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Most of us assume that public schools in America are unequal--that the quality of the education varies with the location of the school and that as a result, children learn more in the schools that serve mostly rich, white kids than in the schools serving mostly poor, black kids. But it turns out that this common assumption is misplaced. As Douglas B. Downey shows in "How Schools Really Matter," achievement gaps have very little to do with what goes on in our schools. Not only do schools not exacerbate inequality in skills, they actually help to level the playing field. The real sources of achievement gaps are elsewhere. A close look at the testing data in seasonal patterns bears this out. It turns out that achievement gaps in reading skills between high- and low-income children are nearly entirely formed prior to kindergarten, and schools do more to reduce them than increase them. And when gaps do increase, they tend to do so during summers, not during school periods. So why do both liberal and conservative politicians strongly advocate for school reform, arguing that the poor quality of schools serving disadvantaged children is an important contributor to inequality? It is because discussing the broader social and economic reforms necessary for really reducing inequality has become too challenging and polarizing--it is just easier to talk about fixing schools. Of course, there are differences that schools can make, and Downey outlines the kinds of reforms that make sense given what we know about inequality outside of schools, including more school exposure, increased standardization, and better and fairer school and teacher measurements. ? "How Schools Really Matter" offers a firm rebuke to those who find nothing but fault in our schools, which are doing a much better than job than we give them credit for. It should also be a call to arms for educators and policymakers: the bottom line is that if we are serious about reducing inequality, we are going to have to fight some battles that are bigger than school reform--battles against the social inequality that is reflected within, rather than generated by--our public school system.

Designed around a practical "practice-what-you-teach" approach to methods instruction, "Your Science Classroom: Becoming an Elementary/Middle School Science Teacher" is based on current constructivist philosophy, organized around 5E inquiry, and guided by the National Science Education Teaching Standards. Written in a reader-friendly style, the book prepares instructors to teach science in ways that foster positive attitudes, engagement, and meaningful science learning for themselves and their students. Appended are: (1) How Do I Write an Instructional Objective?; (2) Safety in Your Science Classroom; and (3) Science Inquiry Learning Centers.

Showcasing the "Downey Walk-Through"--a method developed over a 40-year period, tested and refined in real-world schools and classrooms, and described in the pioneering book, "The Three-Minute Classroom Walk-Through," this innovative multimedia presentation provides trainers and staff developers with a complete resource answering the questions most important to principals: (1) How do our teachers align their instructional practices with the district curriculum? (2) How are they using research-based "best practices"? (3) How are they choosing the instructional strategies that will impact student achievement? and (4) How do I motivate staff to be reflective in their practice and personally accountable for their teaching decisions? Highlighting the reflective practice component that is both unique and integral to the Downey Walk-Through model, "The Multimedia Kit for The Three-Minute Classroom Walk-Through" includes: (1) The pioneering book, "The Three-Minute Classroom Walk-Through" providing the foundational framework for understanding the model as well as the steps and processes for adopting and using it; (2) A 130-minute, content-rich VHS video that features author Carolyn Downey demonstrating in schools, with both administrators and teachers, exactly what the model looks like in practice. This comprehensive video shows teachers in their own classrooms, the principal-teacher conversations that follow, administrator reflection practices, and additional interviews with the contributing authors of the book; (3) A companion DVD with navigational menus and bullets for easy stop-and-search control of the video content; (4) A companion CD-ROM containing all the overheads; and (5) A step-by-step facilitator's guide that connects the core content of the book to the video, DVD and CD-ROM. Included in the guide are video, DVD, and CD-ROM segment prompts, workshop outlines, extended workshop activities, discussion questions, and major points of emphasis. This comprehensive all-in-one package is an indispensable resource for anyone planning, designing, or conducting training on the powerful new classroom walk-through model, including staff developers, district and school administrators, mentor principals, and turnkey staff. After a preface, introduction, chapter-by-chapter study guide for "The Three-Minute Classroom Walk-Through," and "Welcome and Seminar Series Starter," this book is divided into the following 10 chapters: (1) Understanding the Rationale Underlying the Walk-Through and Reflective Approach; (2) Conducting the Walk-Through Observation: A Five-Step Process; (3) Moving Staff to Reflective Inquiry: Focusing on the Reflective Question and Conversation; (4) Constructing a Taxonomy of Reflective Questions and Their Use in the Classroom Walk-Through; (5) Establishing Logistical Procedures for Implementing the Walk-Through Process; (6) Cultivating the Culture; (7) Using the Walk-Through Process to Promote a Collaborative, Reflective Culture; (8) Determining Whether Walk-Throughs Are the Right Stuff; (9) Understanding the Walk-Through as a Discursive Practice; and (10) Linking the Walk-Through Process to a Model of Teacher Growth. The book concludes with: Ways to Organize the Seminars; Sample Agendas; and Seminar Series Evaluation Sample.

