Degrees That Matter Jankowski, Natasha A.; Marshall, David W.
2017, 2023-07-03, 2017-08-31, Letnik:
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eBook
Sponsored by Concerned by ongoing debates about higher education that talk past one another, the authors of this book show how to move beyond these and other obstacles to improve the student learning ...experience and further successful college outcomes. Offering an alternative to the culture of compliance in assessment and accreditation, they propose a different approach which they call the Learning System Paradigm. Building on the shift in focus from teaching to learning, the new paradigm encourages faculty and staff to systematically seek out information on how well students are learning and how well various areas of the institution are supporting the student experience and to use that information to create more coherent and explicit learning experiences for students.The authors begin by surveying the crowded terrain of reform in higher education and proceed from there to explore the emergence of this alternative paradigm that brings all these efforts together in a coherent way. The Learning System Paradigm presented in chapter two includes four key elements-consensus, alignment, student-centeredness, and communication. Chapter three focuses upon developing an encompassing notion of alignment that enables faculty, staff, and administrators to reshape institutional practice in ways that promote synergistic, integrative learning. Chapters four and five turn to practice, exploring the application of the paradigm to the work of curriculum mapping and assignment design. Chapter six focuses upon barriers to the work and presents ways to start and options for moving around barriers, and the final chapter explores ongoing implications of the new paradigm, offering strategies for communicating the impact of alignment on student learning.The book draws upon two recent initiatives in the United States: the Tuning process, adapted from a European approach to breaking down siloes in the European Union educational space; and the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP), a document
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to look at perceptions of young Japanese consumers towards the convenience store, or konbini, with a view to understanding what attracts them to this retail ...format and exploring well-being in a new way that is more relevant the retail experience.
Design/methodology/approach
The study looks at the emergence of the konbini as part of the Japanese food retail environment and reports on an online survey (n=453) of young Japanese consumer’s (>18 years old) attitudes towards this retail format.
Findings
The preliminary analysis of the data finds the konbini is a popular choice for young consumers for specific types of everyday goods. The main appeal lies in the ease of access, location of the stores and the ambience of the space that appeal to young consumer’s sense of well-being.
Research limitations/implications
This is a purposeful sample of young Japanese consumers surveyed across several academic institutions.
Practical implications
Konbini must continue to innovate to attract young consumer while acknowledging the implications of their stocking policy on consumer well-being.
Originality/value
This offers a unique insight into the ways in which young Japanese consumers avail themselves of the food retail provision and provides a broader perspective on well-being in a retail environment that resonates with consumer practice.
Thermal performance curves (TPCs), which quantify how an ectotherm's body temperature (Tb) affects its performance or fitness, are often used in an attempt to predict organismal responses to climate ...change. Here, we examine the key – but often biologically unreasonable – assumptions underlying this approach; for example, that physiology and thermal regimes are invariant over ontogeny, space and time, and also that TPCs are independent of previously experienced Tb. We show how a critical consideration of these assumptions can lead to biologically useful hypotheses and experimental designs. For example, rather than assuming that TPCs are fixed during ontogeny, one can measure TPCs for each major life stage and incorporate these into stage‐specific ecological models to reveal the life stage most likely to be vulnerable to climate change. Our overall goal is to explicitly examine the assumptions underlying the integration of TPCs with Tb, to develop a framework within which empiricists can place their work within these limitations, and to facilitate the application of thermal physiology to understanding the biological implications of climate change.
Partitioned Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of routine genetic data sets, constructed using MrBayes (Ronquist and Huelsenbeck 2003), can become trapped in regions of parameter space characterized by ...unrealistically long trees and distorted partition rate multipliers. Such analyses commonly fail to reach stationarity during hundreds of millions of generations of sampling—many times longer than most published analyses. Some data sets are so prone to this problem that paired MrBayes runs begun from different starting trees repeatedly find the same incorrect long-tree solutions and consequently pass the most commonly employed tests of stationarity, including the average standard deviation of split frequencies (ASDSF) and the potential scale reduction factor (PSRF) statistics offered by MrBayes (Gelman and Rubin 1992). In these situations, failure to reach stationarity is recognizable only in light of prior knowledge of model parameters, such as the expectation that third-codon-position sites usually evolve fastest in protein-coding genes. The conditions that lead to the long-tree problem are frequently encountered in phylogenetic studies today, and I present 6 demonstration examples from the literature. Although the effects on tree length (TL) are often dramatic, effects on topology appear to be subtle. Susceptibility to the problem is sometimes predicted by the difference between the true TL and the starting TL. In some cases, the problems described here can be avoided or reduced by manipulation of the starting TL and/or by adjustments to the prior on branch lengths. In more difficult situations, accurate branch length estimation may not be possible with Bayesian methods because of dependence of the solution on the branch length prior.
The COVID-19 viral pandemic affected all facets of life, including schooling. In March 2020, schools abruptly ended face-to-face instruction and transitioned to emergency remote instruction. David ...Marshall, David Shannon, and Savanna Love surveyed teachers nationally between mid-March and early April 2020 to understand their experiences during this time. Teachers found all aspects of teaching more challenging during remote instruction and shared a range of experiences related to training opportunities, barriers to student learning, as well as support for English learners and students with special needs. Based on the teachers’ comments, the authors recommend incorporating digital learning days in future school calendars and putting clear plans in place for future emergencies.
