Fostering Students\u27 Identification with Mathematics and Science

Book Summary: Interest in Mathematics and Science Learning is the first volume to assemble findings on the role of interest in mathematics and science learning. As the contributors illuminate across the volume’s 22 chapters, interest provides a critical bridge between cognition and affect in learning and development. This volume will be useful to educators, researchers, and policy makers, especially those whose focus is mathematics, science, and technology education. Chapter Summary: The primary purpose of this chapter is to explore the process whereby students transition from a short-term, situational interest in mathematics or science to a more enduring individual interest in which they incorporate performance in mathematics or science into their self-definitions (e.g. I am a scientist ). We do so by examining the research related to domain identification, which is the extent to which students define themselves through a role or performance in a domain, such as mathematics or science. Understanding the process of domain identification is important because it can contribute to an understanding of how individual interest develops over time. The means through which students become highly domain identified involves many factors that are internal (e.g. goals and beliefs) and external (e.g. family environment and educational experiences) to them. Students who are more identified with an academic domain tend to demonstrate increased motivation, effort, perseverance (when faced with failure), and achievement. Importantly, students with lower domain identification tend to demonstrate less motivation, lower effort, and fewer desirable outcomes. Student outcomes in a domain can reciprocally influence domain identification by reinforcing or altering it. This feedback loop can help explain incremental changes in motivation, self-concept, individual interest, and, ultimately, important outcomes such as achievement, choice of college major, and career path. This dynamic model presents possible mechanisms for influencing student outcomes. Furthermore, assessing students\u27 domain identification can allow practitioners to intervene to prevent undesirable outcomes. Finally, we present research on how mathematics and science instructors could use the principles of the MUSIC Model of Academic Motivation to enhance students\u27 domain identification, by (a) empowering students, (b) demonstrating the usefulness of the domain, (c) supporting students\u27 success, (d) triggering students\u27 interests, and (e) fostering a sense of caring and belonging. We conclude that by using the MUSIC model, instructors can intentionally design educational experiences to help students progress from a situational interest to one that is more enduring and integrated into their identities

L’Inde en Afrique : marchandises du commerce et connexions à la fin du premier millénaire

Archaeological approaches to the study of Indian Ocean connections tend to focus on “foreign” objects that appear in different contexts. In East Africa, these objects are found at settlements on what would become the Swahili coast, and they show that these settlements were linked to Indian Ocean networks from as early as the 7th century AD. The limited quantities of these remains mean that these earliest connections are difficult to see; they become much easier to identify from the 11th century onwards, when the largest numbers of goods are known. Yet our ability to trace these earliest connections is not only affected by the amount of evidence at our disposal. The ways that archaeologists have approached this topic have been dominated by historical paradigms that focus on the Persian Gulf and the agency of Arab merchants and consider Indian Ocean connections primarily in terms of trade. This article reviews the ways that this commercial emphasis creates a particular way of thinking in archaeological scholarship and discusses the fact that within this framework connections between India and Africa are poorly accounted for. It then turns to think about traces of these connections in the archaeology of the 7th to 10th centuries in both of these regions. Drawing on the strengths of archaeology in thinking through the meaning and use of material objects, it explores the ways in which a variety of artefact categories evoke a number of different types of connections between the people of India and Africa across the Indian Ocean

Phase Zero

In October 2006 General Charles Wald, Deputy Commander U.S. European Com- mand, brought “Phase Zero” into the joint lexicon with the publication of an article, “The Phase Zero Campaign.”1 Over the last five years the concept of taking coordinated action in peacetime to affect the strategic environment has becomewidely accepted and is now integrated into theater campaign plans. These activi- ties focus on building capacity of partners and influencing potential adversaries to avoid war. In contrast, Chinese strategic culture has encouraged taking actions to defeat an enemy prior to the onset of hostilities for two and a half millennia

Infrared interferometry to spatially and spectrally resolve jets in X-ray binaries

Infrared interferometry is a new frontier for precision ground based observing, with new instrumentation achieving milliarcsecond (mas) spatial resolutions for faint sources, along with astrometry on the order of 10 microarcseconds. This technique has already led to breakthroughs in the observations of the supermassive black hole at the Galactic centre and its orbiting stars, AGN, and exo-planets, and can be employed for studying X-ray binaries (XRBs), microquasars in particular. Beyond constraining the orbital parameters of the system using the centroid wobble and spatially resolving jet discrete ejections on mas scales, we also propose a novel method to discern between the various components contributing to the infrared bands: accretion disk, jets and companion star. We demonstrate that the GRAVITY instrument on the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) should be able to detect a centroid shift in a number of sources, opening a new avenue of exploration for the myriad of transients expected to be discovered in the coming decade of radio all-sky surveys. We also present the first proof-of-concept GRAVITY observation of a low-mass X-ray binary transient, MAXI J1820+070, to search for extended jets on mas scales. We place the tightest constraints yet via direct imaging on the size of the infrared emitting region of the compact jet in a hard state XRB.Comment: 12 Pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Coordinated evolution of co-expressed gene clusters in the Drosophila transcriptome

