The potential of supplemental instruction in engineering education: creating additional peer-guided learning opportunities in difficult compulsory courses for first-year students

Supplemental Instruction (SI) can be an efficient way of improving student success in difficult courses. Here, a study is made on SI attached to difficult first-year engineering courses. The results show that both the percentage of students passing a difficult first-year engineering course, and scores on the course exams are considerably higher for students attending SI, compared to students not attending. The study also shows that a higher percentage of female students attend SI, compared to male students. However, both genders seem to benefit to the same degree as a result of attending SI meetings. Also all students, independent of prior academic ability, benefit from attending SI. A qualitative study suggests that SI meetings provide elements important for understanding course material, which are missing from other scheduled learning opportunities in the courses.     

Acoustophoretic microfluidic chip for sequential elution of surface bound molecules from beads or cells

An acoustophoresis-based microfluidic flow-chip is presented as a novel platform to facilitate analysis of proteins and peptides loosely bound to the surface of beads or cells. The chip allows for direct removal of the background surrounding the beads or cells, followed by sequential treatment and collection of a sequence of up to five different buffer conditions. During this treatment, the beads/cells are retained in a single flow by acoustic radiation force. Eluted peptides are collected from the outlets and subsequently purified by miniaturized solid-phase extraction and analyzed with matrix assisted laser desorption mass spectrometry. Fundamental parameters such as the system fluidics and dispersion are presented. The device was successfully applied for wash and sequential elution of peptides bound to the surface of microbeads and human spermatozoa, respectively.     

Violent Extremism,National Security and Prevention. Institutional Discourses and their Implications for Schooling

Currently, threats to societal security from extremist groups are high on the political agenda in many countries. Politicians, policymakers at various levels and communities are searching for methods to counteract recruitment to violent organizations. These efforts are often referred to as Prevention of Violent Extremism (PVE-programmes). One of the earliest PVE programmes in Europe was the British PREVENT programme, and it has to some extent served as a model for other countries, including Sweden. In this article, we scrutinize a particular method, inspired by the PREVENT, and developed by the Swedish National Coordinator against violent extremism, called The Conversation Compass (CC) intended for so-called front-line workers. This article reports an analysis of this method in order to provide a broader understanding of how the discourse on preventing violent extremism meanders from political and policy discourses into claims about how to organize educational practices and social work and the regulations under which these institutions operate. The results show that the CC contributes to a securitization of the educational system in ways that are not in line with educational traditions of schools in Sweden, or with the laws and policies that regulate the educational system.     

Open access journal publishing in the Nordic countries

The number of open access (OA) journals and their share of all scholarly journals are usually estimated based on indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). DOAJ's coverage of OA journals from different regions of the world is, however, far from complete, particularly of journals publishing in languages other than English. Using alternative data sources for identification and manual verification, 437 scholarly OA journals published in the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) were identified, and some key characteristics were studied. Of these, only 184 were indexed in DOAJ. A vast majority of the journals was published by scholarly societies or universities. Social sciences and humanities dominated as topics, and few journals charge authors. National or university‐specific OJS portals have played a major role in enabling OA publishing. Around a third of the Nordic scholarly journals are currently OA.     

Early prediction of individual growth in reading

Seventy four boys with reading disabilities and amatched control group of normal readers were followedduring their compulsory schooling (to grade 9). Worddecoding performance was assessed with the Wordchainstest on three occasions. For each student a lineargrowth function was estimated. The slope parameter wasused as the dependent variable in a multipleregression analysis with a large number of explanatoryfactors from grades 2 and 3 including phonologicalskills, reading and spelling, non-verbal intelligence,motor skills, eye movements, teacher ratings of schoolbehaviour and parents' education. The proportion ofvariance in growth explained for the reading disabledboys amounted to 25%, the most powerful predictorsbeing early reading performance and non-verbalintelligence. More surprisingly, neither teacherratings nor family background gave useful predictiveinformation. For the control group none of theindependent variables explained the variance of growthin reading.