Howard Community College

Calls for transforming biological curricula have emphasized a need for improving quantitative skill development in STEM education. To address this, we designed six interdisciplinary modules to develop quantitative reasoning competencies for a sophomore-level Cell Biology course. After a comprehensive curriculum alignment procedure between a four-year institution and its primary community college sending institutions, we determined module topics, then developed and implemented the modules. We assessed the effects of the modules on student proficiencies using validated pre-post measurements of specific quantitative competencies. Students showed significant total growth in quantitative goals for all modules and for each module individually, even though modules varied widely in difficulty. Transfer students were equally able as direct entry students to gain in quantitative proficiency across the modules, which is an improvement over the findings of a previous study. Additionally, both transfer and direct entry students exposed to more modules had a higher score on a global assessment of quantitative and biological concepts. Attitude assessments showed that students had an overall positive experience with the modules. Our results suggest that adding quantitative modules to core biology courses can promote student understanding of quantitative concepts for both direct entry and transfer students and can benefit transfer students in particular.

Rapid urbanization is leading to the expansion of human settlements in flood-prone areas, and the impact is not uniform across different communities. Few studies have comprehensively investigated the flood exposure faced by vulnerable communities in the Global South, where pervasive slums present a major challenge to inclusive urban planning and flood management. Here, combining advanced machine learning techniques and publicly available satellite images, we identify hot spots of urban slum populations in floodplains in the Global South and examine their settlement patterns. We find that approximately one in three people living in slums in the Global South resides in a floodplain. Slum dwellers are 32% more likely to settle in floodplains compared with residents in adequate housing. The concentration of slum populations is particularly high in areas that have experienced severe floods. These data-driven insights highlight the disproportionate flood exposure faced by slum dwellers in the Global South and underscore the need for just and equitable flood adaptation management.

We introduce OpenDebateEvidence, a comprehensive dataset for argument mining and summarization sourced from the American Competitive Debate community. This dataset includes over 3.5 million documents with rich metadata, making it one of the most extensive collections of debate evidence. OpenDebateEvidence captures the complexity of arguments in high school and college debates, providing valuable resources for training and evaluation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of fine-tuning state-of-the-art large language models for argumentative abstractive summarization across various methods, models, and datasets. By providing this comprehensive resource, we aim to advance computational argumentation and support practical applications for debaters, educators, and researchers. OpenDebateEvidence is publicly available to support further research and innovation in computational argumentation. Access it here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Hellisotherpeople/OpenDebateEvidence-Anonymized

This paper proposes a new approach for combining top-down and bottom-up approaches intended to lead to a curriculum for action in the public interest that builds on social entrepreneurship and digital skills for students at community colleges. This integrated approach requires a collaborative, participatory approach and aims to provide relevant content for students with different cultures and backgrounds, personal values, and sense of identity. The objective is for all participants to engage in the learning process, become more confident, and develop contemporary skills that inspire and enable them to take initiatives to tackle global challenges and to thrive in a multicultural world. A relevant curriculum must enable students to understand the global and local situations in different geographies and, with the increasing demand for digital skills, to access and share information over networks, to develop possible solutions, and to make them happen. This paper proposes ideas for stimulating students to think about what they can do for the public good, starting with local issues, and to generate outcomes valued by the community. The ideas proposed for specific local communities in Maryland can be generalized for understanding and addressing problems for different communities in the United States as well.

We report the confirmation and characterization of four hot Jupiter-type exoplanets initially detected by TESS: TOI-1295 b, TOI-2580 b, TOI-6016 b, and TOI-6130 b. Using observations with the high-resolution echelle spectrograph MaHPS on the 2.1m telescope at Wendelstein Observatory, together with NEID at Kitt Peak National Observatory and TRES at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, we confirmed the planetary nature of these four planet candidates. We also performed precise mass measurements. All four planets are found to be hot Jupiters with orbital periods between 2.4 and 4.0 days. The sizes of these planets range from 1.29 to 1.64 Jupiter radii, while their masses range from 0.6 to 1.5 Jupiter masses. Additionally, we investigated whether there are signs of other planets in the systems but have found none. Lastly, we compared the radii of our four objects to the results of an empirical study of radius inflation and see that all four demonstrate a good fit with the current models. These four planets belong to the first array of planets confirmed with MaHPS data, supporting the ability of the spectrograph to detect planets around fainter stars as faint as V=12.