Thyroid hormones status during pregnancy in normal Iranian women

Pregnancy is associated with significant, but reversible changes in thyroid function studies, which are among the most profound seen as a result of a normal physiologic state. The present study was carried out to find out alterations in thyroid function tests in each trimester in normal pregnant women as compared to non-pregnant women in Tabriz-Iran. A case-control study designed with 229 normal pregnant women that randomly selected from the first (64 samples), the second (92 samples), and the third (73 samples) trimesters and 250 randomly selected non-pregnant healthy female controls. Age range in both groups was 16–40 years. Thyroid function tests carried out by measuring serum levels of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), free and total thyroxin (FT₄, TT₄), and free and total triiodothyronine (FT₃, TT₃) by commercially available radio immunoassay kits. We found that mean TT₄ increased progressively during pregnancy. Our study showed increasing in serum levels of TT₃ in the second trimester and then declining during the third trimester compared with non-pregnant women. We showed that FT₄ strongly decreased during the third trimester. Free T₃ showed declining in the second and third trimesters. Mean TSH did not show significant difference in each trimester compared with non-pregnant women. The thyroid function tests in pregnancy should be interpreted against gestational age-related reference intervals to avoid mis-interpretation of thyroid function during pregnancy.     

The effects of function-based communication intervention for a student with emotional disturbance in a general education setting

Research has shown that most children with emotional disturbance (ED) are struggling to use communication skills and they may tend to use inappropriate behaviours as a form of communication to disclose their needs. A function-based communication intervention might be an effective approach to decrease inappropriate behaviours of children with ED. The purpose of this single-case multiple baseline reversal design (ABAB) study was to examine the effectiveness of the function-based communication intervention for on-task and disruptive behaviours of an 8-year-old student with ED. Functional behavioural assessment (FBA) was conducted and based on the findings of FBA, a colour-coded communication system, was implemented during reading and math classes. The findings indicated that function-based communication intervention was effective in increasing on-task as well as decreasing disruptive behaviours. Furthermore, the function-based communication intervention improved communication between the teacher and the student that resulted in decreasing disruptive behaviours in a general classroom setting. The generalisability of the findings due to the limited number of participants was an important limitation for this study. Future directions, as well as implications for practices, are discussed.     

Parental perceptions of life context variables for involvement in their young children's education

The purpose of this study was to discover Turkish parents’ perceptions of life context variables, including personal knowledge and skills and personal time and energy for involvement activities in their young children's education. The scales used in this study were based on parents’ self-report, and included: (1) Parental Perceptions of Personal Knowledge and Skills for Involvement Activities and (2) Parental Perceptions of Personal Time and Energy for Involvement Activities. Moreover, a demographic survey was developed and used as the second instrument in this study. The results suggested that parents as a group tend to have positive perceptions of life context variables for involvement in their young children's education and their income is the strongest predictor of these perceptions.     

Emotions Management Skills and Barriers with Library Staff: A Correlational Survey of Agriculture Students

The literature has identified barriers with library staff as one of the important barriers affecting academic activities of students and also recognized the relationship of various academic and demographic characteristics of students with it. The emotions management skills of students may be one of the possible correlates of the barriers with library staff. This study was designed to investigate the levels of barriers with library staff and emotions management skills as well as their possible correlation using two standardized scales. The data were collected from the final year undergraduate agriculture students. The results confirmed the existence of barriers with library staff among the participants of both genders experiencing the same level of anxiety. The participants scored 3.75 (average) on the emotions management scale. The results also revealed significantly negative correlation between emotions management skills and barriers with library staff among these students. These results have many practical implications in the sphere of academic librarianship.     

The reflection of offline activities on users’ online social behavior: An observational study

The ever increasing presence of online social networks in users’ daily lives has led to the interplay between users’ online and offline activities. There have already been several works that have studied the impact of users’ online activities on their offline behavior, e.g., the impact of interaction with friends on an exercise social network on the number of daily steps. In this paper, we consider the inverse to what has already been studied and report on our extensive study that explores the potential causal effects of users’ offline activities on their online social behavior. The objective of our work is to understand whether the activities that users are involved with in their real daily life, which place them within or away from social situations, have any direct causal impact on their behavior in online social networks. Our work is motivated by the theory of normative social influence, which argues that individuals may show behaviors or express opinions that conform to those of the community for the sake of being accepted or from fear of rejection or isolation. We have collected data from two online social networks, namely Twitter and Foursquare, and systematically aligned user content on both social networks. On this basis, we have performed a natural experiment that took the form of an interrupted time series with a comparison group design to study whether users’ socially situated offline activities exhibited through their Foursquare check-ins impact their online behavior captured through the content they share on Twitter. Our main findings can be summarised as follows (1) a change in users’ offline behavior that affects the level of users’ exposure to social situations, e.g., starting to go to the gym or discontinuing frequenting bars, can have a causal impact on users’ online topical interests and sentiment; and (2) the causal relations between users’ socially situated offline activities and their online social behavior can be used to build effective predictive models of users’ online topical interests and sentiments.     

