Companion Course Research Articles

A Cross-Disciplinary Training Program for the Advancement of Medical Countermeasures.

In September 2012, the United States Department of Health and Human Services Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Office of Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston entered into a collaborative educational partnership for the academic development of a robust training program for good laboratory practices in high-biocontainment environments. The implementation of problem-based learning techniques encouraged researchers and regulators to cross-educate each other on the challenges related to the conduct of regulated studies in biological safety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories and identified solutions that were acceptable from scientific and regulatory perspectives. The result was the development of a face-to-face course entitled Achieving Data Quality and Integrity in Maximum Containment Laboratories and an additional online companion course covering the FDA regulation, Good Laboratory Practice for Nonclinical Laboratory Studies (21 CFR Part 58). The course offers a unique opportunity for members of the regulatory and scientific communities to solve complex issues in an interactive educational environment, especially for the advancement of medical countermeasures (MCMs) via the FDA Animal Rule (21 CFR Parts 314 and 601 (2002)). The program occurs annually and is expanding in 2019 to include a course addressing data quality and integrity in clinical trials involving the evaluation of MCMs for high-consequence pathogens. To date, 311 individuals have attended the course. Based on attendance numbers, diversity of participation (by affiliation and area of expertise), and self-reported evaluation results, course attendees indicate that the training program addresses a knowledge gap and that they will implement knowledge gained.

The relationship between subject matter knowledge and teaching effectiveness of undergraduate chemistry peer facilitators

Use of peer instruction and facilitation has surged in undergraduate education at large colleges and universities in recent years. Studies on peer instruction have been directed primarily at student learning gains and affective outcomes among the facilitators. For peer instructors, the relationship between their teaching effectiveness and their foundational content knowledge is assumed but understudied. In an effort to promote instructional coherence (i.e., instructional same-pageness) in the introductory organic chemistry program at the University of Michigan, we observed peer-led study group facilitators’ involvement in their study groups (as teachers of groups of 6–12 students) and in a companion course (as learners) designed to reinforce and enhance their content knowledge. Audiovisual recordings of the facilitators in both the companion course and, for ten of them, leading their study groups, were captured over each of the two week periods covering the topics of stereochemistry and also conformational analysis. Recordings were subsequently coded for topic and correctness in presentation of subject matter. Errors made in either study group or the companion course were investigated for error resolution (corrected or uncorrected), source of error, and propagation of corrected errors. Analysis of recordings revealed that facilitators who have their own errors corrected in the companion course, or observe their peers’ errors corrected in the companion course, correctly describe these concepts in study groups. On examining errors made by facilitators when they are leading study group sessions, a backwards analysis showed consistently that either the topics had not been addressed in the antecedent companion course, or the facilitator was not actively engaged with the discussion when the topics were being discussed. These findings have implications to inform not only our own implementation of peer-led study groups, but also those interested in designing subject matter companion courses for peer leaders in other instructional settings.

Engaging Early-Career Students in Research Using a Tiered Mentoring Model.

Incorporating research into undergraduate curricula, especially at an early stage, has been linked to improved critical thinking, intellectual independence, and student retention. This results in a graduating population more ready to enter the workforce or graduate school. Similarly, mentoring has been linked to enhanced self-efficacy, persistence, and desire to pursue graduate studies. We have designed two linked courses that engage second-year undergraduate students in developing self-directed research projects, proposal writing. These courses also serve to nucleate relationships with graduate student mentors enrolled in the companion course. Early-career undergraduate students, with no previous research experience, receive formal training in the process of scientific research from a faculty process mentor while working with a graduate student content mentor to develop an independent research project and write a proposal and embed themselves in an active research group. Undergraduate students may elect to submit their proposals for funding to continue the project, either as part of the upper division research course required for graduation or independently. Graduate students enrolled in the companion course gain experience in mentoring through formal training and actively mentoring early-career undergraduates. This chapter presents both the model and early assessment of our integrated approach to engaging early career undergraduates in developing and funding independent research projects with the support of empowering mentoring relationships.

