More than half of English patients with NSCLC in areas with low socio-economic levels do not receive new anti-cancer therapies

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF LUNG CANCER

(Denver, May 19, 2023) --Novel anti-cancer therapies were not accessible to more than half of the patients in England who were diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer, according to a new study published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, the official journal of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer.

In England, all cancer patients are entitled to care, free at the point of delivery within the universal, publicly funded, National Health Service (NHS) including treatment with guideline approved targeted therapies and immune checkpoint inhibitors. Private healthcare, especially for conditions like cancer, is uncommon.

Novel anti-cancer therapies include molecular targeted therapies targeting either oncogene addiction or synthetic lethality with activity restricted to tumors with appropriate biomarker status (e.g., simertinib); biological treatments with no predictive biomarker included in the license (e.g., bevacizumab); and immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) which use the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells (e.g. pembrolizumab).

Studies in many countries show that lung cancer survival rates are lower in people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. One reason for this might be socio-economic differences in access to treatment.  Previous research has demonstrated socio-economic inequalities in the utilization of conventional NSCLC treatments such as chemotherapy, but it is not known if these inequalities are also observed with novel anti-cancer therapies.

To assess this, researchers from the Population Health Sciences Institute at Newcastle University and Newcastle-upon-Tyne Hospitals NHS Trust conducted a retrospective analysis of all 90,785 patients diagnosed with histologically confirmed stage IV NSCLC between 2012 and 2017, using data from the English national population-based cancer registry and linked Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy (SACT) database.

The researchers examined receipt of novel anti-cancer treatments by patients’ deprivation category of the area of residence at diagnosis measured using quintile rank of the income domain of the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD - a widely used proxy for socio-economic status).  They accounted for differences between patients in other factors that can determine suitability for treatment, such as stage at diagnosis, tumor morphology, comorbidities, and age.

“Patients residing in the most deprived areas were 55% less likely to utilize any of these novel anti-cancer therapies compared to those residents in the least deprived areas,” according to lead author Linda Sharp, Ph.D., Professor of Cancer Epidemiology from the Population Health Sciences Institute at Newcastle University. “Overall, these findings suggest that despite significant improvements in NSCLC treatment and prognosis, socioeconomic status is an important factor in access to novel treatment, even within the context of England’s NHS, where treatment is free at the point of delivery.”

Co-author Adam Todd, PhD, Professor of Pharmaceutical Public Health added “There is an urgent need to investigate the reasons for these inequalities so we can take steps to eliminate them. This is essential if we want to realize the full potential of these therapies for NSCLC patients.

About the IASLC:

The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) is the only global organization dedicated solely to the study of lung cancer and other thoracic malignancies. Founded in 1974, the association's membership includes 10,000 lung cancer specialists across all disciplines in over 100 countries, forming a global network working together to conquer lung and thoracic cancers worldwide. The association also publishes the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, the primary educational and informational publication for topics relevant to the prevention, detection, diagnosis, and treatment of all thoracic malignancies. Visit www.iaslc.org for more information.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Thoracic Oncology

DOI

10.1016/j.jtho.2023.04.018 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Socio-economic Inequalities in Novel NSCLC Treatments During the Era of Tumor Biomarker Guided Therapy: A Population-based Cohort Study in a Publicly Funded Healthcare System

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

19-May-2023

COI STATEMENT

Dr. Greystoke reports: consultancy and speaker fees from Bayer, Roche, Amgen, Janssen, Merck, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Takeda; meeting and travel support from Roche, Janssen and Takeda and a; leadership role at the Northeast England Yorkshire and Humber genomics laboratory hub, all outside the submitted work. Professor Todd reports royalties from Wiley publishers, outside the submitted work. The remaining authors declare no conflict of interest.

