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4-VA Grant Brings Virginia Education Assessment Professionals Together for a “Virtual Drive In”

In the largest and most widespread event that 4-VA has ever coordinated – including all six 4-VA partner schools — higher education assessment professionals from across the Commonwealth came together for a “virtual” meeting.  The meeting took place in April using telepresence technology at each of the 4-VA schools.

Mason coordinator Stephanie Foster, Associate Director in the Office of Undergraduate Education, and her colleagues at the Virginia Assessment Group applied for and received a 4-VA grant to bring together assessment professionals from two- and four-year public schools, private schools, as well as alternative higher education institutions to offer advanced training for faculty and professionals who have responsibility for learning outcomes assessments in their institutions. Says Foster, “The idea for the drive-in came from a self-study of the Virginia Assessment Group’s professional development offerings. We wanted to increase participation for our community college colleagues, and travel cost was identified as a barrier to their participation. One of our board members had an idea to use the 4-VA telepresence technology to host a virtual workshop. Because it was a free event, and no participant needed to travel more than an hour to get to their closest 4-VA site, the Virtual Drive-in served a wider audience.”

The all-day workshop provided critical training on best practices in data collection, analysis, and reporting.  Facilitators at each location oversaw collaborative activities to encourage partnership and sharing of innovative practices. “Telling our stories: Using assessment data for learning and improvement” was an instant success, with 168 conference registrants representing 50 organizations: 31 universities, 15 community colleges, and 4 professional organizations. The event was funded by a 4- VA Collaborative Research Grant and organized by the nonprofit Virginia Assessment Group.

Says Foster, “Good assessment is essential to our practice as educators, and many programs are doing it well. Across the field, we are striving to improve how we share what we learn with faculty and institutional leaders so that assessment work can contribute to improving curriculum and instruction for student success.”

The day-long conference agenda involved input from each of the six locations. The conference began with a welcome from the Virginia Assessment Group president, Ryan Otto (Roanoke College) at the Virginia Tech location, and review of agenda by Kelsey Kirland from Old Dominion University. The morning workshop was presented by James Madison University Assessment and Measurement doctoral students, Andrea Pope and Caroline Prendergast; Psychological Sciences master’s student, Morgan Crewe; and JMU faculty member, S. Jeanne Horst. The morning workshop, entitled “Can we back up that claim? Making important data collection design decisions” addressed the appropriate inferences that can be drawn from assessment data collection designs. The workshop began with a description of the gold standard, randomized control trial, followed by a “let’s get real” section highlighting the real-world data collection challenges that assessment practitioners face. Participants grappled with how to make appropriate inferences from the data collection designs that are possible given common constraints.  The morning concluded with participants from each location providing suggestions for ways of dealing with practical challenges related to data collection.

The afternoon workshop, entitled “Evidence-based storytelling,” was facilitated by Jodi Fisler (State Council of Higher Education for Virginia), and Gianina Baker (National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment – NILOA). Participants viewed a video produced by Jillian Kinzie (NILOA), illustrating examples and rationale for presenting assessment findings that tell the story of student learning.  Participants engaged in an activity in which they tailored a data report to a particular stakeholder audience. Gianina Baker closed the afternoon, providing reflections and suggestions for effective evidence-based reporting.

It was clear throughout the day, that connections were being made at the individual sites, and also from site to site.  Attendee Adrienne E. Sullivan, Director of Accreditation in the College of Education and Human Development at Mason put it this way, “For me, the opportunity to meet and chat with other colleagues from Mason was great.  (But) The highlight was to meet colleagues from other local higher education institutions and learn how they implement and handle assessment data collection was really fabulous. It made me feel that we are not alone in the struggle to find an efficient way to collect data!”

