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DEC seeks your input and involvement with the disseminiation and product development plan to ensure that the 2014 recommended practices are understood and implemented across the broad field of early childhood. Share your perspective, brainstorm with colleagues, and strengthen dissemination efforts.

The new DEC family recommended practices provide home visitors with specific guidance about enhancing families' abilities to engage their children in learning activities. Participants will learn how to use the new DEC family practices through video demonstrations and how to use a self-reflection tool developed for the DEC family practices.

The transition into Kindergarten is a critical time for children's development--children's patterns of academic development and engagement with school often start in Kindergarten and persist throughout their academic careers. This is a developmental period that is marked by many changes in children's lives, and therefore it is not a surprise that many children struggle during this transition. These struggles are more common for children who are living in poverty, and although there have been national initiatives to address opportunity gaps in access to early education, investigations into the effectiveness of these programs in promoting children's Kindergarten development have shown mixed results. It is therefore essential to identify the types of early education experiences that are effective in supporting children in having a smooth Kindergarten transition. This dissertation presents and evaluates six theoretical frameworks that can be used to understand the Kindergarten transition. The school readiness approach to the Kindergarten transition focuses on the ways in which children's Kindergarten-entry skills can lead to their own development during Kindergarten. The Pre-K launch model examines the role of high-quality Pre-K in boosting children's school readiness, and subsequently their development during Kindergarten. The classroom quality perspective describes the supportive qualities of Kindergarten classrooms that may aid in children's development across this transition. The continuity perspective shows that support for continuous high-quality instruction between Pre-K and Kindergarten systems may promote children's growth. The buffer/compensation model proposes that children with higher-quality Pre-K experiences are more resilient to the effects of lower-quality Kindergarten. Finally, the consistency model suggests that alignment of quality between Pre-K and Kindergarten may be beneficial for children regardless of whether that alignment represents high quality instructional practices. Each of these perspectives provides valuable insight into the Kindergarten transition; however, these theoretical perspectives have not been studied simultaneously to determine the extent to which all may play a role in children's development during the Kindergarten transition, particularly the development of children who are living in poverty. The current study used data from the National Center for Early Development and Learning's Multi-State Pre-kindergarten Study (NCEDL) to chart children's experiences in their Pre-K and Kindergarten classes to determine whether there are qualities of children's experiences before and throughout the Kindergarten transition that support their development during Kindergarten, and evaluated the extent to which these patterns support these major theoretical perspectives. The study found that children's Kindergarten-entry skills were the best predictors of their end-of-Kindergarten outcomes, showing support for the school readiness perspective. In the domain of instructional support, children's concurrent classroom experiences predicted their academic outcomes during a given year, showing support for the classroom quality framework. In the domain of emotional support, statistical effects of Kindergarten emotional support on children's outcomes were seen only under conditions in which Pre-K emotional support had also been high, showing conditional support for the continuity model. Consistency of children's emotional support, when controlling for quality, was negatively related to their social and emotional development, indicating that consistent emotional support alone is not beneficial without taking into account the quality of that emotional support. Associations between Pre-K quality and children's Kindergarten development were not translated through boosts in school readiness, indicating that while Pre-K experiences do matter for children's development during the Kindergarten transition, that relationship is not best described through a launch model. And finally, any benefits of higher quality emotional and instructional interactions during both Pre-K and Kindergarten were largely concentrated in the group of children who were not living in poverty, while higher Pre-K quality was at times related to lower Kindergarten outcomes for children who were living in poverty. Implications for future research and policy are discussed.

In the United States, adult ICU patient care consumes $90 billion annually, or 1% of the gross national product. In the ICU, about 40% of the patients are mechanically ventilated resulting in an 11% greater length of stay (LOS) that requires 35% more resources. And, an estimated 60% of these patients are adversely impacted for as long as five years following discharge. Patient immobility while ventilated contributes to poor quality and financial outcomes. The Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI) reports on average early patient mobility (EPM) reduces a 4.5-day LOS by as much as 1.3 days; and reduces the risk for complications such as ventilator associated pneumonia, thromboembolisms, and pressure ulcers. The purpose of this evidence-based practice (EBP) quality improvement project was to evaluate an EPM program based to improve interdisciplinary collaboration and care coordination. The introduction, development, and evaluation of this project were guided by the Iowa Model and the Awakening and Breathing Coordination, Delirium Monitoring/Management, and Early Exercise/Mobility (ABCDE) bundle. The EPM program was implemented in a 20-bed ICU in a 400-bed hospital as the Mobilization Criteria / Algorithm for Critical Care Patients (MCACCP). Retrospective data was collected for six months from the electronic health record and evaluated with a web-based analytics tool. The project resulted in a 1.2-day decrease in ICU LOS and a 6.7% reduction in ventilator days. The average daily census decreased from 16.2 in 2015 to 14.7 through 2016. EBP research supports the benefit of early mobility of ICU patients to reduce complications, ventilator days, LOS, and the overall cost for care. This project demonstrates standardizing clinical practice based on EBP guidelines and protocols translates into improved teamwork, patient outcomes, and organization metrics.

