Faculty of Health Student Success Programs Receive Major Funding Boost

March 7th, 2013

Three innovative student success programs within the Faculty of Health just received a major boost with renewed funding from York’s Academic Innovation Fund (AIF): YUSTART, Experiential Education (EE), and Personalized Learning Spaces (PerLS).

These three projects, to be undertaken for the 2013-2014 academic year, fall under the AIF development goals of a pan-University systemic approach to Experiential Education, eLearning, and First Year Student Experience. They are also an integral component of the Faculty of Health’s Integrated Resource Plan that focuses on the faculty’s goals for the future, including student success.

Robert Bishop, director of strategic initiatives in the Faculty of Health

YU START is a pilot welcoming program for First Year students meant to simplify the high school to university life transition. The expansion of the pilot study was tested last summer with incoming Kinesiology and Health Science students entering university directly from high school. The aims of the program are to coordinate University-wide information for new students and to support them as they develop their capabilities to successfully transition to university. The program originated from three AIF-funded projects — lead by Rob Bishop, Catherine Salole, Martha Rogers and Lara Ubaldi — that blended into one at the initiative of the respective project leads involving online advising, summer learning communities, and making connections for incoming students.

The pilot program initiated with approximately 650 Kinesiology students in the summer of 2012 and was successful enough to receive renewed funding of $400,000 for the next academic year. Thanks to this new funding, Martha Rogers, Susan Murtha, Gary Spraakman and Diane Woody hope to expand the program to include all of the Faculty of Health high school students going into their first year, along with three other programs within the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies (Law and Society, Criminology, and Sociology) in the fall of 2013. A new “transition” curriculum will be introduced in the fall of 2014 with learning outcomes and modules using the Moodle platform for eventual potential application university-wide in upcoming years.

Martha Rogers, Graduate Program Director of Nursing in the Faculty of Health and Interim Master of Stong College

At the end of the YU START pilot, an evaluation to assess student satisfaction and learning was conducted with YU START participants compared to students entering the university through the usual process of academic orientation. In January 2013, 5 focus groups were conducted by the Institute of Social Research (ISR) to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. “So far the feedback has been excellent. For example, 97 per cent of students surveyed would recommend the YU Start program. As such, we are very excited about expanding this project in the future,” says Bishop.

One of the things that the team is considering in the program’s development is the extension of the project through the first academic year for new students. “Our focus groups after the initial program asked, ‘Why did you drop us so quickly?’ as the program ended in September. We have to see if we can extend the program to provide more support,” says Rogers.

Going forward, the team wants all incoming students to have access to a high quality new student transition curriculum that is research-based and uses the best practices in e-learning. “The ultimate aim is to create a YU START program that is customized for every incoming student based on their needs and academic programs,” says Rogers. With the synchronization of the YU START modules to the Student Information System (SIS), it will be possible to create a truly individualized learning experience for new students.

Researcher helps pinpoint protein important for neuron learning and signalling

January 24th, 2013

York neuroscientist Georg Zoidl is looking into how fundamental communication processes function in the brain and what genes are critical to an adaptability to learn.

What he and a team of international researchers, including former colleagues from the Ruhr-University Bochum and the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, found is the channel protein Pannexin1 plays a critical role in maintaining synaptic strength and plasticity in certain neurons ZoidlG of the brain. What this means that is the presence of Pannexin1 supports the neurons’ ability to learn and signal or remember and communicate.

Georg Zoidl

“Without synaptic plasticity in the nervous system, people would not be able to learn or to forget anything,” says Zoidl, senior principal investigator for the study and aCanada Research Chair in Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience. Synaptic plasticity is a neuron’s ability to adapt to new experiences, a fundamental process that becomes more difficult without the Pannexin1 gene.

The results of the study are published in an article – “Pannexin1 Stabilizes Synaptic Plasticity and Is Needed for Learning” – in the December issue of the journal PLOS ONE.

“The nervous system is like a house built from brick stones. Pannexin1 is like a single brick in the foundation of a wall in that house,” says Zoidl of the Faculty of Health. “What happens to the rest of the house when one of the bricks in the foundation doesn’t fit?”

The team used a mice model with and without Pannexin1 channels to investigate learning and behaviour. In an impressive experiment the two different mice were then let into an enclosure where they had been trained before to identify a cookie in a specific location.

The mouse with a lack of Pannexin1 ran around the space as normal mice do when in a completely new environment. The mouse with Pannnexin1 ran directly to the area where it GeorgZoidlPLOSONE remembered cookies had previously been buried. This mouse remembered past experiences better than the mouse without the Panx1 gene.

Overview of the mouse hippocampus highlighting the major structures, signalling pathways and position of electrodes (Stim, Rec) used to evoke long-term potentiation (LTP). LTP is a candidate mechanism for memory

The mice without Pannexin1 channels were found to have major differences in their molecular and physiological functions, affecting their learning and memory formation. The absence of the gene also led to distinct behavioral alterations, including enhanced anxiety, and impaired recognition and learning tasks.

Zoidl and the team observed that a deficiency of Pannexin1 causes chronic depletion of the signalling molecules ATP and adenosine, which are crucial for energy transmission and signalling in the brain. If the Pannexin1 channel can no longer release ATP and adenosine naturally, signalling (necessary for learning) and energy functions (used for everything in the body, including things like moving muscles) are severely diminished or disturbed. However, Zoidl and the team found that a lack of Pannexin1 can be treated in mice by balancing the levels of the ATP and adenosine molecules in the body.

Pannexin1 is implicated in a wide spectrum of brain disorders, including but not limited to epilepsy, ischemia, inflammation or cancer. Most recently, Pannexin1 has been associated with autism disorder, but the precise nature of Pannexin1 dysfunction in the brain still hasn’t been determined. This is one of the studies that is helping to close the gap.

Article from YFile