For years, the classic supervision model has frustrated both principals and teachers by fostering superior-subordinate relationships, focusing on teacher conformity rather than growth, or producing checklist data that is irrelevant to the curriculum. This book offers a practical, time-saving alternative that impacts student achievement by cultivating self-reliant teachers who are continuously improving their practice. Easy to understand and adopt, this method will answer the questions most important to principals: (1) Is the work of my teachers aligned with the district curriculum? (2) Are my teachers using research-based "best practices"? (3) Are they choosing the instructional strategies that will promote student achievement? Also known as the Downey Walk-through, the method presented in this book has been developed over a 40-year period, tested and refined in actual teaching environments, and taught internationally. Following a preface, this book is divided into 10 sections: (1) Understanding the Rationale Underlying the Walk-Through and Reflective Practice Approach; (2) Conducting the Walk-Through Observation: A Five-Step Process; (3) Moving Staff to Reflective Inquiry: Focusing on the Reflective Question and Conversation; (4) Constructing a Taxonomy of Reflective Questions and Their Use in the Classroom Walk-Through; (5) Establishing Logistical Procedures for Implementing the Walk-Through Process; (6) Cultivating the Culture: Effectuating Change that Works; (7) Using the Walk-Through Process to Promote a Collaborative, Reflective Culture; (8) Determining Whether Walk-Throughs Are the Right Stuff; (9) Understanding the Walk-Through as a Discursive Practice; and (10) Linking the Walk-Through Process to a Model of Teacher Growth. An index concludes the book.

This paper is one of a series of ERIC/ChESS publications intended to give practical tips on teaching various topics and disciplines in the precollege social studies curriculum. The tips offered in this publication, written by seven authors, are intended to help teacheres deal with both content and teaching strategies in American history. Each of five actual lessons provides examples of how to incorporate nontraditional subject matter using a structured inquiry approach into the regular American history curriculum. The structured inquiry approach requires the teacher, rather than the student, to select the content of the lesson and to predetermine the structure of the learning activity. The teacher does not have final answers but has a framework in which most student inquiry can occur. Chapter 1 introduces the work by examining reasons and processes for teaching history. Chapter 2 uses a role-play activity for examining the social history of American industrialization. Chapter 3 presents an interdisciplinary social science approach to the study of the American Revolution. Chapter 4 uses comparative data from other societies to illuminate the issue of American slavery. Chapter 5 describes several methods for active inquiry into local history. Chapter 6 provides short activities for developing information search skills. Chapter 7 contains an annotated list of American history resources including games, audiovisual materials, collections of documents, journals, and teacher resources. (Author/DE)

This book presents a wide array of sophisticated problem-solving tools and shows how to use them in a humanizing way that involves all stakeholders in the process. Chapter 1 develops the rationale for educational stakeholders to consider quality tools. Chapter 2 highlights three quality group-process tools--brainstorming, the nominal group technique, and the focus group. The third chapter discusses the seven basic quality tools, often referred to as statistical process control (SPC) quality tools: histograms, pareto charts, scatter diagrams, run charts, control charts, cause-and-effect diagrams, and flowcharts. Chapter 4 introduces seven additional quality tools that move cross-functional groups into the beginning stages of planning and management--affinity diagrams, tree diagrams, matrices, interrelationship diagraphs, radar diagrams, force-field analysis, and benchmarking. Action planning, activity networks, the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, and Hoshin planning are integrative quality tools presented in the fifth chapter. The final chapter offers suggestions and reasons for getting started. Key terms and concepts are defined at the end of each chapter. Seventy figures are included. (LMI)

Attempts to implement W. Edwards Deming's Total Quality Management (TQM) principles in education and transform school systems into world-class, quality learning environments have proved somewhat disappointing. This book asserts that educators need a way to translate the ideas about corporate quality for adaptation and use in schools. The "missing link" is offered in the description and discussion of Total Quality Education (TQE) presented in this document. The book first clarifies what quality is and who the customers and suppliers in education are. It then presents a Quality Fit Framework, which describes how quality can be infused into school systems. This framework is built on three basic leverage points--shared purpose, structure, and dynamic relationships--that form the basis for applying 18 common core premises of quality to school organizations. Chapter 1 addresses the issue of the international educational challenge and serves as a primer for defining quality and various quality premises. Chapters 2-4 define each of the three leverage points and present strategies for carrying them out in the school system. Chapter 5 presents suggestions for making significant differences in the lives of today's youth. Sixty-two figures are included. Finally, chapter 6 examines the criticisms of TQM in education. (LMI)