In the four early modern revenge tragedies I study, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the ubiquitous depictions of corporeal violence underscore the authors’ skepticism of the human tendency to infuse bodies – physical manifestations of both agency and vulnerability – with symbolism. The revengers in these plays try to avenge the death of a loved one whose disfigured body remains unburied and often continues to occupy a place on stage, but their efforts to infuse corpses with meaning instead reveal the revengers’ perverse obsession with mutilation as spectacle. In Chapter one, I show how in The Spanish Tragedy Thomas Kyd portrays the characters’ assertions of body-soul unity to be arbitrary attempts to justify self-serving motives. Although Hieronimo treats Horatio’s dead body as a signifier of his own emotions, he displays it, alongside the bodies of his enemies, as just another rotting corpse. In Chapter two, I explore how in Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare questions the efficacy of rituals for maintaining social order by depicting how the play’s characters manipulate rituals intended to celebrate peace as opportunities to exact vengeance; Titus demands human sacrifice as not just an accompanying element, but a central motive of rituals ostensibly intended to signify commemoration. In Chapter three, I read The Revenger’s Tragedy as illustrating Thomas Middleton’s characterization of the depiction of corporeal mutilation as an overused, generic convention; the play’s revenger, Vindice, attributes multiple, constantly shifting, meanings to the rotting skull of his lover, which he uses as a murder weapon. In Chapter four I argue that in The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster destabilizes spectators’ interpretive capacities; within this play’s unconventional dramatic structure, the main characters use somatic imagery to associate bodily dismemberment with moral disintegration. Corpses, the tangible remains of once vigorous, able-bodied relatives, serve as central components of respectful commemoration or as mementos of vengeance, yet these dead, often gruesomely mutilated bodies also invite repulsion or perverse curiosity. Thus, rather than honoring the deceased, revengers objectify corpses as frightening spectacles or even use them as weapons.

The fortuitous discovery of early Christian images adorning the catacombs on Via Salaria in 1578 enabled scholars to address urgent, contemporary problems concerning the Catholic tradition of image veneration, which had been attacked by Protestant iconoclasts. Although the catacombs had been important devotional sites for the cult of martyrs and relics throughout the Middle Ages, the 1578 catacomb discovery was the first time that Romans connected the catacombs with the early Christian cult of images. Only after 1578 did scholars and antiquarians begin to collect and study early Christian frescoes and antiquities found in Rome’s numerous catacomb sites. Their research culminated in the publication of Antonio Bosio’s Roma sotterranea (1635), the first treatise on the Roman catacombs. After the Council of Trent (1545–1563), Catholic scholarship on the catacombs defended the early Christian origins of the cult of martyrs, relics, and images. I argue that the Tridentine Church’s claim of continuity motivated the study of early Christian art in the catacombs in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By critically evaluating images and archeological sources to support an interpretation of the Church as semper eadem (ever the same), Bosio and his sixteenth-century predecessors contributed to the development of modern historical and archeological methods. This dissertation explores the juxtaposition of imaginative and analytical interpretations of the Roman catacombs in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Early modern descriptions of the catacombs characterize these burial sites as emotive worship spaces for the early Church that evoked Christian suffering, martyrdom, and devotion to the cult of saints. I argue that the gruesome martyrdom imagery commissioned to decorate S. Stefano Rotondo and SS. Nereo e Achilleo in the last two decades of the sixteenth century imaginatively recreated what contemporaries thought early Christian worship would have been like in the catacombs. As the first in-depth study to consider the relationship between the exploration of the catacombs and the first large-scale martyrdom cycles in the late sixteenth century, this dissertation demonstrates how vivid pictorial imagination of the Christian past inspired the early Christian revival movement in post-Tridentine Rome. / text