Scaffolding serves as an important instructional tool for supporting students’ literacy development. To be effective, however, teachers must continually adapt the scaffolding offered to students to ...provide appropriate levels of both support and challenge. In this article, the sociolinguistic concept of stance is used to conceptualize how elementary teachers interactionally scaffolded their students’ literacy development. Highlighting the findings from a discourse analysis of 48 reading and writing conferences between six teacher–student pairs, the author identifies four stances taken by teachers and students in their interactions—feedback, instruction, collaboration, and management—and describes the different kinds of scaffolding made possible by each stance. Through two vignettes of teacher–student literacy conferences, the author also illustrates how teachers strove to avoid overscaffolding by shifting stance within these interactions. These findings situate stance as a useful instructional tool, illustrating how different stances allow not only different levels of scaffolding but also qualitatively different kinds of support and challenge.
Comparative Civic Culture Reese, Laura A.; Rosenfeld, Raymond A.
2012, 20160523, 2016-05-23, 2016-05-26, 2012-03-01, 20120101
eBook
The quest for a theoretical framework for understanding urban policy-making has been a recurring focus of research into local governments. Civic culture is a means for understanding how municipal ...policy-makers weigh the interests of different groups, govern the local community, frame local goals, engage in decision-making, and ultimately select and implement public policies. While it seems that culture 'matters' in local policy making, how to measure culture in a valid and replicable fashion presents a significant challenge which the authors address in this book. They present their findings of a large multi-city research project to explore the nature of civic culture in cities in the US and Canada. The focus of their analysis is on three overarching 'systems' of community power system, the community value system, and the community decision-making system. The authors address a number of questions around the nature of civic culture and the relationships between the three systemic elements of civic culture, to refine and apply a more sophisticated theory of urban policy-making.
Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) is a promising new tracer modality with zero attenuation deep in tissue, high contrast and sensitivity, and an excellent safety profile. However, the spatial ...resolution of MPI is limited to around 1 mm currently and urgently needs to be improved for clinical applications such as angiography and brain perfusion. Although MPI resolution is highly dependent on tracer characteristics and the drive waveforms, optimization is limited to a small subset of possible excitation strategies by current MPI hardware that only does sinusoidal drive waveforms at very few frequencies. To enable a more comprehensive and rapid optimization of drive waveforms for multiple metrics like resolution and signal strength simultaneously, we demonstrate the first untuned MPI spectrometer/relaxometer with unprecedented 400 kHz excitation bandwidth and capable of high-throughput acquisition of harmonic spectra (100 different drive-field frequencies in only 500 ms). It is also capable of arbitrary drive-field waveforms which have not been experimentally evaluated in MPI to date. Its high-throughput capability, frequency-agility and tabletop size makes this Arbitrary Waveform Relaxometer/Spectrometer (AWR) a convenient yet powerfully flexible tool for nanoparticle experts seeking to characterize magnetic particles and optimize MPI drive waveforms for in vitro biosensing and in vivo imaging with MPI.
Objective
Methionine restriction (MR) decreases inflammation and improves markers of metabolic disease in rodents. MR also increases hepatic and circulating concentrations of fibroblast growth factor ...21 (FGF21). Emerging evidence has suggested that FGF21 exerts anti‐inflammatory effects. The purpose of this study was to determine the role of FGF21 in mediating the MR‐induced reduction in inflammation.
Methods
Wild‐type and Fgf21‐/‐ mice were fed a high‐fat (HF) control or HF‐MR diet for 8 weeks. In a separate experiment, mice were fed a HF diet (HFD) for 10 weeks. Vehicle or recombinant FGF21 (13.6 µg/d) was administered via osmotic minipump for an additional 2 weeks. Inflammation and metabolic parameters were measured.
Results
Fgf21‐/‐ mice were more susceptible to HFD‐induced inflammation, and MR reduced inflammation in white adipose tissue (WAT) and liver of Fgf21‐/‐ mice. MR downregulated activity of signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 in WAT of both genotypes. FGF21 administration reduced hepatic lipids and blood glucose concentrations. However, there was little effect of FGF21 on inflammatory gene expression in liver or adipose tissue or circulating cytokines.
