Email Reducing Stress for Student Teachers

This paper reports on one aspect of a study which investigated the use of email between student teachers and university lecturers during the final practicum experience in a four year Bachelor of Education pre-service primary teaching course. The paper explores how the nature of electronic communication, together with the students' perceptions of university supervision and their place in the school setting, affected the level of stress experienced by the student teachers in their placements. Student teacher stress has been reported in the literature as one factor which impedes student teacher learning during the practicum (Zeichner, 1980). We argue that ICT has the potential to maximise student teachers' learning outcomes in the practicum by giving them more control over the learning process, reducing their stress, and enabling them to manage their practicum experience more effectively.     

Reported maltreatment in children with multiple disabilities

This study examined a population of children with multiple disabilities to investigate whether functional, developmental, or perinatal factors could differentiate children reported and substantiated as maltreated from those not so reported. Data were collected from medical records of a cohort of 500 children evaluated between 1973 and 1984 at the Kennedy Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Maltreatment reporting was documented through the State of Maryland Abuse Registry and the counties of residence of all study children. Results indicated that the profiles of demographic and family characteristics associated with child maltreatment reporting in this population are consistent with the literature, but child functional and developmental characteristics were not confirmed as risk factors for substantiated maltreatment reports. Indeed, contrary to investigator expectations, the more severely disabled children, in terms of functioning, appeared at less risk of maltreatment than did disabled children functioning at more age-appropriate levels.     

The GLOBE Visualization Project: Using WWW in the Classroom

Though commercial interest in the World Wide Web is growing, the potential uses of the medium as a learning tool are numerous. The GLOBE Visualization Project is one such educational application. We have designed and implemented a WWW-based, user-friendly, language-independent, graphical user interface providing access to visualizations created for GLOBE, a multinational program of education and science. The target users of the system are K–12 students and their teachers from over 1100 schools in 39 countries; other clients include the GLOBE scientific investigators and members of the public internationally. Navigation is intuitive, and employs the metaphors of a Control Panel which changes the image appearing in a Viewscreen. The interface can be learned empirically by persons of all ages regardless of technical expertise or native language; context-sensitive help is provided for users who prefer documentation. The GLOBE Visualization server is on the World Wide Web at URL http://globe.gsfc.nasa.gov/globe/.     

Surreptitious warfarin ingestion

Munchausen by proxy has been reported involving children who have been given various drugs or toxins. In addition, there is a body of adult literature regarding covert anticoagulant ingestion. This is a case of an 11-month-old female who appears to combine features of both of these syndromes. This child presented with an acute left hemorrhagic otitis media. The physical examination was unremarkable except for the following: weight, fifth percentile; left external auditory canal filled with blood with the right external canal and tympanic membrane being normal; and several scattered 1 X 2 cm firm, movable, nontender, purple nodules on extremities, chest and forehead. The coagulation studies were consistent with Vitamin K deficiency secondary to anticoagulant ingestion. A serum warfarin study confirmed our suspicions. The mother was noted to have a dependent relationship with her child and characteristics of those involved in Munchausen by proxy: falsifying information and thwarting medical assessment. In addition, she displayed some of the characteristics found commonly in anticoagulant malingerers. She was depressed, with limited medical knowledge, and had access to warfarin. The mother was admitted for inpatient psychiatric care and the patient placed with an extended family member. This case report describes the use of an anticoagulant to induce illness in a child by a psychologically ill mother. This form of child abuse must be considered in the differential diagnoses of hemorrhagic disorders.     

Automated morphosyntactic analysis of medical language

This paper describes an automated procedure for morphosyntactic analysis of medical English based on the recognition of terminal suffixes as syntactic markers. In addition, certain suffixes convey semantic information about a semantic category to which a word may belong.The output of the morphosyntactic analysis provides the input for subsequent syntactic and semantic analysis on the sentence level.     

WormClassroom.org: an inquiry-rich educational web portal for research resources of Caenorhabditis elegans

The utilization of biology research resources, coupled with a “learning by inquiry” approach, has great potential to aid students in gaining an understanding of fundamental biological principles. To help realize this potential, we have developed a Web portal for undergraduate biology education, WormClassroom.org, based on current research resources of a model research organism, Caenorhabditis elegans. This portal is intended to serve as a resource gateway for students to learn biological concepts using C. elegans research material. The driving forces behind the WormClassroom website were the strengths of C. elegans as a teaching organism, getting researchers and educators to work together to develop instructional materials, and the 3 P's (problem posing, problem solving, and peer persuasion) approach for inquiry learning. Iterative assessment is an important aspect of the WormClassroom site development because it not only ensures that content is up-to-date and accurate, but also verifies that it does, in fact, aid student learning. A primary assessment was performed to refine the WormClassroom website utilizing undergraduate biology students and nonstudent experts such as C. elegans researchers; results and comments were used for site improvement. We are actively encouraging continued resource contributions from the C. elegans research and education community for the further development of WormClassroom.