Access, quality and equity in early childhood education and care: A South Australian study

Australian Journal of Education, 59/2, May/2015 published by SAGE Publishing, All rights reservedWhile much is known about the factors related to student performance beyond Grade 3 less is known about the factors that are related to student performance in early childhood education and the early years in primary school. As part of the 'I go to school' project in South Australia, this study tracked children attending integrated preschool/childcare centres -known as Children's Centres- as they made their transition to school. Results indicated that children who attended early childhood education programs that were of higher quality as characterised by higher staff qualifications and a greater range and more engaging children's activities showed a greater gain in cognitive development than children who attended lower quality programs. Findings also suggested that children who benefited the most from attendance in these programs were children from backgrounds of greater social disadvantage than children from less disadvantaged backgrounds

Sustainability of evidence-based healthcare: Research agenda, methodological advances, and infrastructure support

BACKGROUND: Little is known about how well or under what conditions health innovations are sustained and their gains maintained once they are put into practice. Implementation science typically focuses on uptake by early adopters of one healthcare innovation at a time. The later-stage challenges of scaling up and sustaining evidence-supported interventions receive too little attention. This project identifies the challenges associated with sustainability research and generates recommendations for accelerating and strengthening this work. METHODS: A multi-method, multi-stage approach, was used: (1) identifying and recruiting experts in sustainability as participants, (2) conducting research on sustainability using concept mapping, (3) action planning during an intensive working conference of sustainability experts to expand the concept mapping quantitative results, and (4) consolidating results into a set of recommendations for research, methodological advances, and infrastructure building to advance understanding of sustainability. Participants comprised researchers, funders, and leaders in health, mental health, and public health with shared interest in the sustainability of evidence-based health care. RESULTS: Prompted to identify important issues for sustainability research, participants generated 91 distinct statements, for which a concept mapping process produced 11 conceptually distinct clusters. During the conference, participants built upon the concept mapping clusters to generate recommendations for sustainability research. The recommendations fell into three domains: (1) pursue high priority research questions as a unified agenda on sustainability; (2) advance methods for sustainability research; (3) advance infrastructure to support sustainability research. CONCLUSIONS: Implementation science needs to pursue later-stage translation research questions required for population impact. Priorities include conceptual consistency and operational clarity for measuring sustainability, developing evidence about the value of sustaining interventions over time, identifying correlates of sustainability along with strategies for sustaining evidence-supported interventions, advancing the theoretical base and research designs for sustainability research, and advancing the workforce capacity, research culture, and funding mechanisms for this important work

An Examination of Psychological Factors That Predict College Student Success and Retention

The purpose of this study was to examine the interaction among measures of self-efficacy, locus of control, coping behaviors, and attitudes toward the education-employment connection on retention among college students at a small liberal arts college. Results indicated statistically significant differences between high and low intent to return to the college on the educationemployment attitude measures. Students who had greater comfort in selecting their academic major, believed that their academic work would lead to future employment and believed that their current academic work would lead to future success, had significantly higher intent to return to the institution the following semester. Limitations and implications of this finding are presented and directions for future research discussed

Species-level functional profiling of metagenomes and metatranscriptomes.

Functional profiles of microbial communities are typically generated using comprehensive metagenomic or metatranscriptomic sequence read searches, which are time-consuming, prone to spurious mapping, and often limited to community-level quantification. We developed HUMAnN2, a tiered search strategy that enables fast, accurate, and species-resolved functional profiling of host-associated and environmental communities. HUMAnN2 identifies a community's known species, aligns reads to their pangenomes, performs translated search on unclassified reads, and finally quantifies gene families and pathways. Relative to pure translated search, HUMAnN2 is faster and produces more accurate gene family profiles. We applied HUMAnN2 to study clinal variation in marine metabolism, ecological contribution patterns among human microbiome pathways, variation in species' genomic versus transcriptional contributions, and strain profiling. Further, we introduce 'contributional diversity' to explain patterns of ecological assembly across different microbial community types

Francisella tularensis Transmission by Solid Organ Transplantation, 20171.

In July 2017, fever and sepsis developed in 3 recipients of solid organs (1 heart and 2 kidneys) from a common donor in the United States; 1 of the kidney recipients died. Tularemia was suspected only after blood cultures from the surviving kidney recipient grew Francisella species. The organ donor, a middle-aged man from the southwestern United States, had been hospitalized for acute alcohol withdrawal syndrome, pneumonia, and multiorgan failure. F. tularensis subsp. tularensis (clade A2) was cultured from archived spleen tissue from the donor and blood from both kidney recipients. Whole-genome multilocus sequence typing indicated that the isolated strains were indistinguishable. The heart recipient remained seronegative with negative blood cultures but had been receiving antimicrobial drugs for a medical device infection before transplant. Two lagomorph carcasses collected near the donor's residence were positive by PCR for F. tularensis subsp. tularensis (clade A2). This investigation documents F. tularensis transmission by solid organ transplantation

The role of soil in regulation of climate

Funding We received no funding for this study. Data accessibility This article has no additional data.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Integrated responses of crustaceans inhabiting estuaries to the challenges of feeding and digestion in low salinity

Estuaries are highly productive and serve as vital habitats for numerous decapod crustacean species. However, the environmental conditions within estuaries are often highly dynamic and subject to large changes in salinity and temperature that occur on seasonal and tidal scales. Not all of the species occupying these habitats are adept in coping with changes in these environmental conditions. This dissertation describes the influence of low salinity conditions on the 1) habitat preference, 2) feeding behaviour and 3) digestive physiology of crustaceans inhabiting estuaries. I have primarily focussed on a weak osmoregulator, the Dungeness crab, Cancer magister , but have also compared some aspects with the blue crab, Callinectes sapidus , an efficient osmoregulator. Recordings of temperature, salinity and depth using archival data tags affixed to crabs in the field showed that adult Cancer magister spent the majority of time in deep water where they were not subjected to stressful salinity or temperature conditions. When crabs did enter into the estuary, these forays often corresponded to times of increased food abundance and crabs avoided challenging temperature and salinity conditions by exploiting the estuary during nocturnal high tides when salinities were higher and temperatures lower. In the laboratory, experiments in temperature and salinity gradients showed that Cancer magister alters thermal and salinity preference behaviour in response to a food stimulus. Thus, while Cancer magister primarily avoids challenging environmental conditions, they may forage in these areas during times of increased food abundance. Since crabs may be foraging in low salinity, the effects of low salinity and starvation on feeding behaviour of Cancer magister were examined. The likelihood of feeding, the amount of food consumed and the time spent feeding were all reduced in low salinity. However, these responses were partially overridden by starvation. Removal of the sinus gland (the potential source of inhibitory hormones that regulate feeding) revealed that changes in feeding behaviour result from hormonal regulation rather than physiological limitation. Although crabs regulate food intake in response to hyposaline exposure, they may be exposed to low salinity conditions at any point in the digestive cycle. Therefore the effects that low salinity has on digestive physiology and how these effects were influenced by osmoregulatory ability were examined. In Cancer magister , exposure to low salinity post-feeding resulted in a prioritization towards the responses to low salinity, resulting in a reduction in oxygen uptake that corresponded to a reduced rate of gut contraction and an increase in gastric evacuation time. These reductions also corresponded with a delay in digestive enzyme secretion and a subsequent reduction in the post feeding increase in circulating free amino acids in the hemolymph. In contrast, Callinectes sapidus , an efficient osmoregulator, displayed a summation of the metabolic responses to low salinity exposure and digestion. Accordingly, digestive processes continued unabated in low salinity, resulting in a build up of free amino acids in the hemolymph