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Background/Context: High-stakes testing (HST) weaves through the fabric of school life, stretching beyond the test day. Results have consequences for a school's reputation and autonomy, as well as teachers' evaluations and students' graduation and morale. Prior research demonstrates the constraining and inequitable effects assessments can have on students' learning. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Recently, scholars have called for more research on students' and teachers' perspectives on HST. Responding to this call, we conducted a yearlong study in a high school designated as "persistently struggling" by the state. We examined adolescents' and educators' perceptions, reactions, and resistance to HST. We traced participants' interactions with and about testing over the course of a school year as they prepared for, discussed, and eventually participated in test day. Research Design: We conducted a yearlong qualitative study in which participants were 15 focal 11th graders and 9 teachers. We conducted 425 hours of observations and 52 interviews, as well as collected assessment data and classroom artifacts. For this article, we used quantitative survey data as a secondary source and analyzed the responses of 425 11th graders. Conclusions/Recommendations: Analysis showed that HST served as a dominant context for literacy-related teaching across disciplines. Participants negotiated tension between their beliefs about education and their efforts to boost test scores. Teachers reported that assessments and their accompanying prescriptive curriculum hindered literacy and content area teaching and learning. Students, although they had diverse opinions about HST's usefulness, reported it created emotional distress, which compromised test performance. Testing contributed to a high-pressure environment in which literacy and content instruction were made reductive. Participants' perspectives, and ways in which they resisted, provide insights into HST effects, as well as suggest promising, alternative routes toward equitable assessment that supports meaningful learning.

Static reading labels are problematic not only because youths demonstrate varying reading skills and identities across secondary classrooms but also because being labeled as "struggling" can undermine literacy learning. Little research has investigated how "struggling" and "proficient" readers' interactions with shared classroom contexts may mediate their literacy in similar and different ways. In a school-year-long qualitative study, the first author shadowed eight struggling readers across classes in an urban high school and compared their literacy experiences with those of youths not labeled as such. Analysis of 46 interviews, using 425 hr of observations as contextualizing data, showed that interactions with school contexts contributed to students' positioning as struggling or proficient regardless, sometimes, of skilled reading. Proficient readers reported feeling that their perspectives were valued whereas struggling readers reported theirs were not. By documenting how contexts mediated youths' perspectives on reading, findings have implications for disrupting deficit labels and promoting socially just teaching.

The occurrence of clonal perturbations and leukemia in patients transplanted with gamma-retroviral (RV) vector-transduced autologous hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) has stimulated extensive investigation, demonstrating that proviral insertions may perturb adjacent proto-oncogene expression. Although enhancer-deleted lentiviruses are less likely to result in insertional oncogenesis, there is evidence that they may perturb transcript splicing, and one patient with a benign clonal expansion of lentivirally transduced HPSC has been reported. The rhesus macaque model provides an opportunity for informative long-term analysis to ask whether transduction impacts on long-term HSPC properties. We used two techniques to examine whether lentivirally transduced HSPCs from eight rhesus macaques transplanted 1-13.5 years previously are perturbed at a population level, comparing telomere length as a measure of replicative history and gene expression profile of vector positive versus vector negative cells. There were no differences in telomere lengths between sorted GFP+ and GFP- blood cells, suggesting that lentiviral (LV) transduction did not globally disrupt replicative patterns. Bone marrow GFP+ and GF- CD34+ cells showed no differences in gene expression using unsupervised and principal component analysis. These studies did not uncover any global long-term perturbation of proliferation, differentiation, or other important functional parameters of transduced HSPCs in the rhesus macaque model.

The Tavistock Relationships Couple Psychoanalytic training is described from several perspectives. Firstly, the organisational, social and political context in which the training developed. Secondly the psychoanalytic and theoretical approach and influences, particularly that of the Tavistock tradition. Several key couple psychoanalytic concepts taught in the training are described. Thirdly, the current training components and methodology of the training are outlined. Finally, the limitations and possibilities of a couple psychoanalytic training are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]