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Background: Engineering curricula are built around faculty and accreditors' perceptions of what knowledge, skills, and abilities graduates will need in engineering careers. However, the people making these decisions may not be fully aware of what industry employers require for engineering graduates. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study is to determine how industry employer-sought professional and technical skills vary among engineering disciplines and levels of education. Design/Method: Using a large sample (n = 26,103) of mined job advertisements, we use the O*NET skills database to determine the frequencies of different professional and technical skills for biomedical, civil, chemical, electrical, environmental, and mechanical engineers with bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees. Results: The most frequently sought professional skill is problem-solving; the most frequently sought technical skills across disciplines are Microsoft Office software and computer-aided design software. Although not the most frequently requested skills, job advertisements including the Python and MATLAB programming languages paid significantly higher salaries than those without. Conclusions: The findings of this study have important implications for engineering program leaders and curriculum designers choosing which skills to teach students so that they are best prepared to get and excel in engineering jobs. The results also show which skills students can prioritize investing their time in so that they receive the largest financial return on their investment.

Post-course instructor ratings are a common practice at universities in Europe, Australia, and North America. Rather than solely describing teaching practice, however, such ratings may be associated with a range of non-pedagogical factors. We explored engineering students' instructor ratings at a large United States institution, investigating relationships between overall instructor rating and some of those non-pedagogical factors, including subject area, class size, and students' course grades. Instructor ratings were more favourable in humanities courses than in science or math courses, and students gave higher ratings to instructors who taught smaller class sizes. The strongest relationship existed between overall rating and students' course grades: students who received A's rated instructors an average 0.84 points higher on a 6-point scale than students who received F's. Students who withdrew from a course provided the lowest instructor ratings. When instructor ratings are used as metrics of teaching ability in discussions related to promotion, tenure, or salary adjustments, there is an inherent inequity in the system that must be acknowledged beyond already well-documented biases, as non-pedagogical factors often outside of the instructor's control may be significantly associated with those ratings.

To inform instruction, screening and diagnostic assessments must collect accurate data about the current state of the learner. Unfortunately, students may find assessments unengaging, intimidating, or irrelevant, undermining the quality of their effort and the quality of the data. The application of gaming to assessments may provide a way to boost and sustain effortful test-taker engagement, an integration that has thus far yielded mixed results, at best. Our interdisciplinary team reviewed and evaluated existing gamification research to consolidate a set of guiding principles for effectively merging diagnostic assessment tasks and protocols with a motivating game-like context in ways that specifically foster high levels of test-taker effort. We share our work in this paper to help inform ongoing research and development leading to more efficient and effective assessments of children.

IT WOULD BE A CRYING SHAME AND DISGRACE IF AMERICA SHOULD permit one of the very greatest of its historical monuments to pass away,' a reader of the New Orleans [...]

Abstract Background Health care routinely fails Indigenous peoples and anti-Indigenous racism is common in clinical encounters. Clinical training programs aimed to enhance Indigenous cultural safety (ICS) rely on learner reported impact assessment even though clinician self-assessment is poorly correlated with observational or patient outcome reporting. We aimed to compare the clinical impacts of intensive and brief ICS training to control, and to assess the feasibility of ICS training evaluation tools, including unannounced Indigenous standardized patient (UISP) visits. Method Using a prospective parallel group three-arm randomized controlled trial design and masked standardized patients, we compared the clinical impacts of the intensive interactive, professionally facilitated, 8- to10-h Sanyas ICS training; a brief 1-h anti-bias training adapted to address anti-Indigenous bias; and control continuing medical education time-attention matched to the intensive training. Participants included 58 non-Indigenous staff physicians, resident physicians and nurse practitioners from family practice clinics, and one emergency department across four teaching hospitals in Toronto, Canada. Main outcome measures were the quality of care provided during UISP visits including adjusted odds that clinician would be recommended by the UISP to a friend or family member; mean item scores on patient experience of care measure; and clinical practice guideline adherence for NSAID renewal and pain assessment. Results Clinicians in the intensive or brief ICS groups had higher adjusted odds of being highly recommended to friends and family by standardized patients (OR 6.88, 95% CI 1.17 to 40.45 and OR 7.78, 95% CI 1.05 to 58.03, respectively). Adjusted mean item patient experience scores were 46% (95% CI 12% to 80%) and 40% (95% CI 2% to 78%) higher for clinicians enrolled in the intensive and brief training programs, respectively, compared to control. Small sample size precluded detection of training impacts on clinical practice guideline adherence; 100% of UISP visits were undetected by participating clinicians. Conclusions Patient-oriented evaluation design and tools including UISPs were demonstrated as feasible and effective. Results show potential impact of cultural safety training on patient recommendation of clinician and improved patient experience. A larger trial to further ascertain impact on clinical practice is needed. Trial registration Clinicaltrials.org NCT05890144. Retrospectively registered on June 5, 2023.

