Effects of Primary Grade Literacy Field Experiences on Preservice Teachers\u27 Self-Efficacy: A Causal-Comparative Study

Learning to read is an essential skill, yet many new teachers enter the profession unprepared to be effective literacy teachers. Teacher preparation has been at the forefront of many reforms in education. However, discrepancies still exist in how teachers are prepared to enter the profession. This study investigated preservice teachers’ sense of efficacy for primary literacy instruction by the amount of field experience. The levels of field experience included no/ introductory field experience, reading practicum experience, and clinical teaching experience. Participants were preservice teachers who had been accepted into the educator preparation program at small, private universities in Texas and were seeking Early Childhood-Grade 6 certification. The survey measured the preservice teachers’ sense of efficacy for literacy instruction by asking how prepared preservice teachers felt to teach different aspects of literacy. The Kruskal-Wallis H was used to determine if there are differences between the groups. The study included 59 students from six small, private universities in Texas. Results of the study indicated that median scores were statistically significant between groups. Based on this data, the researcher rejected the null hypothesis. Pairwise comparisons showed a statistically significant mean increase from no/introductory field experience to reading practicum experience and from no/introductory field experience to clinical teaching experience

The Impact of Employment Tribunal Fees : A Perspective from Citizens Advice Advisers in Scotland

The Employment Tribunal (ET) evolved from the Industrial Tribunal and provides an individual with the opportunity to have their employment case heard before an independent adjudicator who will apply a legal framework to the dispute to pass a legally binding decision. Previously this system was free for individuals and business to use

Cardiorespiratory fitness levels and body mass index of pre-adolescent children and older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction The social and behavioral effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the health and physiology of most people, including those never diagnosed with COVID-19. While the impact of the pandemic has been felt across the lifespan, its effects on cardiorespiratory fitness (commonly considered a reflection of total body health) of older adults and children may be particularly profound due to social distancing and stay-at-home advisories, as well as the closure of sport facilities and non-essential businesses. The objective of this investigation was to leverage baseline data from two ongoing clinical trials to determine if cardiorespiratory fitness and body mass index were different during COVID-19 relative to before COVID-19 in older adults and children.Methods Healthy older individuals (N = 593; 65-80 years) and 200 typically developing children (8-10 years) completed a graded maximal exercise test and had their height and weight measured.Results Results revealed that older adults and children tested during COVID-19 had significantly lower cardiorespiratory fitness levels than those tested before COVID-19 shutdowns (older adults: 30% lower; children: 53% lower; p's & LE; 0.001). In addition, older adults and children tested during COVID-19 had significantly higher BMI (older adults: 31.34 +/- 0.57 kg/m(2), p = 0.004; children: 19.27 +/- 0.44 kg/m(2), p = 0.05) than those tested before COVID-19 shutdowns (older adults: 29.51 +/- 0.26 kg/m(2), children: 18.13 +/- 0.35 kg/m(2)). However, these differences in BMI did not remain significant when controlling for cardiorespiratory fitness.Discussion Results from this investigation indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic, and behavior changes taken to reduce potential exposure, may have led to lower cardiorespiratory fitness levels in older adults and children, as well as higher body mass index. These findings provide relevant public health information as lower cardiorespiratory fitness levels and higher body mass indexes recorded during the pandemic could have far-reaching and protracted health consequences. Public health guidance is needed to encourage physical activity to maintain cardiorespiratory fitness and healthy body composition.United States Department of Health & Human Services National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USA NIH National Institute on Aging (NIA) R01AG053952 United States Department of Health & Human Services National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USANIH Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD) R01HD09405

Melodic expectations in 5- and 6-year-old children

It has been argued that children implicitly acquire the rules relating to the structure of music in their environment using domain-general mechanisms such as statistical learning. Closely linked to statistical learning is the ability to form expectations about future events. Whether children as young as 5 years can make use of such internalized regularities to form expectations about the next note in a melody is still unclear. The possible effect of the home musical environment on the strength of musical expectations has also been under-explored. Using a newly developed melodic priming task that included melodies with either “expected” or “unexpected” endings according to rules of Western music theory, we tested 5- and 6-year-old children (N = 46). The stimuli in this task were constructed using the information dynamics of music (IDyOM) system, a probabilistic model estimating the level of “unexpectedness” of a note given the preceding context. Results showed that responses to expected versus unexpected tones were faster and more accurate, indicating that children have already formed robust melodic expectations at 5 years of age. Aspects of the home musical environment significantly predicted the strength of melodic expectations, suggesting that implicit musical learning may be influenced by the quantity of informal exposure to the surrounding musical environment

Marek's Disease Virus VP22: Subcellular Localization and Characterization of Carboxyl Terminal Deletion Mutations

AbstractMarek's disease virus (MDV) is an alphaherpesvirus that causes T cell lymphoma and severe immunosuppression in chickens. The MDV UL49 gene, which encodes the tegument viral protein 22 (VP22), has been expressed as a green fluorescent protein (GFP) fusion protein in chicken embryonic fibroblasts to examine its subcellular localization. As with both human herpesvirus 1 and bovine herpesvirus 1VP22-GFP fusion proteins, the MDV VP22-GFP product binds to microtubules and heterochromatin. In addition, the MDV protein also binds to the centrosomes. During mitosis, VP22-GFP binds to sister chromatids, but dissociates from the centrosomes and the microtubules of the mitotic spindle. A series of VP22 carboxy terminal truncation mutants were constructed to define regions responsible for these binding properties. These mutants identified separable domains or motifs responsible for binding microtubules and heterochromatin