Written with contributions from S. Jeanne Horst, JMU. and Stephanie Foster, Mason. Photo credit:  Kim Reedy, JMU

 

 

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Mason Scientists Put Bees Under the Microscope in Groundbreaking Research

As the world has been learning about the precipitous and dangerous decline in bee populations, scientists are scrambling to probe deeper into the “why.”  It’s generally recognized that habitat loss and degradation, increased use of agrochemicals, invasive pathogens, competition from alien species and poor management practices are each contributing factors.  However, what’s not known is the extent and effect of each of these on various species of bees, and, further, the role that the interaction of the species in shared habitats and flower resources plays.  It is supposed that each species will be affected by different degrees, because of differences in bee social organization, foraging and nesting behavior, genetic diversity and other traits, but the hard science is not there. To take a closer look, Dr. Haw Chuan Lim and his Mason team of graduate and undergraduate students armed with a 4-VA2Mason grant are conducting groundbreaking research via their “High Throughput Bee Pathogen Survey.”

In what may be the only study of its kind, the team is in the unique position not only to access, but to develop state-of-the-art research techniques as they closely investigate extracted RNA and DNA from three bee species in Northern Virginia.  Together, they are harnessing the bioinformatics and genomics capabilities at the Mason Sci-Tech campus while developing their own sequence capture probe-set to enable a comprehensive survey of pathogens and micro-parasites. They collaborate closely with Mason’s Rebecca Forkner and UVA’s T’ai Roulston.  Both Forkner and Roulston have many years of experience in pollinator biology, using the Virginia Working Landscapes (VWL) program — the sites of the bee collection — and UVA’s Blandy Experimental Farm.

The team is specifically studying three groups of bees found in Northern Virginia – the European honeybee, the bumble bee and the mason bee – (no relation to George Mason University :+)  To do this, they are collecting bees from nine VWL sites in the region, freezing and preserving each specimen using liquid nitrogen, and bringing them to the lab on the Sci-Tech campus, where they store them in a -80C freezer.

When the initial series of specimens was harvested, master’s student David Lambrecht went into overdrive. “I’ve spent many long days and nights in this space,” notes Lambrecht as he removes a bee sample from the freezer.  After freezing each specimen, the students on the project learned how to extract total RNA and total DNA from each specimen. By using techniques such as target sequence capture and polymerase chain reactions, they can then enrich for and sequence a variety of bee pathogens whose genomes are made up of RNA and DNA molecules.

Although the lab work is taxing, Lim notes that they’re making progress, and big progress at that.  “This is the first time ever that a large-scale target enrichment and sequencing of RNA viruses have been implemented for bees in this region. More specifically, the prevalence of viruses is generally unknown for bees in this region.” explains Lim.  “We have had to optimize lab protocols and bioinformatics analytical approaches.”

Collecting the baseline values and knowing the diversity and strain variation of pathogens can provide valuable information for the future of the bees, including:

  • Being able to identify the pathogen responsible if bees in the region show signs for a particular disease. Conversely, it may be found that high prevalence or abundance of certain pathogen will not affect the bees, suggesting that they have developed resistance to the pathogen.
  • Allowing scientists to target pathogens of interest and to conduct in vivo studies of the mechanisms of infection, as well as the immune responses of bees.
  • Knowing whether managed bees (honey bees) are transmitting diseases to native bees will inform management practices, e.g. – keeping apiaries further away from native vegetation.

But while the initial lab work is buzzing away, the field work was thrown for a loop by Mother Nature.  The total bee collections were hampered by the record setting rains in Northern Virginia this past year.

However, the persistent rains have not dampened the spirits of Lim and his team.  They project that their research findings will not only shed light on critical information to help scientists better understand the bee populations and how to manage disease, stress and habitats; Lim also sees many valuable offshoots of this project for use in various upper division biology courses at Mason, and perhaps as a part of the Bioinformatics Concentration.  Adds Lim, “My goal here is to help push along our bioinformatics and genomics program.”

And with the study still underway, Lim is already looking to the conclusion and beyond.  Explains Lim, “Our results will be very relevant to the basic understanding of pollinator ecology, and management and conservation of bee populations.  I foresee future funding from federal grant resources and private conservation organizations. Some of this lab work hasn’t been done before and it’s already opened up more research opportunities.”

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A CLOSER LOOK…

… How the bees got to the lab.  A story in pictures:

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4-VA at Mason Collaborative Research Grants Awarded

Eight Collaborative Research Grants were recently awarded by 4-VA at Mason, providing faculty and their teams of student researchers, as well as their colleagues at other Virginia partner schools, the opportunity to further important research concepts – from utilizing student ambassadors to support dementia patients, to privacy controls for smart home devices, to species resilience in tropical rain forests.

