The Connector Study: A Strategy for Collecting Post-Graduation Data About Low-Income High School Students

Tracking low-income students after high school graduation presents significant problems for data collection. The Connector Study is an attempt to increase and enrich outcomes data in a longitudinal study of low-income graduates of a national network of innovative high schools by gathering alumni updates through telephone interviews with high school staff members who remain in touch with their former students. Approximately 2 years after they worked with groups of students in high school, these individuals were able to provide information about education, job, and personal outcomes for 96% of 563 graduates. The Connector Study strategy offers a feasible method for collecting quantifiable outcome measures for longitudinal studies. This method also provides information about student change and individual circumstances that is difficult to obtain from students themselves, and that goes beyond the basic outcome indicators available through federal and state student tracking systems.     

The Relationship Between Maternal Beliefs and Behavior During Shared Reading

The goal of the present study was to increase understanding of the connection between maternal beliefs and behavior during shared reading and to examine the relation of these maternal beliefs to children's reading engagement. The study included survey and observational data from an ethnically diverse sample of 50 mothers and their 5- to 6-year-old children. As predicted, mothers who believed that shared reading should involve learning showed more learning-focused behaviors. Similarly, the belief that reading should be fun predicted more positive interactions. Some relationships between beliefs and behavior were moderated by gender. For girls, higher maternal expectations for children's future reading grades were associated with better scaffolding, but this pattern was not found for boys. There was a positive relationship between mothers' belief that reading should be fun and their sons' engagement. No gender differences were found in maternal expectations and beliefs or in observed maternal learning-focused behaviors or positive support. However, girls were observed to be significantly more engaged during the reading interaction. These results point to the connections between maternal beliefs and behaviors during shared reading, as well as the need to consider child gender in understanding these connections.     

EMERITUS PROFESSORS: ENGAGEMENT AND INVOLVEMENT

Teachers and practitioners of gerontology in universities and social agencies are overlooking an important resource that resides in the skills, experience, and knowledge of retired professors. Many of them are healthy, financially secure, and willing to volunteer their talents in interdisciplinary and intergenerational projects on the campus and in the community. The author suggests that retired professors, organized in an Emeritus College, officially recognized and modestly funded, would bring a grand‐parental, extended‐family presence to the campus, and provide a partnership with teaching faculty and students involved in gerontological education and practice. Such a college would not displace regular faculty or graduate assistants, but provide supplementary support in organizing and participating in symposia, lectures, research, tutoring, public relations, fund‐raising, and similar activities on the campus and in the community. The two‐year experience at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale is reviewed.     

Career patterns of scientists in peripheral communities

In an advanced country, the scientific community is large enough to permit differentiation, with sufficient members in each special field to permit complex interaction with each other, and sufficiently different from each other to be able to stimulate each other. …It has its own system of communicating and assessing the results of research and analysis. …It has its own circles of face-to-face interaction and inter-individual communication. …It is linked with other scientific communities across political boundaries by personal contact (emphasis added) by mutual appreciation and by public communication and formal association.…In the underdeveloped countries scientists are relatively few in number.… They suffer isolation from each other.… They are in danger…of losing contacts with their colleagues in the international scientific community.… They are in brief not fully-fledged members of the scientific community and their work suffers accordingly. [7]     

Three-dimensional fit-to-flow microfluidic assembly

Three-dimensional microfluidics holds great promise for large-scale integration of versatile, digitalized, and multitasking fluidic manipulations for biological and clinical applications. Successful translation of microfluidic toolsets to these purposes faces persistent technical challenges, such as reliable system-level packaging, device assembly and alignment, and world-to-chip interface. In this paper, we extended our previously established fit-to-flow (F2F) world-to-chip interconnection scheme to a complete system-level assembly strategy that addresses the three-dimensional microfluidic integration on demand. The modular F2F assembly consists of an interfacial chip, pluggable alignment modules, and multiple monolithic layers of microfluidic channels, through which convoluted three-dimensional microfluidic networks can be easily assembled and readily sealed with the capability of reconfigurable fluid flow. The monolithic laser-micromachining process simplifies and standardizes the fabrication of single-layer pluggable polymeric modules, which can be mass-produced as the renowned Lego^® building blocks. In addition, interlocking features are implemented between the plug-and-play microfluidic chips and the complementary alignment modules through the F2F assembly, resulting in facile and secure alignment with average misalignment of 45 μm. Importantly, the 3D multilayer microfluidic assembly has a comparable sealing performance as the conventional single-layer devices, providing an average leakage pressure of 38.47 kPa. The modular reconfigurability of the system-level reversible packaging concept has been demonstrated by re-routing microfluidic flows through interchangeable modular microchannel layers.     

Faculty perceptions of the scholarship and utility of writing college-level textbooks

The literature and most anecdotal evidence suggest that higher education faculty members hold writing college-level textbooks in relatively low esteem as a scholarly activity. A structured inquiry conducted among tenured faculty and department chairs which separated notions of scholarship from expectation of utility disclosed a surprisingly high regard for the scholarship required in writing textbooks. However, the expectation of utility or reward is much lower, suggesting institutional and financial pressures that act as major disincentives to textbook authorship. Both the regard for scholarship and the expectation of reward were also shown to display disciplinary variations. David L. Arnold is a proposal development officer in research administration at the University of Louisville. His research interests include both scholarly publishing and continuing and adult education as a university activity.