Search

Flipped instruction--the replacement of traditional in-class lecture with at-home, multimedia instruction--continues to grow in popularity. The existing evidence to support its effectiveness in K-12 science classrooms lacks substantial quantitative data to warrant such an enthusiastic embrace. The objective of this study was to clarify the relationship between flipped instruction and student learning in a high school classroom context, as well as to understand the interactions between students and technological tools that took place during flipped instruction. This quasi-experimental mixed-methods study compared learning outcomes in high school Biology students (N= 303) who experienced a flipped lesson to those of peers who experienced a control, traditional lecture-based lesson on the same topic. Average gains from pre-test to post-test were significantly higher for flipped students. Flipped students' completion of the out-of-class online learning activity was particularly important. Interview data suggest that the multimedia nature of the online activity, as well as its convenience, contributed the significant gains of flipped students.

This mixed-methods study examines the implications of using the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) to design an elementary science lesson grounded in four virtual reality (VR) videos. Given the need for additional understandings of how elementary science educators can infuse cultural relevance alongside content development, this study illuminates how designing for CRP can utilize VR as a pedagogical platform to bridge science instruction and students' lived experiences. Using pre- and post-attitudinal surveys (n=145) and post interviews (n=48), we examined students' perceptions of a single virtual reality lesson about energy and food chains. The data suggest that learning through a CRP-based VR design (CRP-VR) enhanced students? perception of the connection between the science content and its socio-political application to social justice issues. Implications highlight the potential of leveraging VR technology as a means to provide science instruction that explicitly affords students the opportunity to connect content learning and social action.

Mentoring relationships in academia have traditionally been described as a dyad between a mentor and a mentee. The mentor provides the mentee with both technical and psychosocial support to move toward obtaining their Ph.D. or gaining tenure and promotion. While there is an embedded assumption that mentoring is best suited when people of common background support each other, scholars must consider the impact of mentoring across differences. Given the lack of diversity among senior faculty members in science education, and given the increasing diversity represented among graduate students and early career scholars in science education, inevitably mentoring relationships will be formed across differences in identities (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability). In our essay, we focus on two focal points: we explore those aspects of mentoring relationships that research suggests are critical to the success of relationships built across differences, foregrounding lessons science education researchers can take from this literature and arguing that it is too much to expect one individual mentor to provide to any given mentee. Next, we propose a brokering framework, leveraging technological advances, to work toward more transformative mentoring outcomes at scale, particularly when mentoring across differences.

Although the population of science teachers in the US lacks diversity, the technology used to teach science should be diverse and culturally connected. Culturally relevant frameworks for science call for science teaching to be situated in meaningful contexts. This study calls for the integration of CRP and situated cognition perspectives as a means of designing pedagogically effective virtual reality. This mixed-methods study explored N = 444 students changes in attitudes after experiencing VR lessons on an attitude survey and qualitative short answers. We found that all students who used the VR improved their attitudes towards science. We also found that students who used the CRP designed VR developed a conscious and politically aware application of science. The results suggest that educational technology should carefully consider how using CRP-based approaches can have both cognitive and cultural implications of students' learning.

Ocean Acidification (OA) is an emerging environmental issue that is still largely unknown to the public and in its infancy in terms of educational strategies. OA teaching material should address the specific challenges that educators face while building learners' understanding of OA. The objective of this study is two-fold. First, we identified the barriers to teaching OA as experienced by formal and informal marine educators. Second, we provided educators an opportunity to experience virtual reality and discuss how it could serve as a tool for face-to-face and distance learning to address the identified challenges. The findings shed light on four overarching themes of challenges to teaching OA: lack of science literacy, unprepared education field, complex and invisible nature of OA and lack of personal connection with the ocean. Marine educators consider empowerment, perspective-taking and visualization as the three principal avenues through which virtual reality may contribute to mitigating the challenges to teaching OA.

Virtual reality (VR) in science classrooms has the potential to enhance students' learning by bridging the knowledge in the learners' communities with science instruction. When virtual environments reflect students' culture, it has the potential to influence their attitudes toward the value of science in their community. This qualitative study examined student reflections on learning science using virtual reality software with embedded culturally relevant design elements. After learning how to use this technology, fifty-eight 4th and 5th grade students from urban schools in Northern California were interviewed about their experiences learning science. Students explained how learning science through virtual worlds influenced their perceptions of how science mattered in their lives. Students explained the influence of CRP-VR in impacting how they saw the value of science in their communities. Implications of this research highlight the need for educational stakeholders to consider the relevance of integrating culturally relevant perspectives in VR technologies. This approach has the potential to position learners and their communities as bearers of scientific knowledge and thus providing a more dynamic learning experience.

