Assessment and Accountability for Programs Serving Young Children with Disabilities

States currently are in the process of developing child and family outcome measurement systems for young children with disabilities to meet federal data reporting requirements for the Part C (Infants and Toddlers with Disabilities) and Part B Preschool Grants program supported through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This article reviews issues related to the use of assessments in providing outcome data, discusses challenges raised in conducting valid assessments with young children for accountability purposes, and outlines decisions states must make related to assessment as they design and implement outcome measurement approaches. Considerations related to the standardized or curriculum-based measures are discussed along with other choices related to the use of assessment for accountability.     

Understanding glocal learning spaces. An empirical study of languaging and transmigrant positions in the virtual classroom

The use of digital tools like computers and tablets in institutional learning arenas give rise to forms of flexibility where time and space boundaries become diffuse. Online learning sites are understood as being crucial today, especially in large parts of the Global North, where anyone anywhere potentially can become a student and have access to educational opportunities.

This study focuses on the analysis of recorded sessions, part of an ‘Italian for (adult) beginners' online course. Our interests relate to accounting for how students negotiate different language varieties, including modalities, and how communication in virtual learning settings enables both flexible participation trajectories and identity positions in and across the boundaries of time and space.

The sociocultural and dialogical analyses here are framed in terms of fluidity of ‘glocal' positions and (trans)languaging that emerge in and across time and space in Technology Mediated Communication. Our findings suggest that online environments support meaning-making where it is possible to identify alternative ways of (co)constructing and mediating learning. Such hybridity as well as the performative character of learning and identity display have important implications for online glocal communities.     

Discriminative graphical models for faculty homepage discovery

Faculty homepage discovery is an important step toward building an academic portal. Although the general homepage finding tasks have been well studied (e.g., TREC-2001 Web Track), faculty homepage discovery has its own special characteristics and not much focused research has been conducted for this task. In this paper, we view faculty homepage discovery as text categorization problems by utilizing Yahoo BOSS API to generate a small list of high-quality candidate homepages. Because the labels of these pages are not independent, standard text categorization methods such as logistic regression, which classify each page separately, are not well suited for this task. By defining homepage dependence graph, we propose a conditional undirected graphical model to make joint predictions by capturing the dependence of the decisions on all the candidate pages. Three cases of dependencies among faculty candidate homepages are considered for constructing the graphical model. Our model utilizes a discriminative approach so that any informative features can be used conveniently. Learning and inference can be done relatively efficiently for the joint prediction model because the homepage dependence graphs resulting from the three cases of dependencies are not densely connected. An extensive set of experiments have been conducted on two testbeds to show the effectiveness of the proposed discriminative graphical model.     

Serum creatine phosphokinase in thyroid disorders

The decreased serum levels of triiodothyroinine (T3) and thyroxine (T4) in hypothyroid patients is well established but whether there is any correlation of creatinephosphokinase (CPK) with hypothyroidism is not well established. There is a paucity of reference on this study. Therefore a study of serum CPK and thyroid profile was carried out in thyroid diseases. In hypothyroid patients T3, T4 levels in serum were found to be lowered with an increase level of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) associated with marked rise in serum CPK level. In hyperthyroid patients serum levels of T3, T4 were found to be increased with decrease in TSh with significant decrease in creatine phosphokinase level. Serum creatine phosphokinase levels thus show an inverse relation with serum T3, T4 levels.     

Blood lipid peroxidation products and antioxidants in senile cataract

Lipid peroxidation products and antioxidants were estimated in either blood, serum or erythrocytes of 25 cases of early and 25 of advanced senile (50–60 years) cataract and 30 persons of age matched healthy controls. Serum lipid peroxidation products (as malondialdehyde) were significantly higher in patients with early senile (0.25±0.05 μm/dl, P<0.05) and advanced senile cataract (0.29±0.05 μm/dl, P<0.001) as compared to healthy controls (0.22±0.07 μm/dl). Erythrocyte superoxide dismutase levels were lower in patients with early senile (730±60.5 units/gm Hb) and significantly lower in advanced senile (712±50.2 units/gm Hb, P<0.05) cataract than those in healthy controls (767±59.5 units/gm Hb). Serum α-tocopherol was significantly lower (P<0.05) in only advanced senile cataract (0.69±0.08 mg/dl) but not in early senile cataract (0.75±0.08 mg/dl) when compared with healthy controls (0.75±0.09 mg/dl). There was no significant difference in the erythrocyte concentration of reduced glutathione and serum levels of total proteins, β-carotene, vitamin A, ascorbic acid, calcium, magnesium and zinc.     

Effect of preoperative stress on serum lipoperoxide levels

To test the concept of intense psychogenic stress manifesting as organic lesion, effect of pre-operative stress on serum lipid peroxide levels in 30 otherwise healthy patients to undergo major abdominal elective surgery has been studied and compared with healthy controls. Significant elevations in serum lipid peroxide levels both on hospitalization and at pre-operative stage were noticed in comparison with healthy controls. However, serum lipid peroxide levels at pre-operative stage did not show significant fluctuations in comparison with those at the time of admission, suggestive of no probable further increment in autoxidation of unsaturated fatty acids of membrane lipids and proper handling by scavenging enzyme system.     

Developing strong transition-focused IEPS using labour market data

Employment rates and post-school transition outcomes for individuals with disabilities remain alarmingly low compared to peers without disabilities. Transition-Focused Individualized Education Plans (TF-IEPs) often centre on skills associated with employment experience opportunities that are immediately available to the individual with a disability. While the transition plans focus on the student's strengths and areas of interest, less attention is paid to the guidance and support a student might need in choosing a sustainable career. We contend that teams must develop transition plans with specific attention to projected labour market data. Using this information will ensure that we are preparing students with disabilities for long-term success. This article describes how school teams can use an in-depth labour market analysis to develop robust transition plans. These plans will prepare students for careers that will last far into the future.