Physical chemists develop photochromic active colloids shedding light on the development of new smart active materials

Peer-Reviewed Publication

THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

 

IMAGE: NOVEL INK COMPOSED OF COLOURFUL MICROBEADS ADAPTS TO THE APPEARANCE OF RECEIVED LIGHT BY LIGHT-DRIVEN SEPARATION. view more 

CREDIT: THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

In nature, the skin of cephalopods (animals with tentacles attached to the head) exhibits unparalleled camouflage ability. Their skin contains pigment groups that can sense changes in environmental light conditions and adjust their appearance through the action of pigment cells. Although intricate in nature, this colour-changing ability is fundamentally based on a mechanical mechanism in which pigment particles are folded or unfolded under the control of radial muscles.

Inspired by this natural process, a research team led by Dr Jinyao TANG from the Department of Chemistry at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), develops a novel wavelength-selective intelligent colloid system to achieve light-controlled multi-dimensional phase segregation in collaboration with scientists from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Xiamen University. The team forms dynamic photochromic nanoclusters by mixing cyan, magenta and yellow microbeads, achieving photochromism on a macro scale. This macroscopic photochromism relies on light-induced vertical phase stratification in the active microbeads mixture, resulting in the enrichment of coloured microbeads corresponding to the incident spectrum.

Unlike existing colour-changing materials, this new photochromic colloidal swarm relies on rearranging existing pigments rather than generating new chromophores in situ and is, therefore, more reliable and programmable. Their findings provide a simple method for applications such as electronic ink, displays, and active optical camouflage, representing a major breakthrough in the field of active matter. The research result is recently published in the prestigious academic journal Nature.

Self-actuated active particles are micro/nanoparticles that mimic the directional swimming of microorganisms in liquid. Recently, they have attracted significant attention in nanoscience and non-equilibrium physics and is being developed for potential biomedical applications. One of the main research objectives of active particles are to develop medical micro/nanorobots based on these particles for drug delivery and non-invasive surgery. However, the structure of active particles is very simple, and their driving mechanism and environment perception are significantly limited. In particular, the size and relatively simple structure of the individual micro/nano active particles restrict the complexity of implementing functions on their body. The challenge and key to realising the future application is how to make active particles with intelligent characteristics despite their simple structure.

Light-powered microswimmers, a type of self-actuated active particles, have been recently developed for the purpose of creating controllable nanorobot, which offers potential for biomedical application and functional novel materials as the swimmer activity, alignment direction, and interparticle interaction can be readily modulated with incident light. On the other hand, light not only induces photosensitive motion in microswimmers but also changes the effective interaction between particles. For example, photocatalytic reactions can change the local chemical gradient field, which in turn affects the movement trajectory of neighboring particles through diffusion swimming effect, resulting in long-range attraction or repulsion.

In this work, Tang’s team designed a simple wavelength-selective TiO2 active microbeads system based on their previous research on light-powered microswimmers. Upon photoexcitation, the redox reaction on TiO2 particles generates a chemical gradient, which tunes the effective particle-particle interaction. That is, the particle-particle interaction can be controlled by combining incident light of different wavelengths and intensities. TiO2 microbead with different photosensitive activities can be formed by selecting dye sensitisation codes with different spectral characteristics. By mixing several otherwise identical TiO2 microbeads species loaded with dyes of different absorption spectra and adjusting the incident light spectra, the on-demand particle segregation is realised.

The purpose of realising particle phase segregation is to control the particle aggregation and dispersion in liquid at both micro and macro levels. Effectively, this resulted in a novel photoresponsive ink by mixing microbeads with different photo-sensitivity that maybe applied to electronic paper. The principle is similar to the pigment clusters in the skin of cephalopods that can sense the light condition of the environment and change the appearance of surrounding pigment cells through their corresponding actions.

‘The research findings have contributed significantly to advancing our knowledge of swarm intelligence in artificial active materials and have paved the way for designing innovative active smart materials. With this breakthrough, we anticipate the development of programmable photochromic ink that could be utilised in various applications such as e-ink, display ink, and even active optical camouflage ink,’ Dr Jinyao Tang concluded.