Science achievement gaps exhibit racial disparities starting in primary grades and have been shown to persist through middle and high school. In turn, increasing positive attitudes toward science have been shown as one factor that affects academic achievement and motivation among K-12 students. Exploring novel ways that technology can influence diverse students' attitudes toward science, and the design elements pertinent therein, is thus one prominent goal toward achieving science education for all. Leveraging the immersive nature of Virtual Reality 360 videos, we present a design-based research iteration testing how a novel technology-enhanced learning experience influenced close to 400 urban elementary students' attitudes toward science. Using a two-way MANCOVA analysis, the data support that our design iteration emphasizing "context-specific learning" can prime students that do not see science as relevant to them to change these attitudes in significantly positive ways. Implications are discussed around relationality, technology use in urban schools, and local contexts as learning resources.

The development of three-dimensional learning among all K-12 student demographics remains a prominent goal for the field of science education. However, substantial research in science teacher education for urban populations showcases hurdles to overcome in order to achieve this goal, particularly for elementary teachers. Research shows that urban elementary teachers are often ill-prepared to develop a type of science pedagogy responsive to students' learning needs. The fidelity of such pedagogies that these teachers adhere to when trying to implement such a requested content-relationality between these populations and how their local contexts can be used as sites to learn science in relevant ways are often not fully realized, as well. Given that science achievement gaps exhibit racial disparities starting in primary grades and attitudes toward science have been shown to affect academic achievement and motivation, we argue that one way to ameliorate, in at least an incremental way, this disparity is to design novel learning experiences to prime students to see the relevancy of science in their local contexts before such three-dimensional designed learning is set to occur. In this research, we leveraged the immersive nature of Virtual Reality 360 videos and present a design-based research iteration testing how this novel technologically enhanced learning experience may have influenced close to 400 urban elementary students' attitudes toward science around those attitudes labeled as "behavioral beliefs" by the field. Using a concurrent, convergent mixed-methods design with a two-way multivariate analysis of covariance quantitative data set triangulated with students' qualitative self-reports that were transformed into quantitative preponderances in graphic form, the data support that our design iteration emphasizing the importance of "context" as a design focus can prime students who struggle to see science as relevant to change their attitudes. Implications are discussed around relationality, novel technological affordances, and the use of local contexts as learning resources.

Previous studies on the differences in gut microbiota between exclusively breastfed (EBF) and non-EBF infants have provided highly variable results. Here we perform a meta-analysis of seven microbiome studies (1825 stool samples from 684 infants) to compare the gut microbiota of non-EBF and EBF infants across populations. In the first 6 months of life, gut bacterial diversity, microbiota age, relative abundances of Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes, and predicted microbial pathways related to carbohydrate metabolism are consistently higher in non-EBF than in EBF infants, whereas relative abundances of pathways related to lipid metabolism, vitamin metabolism, and detoxification are lower. Variation in predicted microbial pathways associated with non-EBF infants is larger among infants born by Caesarian section than among those vaginally delivered. Longer duration of exclusive breastfeeding is associated with reduced diarrhea-related gut microbiota dysbiosis. Furthermore, differences in gut microbiota between EBF and non-EBF infants persist after 6 months of age. Our findings elucidate some mechanisms of short and long-term benefits of exclusive breastfeeding across different populations.

BackgroundExclusive breastfeeding reduces the rate of postnatal human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission compared to nonexclusive breastfeeding; however, the mechanisms of this protection are unknown. Our study aimed to interrogate the mechanisms underlying the protective effect of exclusive breastfeeding.MethodsWe performed a prospective, longitudinal study of infants from a high-HIV-prevalence, low-income setting in South Africa. We evaluated the role of any non-breast milk feeds, excluding prescribed medicines on stool microbial communities via 16S rRNA gene sequencing, peripheral T-cell activation via flow cytometry, and buccal mucosal gene expression via quantitative polymerase chain reaction assay.ResultsA total of 155 infants were recruited at birth with mean gestational age of 38.9 weeks and mean birth weight of 3.2 kg. All infants were exclusively breastfed (EBF) at birth, but only 43.5% and 20% remained EBF at 6 or 14 weeks of age, respectively. We observed lower stool microbial diversity and distinct microbial composition in exclusively breastfed infants. These microbial communities, and the relative abundance of key taxa, were correlated with peripheral CD4+ T-cell activation, which was lower in EBF infants. In the oral mucosa, gene expression of chemokine and chemokine receptors involved in recruitment of HIV target cells to tissues, as well as epithelial cytoskeletal proteins, was lower in EBF infants.ConclusionsThese data suggest that nonexclusive breastfeeding alters the gut microbiota, increasing T-cell activation and, potentially, mucosal recruitment of HIV target cells. Study findings highlight a biologically plausible mechanistic explanation for the reduced postnatal HIV transmission observed in EBF infants.

