Life Span Institute Blog

Staff from the KU Life Span Institute joined dozens of individuals with disabilities, advocates and professionals from across the state Aug. 10-12 at the Kansas Disability Caucus in Topeka, Kan. The event aims to provide opportunities for Kansans with disabilities to learn, share, and provide solutions to issues faced by the disability community. 

Matt Mosconi, interim associate director and senior scientist at the KU Life Span Institute, has been selected to help lead the scientific program for the International Society for Autism Research, or INSAR, over the next two years.

This post will illustrate how to use reports and calculated fields in REDCap to “flatten” data across events and arms. It will cover the basics of setting up Events and Arms in a project, and then illustrate the problem with the default data “report” of all data. Finally, it will step through adding calculated fields in specific instruments to copy data across events.

Brittany Hall, a staff member at the KU Life Span Institute, has been elected president of the National Board of Regents of Haskell Indian Nations University. Hall has served as the board's alumni representative for more than a year and is a former adjunct instructor at Haskell. She will serve a two-year term that began in May 2022.

If you plan to have an open research survey that you distribute through email lists or social media, especially if you indicate that you will be compensating your survey subjects, you should expect to have your survey completed by “bots” and should plan accordingly. This post will try to address the specific scope of the problem and provide suggestions for how to make your survey less likely to be targeted by “bot” authors and other bad actors.

In the last year, SWIFT Education Center welcomed more new staff members to their team. The expanded team will help the Center bring an equity-based, multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) to school districts across the country. 

Nancy Brady, Professor and Chair in the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences and Disorders at the University of Kansas and a researcher at the Life Span Institute, applies her interest in communication to her research focused on clinical practices that benefit individuals who have intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Lyndsie Koon applies her interdisciplinary interests in exercise and disability to conduct research that aims to improve the health and well-being of individuals with disabilities across the life span.

When 11-year-old Xigrid Soto moved to the continental United States from Puerto Rico with her family, her new community and the school lacked the support she needed. “I was placed in a classroom for special needs by accident,” Soto said. “I had to teach myself English, and that was a hard experience. And so, from that, I was really determined to have it not happen to other people.”

  Investigators at a KU education research center have distilled twenty years of education research into a new book focused on an equity-based system to support all students.