The study was conducted in order to establish and describe the mangrove zones and the resource uses in Ajuy and Pedada Bays, Panay Island, Iloilo, Philippines. Plot or quadrat method coupled with informal community folk interviews were done. Cluster and principal component analyses indicated four mangrove zones: Zone 1 – Avicennia–Sonneratia zone; Zone 2 – Avicennia– Rhizophora zone…
In this invited response to Moe and Anzia (2014), we describe both the points of convergence and divergence between our prior research (2007a, 2007b) and that of Moe (2005) and Moe and Anzia (2014). We also respond to Moe and Anzia’s critique of our published work. Moe and Anzia’s study helps to refine the policy discussion around seniority preferences in teacher collective bargaining agree…
Sri Lanka has vast dry low-lying plains irrigated using traditional micro-(or meso-) watershed management system referred to as the Tank Cascade System (TCS). We discuss the implications of this irrigation system which include the development of lowland paddy (Oryza sativa L.) farming. In addition, the TCS has retarded negative consequences from chronic and recurrent droughts, seasonal flooding…
It is often difficult and costly to obtain individual-level student achievement data, yet, researchers are frequently reluctant to use school-level achievement data that are widely available from state websites. We argue that public-use aggregate school-level achievement data are, in fact, sufficient to address a wide range of evaluation questions and the use of this data is more appropriate th…
The increasing trend of placing students with disabilities in general education classrooms has raised questions among researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and parents about classmate peer effects on all students. However, little is known about the peer effects of classmates with disabilities on the outcomes of other students in the classroom; no research has evaluated these peer effects on…
Extensive teacher mobility can undermine policy efforts to develop a high-quality workforce. In response, policymakers have increasingly championed financial incentives to retain teachers. In 2006, the Denver Public Schools adopted an alternative teacher compensation reform, the Professional Compensation System for Teachers (“ProComp”). Using longitudinal teacher-level data from 2001–2002…
College graduation rates often lag behind college attendance rates. One theory as to why students do not complete college is that they lack key information about how to be successful or fail to act on the information that they have. We present evidence from a randomized experiment which tests the coaching. Over the course of two separate school years,InsideTrack, a student coaching service, pro…
Collective bargaining is common in American public education, but its consequences are poorly understood. We focus here on key contractual provisions—seniority-based transfer rights—that affect teacher assignments, and we show that these transfer rights operate to burden disadvantaged schools with higher percentages of inexperienced teachers. We also show that this impact is conditional:It …
In this article, I serve as a secretary for the critical policy analysis presented by hundreds of teachers, parents, students, and community members during 19 public hearings on school closures in New York City. In testimony at hearings,community members rejected the narrow, statistical approach they felt the Department of Education was using to develop policy. They examined the stated motives …
This article explores how conceptions of choice and visions of the future are constructed within the context of specialized arts programs in two Canadian public high schools. The authors consider how discourses of the arts are implicated in the way that possible futures are envisioned differently, delimiting the range of choices available to students. Their analysis shows how choices are unequ…
Value-added approaches for attributing student growth to teachers often use weighted estimates of building-level factors based on “typical” schools to represent a range of community, school, and other variables related to teacher and student work that are not easily measured directly. This study examines whether such estimates are likely to be accurate in “outlier” schools where buildi…
Koski and horng argue that our study of seniority-based transfer rules is narrow and that its findings only apply under limited circumstances. They say that their own study, by contrast, takes a broad frame—so broad that, as detailed in their 127-page technical report, they estimated 40 different models. They argue that the bigger picture that emerges from their more extensive analysis is th…
Abstract—Cluster tools, each of which consists of multiple processing modules, one material handling robot, and loadlocks, are widely used for wafer fabrication processes, such as lithography, etching, and deposition. There have been many approaches and algorithms for cyclic scheduling of cluster tools in which the robot repeats a specified sequence for processing identical wafers. However, t…
Is the U.S. Supreme Court inviting litigants to take aim at unraveling injunctions in institutional reform litigation—especially consent decrees in the schools? In Horne v. Flores (2009), the court remanded a 17-year-old school reform case to a federal judge with orders to look beyond consent decrees on financing, reducing class sizes, and moving from bilingual education to structured English…
This qualitative study investigated the visions and metaphors for teaching held by teacher candidates enrolled in an urban-based alternative certification program. While late-entry teacher recruits are considered to have high motivations for urban school teaching, few studies explore the nature of these motivations. Findings from this study uncovered four orientations concerning teaching in urb…
Abstract—The characteristics of oxynitride thermally grown in either NO or N2O ambient as a tunnel layer are investigated based on an Al/Al2O3/GdON/SiOxNy/Si structure. The physical thickness of each dielectric layer was measured and confirmed by multiwavelength ellipsometry and transmission electron microscopy. Experimental results reveal that better memory performances can be achieved for …
In this study, we examined the college-readiness rates of Black, Hispanic, and White Texas public high school graduates using archival data from the Texas Education Agency Academic Excellence Indicator System. An examination of the state college-readiness rates across a 3-year period was conducted to determine the extent to which academic achievement gaps had increased,decreased, or remained r…
