QUESTION.

1. Define Common Core State Standards (CCSS) (include the definitions of curriculum versus standards).

2. State the concern that you chose (written below) and then decide if the concern is valid or not. Give your rationales and references for your stance.

The Common Core can't speed up child development

Recent evaluations of the state's preschoolers have determined that only 47 percent are ready for kindergarten, compared to 83 percent judged ready last year. This drastic drop isn't the result of an abrupt, catastrophic decline in the cognitive abilities of our children. Instead, it results from a re-definition of kindergarten readiness, which now means being able to succeed academically at a level far beyond anything expected in the past. For example, a child entering kindergarten is now expected to know the difference between informative/explanatory writing and opinion writing. The concern is that preschoolers without that knowledge will not succeed at meeting the new higher-level Common-Core standards. However, I think a more pressing concern is: Why do we have educational standards that are not aligned with even the most basic facts of human development? Clearly these test results show that the problem is with the standards, not the children.

Educational attainment is part of human development, and fundamentally this is a biological process that cannot be sped up. We cannot wish away our biological limitations because we find them inconvenient. Children will learn crawling, walking, listening, talking and toilet training, all in succession at developmentally appropriate ages. Once in school, for skills that require performing a physical task, that are in what Bloom's Taxonomy classifies as the "psychomotor domain," it is understood that children will only learn when they are physically and developmentally ready. No one expects four-year olds to type fluently on a computer keyboard, play difficult Chopin Etudes on the piano, prepare elaborate meals in the kitchen or drive a car.

However, for skills in what Bloom calls the "cognitive domain," the school curriculum has become blind not only to the progression of normal child development but also to natural variations in the rate that children develop. It is now expected that pre-school children should be able to grasp sophisticated concepts in mathematics and written language. In addition, it is expected that all children should be at the same cognitive level when they enter kindergarten, and proceed through the entire grade-school curriculum in lock step with one another. People, who think that all children can learn in unison, have obviously never worked with special needs children or the gifted and talented.

Demanding that children be taught to developmentally inappropriate standards for language and math comprehension is not a harmless experiment. This exercise in futility wastes the time of teachers and students and unethically sets all of them up to fail. It exacerbates the very problems that the new curriculum is supposed to fix. It leaves boys, whose verbal development for biological reasons already lags behind girls, even further behind and will accelerate the trend of fewer boys going on to college. Even today boys only make up about 40 percent of college students nationwide and their numbers will continue to dwindle.

The new curriculum standards and testing regimens are motivated by a well-intentioned desire to close achievements gaps that exist between the various socio-economic and ethnic and racial groups. There is a belief that by demanding that all children meet a set of rigid and arbitrarily high academic standards, achievement gaps can be closed and economic opportunities increased for all. The apparent reasoning is that if all children receive the same education and are held to the same academic standards, then all children will have equal opportunity to succeed as adults.

However, addressing pervasive economic inequality by pretending that in an ideal world all children should be alike isn't a solution. The inequalities that plague our society are inherent in the structure of our political and economic systems. A new curriculum will not change the underlying pathologies corrupting these structures. It is a mistake to conflate unjust economic inequalities that arise from our broken political and economic systems with normal differences in abilities and dispositions among people that arise from being human. If all barriers to inequality were broken down, people would still be different from one another and normal human development would still unfold.

Education should be about helping each child, regardless of background or academic readiness, achieve his or her full, unique potential as a human being. It should instill not just academics but also physical, emotional and social skills, which are also essential for making meaningful contributions to the well being of our families, communities and the economy. Differences between people that arise across all skill sets and educational domains are an inherent and valued part of the human experience that should be celebrated in school, not erased.

f venom evolved in a lizard ancestor of snakes, and was subsequently lost in many descendants, which is a plausible hypothesis for the loss of venom?

13. An investigator does a control series of experiments examining the production of HCO3 when different concentrations of CO2 are added to a number of test tubes all having the same amount of an enzyme that catalyzes this reaction. What should the investigator expect the graph of the raw data to look like when plotting the data points for the total amount of HCO3 produced in each test tube?

A hyperbolic curve with a clear Vmax

a flat line

a straight line with a positive slope

a straight line with a negative slope

A plot with a hyperbolic component but that has no obvious Vmax

Symptom Presentation:

Glutamate: Increased production of the neurotransmitter Glutamate

Memory Loss: Recent demonstrated memory loss

Previously, you researched and considered three conditions through the process of differential diagnosis that would present with varying abnormalities in homeostasis, metabolism, triglycerides and DNA in week 1. Abnormalities in oxidation, plasma and tissue enzyme activity, inflammation and alopecia respectively in week 2. Increased cortisol and demonstrated bone loss in week 3 and fibromyalgia and muscle atrophy in week 4. Given the new symptom presentation above, written presentation: . If choosing a written presentation, create a 2-3 paragraphs per each of the questions listed below. Is there a connection between the previous increased cortisol symptoms and an increase production in the neurotransmitter glutamate? Explain or debunk this connection. Are increased cortisol and increased glutamate associated with memory loss and neuron degradation in the central nervous system (CNS)? Rationalize and explain your answer. Do you believe this recent memory loss to be purely psychologically associated, purely biochemically associated or a mixture of both? Rationalize and explain your answer.you can choose one symptom from week one to three and compare with the two new symptom provided.