The apicomplexan parasite Cryptosporidium is a leading cause of childhood diarrhea in developing countries. Current treatment options are inadequate and multiple preclinical compounds are being actively pursued as potential drugs for cryptosporidiosis. Unlike most apicomplexans, Cryptosporidium spp. sequentially replicate asexually and then sexually within a single host to complete their lifecycles. Anti-cryptosporidial compounds are generally identified or tested through in vitro phenotypic assays that only assess the asexual stages. Therefore, compounds that specifically target the sexual stages remain unexplored. In this study, we leveraged the ReFRAME drug repurposing library against a newly devised multi-readout imaging assay to identify small-molecule compounds that modulate macrogamont differentiation and maturation. RNA-seq studies confirmed selective modulation of macrogamont differentiation for 10 identified compounds (9 inhibitors and 1 accelerator). The collective transcriptomic profiles of these compounds indicates that translational repression accompanies Cryptosporidium sexual differentiation, which we validated experimentally. Additionally, cross comparison of the RNA-seq data with promoter sequence analysis for stage-specific genes converged on a key role for an Apetala 2 (AP2) transcription factor (cgd2_3490) in differentiation into macrogamonts. Finally, drug annotation for the ReFRAME hits indicates that an elevated supply of energy equivalence in the host cell is critical for macrogamont formation.

This article offers a retrospective synopsis of 70 years of development of a humanistic approach to science education. Instruction using the history of science, for example, provides a rich context for students to learn not only canonical science content on a need-to-know basis, but also content from the other domains of humanistic science education, including: the nature of science and scientists, cultural studies, and the multifarious interplay between science/scientists and society. The synopsis leads to the conclusion that instructional materials and student assessment tools developed earlier for teaching the history of science are relevant today. Science--technology--society--environment and socioscientific issues, two of the present six domains of humanistic school science, are given special attention. An example of their teaching materials is described, which illustrates in detail how to organize lessons or units particularly suited for the substantial majority of high school students who would not enroll in any current science classes if not required for graduation. Trends suggested for the future are based on shifts in current global economics.

This study focuses on an educational game titled "Cellverse," a two-player cross-platform VR project intended to teach high school biology students about cell structure and function. In "Cellverse," players work in pairs to explore a human lung cell and diagnose and treat a dangerous genetic disorder. "Cellverse" is being designed by the Collaborative Learning Environments in Virtual Reality (CLEVR) team, an interdisciplinary team consisting of game designers, educational researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students. Using a design-based research approach, we have enlisted the help of both subject matter experts and user testers to iteratively design and improve "Cellverse." The objective of this paper is to share how user and expert feedback can inform and enhance the development of learning games. We describe how we gather and synthesize information to review and revise our game from in-game observations, semi-structured interviews, and video data. We discuss the input of subject matter experts, present feedback from our user testers, and describe how input from both parties influenced the design of "Cellverse." Our results suggest that including feedback from both experts and users has provided information that can clarify gameplay, instruction, subject portrayal, narrative, and in-game goals.

Despite significant progress in recent decades toward ameliorating the excess burden of diarrheal disease globally, childhood diarrhea remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). Recent large-scale studies of diarrhea etiology in these populations have revealed widespread co-infection with multiple enteric pathogens, in both acute and asymptomatic stool specimens. We applied methods from network science and ecology to better understand the underlying structure of enteric co-infection among infants in two large longitudinal birth cohorts in Bangladesh. We used a configuration model to establish distributions of expected random co-occurrence, based on individual pathogen prevalence alone, for every pathogen pair among 30 enteropathogens detected by qRT-PCR in both diarrheal and asymptomatic stool specimens. We found two pairs, Enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC) with Enteropathogenic E. coli (EPEC), and ETEC with Campylobacter spp., co-infected significantly more than expected at random (both pairs co-occurring almost 4 standard deviations above what one could expect due to chance alone). Furthermore, we found a general pattern that bacteria-bacteria pairs appear together more frequently than expected at random, while virus-bacteria pairs tend to appear less frequently than expected based on model predictions. Finally, infants co-infected with leading bacteria-bacteria pairs had more days of diarrhea in the first year of life compared to infants without co-infection (p-value