Will it Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea so You Don’t Waste Your Time and Money

Pat Flynn Will it Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea so You Don't Waste Your Time and Money Flynn Industries, LLC (2016) $15.25 (paperback), 335 pagesWILL IT FLY? HOW TO Test Your Next Business Idea so You Don't Waste Your Time and Money, is an intriguing paperback think book for aspiring entrepreneurs. This book is widely accessible, using common language, rather than terminology familiar to business or entrepreneurship students, graduates, or researchers. The practical hands-on approach provides a manageable to-do list for the reader to vet their business idea(s) before making a substantial investment in a full business launch, whether via or money. The author, Pat Flynn, is the founder of Smart Passive Income, a website devoted to assisting others in building successful internet-based businesses. His work has been featured in Forbes and the New York Times. Additional information on the author can be found at http://smartpassiveincome.com/about.Organizationally, the book features 19 chapters organized into five parts. It also comes with an invitation to access the free online companion course, which is a series of short videos and supplementary content to complement the chapters of the book. The font size, line spacing, and use of screen shot images of websites or software programs, propel the reader quickly through the book and make it an easy read. However, it is likely that the read will go as quickly as the espoused 3½ hours mentioned in the Foreword for most readers, especially if the to complete the series of tests is included in the commitment calculation.The author uses flight analogies to guide the content of the book and engages the reader early on with a personal anecdote of teaching his son to make a paper airplane. Similar to the endeavor of building a flight-worthy paper airplane, the author explains the process of testing one's business idea(s) preflight. In that vein, the author subjects the reader to a series of which actually are tests, in terms of comprehension, but instead are thought activities that serve as a feasibility analysis.In Part one (Chapters 1 through 5), the author guides the reader to first use a variety of visioning exercises to determine what type of business would be most feasible for that individual to pursue. By building an awareness of the consideration of fit between the entrepreneur and the business endeavor itself, the author aims to steer the entrepreneur away from investing in a business that fails to align with an individual's passions or long-term life vision. In other words, the author first focuses the nascent entrepreneur on the question of, how well does this business idea align with my own personal goals and passions?Part two (Chapters 6 through 9) guide the nascent entrepreneur through a series of exercises aimed at developing a well-articulated business idea. The underlying assumption of this section is that the aspiring entrepreneur will waste time with pursuits of business name creation, building websites and branding before dealing with the transition of their seed idea to a detailed business which is not always fun, and definitely easy or fast (Flynn, 2016, p. 107). The goals of this section seem to align with the section of a business model or business plan that describes the product or service and can serve as the basis for an elevator pitch; however, it has yet been refined by any sort of industry or market analysis-considerations that come into play in Part three. …

Judgment based on knowledge

CONCLUSION: PHTLS has had a good acceptance throughout the world. That is because of the people in the pictures that I have shown, as well as a lot of people whom we have not had time to show today. It is what these hard working unselfish individuals have done to make PHTLS and its associated projects such as an international standard. Three-quarters-of-a-million providers in sixty-one countries taught by 7,500 instructors have taken PHTLS since it started. It has been of remarkable importance and of tremendous impact, but we also can’t forget the impact of the companion course, Basic Trauma Life Support (now known as International Trauma Life Support) that was started by Dr. John Campbell, an emergency physician in Alabama, supported by Alabama ACEP. He sent me a copy of his initial book along with a nice letter. John has also a major impact in teaching people how to take care of patients. These photographs are of the current members of the PHTLS committee, as well as other who that are actively involved in PHTLS (Fig. 8). Will Chapleau has really been the leader of PHTLS and has made it work. I cannot say enough about him and his work. You are all familiar with his work with ATLS and many of the things within the American College of Surgeons, but he has made PHTLS what it is. We know that our patients, our trauma patients, are cared for by the PHTLS standards that were strongly supported by Scott Frame a long time ago. I’m sorry that he’s not here with this today in his body, but I know that his spirit is standing here on the podium with me today just as Joyce is sitting in the audience. Thank you very much for allowing me to honor Scott with this lecture.

Characterizing the Effectiveness of Developmental Education: A Response to Recent Criticism