There is a paucity of in vivo studies that investigate the safety and efficacy of temporomandibular joint (TMJ) tissue regeneration approaches, in part due to the lack of established animal models. Review of disease models for study of TMJ is presented herein with an attempt to identify relevant preclinical animal models for TMJ tissue engineering, with emphasis on the disc and condyle. Although degenerative joint disease models have been mainly performed on mice, rats, and rabbits, preclinical regeneration approaches must employ larger animal species. There remains controversy regarding the preferred choice of larger animal models between the farm pig, minipig, goat, sheep, and dog. The advantages of the pig and minipig include their well characterized anatomy, physiology, and tissue properties. The advantages of the sheep and goat are their easier surgical access, low cost per animal, and its high tissue availability. The advantage of the dog is that the joint space is confined, so migration of interpositional devices should be less likely. However, each species has limitations as well. For example, the farm pig has continuous growth until about 18 months of age, and difficult surgical access due to the zygomatic arch covering the lateral aspect of joint. The minipig is not widely available and somewhat costly. The sheep and the goat are herbivores, and their TMJs mainly function in translation. The dog is a carnivore, and the TMJ is a hinge joint that can only rotate. Although no species provides the gold standard for all preclinical TMJ tissue engineering approaches, the goat and sheep have emerged as the leading options, with the minipig as the choice when cost is less of a limitation; and with the dog and farm pig serving as acceptable alternatives. Finally, naturally occurring TMJ disorders in domestic species may be harnessed on a preclinical trial basis as a clinically relevant platform for translation.

This article reports on urban elementary teachers' understandings of cultural relevancy and the practices they enacted after a professional development on culturally relevant education (CRE) and cognitive apprenticeship. Focus group interviews support that participating teachers understood some principles of CRE but did not always match the theory to practice before our professional development. After training, video data of teaching support that this divide was mediated. These findings point to a need to engage in explicit theory-to-practice research about cultural relevancy in urban science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teaching. Implications are provided relating to teachers planning lessons purposefully to infuse cultural relevancy into their STEM classrooms.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the verbal short-term memory skills of children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS) in 2 experiments, focusing on the influence of phonological and semantic similarity. Method: Participants were 42 CWS and 42 CWNS between the ages of 3;0 and 5;11 (years;months). In Experiment 1, children completed the phonological similarity task, in which they listened to lists of phonologically similar and dissimilar words and then repeated them when signaled to do so. In Experiment 2, children completed another forward span task, the semantic category task, which is similar to the phonological similarity task, except that it consisted of lists of semantically homogeneous and heterogeneous words. Main dependent variables were cumulative memory span, proportion of errors by type, and speech reaction time (SRT) for correct responses. Results: The CWS exhibited significantly shorter memory spans for phonologically dissimilar words and were less affected by the phonological qualities of the words than the CWNS in Experiment 1, based on the findings of both between-groups and within-group analyses. In Experiment 2, although the groups did not differ in their performance in either condition, within-group analyses revealed that the CWNS benefitted from semantic similarity, whereas the CWS did not. The between-groups difference in absolute difference scores, however, did not reach significance. The CWS produced more omissions and false alarms than the CWNS in both experiments, but the 2 groups of children were otherwise comparable in SRT, although the CWS exhibited overall faster SRT than the CWNS in Experiment 2. Conclusions: Verbal short-term memory is one domain-general cognitive process in which CWS display weakness relative to typically fluent peers. These weaknesses are likely due, in part, to differences in phonological and, perhaps, semantic processing of words to aid memory.

Zooplankton play an integral role as indicators of water quality in freshwater ecosystems, but exhibit substantial variability in their density and community composition over space and time. This variability in zooplankton community structure may be driven by multiple factors, including taxon-specific migration behavior in response to environmental conditions. Many studies have highlighted substantial variability in zooplankton communities across spatial and temporal scales, but the relative importance of space vs. time in structuring zooplankton community dynamics is less understood. In this study, we quantified spatial (a littoral vs. a pelagic site) and temporal (hours to years) variability in zooplankton community structure in a eutrophic reservoir in southwestern Virginia, USA. We found that zooplankton community structure was more variable among sampling dates over 3 years than among sites or hours of the day, which was associated with differences in water temperature, chlorophyll a , and nutrient concentrations. Additionally, we observed high variability in zooplankton migration behavior, though a slightly greater magnitude of DHM vs. DVM during each sampling date, likely due to changing environmental conditions. Ultimately, our work underscores the need to continually integrate spatial and temporal monitoring to understand patterns of zooplankton community structure and behavior in freshwater ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]