Feast-fast cycles allow animals to live in seasonal environments by promoting fat storage when food is plentiful and lipolysis when food is scarce. Fat-storing hibernators have mastered this cycle over a circannual schedule, by undergoing extreme fattening to stockpile fuel for the ensuing hibernation season. Insulin is intrinsic to carbohydrate and lipid metabolism and is central to regulating feast-fast cycles in mammalian hibernators. Here, we examine glucose and insulin dynamics across the feast-fast cycle in fat-tailed dwarf lemurs, the only obligate hibernator among primates. Unlike cold-adapted hibernators, dwarf lemurs inhabit tropical forests in Madagascar and hibernate under various temperature conditions. Using the captive colony at the Duke Lemur Center, we determined fasting glucose and insulin, and glucose tolerance, in dwarf lemurs across seasons. During the lean season, we maintained dwarf lemurs under stable warm, stable cold, or fluctuating ambient temperatures that variably included food provisioning or deprivation. Overall, we find that dwarf lemurs can show signatures of reversible, lean-season insulin resistance. During the fattening season prior to hibernation, dwarf lemurs had low glucose, insulin, and HOMA-IR despite consuming high-sugar diets. In the active season after hibernation, glucose, insulin, HOMA-IR, and glucose tolerance all increased, highlighting the metabolic processes at play during periods of weight gain versus weight loss. During the lean season, glucose remained low, but insulin and HOMA-IR increased, particularly in animals kept under warm conditions with daily food. Moreover, these lemurs had the greatest glucose intolerance in our study and had average HOMA-IR values consistent with insulin resistance (5.49), while those without food under cold (1.95) or fluctuating (1.17) temperatures did not. Remarkably low insulin in dwarf lemurs under fluctuating temperatures raises new questions about lipid metabolism when animals can passively warm and cool rather than undergo sporadic arousals. Our results underscore that seasonal changes in insulin and glucose tolerance are likely hallmarks of hibernating mammals. Because dwarf lemurs can hibernate under a range of conditions in captivity, they are an emerging model for primate metabolic flexibility with implications for human health.

Heat islands and ongoing urbanization make cities places where the negative impacts of global climate change on society are becoming increasingly evident. Especially the interplay and potential multiplication of heat, low green provision, and the presence of socially deprived urban dwellers constitutes complex challenges. Emerging climate injustices and potential health issues require a powerful counter-reaction in form of adaptation action. For our study, we consider eight cities located in the densely populated and historically highly segregated Ruhr area in Western Germany, which is one of the largest metropolitan areas in Europe with a heterogeneous distribution of socio-spatial problems, economic potential, heat stress, and green infrastructures. We use land surface temperature (LST), data on green provision (normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)), and social indicators to reveal the relationships between these indicators on the city district level (n = 275). Therefore, we first analyze the data regarding spatial autocorrelation (Moran's I) and clustering (Gi*) before calculating study area wide and city specific correlations between the three factors regarded. Finally, we conduct a cluster analysis (k-means) to disclose similar areas with or without multiple burdens. Our results show distinct disparities in heat exposure, green availability, and social status between city districts of the study area. We find strong negative correlations between LST and NDVI as well as between NDVI and social status. The relationship between LST and our social indicator remains ambiguous, affirming the necessity of further detailed studies. The cluster analysis furthermore allows for the visualization and classification of districts featuring similar characteristics regarding the researched components. We can discern in parts pronounced climate injustice in the studied cities, with a majority of people living in unfavorable environmental and socio-economic conditions. Our analysis supports governments and those responsible for urban planning in addressing climate injustice in the future.

Games can be rich environments for learning and can elicit evidence of students' conceptual understanding and inquiry processes. Illuminating students' content-specific gameplay decisions, or methods of completing game tasks related to a certain domain, requires a context that is open-ended enough for students to make choices that demonstrate their thinking. Doing this also requires rich log data and methods of Game Learning Analytics (GLA) that are granular enough to look at the specific choices most relevant to that context and domain. This paper presents research done on student exploration of high school level Mendelian genetics in a multiplayer online game called "The Radix Endeavor." The study uses three approaches to identify content-specific gameplay decisions and distinguish players utilizing different methods, looking at actions and tool use, play patterns and player types, and tool input patterns. In the context of the selected game quest, the three approaches were found to yield insights into different ways that students complete tasks in genetics, suggesting the potential for a set of more generalized guiding questions in the GLA field that could be adopted by learning games designers and data scientists to convey information about content-specific gameplay decisions in learning games.

Purpose: This study isolates the effect of immersion on players' learning in a virtual reality (VR)-based game about cellular biology by comparing two versions of the game with the same level of interactivity and different levels of immersion. The authors identify immersion and additional interactivity as two key affordances of VR as a learning tool. A number of research studies compare VR with two-dimensional or minimally interactive media; this study focuses on the effect of immersion as a result of the head mounted display (HMD). Design/methodology/approach: In the game, players diagnose a cell by exploring a virtual cell and search for clues that indicate one of five possible types of cystic fibrosis. Fifty-one adults completed all aspects of the study. Players took pre and post assessments and drew pictures of cells and translation before and after the game. Players were randomly assigned to play the game with the HMD (stereoscopic view) or without the headset (non-stereoscopic view). Players were interviewed about their drawings and experiences at the end of the session. Findings: Players in both groups improved in their knowledge of the cell environment and the process of translation. Players who experienced the immersive stereoscopic view had a more positive learning effect in the content assessment, and stronger improvement in their mental models of the process of translation between pre- and post-drawings compared to players who played the two-dimensional game. Originality/value: This study suggests that immersion alone has a positive effect on conceptual understanding, especially in helping learners understand spatial environments and processes. These findings set the stage for a new wave of research on learning in immersive environments; research that moves beyond determining whether immersive media correlate with more learning, toward a focus on the types of learning outcomes that are best supported by immersive media.