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While scholars have found that undergraduate involvement in research is beneficial, the lack of such experiences in the social sciences and humanities is glaring. This paper analyzes how an emphasis on community through cohort models impacts undergraduate student experience in research, taking from the Emerging Scholars Program, an interdisciplinary research program where cohorts of undergraduates are matched with faculty and attend meetings, workshops, and presentations together. We find that the cohort model created a robust community that fosters positive relationships that develop professional skills and emotional support, allowing students to collaborate and aim more toward their professional goals. The results from this study offer valuable insights into how universities can ensure that students have meaningful research experience beyond the classroom.

Mathematics and science knowledge/skills are most commonly associated with engineering's pre-requisite knowledge. Our goals in this paper are to argue for a more systematic inclusion of social science and humanities knowledge in the introduction of engineering to K-12 students. As part of this argument, we present a construct for framing the humanistic side of engineering with illustrative examples of what appealing to the humanistic side of engineering can look like in a classroom setting, and opportunities for research that examines the dynamics that the humanistic side of engineering introduces into engineering learning and teaching. The illustrative examples are drawn from interactions among student-teams from elementary classrooms engaged in engineering activities that appeal to the humanistic side of engineering. Referencing these examples as well as other established engineering education programs, we will discuss opportunities for research in the education of K-16 students. These opportunities span understanding how students' attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions shift, particularly among traditionally underrepresented populations, to how students' engineering knowledge and practices develop in the context of a humanistic approach to engineering.

In light of a decision by members of Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences to make access to their scholarly papers free, advocates of open access celebrated, but some publishers expressed concern. Members of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously to provide the university with copies of their published articles and permission to post them in a freely available online database. Harvard becomes the first American university to make open access to faculty articles a default position, requiring authors to opt out rather than opt in. Publishers of journals in the humanities and social sciences expressed reservations, some calling Harvard's policy shortsighted because it might result in the loss of subscription and reprint income to humanities and social-science journals. A lack of specificity about which articles would be put into Harvard's repository has also come under criticism.

