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP); unawareness in the context of other impairments is discussed in the introductions to individual chapters. Chapter 2 presents some background research investigating stroke clinicians’ knowledge of the lateralization of right hemisphere cognitive symptoms, and their judgements of the impact of selected symptoms on the lives of patients and caregivers. While the clinicians were equally able to identify cognitive symptoms associated with left or right brain damage, they were far more likely to misattribute symptoms to right brain damage, suggesting a lack of confidence in their knowledge of the cognitive functions of the right hemisphere. They also regarded anosognosia as having relatively low impact on the lives of patients and caregivers, in stark contrast with the highly negative impact reported in the literature (Jehkonen, Laihosalo & Kettunen, 2006a). Chapters 3 and 4 present two experimental studies investigating different facets of awareness in two groups of stroke patients. Chapter 3 reports the development and testing of a tool designed to measure chronic unawareness of functional difficulties, the Visual Analogue Test of Anosognosia for impairments in Activities of Daily Living (VATA-ADL), with preliminary data from a group of chronic stroke patients. Approximately one third of the patients exhibited mild or moderate levels of overestimation of their ability to carry out day-to-day activities. This contrasts with previous reports that anosognosia is rare in the chronic stages, a discrepancy that may be explained in part by the inappropriateness of the measures typically used to measure it. Overestimation was observed in both right-brain-damaged and left-brain-damaged patients, and was not associated with higher levels of cognitive impairment. The study reported in Chapter 4 examined whether acute stage stroke patients who under- or overestimated their motor skills, similarly under- or overestimated performance on cognitive tasks in the domains of language, memory and attention and executive function. Contrary to the many dissociations between unawareness of different impairment reported in the neuropsychological literature, this study found that patients classed as overestimators of motor ability were also overly optimistic about their cognitive abilities. Overestimators were more likely to have right hemisphere lesions, higher levels of general cognitive impairments, and specific deficits in attention and executive function. Furthermore, by including patients with a range of functional ability, this study revealed that participants were just as likely to underestimate as overestimate their abilities. This unique finding presents a challenge to anosognosia research, suggesting that there may be factors other than neurological damage that predispose stroke patients to over- or under-estimate their abilities and that a baseline of accurate self-insight among control populations cannot be assumed. Chapter 5 reports three different experiments conducted with younger and older, neurologically healthy adults. Using a target-directed reaching task, these experiments investigated whether the participants’ ability to monitor the success of their movements, on a trial by trial basis, depended upon their motor skill level, and whether participants with lower skill were inclined to overestimate their ability, in line with a famous observation from cognitive psychology that people who perform worst in a given task tend to be unaware of how poorly they are performing (Kruger and Dunning, 1999). Overall, the results demonstrated an association between higher accuracy levels and faster movement times, and better ability to monitor success and failure. To my knowledge, this represents that first evidence of a relationship between motor performance ability and self-monitoring ability in healthy individuals, highlighting that some of the mechanisms underpinning anosognosia may also be evident in neurologically intact populations. However, contrary to the findings from cognitive psychology, poor performance was not associated with a specific bias toward overestimation. A similar relationship between task performance and self-monitoring ability was also observed for a visual memory task. Chapter 6 discusses the implications of the results of the clinical and self-monitoring studies for neuropsychological models of anosognosia, particularly those based on motor planning and control, and considers potential ways forward for research in this field

Temperature and salinity tolerances of Stage 1 zoeae predict possible range expansion of an introduced portunid crab, Charybdis japonica, in New Zealand

The successful invasion of a non-native species depends on several factors, including initial colonization and establishment of a self-sustaining population. Populations of the non-native paddle crab Charybdis japonica were first recognized in the Waitemata Harbour, Auckland, New Zealand in 2000, most likely arriving in ballast waters of an Asian merchant vessel. A survey completed in 2003 found C. japonica throughout the Waitemata Harbour, and further sampling in 2009 has revealed several well established populations in estuaries up to 70 km from the putative invasion point. As the potential for further establishment of C. japonica beyond this area may depend on the temperature and salinity tolerances of their free swimming larvae, we quantified the survival of newly-hatched Stage 1 C. japonica zoeae subjected to temperatures ranging from 11 to 43°C or salinities from 5 to 45‰ in the laboratory. Upon hatching, replicate C. japonica zoeae were directly transferred from 21°C and 34.6‰ seawater to either an experimental temperature or salinity level. Behaviour and death rates of the larvae were monitored over a 24 h period in the absence of food. Comparisons of zoeal survival rates to historical sea surface temperatures and salinities show that C. japonica Stage 1 zoeae tolerate a broad range of temperatures and salinities and could survive natural conditions throughout New Zealand. This gives C. japonica the potential to invade many other New Zealand estuaries and harbours