Journal paper: ‘Photochromism from wavelength-selective colloidal phase segregation’ , Nature
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05873-4

View the research video: https://youtu.be/3Ylodxllwvo

Images download and captions: https://www.scifac.hku.hk/press

More information about Dr Jinyao Tang: https://tanglab.hku.hk

For media enquiries, please contact Ms Cindy Chan, Assistant Communications Director of Faculty of Science (Tel: 3917-5286; email: cindycst@hku.hk).

Three-dimensional phase segregation and photochromic colloidal swarm. a, The Illustration of spectral sensitive layered segregation in the ternary colloidal system, where different illumination spectra resulted in distinctive vertical stratification. b, The 3D distribution of ternary colloidal particles as imaged by confocal microscope after red, green, and blue light illumination. The SQ2, LEG4, and L0 sensitized TiO2 colloids are represented in cyan, magenta, and yellow, respectively. Scale bar: 50 mm. c, Modified projector is used to project designed colour images. d, Six colour blocks emerged on the surface of photochromic ink after 2 min exposure. Inset: the projected pattern. Scale bar: 2 mm. e, The university logo emerged on the surface of photochromic ink after 2 min exposure. Scale bar: 2 mm. f, Sequential patterning of the photochromic ink with different colour paintings with 2 min exposure. Inset: the original projected patterns. Scale bar: 2 mm.

CREDIT

The University of Hong Kong

JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-023-05873-4 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Photochromism from wavelength-selective colloidal phase segregation

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-May-2023

Our brain prefers positive vocal sounds that come from our left

Auditory cortex is less sensitive to human vocalizations from the right and non-vocalizations

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FRONTIERS

Sounds that we hear around us are defined physically by their frequency and amplitude. But for us, sounds have a meaning beyond those parameters: we may perceive them as pleasant or unpleasant, ominous or reassuring, and interesting and rich in information, or just noise.

One aspect that affects the emotional ‘valence’ of sounds – that is, whether we perceive them as positive, neutral, or negative – is where they come from. Most people rate looming sounds, which move towards them, as more unpleasant, potent, arousing, and intense than receding sounds, and especially if they come from behind rather than from the front. This bias might have a plausible evolutionary advantage: to our ancestors on the African savannah, a sound approaching from behind their vulnerable back might have signaled a predator stalking them.

Now, neuroscientists from Switzerland have shown another effect of direction on emotional valence: we respond more strongly to positive human sounds, like laughter or pleasant vocalizations, when these come from the left.

“Here we show that human vocalizations that elicit positive emotional experiences, yield strong activity in the brain’s auditory cortex when they come from the listener’s left side. This does not occur when positive vocalizations come from the front or right,” said first author Dr Sandra da Costa, a research staff scientist at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

“We also show that vocalizations with neutral or negative emotional valence, for example meaningles vowels or frightened screams, and sounds other than human vocalizations do not have this association with the left side.”

From erotic vocalizations to a ticking bomb

Da Costa and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare how strongly the brain of 13 volunteers responded to sounds coming from the left, front, or right. These were women and men in their mid-twenties, all right-handed, and none were trained in music. The researchers compared the brain’s response between six categories of sounds: besides positive human vocalizations like erotic sounds, they played back neutral and negative vocalizations, like meaningless vowels and a frightened scream; and positive, neutral, and negative non-vocalizations, like applause, wind, and a ticking bomb.

Da Costa et al. focused on brain regions known to be important for the early stages of sound processing, the primary auditory areas A1 and R, the surrounding other early-stage auditory areas, and the ‘voice area’ (VA). Each of these areas occurs in the left and right hemisphere of the brain.

The results showed that A1 and R in both hemispheres became maximally active when listening to positive vocalizations coming from the left, and much less when listening to positive vocalizations coming from the front or right, to neutral or negative vocalizations, or to non-vocalizations.