Rejecting theorizations of refugee camps as humanitarian spaces of exception and bare life, recent research has emphasized how camps are sites of material struggle, and how refugees are agential ...political subjects. While valuable, this research bifurcates between the material dwellings of refugee camps on one hand and the political subjectivity of refugees on the other. In contrast, this paper examines how Palestinian refugees reproduce a sense of collective belonging within the physical space of the camp and through material practices of care. This research centers the voices of Palestinian children to understand how they view their inherited refugee identities in the context of multi-generational displacement. Using participatory digital storytelling, this research illustrates how, for some Palestinian refugee children, a sense of longing for a future return to their past homeland motivates acts of care in the present that produces a sense of belonging in the camp. The creative agency that refugee youth demonstrate in articulating this entangled temporality of belonging challenges top-down models of youth socialization and refugee subjectivity. The importance of visual and narrative practices in reproducing refugee-ness suggests a wider role for creative methods in research with refugees. This paper introduces place-based digital storytelling as one such method.
Abstract
Motivation
Modern genomic breeding methods rely heavily on very large amounts of phenotyping and genotyping data, presenting new challenges in effective data management and integration. ...Recently, the size and complexity of datasets have increased significantly, with the result that data are often stored on multiple systems. As analyses of interest increasingly require aggregation of datasets from diverse sources, data exchange between disparate systems becomes a challenge.
Results
To facilitate interoperability among breeding applications, we present the public plant Breeding Application Programming Interface (BrAPI). BrAPI is a standardized web service API specification. The development of BrAPI is a collaborative, community-based initiative involving a growing global community of over a hundred participants representing several dozen institutions and companies. Development of such a standard is recognized as critical to a number of important large breeding system initiatives as a foundational technology. The focus of the first version of the API is on providing services for connecting systems and retrieving basic breeding data including germplasm, study, observation, and marker data. A number of BrAPI-enabled applications, termed BrAPPs, have been written, that take advantage of the emerging support of BrAPI by many databases.
Availability and implementation
More information on BrAPI, including links to the specification, test suites, BrAPPs, and sample implementations is available at https://brapi.org/. The BrAPI specification and the developer tools are provided as free and open source.
The effects of progressive global acidification on the shells of marine organisms is a topic of much current interest. Most studies on molluscan shell resistance to dissolution consider the carbonate ...mineral component, with less known about the protective role of the outer organic periostracum. Outer-shell resistance would seem especially important to gastropods living in carbonate-undersaturated and calcium-deficient estuarine waters that threaten shell dissolution and constrain CaCO3 production. We tested this prediction using gastropods from an acidified estuarine population (Neripteron violaceum) that form a clay shield outside the periostracum. Specifically, we aimed to show that the carbonate shell component lacks integrity, that the formation of the clay shield is directed by the organism, and that the clay shield functions to protect against shell dissolution. We found no evidence for any specific carbonate dissolution resistance strategy in the thin, predominantly aragonitic shells of these gastropods. Shield formation was directed by an ornamented periostracum which strongly bonded illite elements (e.g., Fe, Al and S), that become available through suspension in the water column. In unshielded individuals, CaCO3 erosion was initiated randomly across the shell (not age-related) and progressed rapidly when the periostracum was breached. A light reflectance technique showed qualitatively that shield consolidation is negatively-related to shell erosion. These findings support a conceptual framework for gastropod outer-shell responses to acidification that considers both environmental and evolutionary constraints on shell construction. We describe a novel strategy for shell protection against dissolution, highlighting the diversity of mechanisms available to gastropods facing extreme coastal acidification.
Display omitted
•Acidified estuaries compromise building and threaten dissolution of gastropods shells.•Periostracum of Neripteron snails directs formation of an outer shell clay shield.•Shield constructed of the mineral illite is tightly chemically-bonded to the periostracum.•The more reflective unshielded shells showed a greater rate of dissolution.•Ecological and evolutionary constraints on carbonate shell building predict outer protection.
Indentation fracture models of ductile machining in hard and brittle materials are critically appraised. Relations obtained in a seminal study for critical depths of cut below which fracture is ...suppressed are examined and amended. Limitations inherent in any such materials‐based analysis, in addition to uncertainties in empirical measurements of underpinning mechanical properties (modulus, hardness, toughness) and of threshold grinding depths, suggest that caution should be exercised in unconditional usage. Notwithstanding these limitations, the value of the indentation fracture methodology in placing ductile machining on a sound materials science footing is maintained.
This study uses a sector configuration of an ocean general circulation model to examine the sensitivity of circumpolar transport and meridional overturning to changes in Southern Ocean wind stress ...and global diapycnal mixing. At eddy-permitting, and finer, resolution, the sensitivity of circumpolar transport to forcing magnitude is drastically reduced. At sufficiently high resolution, there is little or no sensitivity of circumpolar transport to wind stress, even in the limit of no wind. In contrast, the meridional overturning circulation continues to vary with Southern Ocean wind stress, but with reduced sensitivity in the limit of high wind stress. Both the circumpolar transport and meridional overturning continue to vary with diapycnal diffusivity at all model resolutions. The circumpolar transport becomes less sensitive to changes in diapycnal diffusivity at higher resolution, although sensitivity always remains. In contrast, the overturning circulation is more sensitive to change in diapycnal diffusivity when the resolution is high enough to permit mesoscale eddies.
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