Shape Up Under 5 (SUU5) was a two-year early childhood obesity prevention pilot study in Somerville, Massachusetts (2015–2017) designed to test a novel conceptual framework called Stakeholder-driven Community Diffusion. For whole-of-community interventions, this framework posits that diffusion of stakeholders’ knowledge about and engagement with childhood obesity prevention efforts through their social networks will improve the implementation of health-promoting policy and practice changes intended to reduce obesity risk. SUU5 used systems science methods (agent-based modeling, group model building, social network analysis) to design, facilitate, and evaluate the work of 16 multisector stakeholders (‘the Committee’). In this paper, we describe the design and methods of SUU5 using the conceptual framework: the approach to data collection, and methods and rationale for study inputs, activities and evaluation, which together may further our understanding of the hypothesized processes within Stakeholder-driven Community Diffusion. We also present a generalizable conceptual framework for addressing childhood obesity and similar complex public health issues through whole-of-community interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyzed data from across five decades of passerine bird banding at Manomet in Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA. This included 172,609 captures during spring migration and 253,265 during fall migration, from 1969 to 2015. Migration counts are prone to large interannual variation and trends are often difficult to interpret, but have the advantage of sampling many breeding populations in a single locale. We employed a Bayesian state-space modeling approach to estimate patterns in abundance over time while accounting for observation error, and a hierarchical clustering method to identify species groups with similar trends over time. Although continent-wide there has been an overall decrease in landbird populations over the past 40 years, we found a variety of patterns in abundance over time. Consistent with other studies, we found an overall decline in numbers of birds in the aggregate, with most species showing significant net declines in migratory cohort size in spring, fall, or both (49/73 species evaluated). Other species, however, exhibited different patterns, including abundance increases (10 species). Even among increasing and declining species, the specific trends varied in shape over time, forming seven distinct clusters in fall and ten in spring. The remaining species followed largely independent and irregular pathways. Overall, life-history traits (dependence on open habitat, nesting on or near the ground, migratory strategy, human commensal, spruce budworm specialists) did a poor job of predicting species groupings of abundance patterns in both spring and fall, but median date of passage was a good predictor of abundance trends during spring (but not fall) migration. This suggests that some species with very similar patterns of abundance were unlikely to be responding to the same environmental forces. Changes in abundance at this banding station were generally consistent with BBS trend data for the same geographic region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Safety-net health systems, which serve a disproportionate share of patients at high risk for hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, may use revenue generated by the federal drug discount pricing program, known as 340B, to support multidisciplinary care. Budgetary impacts of repealing the drug-pricing program are unknown. Our objective was to conduct a budgetary impact analysis of a multidisciplinary primary care-based HCV treatment program, with and without 340B support. Methods: We conducted a budgetary impact analysis from the perspective of a large safety-net medical center in Boston, Massachusetts. Participants included 302 HCV-infected patients (mean age 45, 75% male, 53% white, 77% Medicaid) referred to the primary care-based HCV treatment program from 2015–2016. Main measures included costs and revenues associated with the treatment program. Our main outcomes were net cost with and without 340B Drug Pricing support. Results: Total program costs were $942,770, while revenues totaled $1.2 million. With the 340B Drug Pricing Program the hospital received a net revenue of $930 per patient referred to the HCV treatment program. In the absence of the 340B program, the hospital would lose $370 per patient referred. Ninety-seven percent (68/70) of patients who initiated treatment in the program achieved a sustained virologic response (SVR) at a net cost of $4,150 each, among this patient subset. Conclusions: The 340B Drug Pricing Program enabled a safety-net hospital to deliver effective primary care-based HCV treatment using a multidisciplinary care team. Efforts to sustain the 340B program could enable dissemination of similar HCV treatment models elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various studies have reported the physical and mental health benefits from exposure to “green” neighborhoods, such as proximity to neighborhoods with trees and vegetation. However, no studies have explicitly assessed the association between exposure to “green” surroundings and cognitive function in terms of student academic performance. This study investigated the association between the “greenness” of the area surrounding a Massachusetts public elementary school and the academic achievement of the school’s student body based on standardized tests with an ecological setting. Researchers used the composite school-based performance scores generated by the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) to measure the percentage of 3rd-grade students (the first year of standardized testing for 8–9 years-old children in public school), who scored “Above Proficient” (AP) in English and Mathematics tests (Note: Individual student scores are not publically available). The MCAS results are comparable year to year thanks to an equating process. Researchers included test results from 2006 through 2012 in 905 public schools and adjusted for differences between schools in the final analysis according to race, gender, English as a second language (proxy for ethnicity and language facility), parent income, student-teacher ratio, and school attendance. Surrounding greenness of each school was measured using satellite images converted into the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in March, July and October of each year according to a 250-meter, 500-meter, 1,000-meter, and 2000-meter circular buffer around each school. Spatial Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) estimated the impacts of surrounding greenness on school-based performance. Overall the study results supported a relationship between the “greenness” of the school area and the school-wide academic performance. Interestingly, the results showed a consistently positive significant association between the greenness of the school in the Spring (when most Massachusetts students take the MCAS tests) and school-wide performance on both English and Math tests, even after adjustment for socio-economic factors and urban residency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information related to Jack Nusan Porter who is a former research associate at Harvard University and a former professor of social science at Boston University. He founded the Journal of the History of Sociology (JHS), and several other projects in 1976 in Boston, Massachusetts in a burst of creativity between jobs. He discovered later that year also marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the first course in sociology at Yale and taught by William Graham Sumner. This was not the first history of sociology journal nor will it, hopefully, be the last. The time seemed right in 1976 because sociology and especially, the American Sociological Association (ASA), the major sociological, professional group in the world, did not seem interested in its own history. He once asked an ASA officer if she could tell him how long (how many years) members were actually members of the organization, and she could not tell him. Even archives were disorganized. There was no central location. The University of Chicago had some relevant holdings; Pennsylvania State University under Alan Sica had some; the University of Nebraska under Mary Jo Deegan and Michael Hill were other sources; the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada was a fourth source; but most holdings were scattered all over the country, unknown to most scholars.

This article highlights the minutes of the annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society from August 23 to 26, 1968 in Boston Massachusetts.

This article presents a brief information related to the field of sociology. The Social Sciences in Mexico and News About the Social Sciences in South and Central America has been announced as a new quarterly journal in English under the editorship of Laszlo Radvanyi, Professor of the National School of Economics of the National University of Mexico. The purpose is to make known to the social scientists of other countries the work that is being done in this field in Latin America. "Journal of Human Relations," beginning in January 1947, is jointly announced by the Research Center for Group Dynamics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, England. The new journal will seek to encourage the development of an integrated approach in the social Sciences as applied to human affairs, and is intended to supplement those more specific journals already existing in the field by providing an opportunity for side-by-side comparison of related work in various fields both at the conceptual and practical level.