Auditory cortex discriminates in favor of positive vocalizations from left

“The strong activation by vocalizations with positive emotional valence coming from the left takes place in the primary auditory cortex of either hemisphere: the first areas in the brain cortex to receive auditory information. Our findings suggest that the nature of a sound, its emotional valence, and its spatial origin are first identified and processed there,” said co-author Dr Tiffany Grisendi.

In addition, area L3 in the right hemisphere, but not its twin in the left hemisphere, also responded more strongly to positive vocalizations coming from the left or right compared to those coming from the front. In contrast, the spatial origin of the sound didn’t impact the response to non-vocalizations.

The evolutionary significance of our brain’s bias in favor of positive vocalizations coming from the left is still unclear.

Senior author Prof Stephanie Clarke, at the Neuropsychology and Neurorehabilitation Clinic at the Lausanne University Hospital said: “It is currently unknown when the preference of the primary auditory cortex for positive human vocalizations from the left appears during human development, and whether this is a uniquely human characteristic. Once we understand this, we may speculate whether it is linked to hand preference or the asymmetric arrangements of the internal organs."

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Neuroscience

DOI

10.3389/fnins.2023.1164334 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Emotional sounds in space: asymmetrical representation within early-stage auditory areas

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

19-May-2023

Cidrani and Deep Longevity collaborate to build personalized care tools for longevity and well-being

Business Announcement

DEEP LONGEVITY LTD

 

IMAGE: BLOODAGE + MINDAGE IS YOUR GUT HEALTH THE KEY TO A LONGER LIFE? view more 

CREDIT: DEEP LONGEVITY

Cidrani, a pioneering company in probiotics and micro drink supplements, announces its partnership with Deep Longevity, a leading provider of aging clocks and longevity solutions. The collaboration will leverage Deep Longevity's Blood Age and Mind Age clock APIs to develop gut health-management tools that will help drive longevity and avoid diseases  and manage stress. 

Stanford scientists have already demonstrated how fermented diets can boost our health on the molecular level. Cidrani's solution exploits this phenomenon to improve our immunity and longevity, using microbiota-targeted micro drinks based on our current health profile. 

Deep Longevity's Blood Age is a revolutionary aging clock that utilizes artificial intelligence to analyze simple blood test data  to accurately measure an individual's biological age and recommend improving health and longevity. This aging clock technology will complement Cidrani’s fermented products and longevity app for consumers perfectly.  

Mind Age is a psychological assessment framework. Also developed by Deep Longevity, this aging clock relies on a proprietary questionnaire to calculate the psychological age of an individual. Measuring and improving Mind Age, proactively handling mental health will improve motivation, productivity and eventually lifespan.  

Elevated levels of both blood age and psychological age have been linked to accelerated aging, leading to increased risks of chronic diseases, morbidity, and a shorter lifespan. Cidrani aims to mitigate these health risks through its groundbreaking research on probiotics and micro drink supplements. The collaboration with Deep Longevity will provide Cidrani with a data-driven and evidence-backed technology ,  to further its goal of improving longevity . 

Deep Longevity's recent launch of SenoClock, providing easy access to their aging clocks, reflects their commitment to advancing longevity care and research. By also making their aging clocks available through APIs, Deep Longevity empowers researchers and healthcare providers like Cidrani to develop applications tailored to specific use cases, benefiting patients and end users. 

The personalized care tools developed by Cidrani, utilizing Deep Longevity's aging clocks, will provide users with accurate and up-to-date information about their physical and mental health. Armed with this knowledge, individuals can make informed decisions regarding their lifestyle choices, leading to improved metabolism, gut health, and microbe diversity. Ultimately, this partnership will contribute to healthier and longer lives. 

This collaboration between Cidrani and Deep Longevity represents a significant milestone in longevity research within the global health and wellness industry. Expect more good news and exciting announcements from both partners in the near future. 

