The achievement gap observed between African Nova Scotia (ANS) learners and their peers has been a concern to the researchers, the community, policy-makers and other education sponsors. Also, the on-going COVID-19 crisis has increased calls for research studies that can share light on how education investors can trust and work together to address the achievement gap and inform policy.

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Despite significant efforts in the area of prevention and treatment, tobacco and e-cigarette addictions remain a recognized public health problem in Canada. Artificial intelligence (AI) in health offers an innovative avenue in tobacco treatment: the combination of an intelligent pulmonary inhaler coupled with a mobile health app would offer a real-time nicotine cessation and self-care personalized protocol aimed at helping the user quit smoking or, at least, reduce the harms associated with tobacco consumption.

Family Service Canada (FSC) is a Canadian nonprofit organization dedicated to building healthy families. One program delivered by FSC, called Family & Schools Together, has been shown to help families become more involved in their children’s education and support student’s learning but it has not yet been researched in Canada. To find out if this program is helpful for Canadian families, we will be interviewing FSC staff, families, children, and teachers across five FSC sites to determine whether or not they feel the F&ST program is effective.

Ocean industries hold many opportunities for employment for the future Nova Scotian work force. However, Nova Scotian junior high students have a poor understanding and a lack of interest in Nova Scotia’s available ocean careers. Ocean career education through online interactive games could increase Nova Scotian students’ interest in ocean careers. By having students try the games and offering us their feedback through surveys we can determine how effective these online games are for increasing student’s interest in ocean related careers.

More than ever before, Nova Scotia universities and colleges are relying on digital materials to provide information to the public, staff, students, etc. For example, PDF and Word documents are being used for non-curriculum information, such as application materials, campus maps, etc. It is crucial that these documents are accessible for everyone.
In a first of its kind project, the current state of accessibility of these documents will be evaluated by Nova Scotians with cognitive, neurological, intellectual, and/or learning disabilities.

To date, there is little understanding of how to adapt school psychology practice to fit the needs of Indigenous populations. This project seeks to understand the current challenges that exist for school psychology practice with Indigenous peoples and what changes are needed to advance the practice. By completing autobiographical studies, Indigenous master’s students-in-training who will be working with First Nations communities and Indigenous students are uniquely positioned to consider how school psychology can better serve the interests of their people.

As the intern, I will be taking on specific components of this evaluation as my own research contribution. These select components form the research project for which we are seeking Mitacs funding.

Research has illustrated the significant challenges that youth in care often face in meeting their education goals and in managing their mental health and well-being. Specifically, a subset of these transitional aged youth, often referenced as “NEET” (youth not in employment, education, or training) often face significant challenges to meeting their subsequent educational or occupational goals in early adulthood.

The current project aims to increase understanding on the current challenges and opportunities in supporting the learning and mental health needs of these youth in care.

The closure of schools across Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed significant gaps in educational provision. In addition, K-12 teachers have had difficulty finding learning resources related to the programs they are responsible for teaching. When students fall behind in school, they develop a learning gap with their peers. Learning gaps are relatively common and invariably require, at some point, a strategy to help the student catch up.

The objective of this project is to develop a user-friendly, online database of Canadian research that directly relates to Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD), and provide research report synthesizing the contents of the research hub to date. This project will benefit Canadians, as it will provide stakeholders involved with SLD easy access to information.