Students With Special Needs, Reading Education, and Principals: Bridging the Divide Through Instructional Leadership

Principals are held accountable for achievement results of students on state-mandated assessments. Special needs students who struggle with literacy can impact the pass rates on these assessments. This study identifies how reading is taught to special needs students in both self-contained and inclusion settings at the secondary level in one school district determines how school leaders may or may not be facilitating this process and identifies ways school leaders can more effectively facilitate special education reading programs and processes

Differentiated Instruction: A Review of Literature

Differentiated instruction is recognized to be a compilation of many theories and practices related to effective teaching and its link to student achievement. It requires a departure from traditional methods of teaching and the belief that learners vary according to readiness, ability, motivation, and interest. While numerous testimonials, examples of differentiation in practice, and for profit tools abound in the literature, little empirical research exists warranting future research on the effectiveness of differentiated instruction as measured by student achievement on assessment. This manuscript provides a review of the literature

The Administration and Supervision Program in the Department of Leadership, Foundations, and Policy, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia

The Department of Leadership, Foundations, and Policy at the University of Virginia is designed to meet the demand for educational leaders who can combine vision and practice. It houses three integrated academic units: leadership; foundations; and policy. The leadership programs prepare leaders who are committed to social justice and formal education as a means of personal and civic improvement. Graduates of the programs go on to careers in school administration as well as university careers. Graduate students of the educational foundations programs learn concepts and skills related to research and evaluation, human development, learning and motivation, social and cultural contexts of education, multicultural education, new information technologies and education of gifted and talented students. They go on to careers in college teaching, research, instructional technology and administration. The policy studies programs are designed to help students understand and master the processes by which social, political and economic forces influence education policy. Graduates of these programs commonly assume positions in local, state and national or international agencies and organizations

Necessary but not Sufficient: The Continuing Inequality between Men and Women in Educational Leadership, Findings from the AASA Mid-Decade Survey

The gender of school leaders makes a difference in career paths, personal life, and characteristics of workplace. There is additional evidence that men and women are appointed or elected to lead different kinds of educational jurisdictions. Even if those differences did not exist, equitable access to leadership positions for people of different backgrounds would make this an important issue. This article reports gender-related findings from the American Association of School Administrators 2015 Mid-Decade Survey. Findings confirm many of the trends in research on the superintendency over the past 15 years. The profiles of women superintendents are becoming more like their male counterparts. Both men and women appear to be less mobile than in the past. Men and women are spending about the same time as teachers before becoming superintendents, women and men appear to experience stress similarly, and women are receiving mentoring much more than in the past. There are few data to support the beliefs that women superintendents, more than men, are limited by family circumstance although this survey sheds no light on perspectives of women aspirants. This survey also confirms that there are a variety of paths to the position providing opportunities for women who have not necessarily had the typical teacher/principal/central office administrator trajectory. Nevertheless, significant differences still exist. Most important is that men are still four times more likely than women to serve in the most powerful position in education, and both women and men of color are still grossly underrepresented

The signed loop approach to the Ising model: foundations and critical point

The signed loop method is a beautiful way to rigorously study the two-dimensional Ising model with no external field. In this paper, we explore the foundations of the method, including details that have so far been neglected or overlooked in the literature. We demonstrate how the method can be applied to the Ising model on the square lattice to derive explicit formal expressions for the free energy density and two-point functions in terms of sums over loops, valid all the way up to the self-dual point. As a corollary, it follows that the self-dual point is critical both for the behaviour of the free energy density, and for the decay of the two-point functions.Comment: 38 pages, 7 figures, with an improved Introduction. The final publication is available at link.springer.co

Association of Parity and Time since Last Birth with Breast Cancer Prognosis by Intrinsic Subtype

Parity and time since last birth influence breast cancer risk and vary by intrinsic tumor subtype, but the independent effects of these factors on prognosis has received limited attention

Translational recoding as a feedback controller : systems approaches reveal polyamine-specific effects on the antizyme ribosomal frameshift

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Post-diagnosis adiposity and survival among breast cancer patients: influence of breast cancer subtype

Adiposity has been linked with increased breast cancer risk and mortality. It is established that etiologic associations for adiposity vary by tumor subtype, but the influence of adiposity on subtype-specific survival is unknown

Trapped lipopolysaccharide and LptD intermediates reveal lipopolysaccharide translocation steps across the Escherichia coli outer membrane

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is a main component of the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, which is essential for the vitality of most Gram-negative bacteria and plays a critical role for drug resistance. LptD/E complex forms a N-terminal LPS transport slide, a hydrophobic intramembrane hole and the hydrophilic channel of the barrel, for LPS transport, lipid A insertion and core oligosaccharide and O-antigen polysaccharide translocation, respectively. However, there is no direct evidence to confirm that LptD/E transports LPS from the periplasm to the external leaflet of the outer membrane. By replacing LptD residues with an unnatural amino acid p-benzoyl-L-phenyalanine (pBPA) and UV-photo-cross-linking in E.coli, the translocon and LPS intermediates were obtained at the N-terminal domain, the intramembrane hole, the lumenal gate, the lumen of LptD channel, and the extracellular loop 1 and 4, providing the first direct evidence and “snapshots” to reveal LPS translocation steps across the outer membrane

Lipopolysaccharide is Inserted into the Outer Membrane through An Intramembrane Hole, A Lumen Gate, and the Lateral Opening of LptD

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is essential for the vitality of most Gram-negative bacteria and plays an important role in bacterial multidrug resistance. The LptD/E translocon inserts LPS into the outer leaflet, the mechanism of which is poorly understood. Here, we report mutagenesis, functional assays, and molecular dynamics simulations of the LptD/E complex, which suggest two distinct pathways for the insertion of LPS. The N-terminal domain of LptD comprises a hydrophobic slide that injects the acyl tails of LPS directly into the outer membrane through an intramembrane hole, while the core oligosaccharide and O-antigen pass a lumen gate that triggers the unzipping of the lateral opening between strands β1C and β26C of the barrel of LptD, to finalize LPS insertion. Mutation of the LPS transport related residues or block of the LPS transport pathways results in the deaths of Escherichia coli. These findings are important for the development of novel antibiotics