About Cidrani --  

Cidrani is a pioneering company in the field of probiotics and micro drink supplements. With a commitment to research and innovation, Cidrani aims to enhance longevity and well-being through cutting-edge solutions. For more information, please visit https://cidrani.com/  

About Deep Longevity --  

Deep Longevity is a leading provider of aging clocks and longevity solutions. By utilizing artificial intelligence and advanced data analysis, Deep Longevity offers accurate and actionable insights into biological and psychological aging. Their mission is to extend human lifespan as well as healthspan and revolutionize the field of longevity . For more information, please visit https://www.deeplongevity.com/  

Boys need ‘lessons in bromance’ to tackle mental health crisis in schools

School lessons in anger, friendships, and listening needed to combat male suicide, teacher warns

Book Announcement

TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP

Teenage boys are twice as likely as girls to die by suicide, and, when boys become men, they are three times more likely than women to die by suicide.  

After years on the frontline of teaching and observing, first-hand, a decline in teenage mental health, a teacher has warned that we need to deal better with male anger, friendships, and attitudes towards sex in order to combat the male suicide crisis.  

Official statistics for England, Scotland, and Wales show that in 2020, 264 people aged 10–19 died by suicide – 72% of these were boys. In England, suicide is the single biggest killer of men under the age of 45. They are three times more likely than women to die by suicide.  

While statistics surrounding male suicide paint a bleak picture of the future of boys in our schools, teacher Matt Pinkett thinks all is not lost.  

What can be done?  

Pinkett has gathered evidence from teachers and school staff, wellbeing experts and therapists to create a powerful guide to helping boys, in Boys Do Cry, released next month.  

The practical and engaging guide, backed up by the latest research from the fields of psychology and education, suggests that teachers must stop stigmatising anger and instead help angry boys understand the neurological and physiological reasons for their feelings.  

Pinkett says: “Anger isn’t an inherently bad thing and telling boys it is just leads to shame and hiding away. Instead, how about we teach them that anger is a feeling as natural as joy or sadness, and give them ways to manage it and the words to talk about it?”  

He also suggests that teachers need to make loving, male relationships the norm, and to assume that every social interaction that takes place in a classroom is being watched and internalised. 

He advises male teachers to compliment male colleagues openly, to talk lovingly about other people, and praise and salute male emotional vulnerability wherever and whenever possible.  

“I am not suggesting that we should ever try to be therapists – that would never work,” Pinkett explains, “but the fact is that we are in front of these children for massive chunks of their life. If we can speak positively about male emotions and demonstrate ways of dealing with problematic feelings, that would be a powerful thing.”  

Talking isn’t enough  

In Boys Do Cry, Pinkett advocates the benefits of the ‘bromance’, suggesting that teachers and schools harness this relatively recent phenomenon of male-to-male relationships. He argues that in teaching boys about bromances, teachers can equip young men with the skills to actively listen and display compassion and affection towards each other.  

He suggests teachers can help facilitate emotional connection between boys and help build friendships that are supportive.  

He explains: “The problem isn’t encouraging young men to talk – it’s teaching their peers to listen. Research suggests boys don’t listen as well as girls.  There is so much conversation about encouraging boys and men to speak up, but are we teaching them how to support each other through listening effectively?”  

Demonstrated through research and case studies, Pinkett argues that boys crave emotional intimacy and the freedom to express themselves without being mocked, but that toxic ideas about masculinity are preventing these fruitful peer relationships.  

“We need to teach boys to be kind, and that it is OK to be vulnerable and emotionally articulate,” he says.  

Benefit to society  

With his research-backed tools and tips, Pinkett hopes the book will give teachers confidence to engage with really difficult topics – to the benefit of all.  

“This isn’t just a problem for teenage boys. If we can teach these boys to get rid of those harmful and outdated expectations of what it means to be a man, all of society will be better off,” Pinkett says. “It is only through education of young people that the scourge of male-on-female sexual abuse, assault, and harassment can be eradicated.”  

