Institutional Barriers to Innovation: Lessons From a Digital Intervention for Underrepresented Students Applying to College

Abstract

This article draws upon two conceptual frameworks—institutional culture in education and innovation studies—to contextualize findings from a digital intervention for underrepresented students applying to college. The qualitative data that inform this study's findings include 88 open-response surveys with school teachers, as well as campus observations from 52 participating high schools in the U.S. state of California. Through such a conceptual framework, this article highlights four institutional barriers that can inhibit widespread adoption of a promising innovation: (a) the challenge of tapping into participants’ intrinsic motivation; (b) forging opportunities for collaboration and communication between different stakeholders; (c) finding adequate time to schedule and implement an innovation; and (d) a dearth of support for digital resources.     

Microfluidic system for near-patient extraction and detection of miR-122 microRNA biomarker for drug-induced liver injury diagnostics

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) results in over 100 000 hospital attendances per year in the UK alone and is a leading cause for the post-marketing withdrawal of new drugs, leading to significant financial losses. MicroRNA-122 (miR-122) has been proposed as a sensitive DILI marker although no commercial applications are available yet. Extracellular blood microRNAs (miRNAs) are promising clinical biomarkers but their measurement at point of care remains time-consuming, technically challenging, and expensive. For circulating miRNA to have an impact on healthcare, a key challenge to overcome is the development of rapid and reliable low-cost sample preparation. There is an acknowledged issue with miRNA stability in the presence of hemolysis and platelet activation, and no solution has been demonstrated for fast and robust extraction at the site of blood draw. Here, we report a novel microfluidic platform for the extraction of circulating miR-122 from blood enabled by a vertical approach and gravity-based bubble mixing. The performance of this disposable cartridge was verified by standard quantitative polymerase chain reaction analysis on extracted miR-122. The cartridge performed equivalently or better than standard bench extraction kits. The extraction cartridge was combined with electrochemical impedance spectroscopy to detect miR-122 as an initial proof-of-concept toward an application in point-of-care detection. This platform enables the standardization of sample preparation and the detection of miRNAs at the point of blood draw and in resource limited settings and could aid the introduction of miRNA-based assays into routine clinical practice.     

Preparing Teachers to Make the Formative Assessment Process Integral to Science Teaching and Learning

Formative assessment provides a means to successfully scaffold learning. Unfortunately, few teachers understand the pedagogical implications of such scaffolding or their role in utilizing formative assessments. The purpose of our study was to develop an understanding of the experience of being a teacher that is seeking to improve learning through formative assessment and using that understanding to improve our practices in teacher education. Three categories emerged from the data analysis: (1) questioning the validity of tacit pedagogical understandings, (2) understanding the experiences of the students, and (3) exploring the need to develop a more reflexive classroom. The findings from this study are useful for persons seeking to prepare teachers to guide science learning.     

Accidents of Birth: Rawls’s Original Position as the Mother’s Womb

This paper examines the history of welfare policy discourse in the United States since the publication of the “Moynihan Report” (1967) and traces its implications for contemporary education policy research. The central thesis is that an overemphasis on “parents” historically invites unwarranted assumptions about autonomy and responsibility, which obfuscates fundamental questions of justice. Children are consequently punished for their parents’ perceived indiscretions. To militate against this tendency the author employs recent feminist critiques of Rawls’s methodology in A Theory of Justice (1999) to reconceptualize the “Original Position” as a mother’s womb in an effort to redirect focus from parents to children. Through this revision, policy discourse can potentially be shifted to more nearly mirror the reasoning applied in Plyler v Doe (1982), which emphasizes finally that children cannot be punished for their parents’ indiscretions.     

An investigation of the relationship between reported results of educational psychologists’ assessments and levels of special needs provision determined by statutory assessment procedures

ABSTRACT

This study attempts to investigate the relationship between the reported test results within educational psychologists’ (EP) assessments and the actual provision specified on the Statements of Special Educational Needs issued by a local educational authority within the UK under the terms of the 1993 Education Act. Data were drawn from the EPs operating in both rural and urban areas. A discriminant function analysis was applied to the data which indicated cognitive ability and writing speed assessments were correlated with the provision outcomes of the statementing procedures. The relative insignificance of educational attainments, especially reading scores, in affecting these decisions was an unexpected finding of the study. The results raise the significance of the discriminant function analyses’ ability to produce a probability score, given a particular case's test profile, of the most likely provision that will be allocated on the basis of how such profiles have been interpreted in the past. The feedback of such information to the Special Needs Departments would contribute to the quality ‐monitoring process by stimulating consistency in decision‐making as specifically referred to in the recent Code of Practice