By, Adam Sachs, RD

Campus Dietician 

                Many people feel compelled to start s new habit or make a lifestyle change starting after the first of the year. A considerable percentage of people will try a new diet trend for their new year’s resolution. This practice usually is brought on by the desire for weight loss, compensating for indulging over the holidays, or just a general desire to be healthier. Many diet trends from 2019 will carry over into 2020, but a few new ones are popping up just in time for the New Year.

While there is nothing wrong with wanting to improve your health through diet, many diet trends are not based in science and research and can usually fall into the category of “fad diets.” On another note, changing your diet in a major way after the first of the year can sometimes not be very beneficial. Drastic changes of diet can result in a major shift in your lifestyle and routine. So much so that it can be very difficult to stick to your new plan. Many fad diets offer unrealistic results in a very short amount of time, but usually come with some extreme food and dietary restrictions, making them very difficult to maintain. The best practice for changing your diet is to find small components that you can alter and then build off of that. This helps to promote helpful changes in gradual steps, making it much more achievable.

Now we can take a look at some of the current and up and coming diet trends and some actual research surrounding them…

Ketogenic Diet

This popular diet has been trending for the past 2-3 years, and will most likely continue into 2020. Keto was never designed to be a diet for weight loss or healthy eating. The ketogenic diet was originally a treatment for young children with seizure disorder and epilepsy. Eating mostly fat and protein, with very little carbs changes the way your brain uses fuel in your body. This process drastically reduced the amount of seizures many young children were having. The diet has since been taken up by many health and fitness communities as a way to lose weight quickly. Keto requires a drastic change in most people’s usual diet, which makes it very hard to maintain. Are bodies are meant to eat carbs, they are not “bad” or “toxic.” Moderating and variety is key with any food, and that includes carbohydrates.

Food Combining

A relatively new diet trend, food combing states that you will benefit from combining certain food types, where as other food combinations are unhealthy and should be avoided. For example, on this diet carbs and protein should never be eaten together, and fruit and dairy should always be consumed on an empty stomach. There is no research that supports the claims of this diet for the purposes of weight loss or otherwise. Your body digests all food types the same way whether they are eating together or not.

Meat analogs (beyond/impossible meats)

This trend became popular towards the end of 2019, and will mostly likely continue to grow this year. The concept is to have 100% plant based products that taste and look identical to an animal protein product. The best example is the impossible burger or the beyond meat burger. Eating more plant-based foods can be very beneficial to your health and is also very sustainable. That being said, these specific products are meant to very closely resemble the animal protein product. For example the impossible burger is almost nutritionally identical to a beef burger in terms of calories, sodium, fat, and protein. These products are great if you would like to eat less total animal proteins, but they are not always very different from a health standpoint.

Adam Sachs, RD

Using Open Educational Resources (OER) is not just about inexpensive textbook alternatives, it is about advancing student retention, grades, and graduation rates. Given UMBC’s Mission and Vision to “advance knowledge, economic prosperity, and social justice,” OER is a movement well situated to do just that.

With the OER movement declared by EDUCAUSE as a key strategic priority in 2019, and now one in ten faculty nationally reported as using OER, there is an increase in quality OER textbooks and course materials available to review and adopt.

In the recent Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey in Florida, researchers found that students used a variety of cost saving methods to avoid paying the full price of course material costs, such as renting copies for the semester and sharing with a classmate. When students were asked about the academic impact of textbook costs, 64.2% reported not purchasing the required course materials, 42.7% enrolled in fewer courses, 35.6% “earned a poor grade because they could not afford to buy the textbook,” and 22.9% dropped a course due to textbook cost (Florida Virtual Campus, 2019, pp. 13-14).

While lowering course material costs is certainly a goal of the OER movement, the greater purpose is to ensure student academic success. Researchers at the University of Georgia (Colvard, et. al. 2018) who examined student performance from 2010 to 2016 in eight undergraduate courses with both OER course sections and non-OER course sections found that student grades in the OER sections increased for all student populations considered (full-time, part-time, white, non-white, and Pell-grant recipients). At the same time, the rate of students who received grades of D, F, or W (Withdrawal), decreased for part-time, white, non-white, and Pell-grant recipients in the OER sections. It is significant to note that traditionally underserved student populations (non-white, part-time and Pell-grant recipients) showed the greatest increases in grades and decreases in DFW with the OER adoption. The findings indicate that “OER is an equity strategy for higher education: providing all students with access to course materials on the first day of class serves to level the academic playing field in course settings” (Colvard, et. al., 2018, p. 273).

• Want to learn more about OER? Feel free to check out the OER online guide: lib.guides.umbc.edu/OER

• Interested in OER training workshops or in joining an OER interest group on campus?  Please indicate on the OER interest google form: tinyurl.com/UMBC-OER

Erin Durham, MA, MM, MLIS

Reference & Instruction Faculty Librarian

410-455-3592 | edurham@umbc.edu

By Kindel Turner Nash, UMBC and Leah Panther, Mercer University

We are literacy professionals, former reading teachers who now prepare college and graduate students to teach kids how to read.

As scholars, we believe in the study, exchange and debate of ideas. But recently we have become concerned by the direction that the debate about what methods teachers should use to help kids learn to read has taken.

The long-running “reading wars” are flaring again, largely because so many kids are struggling. Only 35% of fourth graders read at or above their grade level, according to the results of a federal standardized test. It’s also an issue because merely 13.5% of American 15-year-olds could distinguish between fiction and fact when they took another assessment, which measures student performance around the world.