Boys Do Cry examines key research on factors impacting boys’ mental health, including topics such as body image, pornography and self-harm, and provides teachers with practical strategies to start enacting positive change.  

With his extensive research, he has created advice on intervening when a child may be in danger, to tips on how to set up group working so friendships can be made while learning.  

“This isn’t about turning teachers into therapists,” Pinkett adds, “It’s just about being brave enough to intervene and give boys a chance to learn another way of being.”  

Further information:  

Boys Do Cry: Improving Boys’ Mental Health and Wellbeing in Schools  
By Matt Pinkett   
Published 17 May 2023  
180 Pages    
Paperback: 9781032168692 | $22.95 USD | £16.99   
Hardback: 9781032168685 | $155 USD | £120  
 

About the author:  
Matt Pinkett is an English teacher in Surrey with a personal and professional interest in gender and masculinity in schools. He is co-author of the bestselling book Boys Don’t Try? Matt has also blogged and written for several publications, and delivers regular CPD sessions on the topic of teaching and masculinity.  

     

About Taylor & Francis Group    
Taylor & Francis supports diverse communities of experts, researchers and knowledge makers around the world to accelerate and maximize the impact of their work. We are a leader in our field, publish across all disciplines and have one of the largest Humanities and Social Sciences portfolios. Our expertise, built on an academic publishing heritage of over 200 years, advances trusted knowledge that fosters human progress.  

  

Our 2650 people, based in a global network of offices in 17 countries, use their skills and the latest technology to curate, validate and share impactful advanced, emergent and applied knowledge. Under the Taylor & Francis, Routledge and F1000 imprints we publish 2700 journals, 8000 new books each year and partner with more than 700 scholarly societies.   

  

Taylor & Francis is proud to be a Global Certified Accessible™ publisher and to have achieved CarbonNeutral® certification for our operations and print publications in accordance with The CarbonNeutral Protocol.  

  

   

***** ENDS *****    

  

 

 

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DOI

10.4324/9781003250722 

Reflecting on their mission increases teachers’ growth mindset

Psychology

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RUHR-UNIVERSITY BOCHUM

 

IMAGE: ANKE HEYDER HAS DEVELOPED A SHORT AND SUCCESSFUL INTERVENTION FOR TEACHERS WITH COLLEAGUES. view more 

CREDIT: © RUB, MARQUARD

All children can thrive

Whether or not students enjoy school and perform well in the classroom depends very much on the teachers, whose fundamental beliefs can be transferred to the learners. “The important factor is whether a teacher is convinced that all children can thrive and learn,” explains Anke Heyder. In psychology, this belief is referred to as the growth mindset. “The belief that a talent or fixed aptitude is necessary for learning success, that students will fail otherwise, is more likely a hindrance.” This so-called fixed mindset tends to reduce motivation, especially among students with poorer performance.

Even though these relations have been identified in many studies, a compact intervention designed to reinforce the growth mindset among teachers hasn’t been introduced as yet. “Our intervention is new, and it is both short and subtle,” points out Anke Heyder. “At its core is a brief reflection on your personal mission: why am I a teacher? How do I want to make a difference to my students through what I do?”

Survey on teacher beliefs

To test the intervention, the researchers recruited a total of 576 student teachers for their study. The participants were divided into groups. In the intervention group, they were asked to briefly reflect on and write down their mission, before completing a survey on their beliefs. In the control groups, they didn’t reflect on their mission but on a different question, and then answered the questionnaire.

“We showed that the beliefs of those participants who focused on their mission was significantly more inclined towards a growth mindset than that of the control group,” explains Anke Heyder. This result was unrelated to the subject the student teachers were pursuing. A survey one week later yielded the same result. “This indicates that the effect does last – at least for a while,” says Heyder. Follow-up research will be necessary to establish whether the effect is permanent. “I can only advise teachers, but also university lecturers and business leaders, to reflect on their own mission every now and then,” concludes the researcher. “Not only does this benefit the people for whom you are responsible, but there’s also evidence that it boosts your own motivation and job satisfaction.”

