7696 research outputs found
Sort by
Review: “Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction or Socialist Realism? Vladislav Todorov’s Zift, Translated from Bulgarian by Joseph Benatov
No full text
Review: A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War
No full text
Common-sense teaching for the 2020s: Ungrading in response to covid-19 and beyond
No full textConventional letter- or number-based grading systems, though ubiquitous at all levels of education, do not optimize the learning experience. The philosophy of “ungrading” includes a variety of approaches that decenter or even remove numeric or letter scoring of student work in favor of descriptive feedback, opportunities for revision, self-assessment and reflection, and assessment toward mastery. This paper presents one of the few published descriptions of the use of ungrading approaches in geoscience courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. We showcase four approaches, detailing the courses and ungrading structures used, positive outcomes and challenges, and tools that might allow others to apply these methods. We describe (a) mastery and specifications grading, chosen to promote mastery of course materials in mid- and upper-level courses for college majors; (b) labor-based grading used to promote depth of student learning by focusing on revision; (c) collaborative grading utilizing self-assessment and reflection chosen to promote meta-cognition and growth mindset; and, (d) partial ungrading as a means to begin the ungrading process. Importantly, our experiences have led us to recognize the equity that ungrading approaches create, enabling students from different backgrounds, including students of color and disabled students, to find stronger support and build greater competence and confidence in geoscience classes
From Rumblings to Roar: Racial Violence, Historical Justice and the Changing Public History of Slavery in the United States
No full textRenee C. Romano, in Chapter 4, examines the evolution and challenge of representing the violence of slavery in the United States in public history. Drawing on a variety of sources, she explores both the current state of the public history of slavery in the United States and the challenges of telling the truth about slavery and its legacies. In doing so, she joins the conversation as to why recent racial violence has sparked change in the way public history sites deal with slavery. To adequately answer that question, Romano relates the need to contextualize debates about slavery within a politics of historical justice that predates 2015, the year when a white supremacist murdered several Blacks in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. She also explores the contemporary political movement through the lens of historical justice. Romano argues that current interventions fall into three categories: battles to dismantle pro-slavery narratives and monuments; efforts to recuperate and mark erased or obliterated sites of slavery; and, what she terms the most challenging of all, imaginative work to construct and communicate new narratives of American history that acknowledge the centrality of slavery and its legacies to the American story
Characterization of striatal dopamine projections across striatal subregions in behavioral flexibility
No full textBehavioural flexibility is key to survival in a dynamic environmentWhile flexible, goal-directed behaviours are initially dependent on dorsomedial striatum, they become dependent on lateral striatum as behaviours become inflexible. Similarly, lesions of dopamine terminals in lateral striatum disrupt the development of inflexible habits. This work suggests that dopamine release in lateral striatum may drive inflexible behaviours, though few studies have investigated a causative role of subpopulations of striatal dopamine terminals in reversal learning, a measure of flexibility. Here, we performed two optogenetic experiments to activate dopamine terminals in dorsomedial (DMS), dorsolateral (DLS) or ventral (nucleus accumbens [NAc]) striatum in DAT-Cre mice that expressed channelrhodopsin-2 via viral injection (Experiment I) or through transgenic breeding with an Ai32 reporter line (Experiment II) to determine how specific dopamine subpopulations impact reversal learning. Mice performed a reversal task in which they self-stimulated DMS, DLS, or NAc dopamine terminals by pressing one of two levers before action-outcome lever contingencies were reversed. Largely consistent with presumed ventromedial/lateral striatal function, we found that mice self-stimulating medial dopamine terminals reversed lever preference following contingency reversal, while mice self-stimulating NAc showed parial flexibility, and DLS self-stimulation resulted in impaired reversal. Impairments in DLS mice were characterized by more regressive errors and reliance on lose-stay strategies following reversal, as well as reduced within-session learning, suggesting reward insensitivity and overreliance on previously learned actions. This study supports a model of striatal function in which DMS and ventral dopamine facilitate goal-directed responding, and DLS dopamine supports more inflexible responding
How Do I Get People to Use My Ideas?: Lessons from Successful Innovators in CS Education
No full textImproving Computer Science (CS) education requires increasing the meaningful usage of research-supported pedagogy and curriculum. Studies on propagation have largely looked at dissemination and adoption from the perspective of adopters: what motivates them to discover, experiment with, and continue using innovative teaching. This study adds to a growing body of research on approaches to encourage adoption by examining the perspectives and advice of successful propagators-education researchers who have had their innovations widely adopted. Drawing on interviews with fourteen CS education researchers, this paper identifies both points of convergence and unique insights across several broad areas: barriers to adoption, the structure of academia, relevant principles of design and techniques for deployment, and strategies for propagation. Notable findings include: the structure of academia has aspects that both impede and facilitate successful propagation; traditional academic funding sources do not adequately support ongoing propagation; and some successful strategies for getting the word out involve oblique approaches for reaching potential users. This exploration of common successful approaches can serve as a guide for developers and educational advocates when working to attract new users and broaden impact