Honduras is one of the poorest and most violent countries in Central America. In this context, education should offer an escape; a path to a better future. However, the quality of Honduran schooling is abysmal, and few youth are able to study in secondary schools.. Despite these challenges, in our previous research we have discovered what one Honduran educational authority described as a "light in the path," a way for rural youth from disadvantaged communities to have access to high quality education. This "light" is the Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial program (Tutorial Learning System or SAT). In the proposed research we will build upon the positive findings of our recently completed impact evaluation (see McEwan et al., 2014) to examine a number of remaining questions regarding the elements that support effective teaching in poor, rural, geographically isolated communities. Furthermore, by collecting follow-up data collection with a cohort of youth from 94 villages that we began tracking in 2008, we will be able to examine whether learning gains fade over time as well as whether there are linkages between improved quality education and successful transition to adulthood (e.g. enrollment in tertiary education, labor market outcomes, delayed marriage and pregnancy). In doing so, this research will also provide a unique opportunity to develop improved measures of educational quality and adolescent girls' empowerment in low-income countries. Informed by our earlier research and a review of the literature, we conceptualize effective teaching to be supported by three features of the SAT system of education: 1) Teacher recruitment and preparation; 2) The provision of resources for teaching effectiveness; 3) A system of professional support, accountability, incentives and rewards. With this framework in mind, we have designed a research project that examines the following core research questions through a mixed-methods case study: 1) What system-wide supports make a critical contribution to "effective teaching" in rural Honduran secondary schools? 2) Which elements of effective teaching contribute to sustained learning gains that are relevant and useful for youth as they transition to adulthood? For the purposes of this proposal, we define "effective teaching" as teaching that leads to both immediate and sustained gains in learning across a range of competencies relevant to successful adulthood. We will employ case study methodology, examining two "nested" cases of secondary schooling in rural Honduras, the SAT program and more traditional Centros de Educación Básicos (CEB). Results of our earlier research comparing SAT and CEB suggest that learning outcomes for SAT are considerably higher than CEBs (.2 standard deviations; stated differently residing in a SAT village increased the rate of learning by 45 percent). Despite these striking learning improvements, we estimate the cost of SAT to be 18 percent lower than CEBs. This comparison (SAT/CEB) allows us to gain valuable insights regarding the elements that support effective teaching and improved learning outcomes. A follow-up round of data collection with our cohort of youth will also address the question of whether learning gains fade over time and allow us to better understand the ways in which quality education influences the transition to adulthood. Our research methods will include the application of quantitative instruments (surveys and assessments) as well as qualitative in-depth interviews, extensive classroom observation, and the observation of teacher professional development sessions. Beyond the qualitative and quantitative datasets that this study will generate, the outputs of this research include measures of educational quality (assessments and scales) that can inform future research in other developing country contexts. We will disseminate our findings via traditional (e.g. academic journals, conferences) and new (e.g. Prezi, YouTube) venues.

The Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial (Tutorial Learning System or SAT) model for lower and upper secondary school (gradesyear 7-12) provides a rare example of a cost-effective system of effective teaching and learning, particularly for rural areas. Results from a quasi-experimental impact evaluation found that students in SAT had 45% higher rates of learning than their counterparts in traditional rural secondary schools in Honduras (McEwan, et. al, 2015). SAT has operated in Colombia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Ecuador for over three decades, and functions as a public-private partnership between the government and local NGOs. In 2018, SAT was identified as a solution for the major challenges facing youth globally by "Generation Unlimited," which aims to ensure that every young person is in education, learning or employment by 2030. For the past three years, our research on SAT has focused on identifying the system-wide features that make a critical contribution to effective teaching in rural Honduran secondary schools. We have conducted in-depth interviews with teachers (called "tutors" in the SAT program), observed tutor professional development/training sessions, and observed a small number of SAT classrooms, with a particular focus on teaching and learning in science (Shareff and Murphy-Graham, in preparation). However, our research has been significantly constrained because we have not conducted systematic classroom observation using a standardized observation tool. This was not only due to lack of financial resources, but also the the lack of an appropriate observation tool to capture elements of effective teaching in SAT. At our first RLO meeting in London, our research team learned of the work of Seidman and colleagues, and their development of the Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPPS; Seidman, Raza, Kim, & McCoy, 2013; Seidman, et al., 2018), which is a tremendous contribution to the field of education research in developing country contexts. The current proposal for follow-on funds allows us to augment our research on SAT by applying TIPPS in SAT classrooms, as well as simultaneously enhancing impact and building capacity in Honduras. In the future, a cross-grant synthesis will allow our two research teams to co-produce outputs to reach a wide range of stakeholders and to co-author publications. Our research findings from the previous RLO grant, augmented by this opportunity to extend this work, will allow us to understand what makes SAT an effective system of secondary schools in rural Honduras, particularly in terms of the recruitment, professional development and ongoing support of teachers. Through our research on SAT, we will generate key insights that can inform interventions to improve teaching and learning outcomes in developing countries (Murphy-Graham, 2018). This is a key area of interest for policy-makers and others in the international education community, who in support of Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, seek models of high quality secondary education that can inform the design, delivery and expansion of grades 7-12. SAT responds to a number of key challenges identified that prevent quality teaching, including that there are two few teachers in rural areas, and that they lack knowledge and skills to teach effectively (DFID, 2018). The supplemental funds we are applying for will allow us to extend our work in Honduras to enhance research impact and build capacity among key researchers and education stakeholders.