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JOURNAL

Learning and Instruction

DOI

10.1016/j.learninstruc.2023.101770 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Reflecting on their mission increases preservice teachers’ growth mindsets

Collaboration is key to creating a culture that supports children’s behavior in early childhood education

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND

When a child behaves in an unwanted manner, changing their behaviour often becomes a focus. Research, however, suggests that influencing the behaviour of adults who interact with the child would be more effective.

Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Jyväskylä conducted an 18-month follow-up of 18 Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres that were piloting positive behaviour intervention and support (PBIS), which takes a research-based approach to creating an operational culture that supports the behaviour of all children. The PBIS approach sought to clarify the situation-specific behavioural expectations of the ECEC centres and provided training and coaching on how to comply with them. Children’s appropriate social behaviour was acknowledged as systematically as possible through positive feedback, and efforts were made to pay less attention to possible failures.

One ECEC centre, for example, managed to make its corridors less noisy and crowded by teaching children about personal space when moving in the corridors. Professionals working in the ECEC centre, on the other hand, were committed to acknowledging children’s success in considering personal space, and they gave plenty of individual and positive feedback whenever children moved about in the corridors in an orderly manner.

In some ECEC centres, children’s success with social behaviour was also reinforced with tokens. Collecting these tokens gave cause to collective celebration of achievement, or otherwise served as a pleasant collective activity.

Change takes time

According to Senior Researcher Noora Heiskanen of the University of Eastern Finland, the study showed that even when successful, development was a balancing act between many challenges.

“In order to support children in their behavioural challenges in the right way, the entire environment of ECEC, and the ECEC community, must commit to the change of pedagogical practices and understand its significance.”

The theoretical implementation of the new approach and its integration into the existing practices of ECEC centres require time, collaboration, and competence.

“It is not always easy for ECEC professionals to accept change, and enough time should be given to the adoption of the new approach. The ECEC centres piloting the PBIS approach succeeded in creating a uniform way of teaching social behaviour to children, specifically through the participation of the whole community, as well as through research-based, guided development.”

According to University Lecturer Anne Karhu of the University of Eastern Finland, the findings give good tools for a wider development of practices in ECEC.

“Review and development of the common practices plays a key role. The PBIS approach can be used to build an ECEC community that is welcoming to all children and that has research-based means to address possible challenges in children’s behaviour.” 

According to Karhu, behavioural support should be integrated into all activities. In addition, social behaviour should be taught in a preventive manner, while also ensuring enhanced support for those who need it.

“The PBIS approach also provides a good basis for providing more advanced and more intensive behavioural support for children who need it.”

The joint research project between the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Jyväskylä will continue to develop and study these enhanced and individual forms of behavioural support, funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. Highlighting the importance of developing community-level practices, the findings are very topical in view of the discussion related to inclusion in ECEC, and in the educational system at large.

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JOURNAL

European Journal of Special Needs Education

DOI

10.1080/08856257.2023.2207057 

ARTICLE TITLE

Implementing positive behaviour intervention and support in Finnish early childhood education and care: leadership team’s perspective

We must insert joy back into education in the wake of COVID-19, researcher warns

Book Announcement

TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP

Education systems need major reform in the light of lessons learned from Covid, according to a leading education academic.

Klaus Zierer, Professor of Education at the University of Augsburg, Germany, and an associate research fellow at the University of Oxford, UK, has revealed ways in which the ‘collateral damage’ from school closures is still hitting children and young people particularly hard.

He examines the evidence in his new book, Educating the Covid Generation, publishing on May 17. The author believes policymakers are turning a blind eye not only to the physical, emotional and educational after-effects on children, but also to deep flaws in educational systems which have been exposed by the pandemic.

Flaws in the system

“The Covid-19 pandemic has shaken the education system and at the same time exposed known weaknesses in a dramatic way. We are stumbling through this crisis from an educational policy perspective… It is hard to avoid the impression that educational policy is turning a blind eye to this,” Professor Zierer says.