The evaluation of students’ learning has been the central focus in Indian schools for a very long time. Teachers and school administrators in most schools train students from the very beginning to sit for the examinations conducted at the end of Classes X and XII. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (popularly known as RTE) Act, 2009 attempts to ensure the availability of q…
In the new millennium, the Indian education system has experienced a major shift and the issue of the quality of education has taken centre stage in policy discussion fora. Globally, assessment has become an important means of improving the quality of education, both at the systemic level and at the level of individual students. It necessitates innovation, exploration and implementation of worl…
The increased participation of women in higher education in India since 1947 has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Since independence, there have been shifts–dispersal and clustering of women students in various disciplines in higher education. There is a need to understand the processes of decision making regarding schooling, subject choice and access (physical and social) to…
This pilot study explored the potential for Project ASPIRE to effect behavior change in a sample of 11 parents of children with hearing loss who were from typically underserved populations,such as families from backgrounds of low socioeconomic status or families who speak English as a second language. The study consisted of one education session, five 16-hour home audio environment recordings, …
This article reports on the development and preliminary implementation trials of a modular small-group intervention targeting syntax and vocabulary for children at high risk for reading comprehension difficulties in grades prekindergarten through first. The intervention, delivered by trained paraprofessionals, included 12 weeks of 20-minute lessons that included hands-on activities promoting re…
For most Anglophone countries, the history of grammar teaching over the past 50 years is one of contestation, debate and dissent: and 50 years on we are no closer to reaching a consensus about the role of grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum. The debate has been described through the metaphor of battle and grammar wars (Kamler, 1995; Locke, 2005), frequently pitting educational profe…
This study examined the influence of phonotactic probability on word recognition in Englishspeaking toddlers. Typically developing toddlers completed a preferential looking paradigm using familiar words, which consisted of either high or low phonotactic probability sound sequences. The participants’ looking behavior was recorded in response to correctly-produced and incorrectly-produced forms…
This article describes the development of new scales for assessing the status of a young child’s language comprehension and production. Items and sections on the scales were included to reflect advances in research on language acquisition and impairment. The New Reynell Developmental Language Scales (NRDLS) were trialled on 301 children and then standardized on a sample of 1,266 participants …
Children with delayed language skills, who were from a socio-economic area defined as disadvantaged, made significant improvements in language skills after their parents were trained in easily learned strategies, enabling them to make simple changes in the way they interacted with their children. The 36 children, mean age five years, were allocated into three groups: an Experimental group and a…
This article summarizes the evidence as regards the effectiveness of therapy for grammar for school-aged children with language impairments. I first review studies focusing on specific areas of grammar (both expressive and receptive targets) and then studies aiming to improve language more generally, several of which focus more on the effectiveness of different methods of delivery. I conclude t…
An improved quadrature nonlinear filter named delayed Genz–Keister sequences-based sparse-grid quadrature filter (DGKSGQF)is developed for the target tracking problems. The filter changes the non-nested Gaussian quadrature points of the quadrature filters to the nested Genz–Keister points for selecting the unvariate points, which are the basis point sets extended to form a multidimensional…
Single and low copy nuclear genes offer a larger number of, and more rapidly evolving, characters than the chloroplast and nuclear ribosomal gene sequences that have dominated plant phylogenetic studies to date. Until recently, only one or a few low copy nuclear gene markers were included in such studies. Now, the rapid adoption of “next generation sequencing” (NGS) techniques offers sim…
The leaf-opposed tendril, a characteristic organ in Vitaceae (grape family), is likely a morphological key innovation for the family. It has been considered as the homologous organ of the inflorescence. Expression of floral related genes has been studied extensively in the model species, grapevine (Vitis vinifera), to uncover molecular mechanisms that determine the development of a common un…
Hystrix Moench was a perennial genus of the Triticeae. Its members differed from those of other genera in the tribe in lacking glumes. The type species is H. patula Moench, a North American taxon. When it became accepted that H. patula should be included in Elymus, Hystrix could not be used as a generic name. The problem became how to treat the other species that had been included in Hystrix…
In plants with infrequent pollinator services, the benefits of reproductive assurance could be eroded by severe ovule discounting and inbreeding depression (ID). However, it remains unclear how selfing evolves under complete pollinator failure and strong ID. We examined the mating system and ID under netting and robbing conditions in Comastoma pulmonarium (Turcz.) Toyok. (Gentianaceae), an a…
Museum collections are essential for understanding biodiversity and next-generation sequencing methods (NGS) offer new opportunities to generate genomic data on specimens of extinct species for phylogenetic and other studies. Hesperelaea is a monotypic Oleaceae genus that was collected only once, 140 years ago on Guadalupe Island, Mexico. This lineage is almost certainly extinct, and has bee…