From praxis to pragmatism: Junior scholars and policy impact

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Buckingham’s observation that academic research either has to become public knowledge or its originators must have a high visibility in the public realm before their research can find inclusion into policymaking processes, this article offers a variety of examples of how academics have managed to bridge the gap between media and communication policy scholarship and policymaking. Contrary to the long-standing belief that policy impact is extremely difficult and rare to achieve, we argue that junior scholars have many opportunities to have their work become part of the policymaking process through new forms of conversation, collaboration, coalition-building, changing perceptions of public knowledge, and a more conceptual understanding of impact.     

Teachers' Opinions about Inclusion: A pilot study in a Palestinian context

The present study explored teachers' opinions about the inclusion of students with disabilities and special needs in regular primary schools in a Palestinian context, and factors that influenced such opinions. The sample consisted of 90 teachers at six schools. Eighty-seven (97%) of them had students with disabilities or special needs in their classes. Fifty-four (60%) of the teachers were of the opinion that students with disabilities and special needs should have an opportunity to attend public schools. Opinion-related factors were identified and compared to results of previous studies. Eighty-one (90%) of the teachers expressed a need for changes in the public schools in order to meet the needs of students with disabilities and special needs. Their focus of interest for building their own competence was on knowledge and skills that could empower them as teachers, not on knowledge about the students' disabling impairments.     

Temporal expert profiling: With an application to T-shaped expert finding

Cost optimization continues to be a critical concern for many human resources departments. The key is to balance between costs and business value. In particular, computer science organizations prefer to hire people who are expert in only one skill area and have a slight superficial knowledge in other areas that gives them the ability to collaborate across different aspects of project. Community Question Answering networks provide good platforms for people and organizations to share knowledge and find experts. An important issue in expert finding is that an expert has to constantly update his knowledge after being saturated in his field of expertise to still be identified as expert. A person who fails to preserve his expertise is likely to lose his expertise. This work justifies this question that does take the concept of time into account improve the quality of expertise retrieval. We propose a new method for T-shaped expert finding that is based on temporal expert profiling. The proposed method takes the temporal property of expertise into account to mine the shape of expertise for each candidate expert based on his profile. To this end, for each candidate expert, we take snapshots of his expertise trees at regular time intervals and learn the relation between temporal changes in different expertise trees and candidates’ profile. Finally, we use a filtering technique that is applied on top of the profiling method, to find shape of expertise for candidate experts. Experimental results on a large test collection show the superiority of the proposed method in terms of quality of results in comparison with state-of-the-art.     

Windows,Bridges and Mirrors: Building Culturally Responsive Early Childhood Classrooms through the Integration of Literacy and the Arts

This article investigates how instructors can utilize the integration of early literacy skills and the arts to cultivate the appreciation and celebration of cultures in early childhood classrooms. The theoretical framework is developed through three personal accounts establishing a rationale for the importance of a viable home to school connection for young children. Finally, the suggested activities support the transference of theory into classroom practice.     

Design and implementation of an intelligent virtual environment for improving speaking and listening skills

In this paper, we present an intelligent architecture, called intelligent virtual environment for language learning, with embedded pedagogical agents for improving listening and speaking skills of non-native English language learners. The proposed architecture integrates virtual environments into the Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning. This architecture supports visual, auditory, and haptic channels of interaction. It allows pedagogical ideas about language skills to be implemented and validated with a minimum design time. Moreover, we design a computational model to evaluate learner's proficiency level, and an automatic adaptation mechanism which adjusts to the learner's learning curve. We have implemented two scenarios based on the proposed architecture to teach learners how to communicate in public places such as airports and TV stores. Inputs to this system include learner's speech and hand motion, and outputs include graphical scenes, force feedback, and speech by a few embodied agents. Throughout interactions, agents discover the proficiency level of the learner and customize the level of communication complexity accordingly. The system is tested on 10 subjects. Experimental results show 14% increase in the number of proper replies, 3% decrease in grammatical errors, 16% decrease in pronunciation duration, and 11% increase in learners' proficiency level within three trials.