“These research grants are a key element of our 4-VA mission,” explains Janette Kenner Muir, Campus Coordinator for 4-VA at Mason.  “Through this program, we identify vital promising research possibilities and provide the seed money to get them off the ground.  From there, many of our awardees go on to receive further funding from the likes of National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation.  We’re proud of the role that 4-VA has played in advancing research of consequence.”

One critical component of the Collaborative Research projects is a focus on the partnerships formed between Mason faculty and the other 4-VA partner institutions – James Madison, Old Dominion, Virginia Commonwealth, Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia.  This aligns with the 4-VA mission “To promote collaborations that leverage the strengths of each partner university and improve efficiencies in higher education across the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

The  Mason grant recipients and project titles awarded for the 19-20 cycle are:

  • Broeckelman-Post, Melissa (College Of Humanities And Social Sciences)
    • Communication Across the Curriculum: Creating Faculty Resources for Building Communication Skills in the Discipline
  • Couch, Robin (College of Science)
    • Developing a Blood Test to Support Treatment of Surgically Induced Type I Diabetes
  • Luther, David (College of Science)
    • Species richness resilience to habitat fragmentation and restoration in tropical rainforests
  • Moran, Jeffrey (Volgenau School of Engineering)
    • Toward T Shaped Graduates A Joint Capstone Program at the Nexus of Mechanical Engineering
  • Motti, Vivian G  (Volgenau School of Engineering)
    • Human-Centric Privacy-Preserving Controls for Smart Home Devices
  • Tompkins, Catherine J (College of Health and Human Services)
    • The Implementation and Evaluation of a Student Ambassador Program for a Music & Memory Intervention
  • Van Aken, Benoit (College of Science)
    • Molecular Biology Methods for Understanding Aerobic Granulation in Wastewater Treatment Systems
  • Van Hoek, Monique (College of Science)
    • Secreted Proteins of Francisella – a new understanding
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News

Mason/NOVA Teacher Education: Public/Private School Representatives Invited to Join the Discussion

While George Mason University produces hundreds of candidates each year in the field of education, academic leaders at Mason recognized the need to work closely with area educational institutions – both public and private – to ensure that those candidates meet and surpass the expectations in today’s educational environment.

To do so, armed with a grant from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU), Mason recently held a roundtable of academic leaders as well as a host of representatives from private and public schools from the greater Washington, DC area to look closely at the needs of area teaching institutions.  The event also prominently included educators and faculty from Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), Mason’s community college partner in the ADVANCE program, a nationally recognized program which supports the seamless transfer of students from the two-year school to Mason.

The roundtable included presentations and focused examinations of various aspects of the educational curriculum, as well as breakout sessions that delved directly into the qualifications of the ideal teacher.  The roundtable host, Mason’s Associate Provost for Academic Iniatives and Services Janette Muir, noted, “It’s time to talk about education in a more organized way.”  Specific goals for the day included future job demands, student preparation, knowledge gaps and work based experiential learning.  Muir told the assembled audience, “Today, we need to learn from you.”

Participants then rolled up their sleeves and dissected a variety of elements and experiences that representatives identified as critical for successful teachers.  Not surprisingly, many groups arrived at the same conclusions, including the need for significant ‘ground level’ experience with groups of students, providing background for how to handle classroom situations; the ability to work in a team environment; and the ‘soft skills’ necessary to handle a variety of audiences — students, fellow teachers and parents.

Attendee Zachary Shelton, Director of STEM exCel which offers STEM classes and programs said, “The best programmer is not necessarily the best instructor.  Very important:  They need to have classroom and behavior management skills.”   Shelton then reflected on the roundtable meeting, “I’m inspired by the Education focus here, though.  You are having this meeting and you want to listen.”

At the conclusion of the event, each table shared their findings with the room and a list of targeted skill sets were noted.  Muir recalled the energy and environment throughout the day, “We were able to connect a group of passionate, motivated leaders in education – they were enthusiastic about the idea of building better teachers and I know we’ve begun to construct stronger pathways for our students from NOVA to Mason and beyond.”