As national reform efforts are reshaping community college policies with the goal of improving degree completion rates, many two-year colleges are rethinking longstanding course placement processes. Directed Self-Placement (DSP) has emerged as one increasingly visible and viable option for placing students into introductory English and mathematics courses. However, higher education researchers advocating placement reform demonstrate little familiarity with the extensive scholarly literature on DSP in writing studies. To date, that literature has focused almost exclusively on 4-year institutions, with few studies of DSP at two-year colleges. This article begins to address these gaps by (a) reviewing writing studies scholarship on DSP to identify key theoretical insights that are missing in the community college placement reform literature and (b) presenting findings from semi-structured interviews with implementation leaders at twelve 2-year colleges that have attempted DSP. These findings demonstrate a more extensive record of DSP for writing placement at 2-year colleges than has previously been visible in published scholarship, and that DSP can be successful in these institutional settings. These findings also demonstrate distinctive considerations, challenges, and opportunities for DSP at open admissions 2-year colleges that warrant greater attention from placement reformers and writing assessment scholars.

Keywords: two-year colleges, placement, directed self-placement, developmental education reform

The most common type of pronunciation exercises found in current ESL textbooks are those that focus on the voicing variation of past tense endings, /t/ and /d/, and the voicing variation of plural nouns and third-person singular verb endings, /s/ and /z/. While these voicing variations are a reality in English, knowing about them and practicing them do not help ESL students improve their pronunciation. The following article provides both linguistic and pedagogical arguments for excluding such exercises from ESL curricula because such exercises have a tendency to confound students, who often are already overwhelmed with the quantity of information they must master in the target language, and instructors who may have minimal training in the phonology of English and in the teaching of pronunciation.

Human lymphoid cells, when stimulated in vitro with Con-A† or PHA-P, release a group of cytolytically active molecules, termed lymphotoxins (LT). These can be physically separated into various classes and sub-classes by means of molecular sieving columns and ion exchange resins. These studies examine whether these molecules contain carbohydrate. The use of lectin-Sepharose affinity chromatography reveals that human LT molecules in the unfractionated supernatant, and in separated classes and sub-classes, contain at least six different heterogeneously distributed saccharide units. We find that some of the charge heterogeneity associated with α2 sub-class of these molecules appears to be due to the presence of sialic acid, since neuraminidase treatment alters the charge on approximately 20% of this material by ion-exchange analysis. However, this enzyme treatment has no effect on the antigenicity of these molecules. In addition, the carbohydrate moieties do not appear to be necessary for the in vitro lytic activity measured on L-929 cells, since removal with neuraminidase or the presence of saccharides in the lytic reaction has no effect. These studies indicate that LT molecules are glycoproteins. © 1979.

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Heterozygous SPINK1 mutations are strong risk factors for chronic pancreatitis in humans, yet heterozygous disruption of mouse Spink1 yielded no pancreatic phenotype. To resolve this contradiction, we used CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing to generate heterozygous Spink1-deleted mice (Spink1-KOhet) in the C57BL/6N strain and studied the effect of this allele in trypsin-independent and trypsin-dependent pancreatitis models. METHODS: We investigated severity of acute pancreatitis and progression to chronic pancreatitis in Spink1-KOhet mice after transient (10 injections) and prolonged (2 × 8 injections) cerulein hyperstimulation. We crossed Spink1-KOhet mice with T7D23A and T7D22N,K24R mice that carry strongly autoactivating trypsinogen mutants and exhibit spontaneous chronic pancreatitis. RESULTS: Prolonged but not transient cerulein stimulation resulted in increased intrapancreatic trypsin activity and more severe acute pancreatitis in Spink1-KOhet mice relative to the C57BL/6N control strain. After the acute episode, Spink1-KOhet mice developed progressive disease with chronic pancreatitis-like features, whereas C57BL/6N mice recovered rapidly. Trypsinogen mutant mice carrying the Spink1-KOhet allele exhibited strikingly more severe chronic pancreatitis than the respective parent strains. CONCLUSIONS: Heterozygous Spink1 deficiency caused more severe acute pancreatitis after prolonged cerulein stimulation and promoted chronic pancreatitis after the cerulein-induced acute episode, and in two strains of trypsinogen mutant mice with spontaneous disease. In contrast, acute pancreatitis induced with limited cerulein hyperstimulation was unaffected by heterozygous Spink1 deletion, in agreement with recent observations that trypsin activity does not mediate pathologic responses in this model. Taken together, the findings strongly support the notion that loss-of-function SPINK1 mutations in humans increase chronic pancreatitis risk in a trypsin-dependent manner.