Conclusions
MR reduces inflammation independent of FGF21 action. Endogenous FGF21 is important to protect against the development of HFD‐induced inflammation in liver and WAT, yet administration of low‐dose FGF21 has little effect on markers of inflammation.
The purpose of this integrative literature review was to evaluate and synthesize the evidence regarding the existence, extent, and significance of a preparation-practice gap-namely, the deficits in ...knowledge and skills that novice nurses may demonstrate on entry into the clinical setting and the identified best practices to narrow this gap.
An integrative literature review was performed.
A final set of 50 articles were included in the review. Three main themes permeate the evidence: a preparation-practice gap exists; this gap is costly; and closing the preparation-practice gap will likely rely on changes in undergraduate education and on-the-job remediation (i.e., nurse residency or preceptor programs).
The preparation-practice gap is a challenge that has faced the nursing profession for years. Efforts to close this gap can be justified on the hopes of decreasing turnover (and its attendant costs), boosting morale of novice nurses and their preceptors, decreasing stress among the novice nurses, and improving patient safety.
The AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is an αβγ heterotrimer that acts as a master metabolic regulator to maintain cellular energy balance following increased energy demand and increases in the ...AMP/ATP ratio. This regulation provides dynamic control of energy metabolism, matching energy supply with demand that is essential for the function and survival of organisms. AMPK is inactive unless phosphorylated on Thr172 in the α-catalytic subunit activation loop by upstream kinases (LKB1 or calcium-calmodulin-dependent protein kinase kinase β). How a rise in AMP levels triggers AMPK α-Thr172 phosphorylation and activation is incompletely understood. Here we demonstrate unequivocally that AMP directly stimulates α-Thr172 phosphorylation provided the AMPK β-subunit is myristoylated. Loss of the myristoyl group abolishes AMP activation and reduces the extent of α-Thr172 phosphorylation. Once AMPK is phosphorylated, AMP further activates allosterically but this activation does not require β-subunit myristoylation. AMP and glucose deprivation also promote membrane association of myristoylated AMPK, indicative of a myristoyl-switch mechanism. Our results show that AMP regulates AMPK activation at the initial phosphorylation step, and that β-subunit myristoylation is important for transducing the metabolic stress signal.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic pain are highly prevalent comorbid conditions. Veterans dually burdened by PTSD and chronic pain experience more severe outcomes compared to either ...disorder alone. Few studies have enrolled enough women Veterans to test gender differences in pain outcomes catastrophizing, intensity, interference by the severity of PTSD symptoms.
Examine gender differences in the association between PTSD symptoms and pain outcomes among Veterans enrolled in a chronic pain clinical trial.
Participants were 421 men and 386 women Veterans with chronic pain who provided complete data on PTSD symptoms and pain outcomes. We used hierarchical linear regression models to examine gender differences in pain outcomes by PTSD symptoms.
Adjusted multivariable models indicated that PTSD symptoms were associated with higher levels of pain catastrophizing (0.57, 95% CI 0.51, 0.63), pain intensity (0.30, 95% CI 0.24, 0.37), and pain interference (0.46, 95% CI 0.39, 0.52). No evidence suggesting gender differences in this association were found in either the crude or adjusted models (all interaction p-values<0.05).
These findings may reflect the underlying mutual maintenance of these conditions whereby the sensation of pain could trigger PTSD symptoms, particularly if the trauma and pain are associated with the same event. Clinical implications and opportunities testing relevant treatments that may benefit both chronic pain and PTSD are discussed.
Humanizing pedagogies present a promising framework for contesting dehumanizing practices all too common in U.S. urban schools. To co-construct such pedagogies, however, teachers and students must ...negotiate between the humanizing and dehumanizing discourses that circulate within their school context. Drawing from data collected from a qualitative study of literacy conferences in three urban elementary classrooms, I use microethnographic and critical approaches to discourse analysis to explore two sets of conflicting discourses mobilized by teachers and students in their pedagogical interactions: curriculum as tailored versus standardized and as present oriented versus future oriented. To further explore how teachers and students interact amidst the tensions between these discourses, I present a close analysis of a writing conference in which a teacher-student pair prepare for the upcoming high-stakes writing test. This analysis makes visible challenges and possibilities of teachers and students co-constructing humanizing pedagogies while suggesting the need to attend to its temporal dimensions.
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