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Writing assessment has a long and contentious history in the United States. The debate has centered on issues of reliability and validity of direct and indirect measures of writing achievement. A historical review of direct writing assessment from its origin at Harvard shows the absence of protocols that identify changes in the writing achievement of writers over time. The need for such a protocol was seen as a result of a program evaluation of a professional development program focused on the teaching of writing in upper elementary and middle schools. A corpus of 400 pre- and post-papers from 200 writers was evaluated using two methods. The first used traditional scaled-scoring procedures. Every paper was scored both holistically and on six analytic traits by trained scorers. The results of these scaled-scorings were used to calculate changes in the writing achievement. The second protocol, called Forced-Choice Scoring and introduced in this report, requires readers to compare the pre- and post-writing samples to each other and judge the differences between them both holistically and with six analytical traits. The differences are ranked as \"slightly,\" \"moderately,\" or \"significantly\" better. Comparison of the data generated by these two scoring protocols reveals equivalent numbers of writers demonstrating improvement between the pre- and post-writing samples. However, a detailed analysis of these numbers shows a more complicated picture. The protocols identified the changes in writing achievement the same way for writers only approximately 40% of the time. These differences point out the need to develop an array of writing assessment protocols and the importance of matching the assessment to the goals of the evaluation. Further, this study indicates a striking need too develop a map of writing development across the lifespan.

In this article, a group of inservice providers and beginning researchers describe their experiences in learning to conduct evaluation research on a long-term school-university partnership program. We offer the practical lessons we learned in how to undertake such a study, and we share the immediate and powerful effects that the process of conducting the research had on the way we envisionand enact our inservice work. As the director of the inservice program noted, the problem we were addressing changed from “How can we convince others that we do good work?” to “How canwe make our work better?” This is a question at the heart of professional learning communities.

Though it is now difficult to imagine any language arts teacher at any grade level not knowing about “the writing process,” many of the teaching practices employed in classrooms in the name of said writing process suggest that teachers may have different understandings about what the writing process entails as a model of writing and learning to write, conceptually or epistemologically.

Although animals have never enjoyed as much legal protection as they do today, it is still a sad testament that we must set aside a week each year to remind people to be kind to them.

Re \"Spay Day Event,\" letters, Feb. 21.

Re \"Pet Overpopulation Crisis Makes Low-Cost Clinics a Necessity,\" Dec. 6.

We sought to map the landscape of trials investigating hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for SARS-CoV-2 in order to draw conclusions about how clinical trials have been conducted in the pandemic environment and offer potential regulatory recommendations. We identified and captured data related to registered studies using HCQ to treat SARS-CoV-2 registered with the publicly available National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Trials Registry between February and November 2020. Between February and November 2020, 206 studies investigating HCQ in SARS-CoV-2 were registered with the NIH Clinical Trials Registry. As of November 2020, 135 studies were listed as ongoing, 22 have been completed, and 46 are either suspended or have been terminated. Reasons for suspension or termination included difficulties with patient recruitment (n = 9), emerging evidence showing a lack of benefit of HCQ (n = 7), and recommendations by regulatory boards to discontinue (n = 10). Many clinical trials of HCQ were launched in the first months of the pandemic, and a significant proportion of them remained active as of November 2020. The medical community appears to have responded very quickly to political interest in HCQ, while responding much more slowly to the evolving medical evidence of its lack of efficacy.

Vaccines based on the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 are a cornerstone of the public health response to COVID-19. The emergence of hypermutated, increasingly transmissible variants of concern (VOCs) threaten this strategy. Omicron (B.1.1.529), the fifth VOC to be described, harbours multiple amino acid mutations in spike, half of which lie within the receptor-binding domain. Here we demonstrate substantial evasion of neutralization by Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 variants in vitro using sera from individuals vaccinated with ChAdOx1, BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273. These data were mirrored by a substantial reduction in real-world vaccine effectiveness that was partially restored by booster vaccination. The Omicron variants BA.1 and BA.2 did not induce cell syncytia in vitro and favoured a TMPRSS2-independent endosomal entry pathway, these phenotypes mapping to distinct regions of the spike protein. Impaired cell fusion was determined by the receptor-binding domain, while endosomal entry mapped to the S2 domain. Such marked changes in antigenicity and replicative biology may underlie the rapid global spread and altered pathogenicity of the Omicron variant. The Omicron variant evades vaccine-induced neutralization but also fails to form syncytia, shows reduced replication in human lung cells and preferentially uses a TMPRSS2-independent cell entry pathway, which may contribute to enhanced replication in cells of the upper airway. Altered fusion and cell entry characteristics are linked to distinct regions of the Omicron spike protein.

Under the pandemic conditions created by the novel coronavirus of 2019 (COVID-19), physicians have faced difficult choices allocating scarce resources, including but not limited to critical care beds and ventilators. Past experiences with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and current reports suggest that making these decisions carries a heavy emotional toll for physicians around the world. We sought to explore Canadian physicians' preparedness and attitudes regarding resource allocation decisions. From April 3 to April 13, 2020, we conducted an 8-question online survey of physicians practicing in the region of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, organized around 4 themes: physician preparedness for resource rationing, physician preparedness to offer palliative care, attitudes towards resource allocation policy, and approaches to resource allocation decision-making. We collected 219 responses, of which 165 were used for analysis. The majority (78%) of respondents felt \"somewhat\" or \"a little prepared\" to make resource allocation decisions, and 13% felt \"not at all prepared.\" A majority of respondents (63%) expected the provision of palliative care to be \"very\" or \"somewhat difficult.\" Most respondents (83%) either strongly or somewhat agreed that there should be policy to guide resource allocation. Physicians overwhelmingly agreed on certain factors that would be important in resource allocation, including whether patients were likely to survive, and whether they had dementia and other significant comorbidities. Respondents generally did not feel confident that they would have the social support they needed at the time of making resource allocation decisions. This rapidly implemented survey suggests that a sample of Canadian physicians feel underprepared to make resource allocation decisions, and desire both more emotional support and clear, transparent, evidence-based policy.

Within the fields of biology and ecology, animal movement is arguably one of the most basic, and yet, often one of the most difficult areas of study. Where and why animals migrate, and what patterns can be derived from individual movements in order to make population-level inferences are key areas when attempting to define basic population dynamics. These questions are of equal interest to biologists and managers, with many species assessments identifying improvements in the understanding of population-level movement as a key research need. We aimed to improve our understanding of population level movement for common thresher sharks Alopias vulpinus by leveraging the largest satellite tagging dataset available for this species. Using a Bayesian approach specifically designed to address population-level questions with sparse telemetry data, we identified that A. vulpinus off the west coast of North America are partial migrators which conditionally migrate, based on a combination of fixed intrinsic states (size, sex) and variable extrinsic states (e.g. season, environment). Waters of the Southern California Bight were identified as an area where, seasonally, a large variety of sizes of A. vulpinus can be found. While smaller juveniles can be found throughout the year, larger sub-adults and adults often move out of the Bight during certain seasons (spring and winter). Knowledge of how A. vulpinus distribute along the coast, and that season, size, and to some extent sex, play important roles in where and what type of animals are likely to be found, are key pieces of information when attempting to accurately characterize basic biological parameters like age, growth, and reproduction, as well as understanding the effects of variable fishing pressures across the species’ range.