Search

Prior to 2020, empirical research and reports on approaches to education during health crises were limited. They focused primarily on reporting local-level response and provided only limited analysis. Various historic epidemics, like SARS, Ebola, and HIV/AIDS, provided important lessons about educational efficacy during major health emergencies. However, the sudden emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic led to an explosion of research on educating during a worldwide health crisis. This integrative literature review (Torraco 2005) uses the INEE Minimum Standards framework to conceptualize the response to pandemics and epidemics from 1990 to 2020. The research analyzes 124 empirical studies, practitioner and governmental reports, and historic accounts of Ebola, SARS, and other epidemics, as well as early responses to COVID-19, in order to understand how education stakeholders continued educating during widespread communicable illnesses. The high-level themes that emerged included the foundational role of context and community support; access to an equitable education in the digital age; the social-emotional wellbeing of teachers and students; teachers' role in adapting curriculum and pedagogy; the need for additional training and support for teachers; and the opportunity for a creative shift in practices and policies in education.

Novel approaches are needed to accurately classify and monitor sleep patterns in older adults, particularly those with cognitive impairment and non-normative sleep. Traditional methods ignore underlying sleep architecture in these patient populations, and other modern approaches tend to focus on healthy, normative patient populations. In this paper, we developed a model using a long-short-term memory neural network (LSTM) and trained it on a sample of older, non-normative patients. The 22 nights of data collected were trained on gold-standard polysomnography (PSG) as ground truth and were compared against the clinical standard threshold-based method for sleep detection. The LSTM more than doubled the traditional method's ability to detect clinically-relevant wakefulness during sleep (37.7% vs. 15%) without significantly sacrificing accuracy (67.7% vs. 75%) or precision (90.7% vs. 94%) of sleep classification.

In recent years, anticoagulant rodenticides have emerged as an important factor reducing the survival of many birds of prey and some predatory mammals (Berny and Gaillet 2008, Jacquot et al. 2013, Poessel et al. 2015, Serieys et al. 2015, Murray 2017). Understanding the ecological factors driving the exposure of predators is a key component in assessing the risk posed by anticoagulant rodenticides. We have reviewed the literature to better understand and synthesize the ecological factors driving AR exposure in predators, focusing on landscape and environmental management, traits of the exposed predators and the most common exposure pathways. On a global scale, the large output of ARs, in particular the more toxic and persistent second generation ARs into urban and agricultural settings and the relatively large footprint of these landscapes, has led to widespread AR exposure of many species, ranging from insects to large carnivores (Dowding et al. 2010, Sánchez-Barbudo et al. 2012, Serieys et al. 2015, Alomar et al. 2018). The methods of applying ARs vary widely, and can range from fastening bait stations to the outside or inside perimeter of buildings, to placing AR bait in underground burrows in fields, to mass application of ARs in agricultural fields and orchards (Corrigan 2001, Rattner et al. 2014). The scale of AR field application varies from a couple of hectares to mass application of ARs on a regional scale (3,000 - 10,000 km²) to control rodent outbreaks (Jacquot et al. 2013, Baldwin et al. 2014). General inferences can be made with regards to the traits of the most affected predators. We determined that at-risk predators tend to be nocturnal opportunistic predators for which rodents are a key dietary component, seasonally or year-round (Birks 1998, Jacquot et al. 2013, Hindmarch and Elliott 2015, Serieys et al. 2015). They also tend to be non-migratory and occupy habitats within, or in close proximity to landscapes that are heavily influenced by human activities such as intensive agriculture or urban areas (Birks 1998, Way et al. 2006, Elmeros et al. 2011, Christensen et al. 2012, Cypher et al. 2014, Nogeire et al. 2015, Poessel et al. 2015, Serieys et al. 2015, Hindmarch et al. 2017). Predators that consume rats in urban environments are disproportionately affected by ARs (Lambert et al. 1981, Hindmarch and Elliott 2014, 2015). As our understanding of how ARs are transferred up the food-chain is still limited, there is a need to further comprehend the extent to which non-target prey are being exposed to ARs in different landscapes, as we are frequently documenting AR residues in predators that do not typically prey on rodents (Dowding et al. 2010, Ruiz-Suárez et al. 2014, López-Perea et al. 2015). We recommend a focus on urban landscapes, where to date no exposure data has been collected on non-target prey. We also have a very limited understanding of non-target prey exposure in the urban-wildland/agricultural interface where opportunistic predators are known to hunt both habitat types interchangeably. Finally, we need to decipher whether the mounting evidence of exposure in predators translates into any sub-lethal and population levels effects. For a more in-depth review of this topic, we refer to the chapter “Ecological Factors Driving Uptake of Anticoagulant Rodenticides in Wildlife" (Hindmarch and Elliott 2018) in the book Anticoagulant Rodenticides and Wildlife (van den Brink et al. 2018).

Teachers often find themselves grouped into categories by administrators. Common labels for teacher groupings include grade level and subject matter, for example, 3rd-grade teacher or math teacher. Those teachers who serve multiple grade levels are usually also the only representatives for their subject within the school or the district. They include positions such as librarians, art, music, technology, physical education, and, occasionally, foreign language teachers. These teachers prove to be difficult to fit within a grade-level or subject-matter label. The challenge of grouping these teachers arises in instances such as professional learning communities, school or district training directed toward teachers of highly tested subjects, and placement on school websites, staff directories, or yearbooks. To navigate these challenges, some administrators create umbrella labels for visual art and similar teachers. In this article, the authors explore the labels placed on art teachers, explain the effects of labels on art teacher professional identities through the concept of label theory, and invite readers to advocate for change.

After regulation of pesticides, determination of their persistence in the environment is an important indicator of effectiveness of these measures. We quantified concentrations of two types of systemic insecticides, neonicotinoids (imidacloprid, acetamiprid, clothianidin, thiacloprid, and thiamethoxam) and butenolides (flupyradifurone), in off‐crop nontarget media of hummingbird cloacal fluid, honey bee (Apis mellifera) nectar and honey, and wildflowers before and after regulation of imidacloprid on highbush blueberries in Canada in April 2021. We found that mean total pesticide load increased in hummingbird cloacal fluid, nectar, and flower samples following imidacloprid regulation. On average, we did not find evidence of a decrease in imidacloprid concentrations after regulation. However, there were some decreases, some increases, and other cases with no changes in imidacloprid levels depending on the specific media, time point of sampling, and site type. At the same time, we found an overall increase in flupyradifurone, acetamiprid, thiamethoxam, and thiacloprid but no change in clothianidin concentrations. In particular, flupyradifurone concentrations observed in biota sampled near agricultural areas increased twofold in honey bee nectar, sevenfold in hummingbird cloacal fluid, and eightfold in flowers after the 2021 imidacloprid regulation. The highest residue detected was flupyradifurone at 665 ng/mL (parts per billion [ppb]) in honey bee nectar. Mean total pesticide loads were highest in honey samples (84 ± 10 ppb), followed by nectar (56 ± 7 ppb), then hummingbird cloacal fluid (1.8 ± 0.5 ppb), and least, flowers (0.51 ± 0.06 ppb). Our results highlight that limited regulation of imidacloprid does not immediately reduce residue concentrations, while other systemic insecticides, possibly replacement compounds, concurrently increase in wildlife. Environ Toxicol Chem 2024;43:1497–1508. © 2024 The Authors. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of SETAC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]