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Background: Teachers often rely on the use of open‐ended questions to assess students' conceptual understanding of assigned content. Particularly in the context of mathematics; teachers use these types of questions to gain insight into the processes and strategies adopted by students in solving mathematical problems beyond what is possible through more close‐ended problem types. While these types of problems are valuable to teachers, the variation in student responses to these questions makes it difficult, and time‐consuming, to evaluate and provide directed feedback. It is a well‐studied concept that feedback, both in terms of a numeric score but more importantly in the form of teacher‐authored comments, can help guide students as to how to improve, leading to increased learning. It is for this reason that teachers need better support not only for assessing students' work but also in providing meaningful and directed feedback to students. Objectives: In this paper, we seek to develop, evaluate, and examine machine learning models that support automated open response assessment and feedback. Methods: We build upon the prior research in the automatic assessment of student responses to open‐ended problems and introduce a novel approach that leverages student log data combined with machine learning and natural language processing methods. Utilizing sentence‐level semantic representations of student responses to open‐ended questions, we propose a collaborative filtering‐based approach to both predict student scores as well as recommend appropriate feedback messages for teachers to send to their students. Results and Conclusion: We find that our method outperforms previously published benchmarks across three different metrics for the task of predicting student performance. Through an error analysis, we identify several areas where future works may be able to improve upon our approach. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: Open‐ended questions are used by teachers in the domain of mathematics to assess their students understanding but automated support for these types of questions are limited in online learning platforms. Recent advancements in areas of machine learning and natural language processing have led to promising results in a range of domains and applications. What this paper adds: Emulating how teachers identify similar student answers can be used to build tools that support teachers in assessing and providing feedback to student open‐ended work. Implications for practice: Developing better automated supports can increase the amount of direct feedback students receive to guide their learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on empirical research that examines the mentoring experiences of minoritized postdocs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, the researchers conceptualized a framework to cultivate inclusive, supportive, and mutually beneficial mentoring relationships among faculty mentors or Principal Investigators (PIs) and postdocs. The paper begins with an introduction to the STEM postdoc landscape, reviews relevant literature, and leverages data from 31 STEM postdocs at a research-intensive university in the southeast United States to introduce a conceptual framework that sheds light on and expands our understanding of STEM faculty-postdoc mentoring. The paper concludes with practical implications for improving STEM postdoc mentoring in research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Family Group Conference (FGC) is grounded in a rights‐based framework, whereby children and their families have the right and responsibility to be primary decision‐makers when child protection issues arise, and the statutory agency has the responsibility to convene the entitled members of the family network to lead the decision‐making. A distinct core component of FGC—private family time (PFT)—allows families to discuss the information and formulate their responses and plans privately during conferencing. This paper describes how a large child welfare agency in the United States adapted PFT in two ways: (1) including a parent advocate (PA) and (2) abbreviating the amount of time allowed for this discussion. Given the lack of empirical research on the PFT component, this qualitative exploratory study sought to understand the functions and perceived impacts of PA‐supported PFT during initial child protective services (CPS) conferences at which decisions of child removal or placement were being contemplated. PFT served multiple beneficial functions and impacted families in several positive ways: families gained greater awareness of safety concerns, felt empowered and confident in the preferred safety and service plan, became increasingly engaged and involved in the case decision‐making process and ultimately felt less apprehensive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States is home to more than 60 million Americans with disabilities and more than 300,000 churches. Yet the relationships among these individuals and congregations is alternately described as encouraging or concerning—sometimes stellar, other times deeply disappointing. Although anecdotes have characterized much of these depictions, a growing body of research also focuses on this area. This research review addresses the current landscape of congregational participation and practices related to individuals with disabilities and their families. What is known about the participation of individuals with disabilities in relation to faith community life? What is known about the practices of local congregations in relation to individuals with disabilities? This paper highlights key findings, identifies gaps in the current literature, and concludes with recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates flexible demand systems for heterogeneous households in the United States and links the estimated parameters with an economy-wide model to assess their relative contributions to the social cost of regulation. We estimate elasticities for several final demand categories as well as labor-leisure elasticities that are important for calibrating the labor-leisure choice in the economy-wide model and find that estimated elasticities are relatively similar across regions but vary meaningfully by income. Using the estimated elasticities, we explore the implications of both the functional form and its parameterization in a simplified computable general equilibrium model for the social and distributional costs of illustrative policy scenarios. Model variants with less flexible consumer demand systems overestimate social costs across our entire range of scenarios. Furthermore, we find that parameterizing the model with elasticities that vary with household income is important for adequately characterizing the distributional implications of a policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past five decades in the United States, White women have breastfed at higher rates than Black women. While a small but growing body of social historical research has examined racial disparities in breastfeeding over time, empirical research, particularly quantitative research, has focused on single historical snapshots, unintentionally treating the persistent racial disparities in breastfeeding as a static phenomenon, rather than one with distinct social mechanisms at different points in time. Further, few studies on racial disparities in health deconstruct difference both within and across racial groups. But what if we thought about persistent racial disparities instead as discrete trends with distinct social mechanisms at different points in time? In a binary logistic regression of breastfeeding initiation rates from 1973 to 2015 using the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), I found that the persistent racial disparities were actually comprised of three distinct types of changing racial disparities: (1) increases in racial disparities that derive from improvements for Whites not captured by Blacks (1973–1982); (2) decreases in racial disparities that stem from improvements for Whites captured even more strongly by Blacks (1995–2006); and, (3) leveling off of racial disparities (2006–2015). Placing results of this quantitative analysis within the context of public policy and social movement history, I identify three distinct mechanisms that drive the different trends in racial disparities in breastfeeding. This paper contributes to the literature on motherhood, race, and health a more nuanced understanding of the social historical mechanisms that pattern breastfeeding, and more broadly, racial disparities in health. • From 1973 to 2015, White women breastfed at higher rates than Black women. • Three distinct types of disparities comprised persistent racial disparities in breastfeeding. • Public policy & social movements impact people differently based on social location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]