He suggests that three key flaws in education systems have been highlighted by the pandemic. They are:

• A too-narrow focus on easily-measured mathematical, scientific-technical and linguistic competencies.
• A tendency for schools to think mainly in terms of ‘effectiveness,’ which is only one element of a good education.
• A lack of ‘joy,’ which should be ‘the guiding principle for education and teaching.’

The book sets out five key elements for a more joyful education:

1. Reasons: Children and young people need to know why their lessons should matter to them.
2. Feelings: Children’s emotions should be taken into account, both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities.
3. Activity: Learning that consists only of listening and executing is ultimately inhumane.
4. Success: Children need to be given challenges through which they can gain a sense of achievement.
5. Community: A new balance is needed between individual achievement and the experience of becoming a team player.

Professor Zierer also describes how his own family struggled during Covid – he has three school-age children who were then aged six, nine and 11.

“We have not fallen as a family but we have stumbled many times,” he says. “It fills me with concern that they have spent more time at home than at school between 2020 and 2022. How is a young person supposed to develop if they are cut off from the outside world, isolated from friends, quarantined again and again, and not allowed to do all the things that make life worth living?” 

Teachers cooperation: team-knowledge distillation for multiple cross-domain few-shot learning

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HIGHER EDUCATION PRESS

 

IMAGE: THE ARCHITECTURE ILLUSTRATION OF THE PROPOSED TKD-NET ON 5-WAY 1-SHOT CLASSIFICATION. view more 

CREDIT: HIGHER EDUCATION PRESS LIMITED COMPANY

Although few-shot learning (FSL) has achieved great progress, it is still an enormous challenge especially when the source and target sets are from different domains, which is also known as cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL). Utilizing more source domain data is an effective way to improve the performance of CD-FSL. However, knowledge from different source domains may entangle and confuse with each other, which hurts the performance on the target domain.

To solve the problem, a research team led by professor Zhong JI in Tianjin University published their new research on 15 April 2023 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature.

The team propose team-knowledge distillation networks (TKD-Net) to tackle the CD-FSL, which explores a strategy to help the cooperation of multiple teachers. They distill knowledge from the cooperation of teacher networks to a single student network in a meta-learning framework. It incorporates task-oriented knowledge distillation and multiple cooperation among teachers to train an efficient student with better generalization ability on unseen tasks. Moreover, their TKD-Net employs both response-based knowledge and relation-based knowledge to transfer more comprehensive and effective knowledge.

Specifically, their proposed method consists of two stages: a teacher development stage and a multi-level knowledge distillation stage. They first respectively pre-train teacher models with the training data from multiple seen domains by supervised learning, where all the teacher models have the same network architecture. After obtaining multiple domain-specific teacher models, multi-level knowledge is then transferred from the cooperation of teachers to the student in the paradigm of meta-learning. Task-oriented distillation is beneficial for the student model to quickly adapt to few-shot tasks. The student model is trained based on Prototypical Networks and the soft labels provided by the teacher models. Besides, they further explore the knowledge embedded in the similarity and explore the similarity matrix of teachers to transfer the relationship between samples in the few-shot tasks. It guides the student to learn more specific and comprehensive information.

Future work can focus on adaptively adjusting the weight of multiple teacher models, and finding more ways to effectively aggregate the knowledge from multiple teachers.

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Research Article, Published: 27 March 2023

Zhong JI, Jingwei NI, Xiyao LIU, Yanwei PANG. Teachers cooperation: team-knowledge distillation for multiple cross-domain few-shot learning. Front. Comput. Sci., 2023, 17(2): 172312, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-022-1250-2

 

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JOURNAL

Frontiers of Computer Science

DOI

10.1007/s11704-022-1250-2 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Teachers cooperation: team-knowledge distillation for multiple cross-domain few-shot learning