Over the past several years, the Community College Research Center (CCRC), the National Center for Postsecondary Research (NCPR), MDRC, and other researchers and research organizations have conducted several research studies and reviews on developmental education (see http://ccrc. tc.columbia.edu/Developmental-Education-and-Adult-Basic-Skills.html). In a recent issue of the Journal of Developmental Education, Alexandras Goudas and Hunter Boylan (2012) aimed several criticisms at this body of work, with the key claims being that: (a) we unfairly portray developmental education as ineffective because it does not lead to outcomes better than those of college-ready students; (b) we ignore several studies showing positive results; and (c) we overgeneralize from results that are only valid for students near the developmental cutoff scores. These three claims are woven into a broader critique that we have cherrypicked negative results, neglected methodological problems with the studies yielding such results, and ignored positive results in order to advance our own reform agenda and, in particular, to support the notion of corequisite developmental education. (In the corequisite model, developmental students enroll in college-level courses and in the same term are provided additional academic support, which might include enrollment in a companion course or workshop that is linked to the college-level course for which they are weakly prepared.)In this commentary, we address each of the claims advanced by Goudas and Boylan (2012). We disagree with their portrayal of our research as biased and flawed, yet we also believe that their comments may reflect some widespread confusion in the field about research on developmental education, so our response has significance beyond our particular disagreements with these authors. However, before addressing their claims, we wish to clarify a critical point.We value and appreciate the challenging and important work performed by developmental education faculty within the classroom. Faced with underprepared students, these instructors can make a substantial positive difference in the academic and personal lives of the people they teach. We do not dispute this reality. However, this reality coexists with another one suggested by the research: The traditional system of assessment, placement, and developmental coursework has negative side effects (at the very least, developmental coursework takes time and resources and may discourage students) which, when considering the developmental population as a whole, tend to balance out its positive effects.Although our research concludes that the current system of developmental education needs improvement, we do not advocate-nor do we believe that the results of our research support- the elimination of developmental education, the placing of all students into college courses, or the wholesale conversion of developmental education into a corequisite model. We do think, however, that community colleges can more effectively help students who arrive with academic and nonacademic weaknesses that impede success. We recognize that improvements will draw heavily on the skill and experience of today's developmental faculty, but they cannot do it alone. We contend that the system of developmental education needs reform. Moreover, we are optimistic about the many exciting and innovative reforms being implemented in states and colleges all over the country. These reforms include changes in assessment, placement, financial aid, connections to high schools, links to college-level programs, curricular content, student supports, and pedagogy.We also want to clarify our use of the term developmental education. Most of the research we cite refers to students who were referred to developmental education based on their scores on placement exams. Therefore those students could take advantage of all of the services provided by the college to students with weak academic skills, including developmental courses or other types of tutoring or non-credit assistance. …

Desire as interruption: young women and sexuality education in Ontario, Canada

Danger and pleasure are terms commonly employed to describe women's sexual experiences, including those of young women. This paper explores how young women's sexual danger and pleasure are represented and characterized in official discourses, specifically those of school‐based sexuality education. Drawing on Michelle Fine's four major discourses of sexuality education, this paper uses the Ontario Curriculum and its companion Course Profiles to analyze school‐based sexuality education in Ontario, Canada. This paper describes how the discourses of victimization and individual morality dominate in the curriculum while the discourse of desire is largely absent. Because there is considerable emphasis on danger/victimization and insufficient attention paid to pleasure/desire, the paper concludes by describing how a discourse of desire might be included in sexuality education curriculum.

A Companion Course in General Chemistry for Pre-Education Students

At the University of Wisconsin—Madison, education majors are required to take a laboratory science course. In the past decade, however, relatively few students selected chemistry to fulfill this requirement. In an attempt to change this trend, we designed a one-credit companion course that is paired with the five-credit general chemistry course taken by pre-education students. Over the course of a semester, students design chemistry-based activities for classroom use, and become familiar with quality science materials available to teachers. In addition, good teaching ideas and practices are modeled. Overall, it is hoped that those who participate in the course will strengthen their commitment to becoming teachers.

The Companion Course: A Pilot Project to Teach Discipline‐Specific Library Research Skills

In early 1997, fueled by reports from the university administration of declining enrollments and student retention problems, the University of Oregon Library System formed a task force to explore opportunities to boost student retention. The most popular recommendation from the task force was to develop library courses that would address discipline‐specific information needs in a number of library‐intensive courses, especially in journalism, management, psychology, and women’s studies. In this article, Bell and Benedicto discuss the pilot program that arose out of this recommendation and that was conducted over spring term 1998.

Basic Null Space Calculations

Dan Kalman studied mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, earning a B.S. in 1974, and at University of WisconsinMadison earning a Ph.D. in 1980. He has taught at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and is at present an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. His interests span the undergraduate mathematics curriculum and extend to preparation of elementary school teachers, history and philosophy of mathematics, and com? puter science. Currently, he is developing a laboratory companion course for first semester calculus using programmable calculators.