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The Bacterial Flagellar Motor is one of nature's rare rotary molecular machines. It enables bacterial swimming and is a key part of the bacterial chemotactic network that enables bacteria to direct their movement given the chemical environment. This network is one of the best-studied chemical signalling networks in biology, sensing down to nanomolar concentrations of specific chemicals on the time scale of seconds. The motor's rotational speed is linearly proportional to the bacterial electrochemical gradients, most notably of proton or sodium ions, while its direction is regulated by the chemotactic network. Recently, it has been discovered that the motor is also a mechanosensor. Given these properties, the motor has the potential to serve as a multimodal biosensor with unprecedented speed and sensitivity, and thus a tool for characterizing and studying the external environment, but also bacterial physiology itself. However, at the resolution needed, motor speed and rotational direction are currently detected optically, one motor at a time. A step-change in harnessing the unprecedented potential of this rotary molecular machine would be to detect each motor's rotation electrically and with high throughput. Here I propose to achieve this by specifically attaching individual bacteria to a precise location on the surface and testing two electrical means of detecting the motor's rotation: an integrated circuit and a graphene surface. The detection method will also be employed to fully characterize the three different sensing modalities offered by the flagellar motor: that of cells own physiology, of mechanical forces and of a given set of chemicals. The success of the project we will enable portable biosensor-on-a-chip configuration of the motor speed and rotational direction detection, which can be a game-changer in the biosensing field.

Pregnant refugee and asylum-seeking women are subject to maternal care and immigration controls, two divergent forms of state management. Both are concerned with risk, however antenatal surveillance is generally understood as a form of care for the expectant woman and her foetus, whereas immigration controls frame migrants themselves as a source of risk. In the UK, such women are also subject to contradictory policies and political ideologies, from 'New Scots Integration Strategies' to the UK-wide 'hostile environment' immigration policies. Research on forced migrants in Europe often focuses on the social, political, and physical exclusion of refugees by the state, however pregnancy and motherhood can be perceived as reasons to provide women with preferential treatment and care. This project represents a major new social science led investigation into how pregnancy and motherhood affect refugee and asylum-seeking women's experiences of migration and settlement in Scotland, with implications for how we understand women's experiences of irregular migration and asylum across Europe and beyond. 99 percent of all maternal deaths occur in developing countries, and most are caused by preventable or treatable conditions. Women in high-income countries are more likely to receive regular access to skilled health workers, however, immigrant women in those same countries can face complex and overlapping social, economic, and political obstacles to quality healthcare and positive reproductive experiences. Refugee and asylum-seeking women in the UK are at increased risk of poor pregnancy and birth outcomes and are more likely to die as a result of pregnancy or childbirth. Research suggests there are between 6,000 and 10,000 asylum-seeking women in Scotland, while the number of women who have been granted refugee status or other forms of humanitarian protection is unknown, yet very little is known about their reproductive experiences or how they can shape their capacity to navigate asylum processes. This project aims to make maternal health in refugee and asylum-seeking communities an issue of reproductive justice, contributing to the international challenge of ensuring reproductive and maternal healthcare for displaced people. Reproductive justice was developed as a framework for activism and analysis which emphasises that gender and reproductive discrimination are intersectional, and they transect with race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, immigration status, physical ability, gender identity, sexuality, and religion. These intersectional axes of opportunity and oppression reveal that reproductive access and decision-making is more complex than the discourse of 'choice' might suggest. This project will use a reproductive justice framework to examine the intersection of gender, reproduction and asylum in Scotland. In doing so, this project will answer the following questions: 1) How do pregnancy and motherhood shape refugee and asylum-seeking women's strategies for accessing social, economic, and medical support? 2) How do pregnancy and motherhood produce or affect personal and institutional relationships? 3) How are concepts of 'deservingness' utilised in the formal and informal support provided for asylum-seeking and refugee women? Answering these questions will achieve the following research objectives: a) Generate empirical evidence on refugee and asylum-seeking women's experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in Scotland; b) Map out refugee and asylum-seeking women's formal and informal relationships and networks of support and management relating to pregnancy and immigration status; c) Develop an ethnographic approach to reproductive justice that centres reproductive politics in refugee and migration studies.