Advance Care Planning for Individuals With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: A State-by-State Content Analysis of Person-Centered Service Plans

Older adults are a rapidly growing segment of the intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) population. Advance care planning (ACP) is recommended as a best practice for adults with IDD, yet, adoption remains low. For individuals receiving Medicaid services, regular meetings maintain the person-centered planning (PCP) process. Content analysis was used to examine data from public documents across the United States to identify the frequency of ACP in PCP and the ways it manifests. Results indicate most states had evidence of ACP within the PCP process with notable variation to the extent. Findings suggest many PCP documents lack content specific to late-life transitions. Included are examples of the ways states have integrated ACP into PCP that can serve as a guide.

Differential tracking of linguistic vs. mental state content in naturalistic stimuli by language and Theory of Mind (ToM) brain networks

Language and social cognition, especially the ability to reason about mental states, known as Theory of Mind (ToM), are deeply related in development and everyday use. However, whether these cognitive faculties rely on distinct, overlapping, or the same mechanisms remains debated. Some evidence suggests that, by adulthood, language and ToM draw on largely distinct—though plausibly interacting—cortical networks. However, the broad topography of these networks is similar, and some have emphasized the importance of social content / communicative intent in the linguistic signal for eliciting responses in the language areas. Here, we combine the power of individual-subjects functional localization with the naturalistic-cognition inter-subject correlation approach to illuminate the language-ToM relationship. Using fMRI, we recorded neural activity as participants (n=43) listened to stories and dialogs with mental state content (+linguistic, +ToM), viewed silent animations and live action films with mental state content but no language (-linguistic, +ToM), or listened to an expository text (+linguistic, -ToM). The ToM network robustly tracked stimuli rich in mental state information regardless of whether mental states were conveyed linguistically or non-linguistically, while tracking a +linguistic/-ToM stimulus only weakly. In contrast, the language network tracked linguistic stimuli more strongly than a) non-linguistic stimuli, and than b) the ToM network, and showed reliable tracking even for the linguistic condition devoid of mental state content. These findings suggest that in spite of their indisputably close links, language and ToM dissociate robustly in their neural substrates, and thus plausibly cognitive mechanisms, including during the processing of rich naturalistic materials.

A Systematic Review of Modified Schema-Based Instruction for Teaching Students with Moderate and Severe Disabilities to Solve Mathematical Word Problems

Modified schema-based instruction (MSBI) is a strategy to teach mathematical word problem solving to students with moderate and severe disabilities (MSD). In this comprehensive review, we explore the current state of research on MSBI to determine whether MSBI is an evidence-based practice (EBP) for students with MSD. We reviewed 12 studies, of which 11 met quality standards. Thirty-nine participants, all of whom participated in statewide alternate assessments, were included in these studies, the majority of whom were middle school students with intellectual disability. Four research teams explicitly targeted state content standards. The researcher served as interventionist in 82% of the studies. Although the overall effect size was very large (1.0 Tau), our findings suggest that MSBI is not yet an EBP for students with MSD. We provide an overview of current contextual factors and suggestions for future researchers to continue the investigation of MSBI.

“Boots on the ground”: The authority-power dynamic of regional service centers in standards-based reform

The current context of standards-based reform has positioned regional service centers (RSCs), intermediary governmental agencies that support state policy implementation in local districts, as a critical source of professional development (PD). In this article, we ask how a governing body that districts often interact with during challenging reform processes manages maintain strong relationships with district and school staff, and thus maintain their image as trustworthy experts on standards implementation. We explore these questions using data from 108 interviews of state, district, and regional administrators in education agencies in Ohio, Texas, and California over a three-year period. We illustrate that by providing districts with (a) differentiated support specific to their unique needs, (b) materials and tools consistent with state content standards, and (c) expertise in supporting students with disabilities and English learners in standards-based environments, RSC staff become, in the words of one state leader, the state’s trusted “boots on the ground.”

NCDN: A Node-Failure Resilient CDN Solution with Reinforcement Learning Optimization

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have enabled large-scale, reliable, and efficient content distribution over the Internet. Although CDNs have been very successful in serving a large portion of Internet traffic, they have several drawbacks. Despite their distributed nature, they rely on largely centralized management and replication. This can affect availability in case of node failure. Further, CDNs are complex infrastructures that span multiple layers of the networking stack. To address these issues, in this paper, we introduce NCDN, a novel highly distributed system for large-scale delivery of content and services. NCDN is designed to provide resilience against node failure through location-independent storage and replication of content. This is achieved through a two-layer architecture: the first layer (exposure layer) exposes services implemented by NCDN (e.g., Web, SFTP) to clients; the second layer (hidden layer) provides reliable distributed storage of content and application state. Content in NCDN’s hidden layer is stored and exchanged as Named Data Network (NDN) content packets. We employ the reinforcement learning (RL) to dynamically learn the optimal numbers of duplicates for different type of contents, because the RL agent has the advantage of not requiring expert labels or knowledge and instead the ability to learn directly from its own interaction with the world. The combination of NDN and RL brings NCDN fine-grained, fully decentralized content replication mechanisms. We compare the performance and resilience of NCDN to those of an idealized CDN via extensive simulations. Our results show that NCDN is able to provide higher availability than CDNs (between 8% and 100% higher under the same conditions), without substantially increasing content retrieval delay.

MENTAL STATE TALK: ASSESSMENT THROUGH WORDLESS PICTURE STORY BOOK READING

Mental state talk involves words that describe the mental world of individuals. These could be words that are about thoughts, feelings, desires, intentions, and emotions. There has been dearth of research in Pakistan assessing the parents and teachers’ use of mental state talk in conversation with young children, commonly because of lack of assessment tool that are employed to measure the mental state talk in Pakistan. The present study aimed at validation and development of indigenous tool for the assessment of mental state talk of parents/teachers to use with children. Wordless picture story book reading was selected as one the various methods devised for mental state talk assessment; which facilitates interactions between parents/teachers and their children. For validation, Indigenous picture story books were reviewed for its content and modified through opinion of subject matter experts. Content and face validity of the story book were examined and found to be good. The finding concluded that finalized wordless picture story book has rich mental state content and has great potential to stimulate rich discourse on mental state talk. It will bridge the research gap and will promote as a good measurement instrument for research on mental state talk in Pakistan.

Implementation of Language Education in Russian and Foreign Universities

The article provides a comparative analysis of the practice of language education in modern Russian and European universities in the course of studying the fundamental documents on the problem, as well as consideration of the current state, content, goals, methods and monitoring the quality of language training of students. Research methods: analysis of scientific literature on the problem; study and generalization of the accumulated pedagogical experience, etc.