Abstract Background Co-expression of genes that physically cluster together is a common characteristic of eukaryotic transcriptomes. This organization of transcriptomes suggests that coordinated evolution of gene expression for clustered genes may also be common. Clusters where expression evolution of each gene is not independent of their neighbors are important units for understanding transcriptome evolution. Results We used a common microarray platform to measure gene expression in seven closely related species in the Drosophila melanogaster subgroup, accounting for confounding effects of sequence divergence. To summarize the correlation structure among genes in a chromosomal region, we analyzed the fraction of variation along the first principal component of the correlation matrix. We analyzed the correlation for blocks of consecutive genes to assess patterns of correlation that may be manifest at different scales of coordinated expression. We find that expression of physically clustered genes does evolve in a coordinated manner in many locations throughout the genome. Our analysis shows that relatively few of these clusters are near heterochromatin regions and that these clusters tend to be over-dispersed relative to the rest of the genome. This suggests that these clusters are not the byproduct of local gene clustering. We also analyzed the pattern of co-expression among neighboring genes within a single Drosophila species: D. simulans. For the co-expression clusters identified within this species, we find an under-representation of genes displaying a signature of recurrent adaptive amino acid evolution consistent with previous findings. However, clusters displaying co-evolution of expression among species are enriched for adaptively evolving genes. This finding points to a tie between adaptive sequence evolution and evolution of the transcriptome. Conclusion Our results demonstrate that co-evolution of expression in gene clusters is relatively common among species in the D. melanogaster subgroup. We consider the possibility that local regulation of expression in gene clusters may drive the connection between adaptive sequence and coordinated gene expression evolution

Isolation and characterization of the herpes simplex virus 1 terminase complex

During herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) infection, empty procapsids are assembled and subsequently filled with the viral genome by means of a protein complex called the terminase, which is comprised of the HSV-1 UL15, UL28, and UL33 proteins. Biochemical studies of the terminase proteins have been hampered by the inability to purify the intact terminase complex. In this study, terminase complexes were isolated by tandem-affinity purification (TAP) using recombinant viruses expressing either a full-length NTAP-UL28 fusion protein (vFH476) or a C-terminally truncated NTAP-UL28 fusion protein (vFH499). TAP of the UL28 protein from vFH476-infected cells, followed by silver staining, Western blotting, and mass spectrometry, identified the UL15, UL28, and UL33 subunits, while TAP of vFH499-infected cells confirmed previous findings that the C terminus of UL28 is required for UL28 interaction with UL33 and UL15. Analysis of the oligomeric state of the purified complexes by sucrose density gradient ultracentrifugation revealed that the three proteins formed a complex with a molecular mass that is consistent with the formation of a UL15-UL28-UL33 heterotrimer. In order to assess the importance of conserved regions of the UL15 and UL28 proteins, recombinant NTAP-UL28 viruses with mutations of the putative UL28 metal-binding domain or within the UL15 nuclease domain were generated. TAP of UL28 complexes from cells infected with each domain mutant demonstrated that the conserved cysteine residues of the putative UL28 metal-binding domain and conserved amino acids within the UL15 nuclease domain are required for the cleavage and packaging functions of the viral terminase, but not for terminase complex assembly

Parental Attachment Style: Examination of Links with Parent Secure Base Provision and Adolescent Secure Base Use

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Attachment & Human Development on June 5, 2014, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2014.921718 .The secure base construct represents one of attachment theory’s most important contributions to our understanding of parent–child relationships and child development. The present study represents the first examination of how parents’ self-reported attachment styles relate to parental secure base provision and adolescent (mean age = 16.6 years, SE = .59) secure base use during an observed parent–adolescent interaction. Further, the present study is the first to examine how fathers’, as well as mothers’, attachment styles relate to observed behavior in a parent–child interaction. At the bivariate level, maternal avoidance, but not anxiety, was negatively associated with observed adolescent secure base use. In addition, path analysis revealed that maternal avoidance was indirectly related to less adolescent secure base use through mothers’ self-reported hostile behavior toward their adolescents and through adolescents’ less positive perceptions of their mothers. Further, paternal anxiety, but not avoidance, was indirectly related to less adolescent secure base use through fathers’ self-reported hostile behavior toward their adolescents. No significant findings emerged in relation to parental secure base provision. We discuss these results in the context of attachment theory and suggest directions for future research.https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2014.92171

Persistent neuronal Ube3a expression in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of Angelman syndrome model mice

Mutations or deletions of the maternal allele of the UBE3A gene cause Angelman syndrome (AS), a severe neurodevelopmental disorder. The paternal UBE3A/Ube3a allele becomes epigenetically silenced in most neurons during postnatal development in humans and mice; hence, loss of the maternal allele largely eliminates neuronal expression of UBE3A protein. However, recent studies suggest that paternal Ube3a may escape silencing in certain neuron populations, allowing for persistent expression of paternal UBE3A protein. Here we extend evidence in AS model mice (Ube3am–/p+) of paternal UBE3A expression within the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), the master circadian pacemaker. Paternal UBE3A-positive cells in the SCN show partial colocalization with the neuropeptide arginine vasopressin (AVP) and clock proteins (PER2 and BMAL1), supporting that paternal UBE3A expression in the SCN is often of neuronal origin. Paternal UBE3A also partially colocalizes with a marker of neural progenitors, SOX2, implying that relaxed or incomplete imprinting of paternal Ube3a reflects an overall immature molecular phenotype. Our findings highlight the complexity of Ube3a imprinting in the brain and illuminate a subpopulation of SCN neurons as a focal point for future studies aimed at understanding the mechanisms of Ube3a imprinting

A Tale of Four Departments: Interdisciplinary Faculty Learning Communities Informing Mathematics Education

As a result of the Curriculum Foundations Project and the SUMMIT-P consortium, faculty from four different departments at Lee University created a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) with the goal of improving students’ attitudes toward undergraduate mathematics courses, including students’ perception of the utility of mathematics in their lives and the feelings of anxiety that they experience in these courses. The interdisciplinary collaborations resulted in introducing novel activities and manipulatives in various mathematics courses (Introduction to Statistics, Concepts of Mathematics I and II, and Algebra for Calculus). This paper first describes the efforts of creating the inter-departmental FLC. Second, it discusses the interventions that were introduced in the mathematics courses. Finally, it reflects on the lessons learned while participating in the learning community. The goal is to guide and challenge readers to consider how similar collaborative opportunities can be initiated at their own institutions