‘Salk Hops’: Teen Health Activism and the Fight against Polio, 1955 – 1960

In the late 1950s, a health charity, known as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (March of Dimes), organized American teens into volunteer divisions to fight polio, as well as tame adult anxieties surrounding juvenile delinquency. The alliance that developed permitted the NFIP to increase its influence and revenue, while granting teens an opportunity to assert their cultural power and challenge negative stereotypes. Although the NFIP nurtured and at times dominated the relationship, young volunteers joined for their own reasons and shaped the program to suit their own aspirations and interests.     

M.A.S.S.: A Model for Producing Transfer

Transfer is the application in the workplace of the knowledge, skills and attitudes learned in training. With transfer, trainers hope to link training to increased job performance. However, training alone will not produce transfer. To affect job performance as a result of training, trainers must intentionally promote transfer using a variety of strategies based on known principles of human performance technology. The MASS model, presented in this paper, brings together four of these principles. According to the MASS model, trainers who promote transfer (and who thereby become performance technologists) 1) Motivate trainees to learn and use the training material; 2) increase trainees' Awareness of when to use new skills and ideas; 3) enable trainees to master and to apply Skills; and 4) give trainees psychological and physical Support on the job. When performance technologists follow the MASS model, they can expect to produce trainees who apply at work what they have been taught in training. Use of the model is illustrated with two examples.     

A comparison of students who delay kindergarten entry and those who are retained in grades K−5

Retention has been one way that school personnel have dealt with the problem of school failure. Some authors have proposed delayed school entry as an alternative to retention, especially since there are concerns about the effects of retention on students' self-esteem. It is unclear from the literature whether retention and delayed entry have differential outcomes on measures of school success. This study explored whether there were differences in IQ and achievement (at grades 2, 5, and 7) between students who delayed school entry and those who were retained in later elementary grades, as well as any interactions with gender. There was a significant 6-point difference in IQ, favoring the delayed-entry group. Furthermore, when the achievement test scores were analyzed using an ANCOVA with IQ as a covariate, no significant differences were identified for either group or gender. Implications for school practices are provided.     

New physics searches at the BESIII experiment

The standard model (SM) of particle physics, comprised of the unified electroweak and quantum chromodynamic theories, accurately explains almost all experimental results related to the micro-world, and has made a number of predictions for previously unseen particles, most notably the Higgs scalar boson, that were subsequently discovered. As a result, the SM is currently universally accepted as the theory of the fundamental particles and their interactions. However, in spite of its numerous successes, the SM has a number of apparent shortcomings, including: many free parameters that must be supplied by experimental measurements; no mechanism to produce the dominance of matter over antimatter in the universe; and no explanations for gravity, the dark matter in the universe, neutrino masses, the number of particle generations, etc. Because of these shortcomings, there is considerable incentive to search for evidence for new, non-SM physics phenomena that might provide important clues about what a new, beyond the SM theory (BSM) might look like. Although the center-of-mass energies that BESIII can access are far below the energy frontier, searches for new, BSM physics are an important component of its research program. This report reviews some of the highlights from BESIII’s searches for signs of new, BSM physics by: measuring rates for processes that the SM predicts to be forbidden or very rare; searching for non-SM particles such as dark photons; performing precision tests of SM predictions; and looking for violations of the discrete symmetries C and CP in processes for which the SM expectations are immeasurably small.     

Culturally and Linguistically Relevant Readalouds

The teacher readaloud is an instructional tool established in its ability to foster children's language and literacy development. Increasing cultural and linguistic diversity and changing standards place pressure on teachers to provide literacy and language instruction relevant to children's everyday lives and learning. This article presents a framework for conducting culturally and linguistically relevant readalouds within two essential components, talk and text, in terms of developing cultural competence, maintaining high academic expectations, and fostering a critical stance. Particular attention is given to the interactive nature of these readalouds and how they can be used to promote children's active co-construction of textually-based meaning.