Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (2 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
Journal for Learning through the Arts, Volume 10, Issue 1 (2014)

This paper examines the impact of two approaches to teacher professional development in arts integration – a summer institute model and a model combining the summer institute with instructional coaching.  In an experimental design, the intervention trained third and fourth grade teachers to integrate visual arts and theater into reading curriculum.  Findings suggest the coaching plus institute intervention had a greater impact on teacher confidence, use and frequency of arts integration than the institute-only intervention or on the comparison group.

Coached teachers reported greater confidence integrating the arts, produced higher-quality work samples, taught more reading concepts with arts integration, implemented more arts standards, and used arts integration more frequently than did the institute-only teachers or the control group teachers.  Coached teachers reported in greater numbers about the positive impact the professional development had on their teaching practice, including feeling more creative, inspired and finding greater enjoyment in teaching.  Coached teachers were more likely than institute-only teachers to correctly use state VAPA standards and to perceive student progress towards those standards.

Institute-only teachers demonstrated greater confidence in and used arts integration more frequently than did the comparison group.  However, they did not reach the same levels as the coached teachers and were more likely to report time constraints and other roadblocks to successful implementation.

Teachers in both treatment groups reported high student engagement and better expression of learning by students when using arts integration instructional strategies.

This project was funded through the U.S. Department of Education Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination program.

    Cover page: “Unlocking My Creativity”: Teacher Learning in Arts Integration Professional Development
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Santa Cruz Previously Published Works (2014)
    Genetic diversity provides the raw material for populations to respond to changing environmental conditions. The evolution of diversity within populations is based on the accumulation of mutations and their retention or loss through selection and genetic drift, while migration can also introduce new variation. However, the extent to which population growth and sustained large population size can lead to rapid and significant increases in diversity has not been widely investigated. Here, we assess this empirically by applying approximate Bayesian computation to a novel ancient DNA dataset that spans the life of a southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina) population, from initial founding approximately 7000 years ago to eventual extinction within the past millennium. We find that rapid population growth and sustained large population size can explain substantial increases in population genetic diversity over a period of several hundred generations, subsequently lost when the population went to extinction. Results suggest that the impact of diversity introduced through migration was relatively minor. We thus demonstrate, by examining genetic diversity across the life of a population, that environmental change could generate the raw material for adaptive evolution over a very short evolutionary time scale through rapid establishment of a large, stable population.
      Cover page: Rapid increase in southern elephant seal genetic diversity after a founder event.
      Top