This examination of the condition of history instruction in the public schools offers chapters on four major areas of concern to educators: (1) the status of history in the schools; (2) problem areas in the history curriculum; (3) students, methods, and instructional materials; and (4) preparation and certification of history teachers. In the first chapter, Matthew T. Downey reviews the status of history in the curriculum as it has evolved over the years and concludes that although history remains a dominant subject in the social studies curriculum, patterns of enrollment and course offerings change from time to time. In Chapter 2, Douglas D. Alder and Matthew T. Downey discuss major challenges facing those concerned with history in the schools, especially the importance of restoring world history to its former place in the high school curriculum and U.S. history to the junior high curriculum. In chapter 3, Hazel W. Hertzberg recommends that future improvement in the teaching of history will be based on strengthening the link between purpose, content, method, and materials of instruction with each other and with the developmental needs and capacities of students. The chapter then discusses aspects of examining change through time, characteristics of historical inquiry, research on adolescent conceptualization of historical time, the value of active participatory learning, and the need for better materials. In the final chapter, Clair W. Keller presents recommendations for teacher preparation, certification, inservice education, and master's degree requirements. (LH)

Almost all patients with stage IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have diffusely metastatic disease, and therefore, the standard of care for NSCLC is chemotherapy or palliative care. A small percentage of patients with newly diagnosed and untreated stage IV disease are found to have a solitary synchronous site of extrathoracic disease, and a small number of patients who have undergone curative resections of intrathoracic disease experience metachronous solitary extrathoracic recurrences. There have been retrospective case reports or limited series that suggest that some such patients may be effectively treated by resection of both the primary tumor and the metastasis. Most of these studies have reported patients with cerebral or adrenal metastases, although there are reports describing the surgical management of metastases to the small bowel, spleen, skeletal muscle, and bone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with challenges in relation to interpretation of requirements, issues with build and deployment and excessive integration defects, this paper examines how a software team propose using a novel combination of Covey's ‘First Things First' principle and Cockburn's Methodology Shaping, as a potential solution to examine their current process and define a new set of working conventions which will address these issues. Keywords: Methodology, software, agile, time-management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Threat management in drinking water distribution systems involves real-time characterization of any contaminant source and plume, design of control strategies, and design of incremental data sampling schedules. This requires dynamic integration of time-varying measurements along with analytical modules that include simulation models, adaptive sampling procedures, and optimization methods. These modules are compute-intensive, requiring multi-level parallel processing via computer clusters. Since real-time responses are critical, the computational needs must also be adaptively matched with available resources. This requires a software system to facilitate this integration via a high-performance computing architecture such that the measurement system, the analytical modules and the computing resources can mutually adapt and steer each other. This paper describes the development of such an adaptive cyberinfrastructure system facilitated by a dynamic workflow design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will discuss recent work of the authors (Downey, Greenberg and Weber [8] and Downey and Greenberg [6, 7]) devoted to understanding some new naturally definable degree classes which capture the dynamics of various natural constructions arising from disparate areas of classical computability theory. It is quite rare in computability theory to find a single class of degrees which capture precisely the underlying dynamics of a wide class of apparently similar constructions, demonstrating that they all give the same class of degrees. A good example of this phenomenon is work pioneered by Martin [22] who identified the high c.e. degrees as the ones arising from dense simple, maximal, hh-simple and other similar kinds of c.e. sets constructions. Another example would be the example of the promptly simple degrees by Ambos-Spies, Jockusch, Shore and Soare [2]. Another more recent example of current great interest is the class of K-trivial reals of Downey, Hirscheldt, Nies and Stephan [5], and Nies [23, 24]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a system for dynamic intraoperative prostate brachytherapy using 3D ultrasound guidance with robot assistance. The system consists of 3D transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) imaging, a robot and software for prostate segmentation, 3D dose planning, oblique needle segmentation and tracking, seed segmentation, and dynamic re-planning and verification. The needle targeting accuracy of the system was 0.79 mm ± 0.32 mm in a phantom study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter focuses on the coverage of the 2003 Iraq War by the press in Great Britain. The author analyzes the reporting of the conflict by seven national newspapers during a key week of this low point in support for war. Different discourse positions could be found within the same newspaper during the Iraq crisis. This is indicative in itself of both crisis and flux in the mass media public sphere concerning the then impending invasion of Iraq. The degree of dissent from the pro-war position of the British government and official opposition poses an interesting but welcome problem for critical media researchers. It has become the received wisdom among critical media scholars that the mainstream media generally act as handmaidens to the public relations state in the manufacture of consent. The relationship between media dissent and popular dissent is, of course, complex and multi-causal, and requires, ideally, an holistic approach, both to media and to broader social and cultural change.