Phonics and the ‘science’ of reading

A growing number of influential journalists, dyslexia advocates, politicians and some local school officials argue that there’s only one way to teach reading. They advocate for having all public schools teach phonics between kindergarten and third grade.

Phonics is a method of teaching reading that emphasizes getting kids to decode individual letters and groups of letters and to connect them with the sounds they make, such as connecting the letter “a” with the sound it makes in the words “cat” or “ate.”

This approach was developed in the mid-19th century by experimental psychologists who held that reading was a linear, bottom-up process involving rote learning of letters, sounds, words, sentences, then comprehension.

These days, phonics-first advocates call their favored approach “the science of reading.” They say it has been proven to work through rigorous scientific testing. They dismiss all other methods.

These “science of reading” proponents fail to mention that many methods of teaching reading do include teaching letters and sounds, along with surrounding students with interesting books and exciting texts, building background knowledge and using multiple teaching techniques like shared reading, guided reading and individual instruction.

While phonics, or other teaching strategies, may work effectively in one context, it does not guarantee the same results with different teachers or students. For example, if a child does not learn in a linear way or have the visual or auditory processing skills needed to learn letters and sounds, phonics may not be a reliable approach.

Many methods

Comprehensive methods encompass reading to students often, providing time for students to read, write and talk about texts often, and supporting reading fluency by reading texts repeatedly and teaching kids to combine strategies to figure out words they don’t know.

These strategies include sounding out a word using phonics knowledge, looking at the pictures, skipping the word and coming back to it after reading the rest of the sentence, and thinking about what would make sense.

A comprehensive approach also includes providing time for studying spoken language, including vocabulary and spelling. It also calls for providing explicit comprehension instruction through having kids respond to texts through writing, talking, acting it out or drawing. Teaching higher-order critical thinking skills , such as prediction and reflection about stories, helps kids get the hang of reading as well.

Perhaps ironically and despite the decades-long and sometimes heated debate over what teaching methods work best, there are no reliable data about which methods U.S. teachers use most to teach kids.

And yet in Minnesota and other states lawmakers are seeking ways to force schools to emphasize phonics even though the Common Core State Standards, adopted in 41 states and the District of Columbia, already include phonics instruction.

Skewed media coverage

Many prominent news outlets appear to be taking one side.

Google the term “the science of reading” and you’ll find pages of hits proclaiming the superiority of teaching reading through a phonics-first approach, from National Public Radio, EdWeek, American Public Media, the Great Schools website and The Atlantic, to name a few.

A Dec. 3 EdWeek article by Madeline Will, for example, discusses former elementary teacher’s Mary Sacchetti’s experience using “an intensive phonics based program” to help a second grade student named “Juan.” The boy was identified as requiring special education.

Will indicates that Juan “knew about half of his consonant sounds and none of his vowels.” She reports that Juan made reading gains after phonics interventions, although she doesn’t share the specifics.

The article questions why Sacchetti and other teachers are not always prepared to offer phonics interventions since, Will writes, this approach to teaching reading is rooted in science.

Comprehensive approach

The answer is that other methods for teaching reading are also backed by ample evidence.

The International Literacy Association recently rebutted the phonics-first narrative with a report that synthesized evidence from decades of research on teaching children to read.

Many studies have shown the importance of educators adapting their teaching based on their knowledge of reading practices and a deep understanding of children’s strengths and needs. Other research has indicated that strong schools that support teachers and children over time are key. And additional studies have underscored the effectiveness of teaching reading with a comprehensive approach that includes both phonics and other methods.

Similarly, the National Council of Teachers of English recently issued a Statement on the Teaching of Reading that brought together multiple research studies to define teaching reading as an evolving complex process that cannot be reduced to one skill or a linear set of skills.

This research underscores the important role that learning to understand texts based on your own experiences can play when kids learn to read. It also highlights the importance of a comprehensive approach that includes fluency, oral language, writing, spelling, phonics, vocabulary and comprehension – and that readers learn to read by reading widely.

In addition, kids benefit from reading different kinds of texts, including online, interactive content from web apps or e-books.

Teaching reading

Instead of being forced to step up their reliance on phonics, we believe teachers should use a comprehensive approach and understand an individual child’s strengths, previous knowledge and experiences, languages, ethnic, racial and cultural
backgrounds and other relevant information.

Children’s parents, families and communities know these strengths best and, like teachers, can support children learning to read by frequently and repeatedly reading books popular with children like “Please, Baby, Please” by filmmaker Spike Lee or the “Elephant and Piggie” series by author and illustrator Mo Willems. When parents regularly read to and with their own kids, their children are much more likely to become good readers.

Just like each child, family and teacher grows over time, reading methods should too because there is more than one good way to teach a kid how to read.

* * * * *

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Kindel Turner Nash, Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Leah Panther, Assistant Professor of Literacy Education, Mercer University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Header image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

Ellicott City, Maryland non-profit dance organization Kinetics Dance Theatre seeks Artistic Director to implement its artistic vision and direct its professional modern dance company. The Artistic Director is an exempt full time position that reports to the Board of Directors and is comprised of administrative, rehearsal, and instructional components.

POSTPONED to Feb 16th

Dance & Bmore seeks outstanding Performers for our 2020 season Jan - July 2020. Dancers, Singers, and Musicians welcome. Creative collaborators highly encouraged.

Date: Sun, Feb 16th, 2020

Check In: 2:45PM

Auditions: 3 - 4:30PM

Location: City Arts 2, 1700 Greenmount Ave, Baltimore, MD 21202

Prepare: Come learn DAB repertoire from performances.

Attire: Clothes you can move in.