ABSTRACT
This paper presents the experiences of two STEM outreach specialists as they prepared two rural middle school teachers with limited STEM backgrounds to implement a 3-part grade level specific engineering design elective course at their schools. This work is part of an Innovative Experiences for Teachers and Students (ITEST) project designed to provide community-based engineering design experiences for underrepresented middle school students (grades 6-8) from rural N.C. The course engages students in authentic STEM design experiences situated in the advanced manufacturing industry in an effort to improve their STEM content knowledge and career awareness and their self-efficacy, identity and interest in STEM careers, particularly engineering. The outreach specialists experienced a number of challenges as they worked with the teachers, many of which were exacerbated by the on-going pandemic. In response to social distancing requirements imposed by COVID-19, the specialists adopted a just-in-time (JIT) approach to teacher professional development (PD) where the content, pace, and scheduling of PD sessions were based on each individual teacher's prior content knowledge, comfort level and work schedule. This paper focuses on the process of skill preparation of the middle school teachers in the execution of the 6th grade course in the 2020-21 school year. Additional aspects to be discussed include a sampling of best practices, an overview of lessons learned and implementation strategies during the second iteration of the 6th grade course and the first implementation of the 7th grade course during the 2021-22 school year. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
4-H youth development programs throughout the United States can be planned and delivered more effectively in their states by assessing demographic data and following research-based theories and models of positive youth development. A review of the research literature determined current youth development theories and models to effectively guide statewide 4-H program implementation. A state assessment was conducted for demographic areas of youth population age, race, socioeconomic status, health factors, child poverty (includes parent-guardian job status at the onset of COVID), and household structure. The Ohio 4-H Youth Development program utilized the demographic data to establish goals of becoming more diverse and inclusive. In addition, demographic data points help for targeted recruitment of youth to include families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, household structures, and those with health risks. Finally, implications and conclusions are presented to serve as an illustration for other states to advance their state 4-H programs and practices.
ABSTRACT
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, universities were required to shift teaching online in 2020, including exams. This rapid move required many changes and compromises to be made in order for students to take their exams remotely. We report on the experiences of running online exams for a large CS1 course at an Australian university, describing the changes made to the online learning platform to support this task, as well as the authoring of the exam and the support provided to students. Several clear instances of academic misconduct are presented to illustrate some of the issues endemic to online exams. Broadly, this approach to examination was a success that we plan to continue in future years, and we reflect on how the approach can be improved. © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has driven ever-greater demand for tools which enable efficient exploration of biomedical literature. Although semi-structured information resulting from concept recognition and detection of the defining elements of clinical trials (e.g. PICO criteria) has been commonly used to support literature search, the contributions of this abstraction remain poorly understood. In this study, we compare the results retrieved by a standard search engine with those filtered using clinically-relevant concepts and their relations. Most importantly, with an analysis based on the TREC-COVID dataset, we find that the relational concept selection filters the original retrieved collection in a way that decreases the proportion of unjudged documents and increases the precision, which means that the user is likely to be exposed to a larger number of relevant documents. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
We present COVID-SEE, a system for medical literature discovery based on the concept of information exploration, which builds on several distinct text analysis and natural language processing methods to structure and organise information in publications, and augments search through a visual overview of a collection enabling exploration to identify key articles of interest. We developed this system over COVID-19 literature to help medical professionals and researchers explore the literature evidence, and improve findability of relevant information. COVID-SEE is available at http://covid-see.com. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 pandemic, marginalized populations are at a higher risk for health complications. While this virus is capable of infecting anyone, existing health inequities in the United States have resulted in a much larger impact on marginalized communities. It is vital that healthcare providers, policymakers, and other decision makers are aware of the increased risks for vulnerable populations. LGBTQ+ individuals are considered a vulnerable population and have increased risks of severe complications from COVID-19. Currently, there still remains a gap in medical providers’ knowledge of the specific medical challenges that LGBTQ+ individuals face. Scientific data on how LGBTQ+ people are susceptible to more severe complications from a COVID-19 infection will hopefully supplement healthcare provider’s understanding of the challenges this community faces during this health crisis. In turn, these efforts can increase the likelihood that LGBTQ+ individuals receive affirming and competent care. At the same time, the impact of these efforts to increase health equity and healthcare services for LGBTQ+ individuals during the COVID-19 crisis must be evaluated to determine effectiveness and potential for scalability in the United States and across the world. © 2021. Common Ground Research Networks, Danielle Pacheco, Trent Baldwin, Katherine E. Soule, Published by Common Ground Research Networks. Attribution License (CC BY 4.0). Permissions: cgscholar.com/cg_support. All Rights Reserved.