The regulation of telomerase activity is likely to be a complex issue, involving the transcriptional activity of the telomerase RNA component gene, (hTR) and the telomerase catalytic component gene (hTRT), as well as the interaction of telomerase with other telomere-associated proteins (1-7), (see Fig. 1). The use of telomerase as a diagnostic marker and target for cancer therapy relies on the development of reliable assays and technologies to detect telomeres and telomerase expression (8-14), (Table 1). Molecular techniques can be roughly broken down into two groups: lysate analysis and in situ analysis (10,15). With lysate methods, tumor biopsies are homogenized and the spatial relationships between tumor cells are destroyed (Southern blot analysis and polymerase chain reaction [PCR]). This leads to a loss of information on heterogeneity and small subpopulations and presents an averaging of changes. How ever, quantitation can be simpler and more accurate than in situ approaches. In comparison, in situ techniques, such as RNA in situ hybridization (ISH), allow visualization of gene expression in individual cells within their histological context (10,11,16,17). This is an important issue in examining the role of telomerase in the development of immortal clones of cancer cells from a telomerase-negative normal tissue. Also, for telomerase and telomerase component genes to be useful biomarkers for disease or as a therapeutic targets, differential expression is required between normal and cancerous tissue (11). However, in both normal and cancerous tissue, admixture of cell types may confound interpretation of many assays. The in situ approach described here is ideally placed to solve this problem (10,11). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Saskatchewan has a publicly funded health system. Within this system, Saskatchewan Health, a provincial government department, and 32 district health boards provide health services to the citizens of Saskatchewan. With funding from Saskatchewan Health, the district boards plan and deliver most services to people within their geographic jurisdictions based on the needs of their residents. Saskatchewan Health coordinates province-wide programs such as the Prescription Drug Plan and physician services. In almost all of the provincially funded programs, residents of the province enjoy universal health insurance. There is no eligibility distinction based on socioeconomic status. As a by-product of these universal health care programs, Saskatchewan Health has been accumulating a very large amount of health care information in computerized databases over a number of years.

This paper presents the design and implementation of Lachesis, a job scheduler for the Cray T3E. Lachesis was developed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in an attempt to correct some problems with the scheduling system Cray provides with the T3E. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to develop and test a multivariate, multidimensional exploratory model of successful and unsuccessful contraceptive use. Data were provided by 200 sexually active females, including abortion patients, high risk pregnancy patients, infertile females, and child-free females. Information was collected in the following areas: sociodemographics; contraceptive knowledge and use; psychosexual development; personality (Cattell's 16 Personality Factor Inventory); and sex roles. The findings of the study lead to two major conclusions which have both theoretical and clinical importance. First, the phenomenon of successful contraceptive use should be viewed in a multidimensional context--education in itself is not sufficient. Second, early sexual socialization and education, most often in the family setting, is important in the development of sexually aware and responsible individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on health problems which affect large number of women or for which it is difficult to get reliable information elsewhere. It includes breast cancer and breast problems, diabetes, endometriosis, abnormal uterine bleeding and many other problems. Pelvic examination should include an examination of external genitals, an internal exam using a speculum, a bimanual internal examination. During any physical exam, a practitioner should take the time to explain exactly what he is doing and why. This enables to learn more about body. When examining the vulva, the practitioner should first check visually for irritations, discoloration, swelling, bumps, skin lesions, size and adhesions of the clitoris, hair distribution, lice and unusual vaginal discharge. If tests show that an sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, syphilis is responsible for the infection, one get's oral or injected antibiotics. For mild cervicitis caused by other infections or injury, physicians usually prescribe vaginal creams containing sulfa, antibiotics or iodine based gels. For more severe cases, some physicians recommend cryosurgery or electrocautery. While these treatments work well when all other methods have failed, it should be used only as a last resort, as they can be painful and it will take about six weeks for cervix to return to normal.

A common step in cloning experiments is the purification of DNA fragments prior to ligation. Often, both the insert and vector DNA fragments will be derived from restriction endonuclease digests and, thus, will be mixed with enzymes, salts, and possibly other DNA fragments that may inhibit the ensuing ligation reaction. A simple solution to this problem is to purify the DNA fragments of interest. This often involves agarose gel electrophoresis to separate mixtures of DNA fragments, followed by extraction of the DNA fragment of interest from the gel. The importance of this step is obvious from the fact that every vendor of molecular-biology products produces a gel extraction kit. Most of these kits utilize a chaotropic agent, such as sodium iodide, to destabilize the agarose gel. The DNA is subsequently bound to a substrate (e.g., an anionic resin) and washed to remove impurities prior to elution of the DNA from the substrate. Other methods include hot phenol extraction of the DNA from the gel. The use of phenol is best avoided if possible because of safety and waste disposal concerns. Presented here are two alternative techniques that avoid these concerns, do not require the purchase of a specialized kit, and are simple to perform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]