The present study analyzes the fatty acid (FA) profile of lipids isolated from Varroa destructor Anderson & Trueman, a parasitic mite of the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.), uninfected and infected worker prepupae of the Carnolian subspecies Apis mellifera carnica Pollmann, and bee bread fed to the worker brood. Significant differences are observed in the FA profiles of lipids isolated from paras…
Pathogens target phytohormone signalling pathways to promote disease. Plants deploy salicylic acid (SA)-mediated defences against biotrophs. Pathogens antagonize SA immunity by activating jasmonate signalling, for example Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 produces coronatine (COR), a jasmonic acid (JA) mimic. This study found unexpected dynamics between SA, JA and COR and co-operation be…
Climate oscillations and landscape heterogeneity make the historical population processes of organisms of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau quite complex. We used chloroplast DNA sequences and amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLPs) to study the phylogeography and genetic variation of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau endemic Spenceria ramalana Trimen. The parsimony network contains two star‐li…
The rhythmic opening/closing and volatile emissions of flowers are known to attract pollinators at specific times. That these rhythms are maintained under constant light or dark conditions suggests a circadian clock involvement. Although a forward and reverse genetic approach has led to the identification of core circadian clock components in Arabidopsis thaliana, the involvement of these clo…
1. The issue of how to estimate species abundance from presence/absence maps has attracted much attention. Several methods have been developed to address this problem. However, those methods either overlook the structure of spatial autocorrelation of species distribution, thus leading to underestimation, or they demand extra information besides presence/absencemaps. 2. This study first deve…
Anthracnose disease caused by Colletotrichum spp. is a serious disease of chili (Capsicum annuum), particularly in tropical countries. Host plant resistance breeding is one of the most effective disease management strategies. It requires identification of parents with genes resistant to Colletotrichum species predominant in a given region. For phenotypic evaluation, 35 chili lines consisting of…
The strong association between Phytophthora cinnamomi and the mortality and decline of Quercus suber and Q. ilex subsp. rotundifolia has been known for two decades. The ability of elicitins secreted by this pathogen to trigger defence responses in these Quercus against itself was evaluated in this work. Biomass quantification by quantitative real-time PCR revealed a significant decrease in path…
Rubia L. is the type genus of the coffee family Rubiaceae and the third largest genus in the tribe Rubieae, comprising ca. 80 species restricted to the Old World. China is an important diversity center for Rubia, where approximately half of its species occur. However, its internal phylogenetic relationships are still poorly understood. The objective of the present study is to contribute to t…
A close relationship between Androsace and related genera (Douglasia, Vitaliana, and Pomatosace) has long been recognized. Recent molecular studies have provided abundant evidence that Douglasia, Vitaliana, and Pomatosace are nested within Androsace and together constitute the monophyletic “Androsace group”. We investigated the pollen morphology of 80 taxa representing all sections of An…
There have been few studies of the alpine subnival belt flora in the Hengduan Mountains (HM), which host remarkable biodiversity. To extend knowledge of this flora, we examined published florae, herbarium specimens, and field observations (and material) collected by both ourselves and others. In total, 942 seed plant species have been recorded in the belt, representing 168 genera and 48 fami…
1. EnvironmentalDNA(eDNA) is increasingly used for surveillance and detection of species of interest in aquatic and soil samples. 2. A significant risk associated with eDNAmethods is potential false-positive results due to laboratory contamination. 3. To minimize and quantify this risk, we designed and validated a set of synthetic oligonucleotides for use as species-specific positive PCR co…
Objectives: We report cross-sectional, objectively measured physical activity data for 399 children and adolescents aged 6 to 18 years. We evaluated physical activity of children and adolescents, considered time spent in each activity intensity category, and explored the impact of growth disruption (stunting and wasting) on physical activity patterns. Methods: Participants wore an Actical (M…
1. Estimates of mortality are fundamental to studies of population ecology and assessments of conservation status. Mortality is frequently estimated using individual identifications by means of mark–recapture methods. These estimates become biased with heterogeneity in identification and especially if patterns of heterogeneity change with time. 2. If animals are social, then survival may …
Mitochondrial markers have been among the most utilized loci for phylogenetic inference, especially for understudied invertebrate groups for which we yet lack genomic resources. Mitochondrial genes generally evolve faster than nuclear genes and have smaller effective population sizes (Funk & Omland 2003), which has contributed to their popularity in species-level studies. Although the evolut…
Transitions between animal and wind pollination have occurred in many lineages and have been linked to various floral modifications,but these have seldom been assessed in a phylogenetic framework. In the dioecious genus Leucadendron (Proteaceae),transitions from insect to wind pollination have occurred at least four times. Using analyses that controlled for relatedness among Leucadendron specie…
Inbreeding depression, the reduced fitness of offspring of related individuals, is a central theme in evolutionary biology. Inbreeding effects are influenced by the genetic makeup of a population, which is driven by any history of genetic bottlenecks and genetic drift. The Chatham Island black robin represents a case of extreme inbreeding following two severe population bottlenecks. We tested …
1. The surface layer of soil as transition zone between pedosphere and atmosphere plays a crucial role in exchange processes of nutrients, atmospheric gases and water. Knowledge of its water content is essential, as it governs both physiological and transport mechanisms. In arid and semi-arid regions, this uppermost soil layer is commonly colonized by biological soil crusts (biocrusts), whic…