Thanksgiving will be here before we know it! If you’re like us, you have an extra pumpkin around the house right now. I’d like to challenge you to Thirty Days of Thankfulness for the month of November. By the end of the month, you’ll have one thankful pumpkin on display to kick off the holidays! You’ll also have a family that realizes they have much to be thankful for! I thought of this idea one year when I was visiting family. I was trying to think of a way to use a little pumpkin that my niece and nephew had for decoration. So we sat around the table and tried to list everything we were thankful for. As they contributed, I wrote keywords with a marker all over the pumpkin. Even when we were done with our brainstorming activity, they would think of things to add to our thankful pumpkin. It’s a simple yet meaningful activity that encourages children (and adults) to find things they are grateful for in their lives. When you’re not writing on it, place the pumpkin in a spot where everyone can see it every day. It serves as a reminder, not only for all the good things in life, but also to continue the challenge with quality family discussions. If you made these decorative pumpkins, and don’t want to save them, you could paint them a neutral color and write or paint all over them too. We’re going to use a regular picked-from-the-patch pumpkin in our house. The following document gives brief instructions for this activity. You can clip it to the fridge for this year and/or file it away for next year if you’d like. Or, you can make the conversation more interesting by cutting out the prompt strips from the document and placing them in a jar or container. Each day when you sit down to write on your thankful pumpkin, you can have your child choose a strip to start the discussion. The author believes that this activity: Pick the correct answer from the following options: - Brings families closer together - Creates family debates - not enough information - Creates family arguments
Brings families closer together

There is no hiding from the impact agenda. The impact weighting of the Research Excellence Framework has been increased for 2021, and more recently the UK Government announced a new funding stream for knowledge exchange. But achieving impact isn’t easy, especially for researchers early in their careers. If you ever have a spare week, or ten, it’s worth reading through some of the 6,637 REF impact case studies on the HEFCE website. There are some brilliant and fascinating examples of how researchers have achieved impact, but what strikes me most is how different impact looks across different subjects. At the risk of being flippant, among many of the medical or technological examples there is a familiar pattern and a clear route to impact: make breakthrough; license drug/technology; save lives/£millions. For social and political science (not to mention economics, languages, education, philosophy, etc.) the route to impact is much more fragmented. Among the 97 sociology case studies, for example, impact comes from numerous briefings of government officials and parliamentarians, before the academics join “networks” and “committees” discussing their research and wider issues. Their research is covered by national media, they meet even more people – practitioners or third sector campaigning organisations to pass on their knowledge. And, after all that, and often a good deal more, sometimes there is a policy or practice change that can be pointed to as a direct impact, sometimes not. Central to much of the impact is “access”. Prominent and experienced academics are more likely to get on the committees, know the right journalists and government officials, and have links into third sector organisations, etc. I worked with Professor Sir John Curtice, of election night fame, for a number of years. He didn’t need much support. I advised and facilitated, but after 30 years in the game he knew Whitehall (and Holyrood) inside and out – and they knew him. But many researchers, especially at the start of their careers, don’t... According to the text, what has been increased for 2021? Pick the correct answer from the following options: - The price of televisions - the price of books - not enough information - Research Excellence Framework
Research Excellence Framework

The sound of the clacking grew unbearable, so we turned the volume down. "Mute it." We muted it. "Turn it up; we might miss something." It's a silent movie. We won't miss anything. The sound of clacking gradually fills the room as my brother reluctantly turns up the volume. I can tell he's pressing hard on the button, jamming his thumb down in defiance or muted anger. He doesn't like for anyone to tell him what to do with the remote. But my grandmother wants the volume up, so we turn it up. We're all sitting along the edges of the tiny living room, staring at the fuzzy black-and-white images as they hazily walk across the television screen. I can hear a siren outside, barely discernable and then gone entirely. "Who's that?" my brother asks, evidently past his momentary and barely-noticeable indignation over the remote. "Uncle Arehl, and maybe his sister, Edna," my grandmother says, leaning in closer. "I think it's Edna," she says, in the tone of a doctor diagnosing a disease, as if the verdict was somehow relevant to someone who has only the vaguest idea who Arehl's sister is, or was. Uncle Arehl (I don't know precisely whose uncle he is, or for what the two initials of his name once stood) saunters slowly across a dry, patchy lawn, and the camera follows him. For some reason I'm more interested in the lawn--if it can be called that--than in the people on it. The sun in the movie is blazing, and everyone filmed looks only briefly at the camera before averting their faces once again to look at the stubbly grass. The camera pans once again and I can see an incredibly rutted path leading from the porch to the fence at the edge of the yard, broken pieces of concrete amid deep tire tracks fossilized in sun-baked mud. The fence is low, wire like a chain-link, but lower, with metal stakes holding it up instead of tubes. Who was sitting in the living room? Pick the correct answer from the following options: - The narrator, his brother, and his grandmother. - Family members. - Three people who are related. - not enough information