• Know-how p53 is activated during the cell cycle and what two outcomes are possible – know the signaling pathways (you do not have to know how PUMA induces apoptosis, just that it does)

• Know the types of chemical modulators of receptors – agonist/antagonist

• Know the G-protein-linked signaling pathway – how it is activated and what happens downstream – be able to describe the signaling pathways that lead to PKA and PKC activation

• Know the tyrosine-kinase signaling pathway – how it is activated and what happens downstream

• Be able to explain a dominant-negative mutant and constitutive mutant receptor in signaling

• Know the types of cell junctions

• Difference between a benign and malignant tumor

• “Seed & soil” hypothesis of cancer metastasis

• Know & describe the 10 hallmarks of cancer

• Know the four most common causes of cancer

• Know the difference between an oncogene and a tumor suppressor

• Understand the immune surveillance theory

• Know the phases of the cell cycle and what occurs at each stage

• Know where the checkpoints (restriction points) occur in the cell cycle and what influences each checkpoint

• Understand the role of cyclins and CDKs – which one is regulatory and which one has the enzyme activity

1. Imagine you have a plasmid and you cut it with three different restriction enzymes (enzymes 1, 2, 3). You then run these fragments through a gel and get this separation.
   1. Label the positive and negative terminals on this gel with a (+) and (-) sign.

2. If you were working with a single plasmid, how many cut sites did restriction enzyme 1 have? Explain?

3. When creating a gel, we stain it with Ethidium Bromide or Gel Red. What is the purpose of this? Explain.

2- When separating plasmids from proteins and ribosomes, why do you add N Buffer and THEN centrifuge? Why not just centrifuge? What is the advantage of adding the N Buffer?

1. I give you 100mL of a 3 M aqueous glucose stock solution. I need you to dilute it to make 100mL of a solution that is 0.03M. To accomplish this task, you have 2 additional 100 mL graduated cylinders and however much distilled water you need. The graduated cylinders are not really accurate at measuring any volume less than 5mL. (10 pts)

1. How would you dilute 3M stock solution into 0.03 M solution? Explain strategy.

Show your calculations:  

answer the following regarding DNA repair mechanisms

What is "direct repair"? Give a couple of examples of the enzymes involved. Which one requires light and what kind of mutation does it repair? Which one repairs bases with alkyl groups attached? Which base is involved?

What is “nucleotide-excision repair”? What kinds of mutations can it repair? In prokaryotes, what four key proteins are involved and how did they get their names? What two enzymes are involved?

What is “mismatch repair”? What does it do? This system corrects mistakes that have been missed by the normal correction system that occurs during DNA replication. Which enzyme normally corrects these mistakes during replication?

What source of DNA is usually used in “homologous recombination repair” to fix the mutated strand of DNA? During which parts of the cell cycle can this type of repair occur? HRR can also occasionally occur at other times, but the homologous regions may not be identical. Why might that be the case?

What happens during “nonhomolgous end joining”? During which part of the process might some of the sequence be lost? When during the cell cycle can this type of repair occur?

Bobby, a 72-year-old retired male went to his doctor, complaining of leg pain that started in his lower back, ran across the side of his thigh and over the front of his knee. Next, he developed pain that radiated from his back to his front at the chest through the level of his nipples and also at the umbilicus.

A physical and laboratory tests showed hard nodule on his prostate and an elevation in several of the blood tests. His PSA (prostate specific antigen), an enzyme secreted by normal prostate tissue was very high. Alkaline phosphatase was also elevated, an indication of bone involvement.

A bone scan was ordered to visualize the bone involvement.

Usually prostate cancer's growth is initially influenced by the presence of testosterone. If testosterone is removed by castration, the cancer will often shrink for some period of time before the remaining fraction of testosterone-independent cancer cells grow.

Bobby was not interested in castration and asked if there was another form of treatment. He was treated was a single shot of a drug which is slowly released into the body over a three month time period. Within that time the patient noticed marked relief in his pain.

Why would the scan show bone abnormalities? What would cause it?

It has been determined that an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. spends an average of 108 days per year identifying potential threats to human existence, with a standard deviation of 13.5 days. A random sample of 36 S.H.I.E.L.D. agents is taken.

a. What is the probability that the sample will have a mean of less than 105 days?

b. What is the probability that the sample will have a mean of more than 110 days?

c. What is the probability that the sample will have a mean between 109 and 114 days?

d. What is the probability that the sample will have a mean of no more than 104 days?

Thalassemia is a genetic disorder where affected individuals have red blood cells that produce too much iron. This disease is inherited as an autosomal recessive (tt). However, heterozygous individuals (carriers= Tt) may have some immunity to malaria (similar to sickle cell anaemia). Human blood samples are obtained from a Mediterranean population of 100 people where malaria is endemic. Of these, 50 people are found to be carriers (Tt), and additional 3 people have thalassemia (tt). Use these observed results to explain if heterozygous individuals have partial immunity to malaria?