Uncovering the evidence of non-expert nephrology nursing practice

Expertise in nursing has been widely studied although there have been no previous studies into what constitutes expertise in nephrology (renal) nursing. This paper, which is abstracted from a larger study into the acquisition and exercise of nephrology nursing expertise, provides evidence of the characteristics and practices of non-expert nephrology nurses. Using the grounded theory method, the study took place in one renal unit in New South Wales, Australia, and involved six non-expert and 11 expert nurses. Sampling was purposive then theoretical. Simultaneous data collection and analysis using participant observation, review of nursing documentation and semistructured interviews was undertaken. The study revealed a three-stage skills-acquisitive process that was identified as non-expert, experienced non-expert and expert stages. Non-expert nurses showed superficial nephrology nursing knowledge and limited experience; they were acquiring basic nephrology nursing skills and possessed a narrow focus of practice.

Integrating molecular diagnostics into histopathology training: the Belfast model

Molecular medicine is transforming modern clinical practice, from diagnostics to therapeutics. Discoveries in research are being incorporated into the clinical setting with increasing rapidity. This transformation is also deeply changing the way we practise pathology. The great advances in cell and molecular biology which have accelerated our understanding of the pathogenesis of solid tumours have been embraced with variable degrees of enthusiasm by diverse medical professional specialties. While histopathologists have not been prompt to adopt molecular diagnostics to date, the need to incorporate molecular pathology into the training of future histopathologists is imperative. Our goal is to create, within an existing 5-year histopathology training curriculum, the structure for formal substantial teaching of molecular diagnostics. This specialist training has two main goals: (1) to equip future practising histopathologists with basic knowledge of molecular diagnostics and (2) to create the option for those interested in a subspecialty experience in tissue molecular diagnostics to pursue this training. It is our belief that this training will help to maintain in future the role of the pathologist at the centre of patient care as the integrator of clinical, morphological and molecular information.

Simulation to practice: developing nursing skills in mental health: an Australian perspective

A variety of developments in nursing education in Australia including some innovative and exciting models, educational enterprises between education and industry, and evidence of developing strengths in research and professional alliances on a national level have been discussed recently. This paper presents Simulation to Practice as an example of an educational program that can maximise skill mastery for nurses in mental health fields as practised by Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. The program is multimodal and is under-pinned by a problem-solving approach and has an online presentation. The extension of nursing skills through this approach encourages nurses to take theoretical skills to practice during these scenarios which help student nurses to gain experience through simulated real life characters. These sessions, while challenging at the time, were highly valued by students and seen as a beneficial part of their learning as a beginning nurse and often instrumental in moving comprehensively trained students into mental health careers.

Phonological remediation program in students with developmental dyslexia

Background: program for phonological remediation in developmental dyslexia. Aim: to verify the efficacy of a program for phonological remediation in students with developmental dyslexia. Specific goals of this study involved the comparison of the linguistic-cognitive performance of students with developmental dyslexia with that of students considered good readers; to compare the results obtained in pre and post-testing situations of students with dyslexia who were and were not submitted to the program; and to compare the results obtained with the phonological remediation program in students with developmental dyslexia to those obtained in good readers. Method: participants of this study were 24 students who were divided as follows: Group I (GI) was divided in two other groups - Gle with 6 students with developmental dyslexia who were submitted to the program; and Glc with 6 students with developmental dyslexia who were not submitted to the program; Group II (GII) was also divided in two other groups - GIIe with 6 good readers who were submitted to the program, and GIIc with 6 good readers who were not submitted to the program. The phonological remediation program (Gonzalez & Rosquete, 2002) was developed in three stages: pre-testing, training and post-testing. Results: results indicate that GI presented a lower performance in phonological skills, reading and writing when compared to GII in the pre-testing situation. However, GIe presented a similar performance to that of GII in the post-testing situation, indicating the effectiveness of the phonological remediation program in students with developmental dyslexia. Conclusion: this study made evident the effectiveness of the phonological remediation program in students with developmental dyslexia.

Simulation-based ultrasound-guided central venous cannulation training program

PURPOSE: To propose a simulation-based ultrasound-guided central venous cannulation skills' training program, during residency.METHODS: This study describes the strategies for learning the ultrasound-guided central venous cannulation on low-fidelity bench models. The preparation of bench models, educational goals, processes of skill acquisition, feedback and evaluation methods were also outlined. The training program was based on key references to the subject.RESULTS: It was formulated a simulation-based ultrasound-guided central venous cannulation teaching program on low-fidelity bench models.CONCLUSION: A simulation-based inexpensive, low-stress, no-risk learning program on low-fidelity bench models was proposed to facilitate acquisition of ultrasound-guided central venous cannulation skills by residents-in-training before exposure to the living patient.

Simultaneous implementation of the Bachelor, Masters and PhD degrees in nursing in the Universidad Jaume I. Castellón de la Plana, Spain

We present an experience in Nursing Education, accredited and implemented under the Spanish University System Reform in a Public University (Jaume I, Castellón) which had no previous nursing studies. The academics offered included all three educational levels (Bachelor, Master's and Doctorate), with an integrated theoretical-practical-clinical teaching methodology for the Bachelor Degree, competence acquisition in research in the Master's degree, and a doctorate formed by lines of research in the field of Nursing. Studies are accredited by the National Agency for Quality Assessment, which were authorized by the Spanish Ministry of Education and implanted between 2009 and 2011.

Wilfried Plöger: Allgemeine Didaktik und Fachdidaktik. Modelltheoretische Untersuchungen. (Studien zur Pädagogik der Schule. Bd. 18.) Frankfurt a.M./Bern: Lang 1993 [Rezension]

Rezension von: Wilfried Plöger: Allgemeine Didaktik und Fachdidaktik. Modelltheoretische Untersuchungen. (Studien zur Pädagogik der Schule. Bd. 18.) Frankfurt a.M./Bern: Lang 1993, 386 S.

Assessment of simulated clinical skills and distance students: can we do it better?

Australian universities have traditionally been able to supplement clinical education, for undergraduate nursing courses, delivered on placement with weekly clinical teaching in the simulated environment. The Objective Structured Clinical Assessment (OSCA) tool has been used in this simulated environment to assess clinical skills. Recently, however, online delivery of undergraduate nursing courses has become more common. The move from an internal mode of teaching to an online external mode is seen worldwide and poses challenges to staff and students as well as changing the teaching and learning culture of institutions (Philip and Wozniak, 2009). This cultural shift and the resulting diminishing timeframe for students to acquire and practice simulated clinical skills imply that it may become necessary to rethink assessment forms such as the OSCA assessment. This study examines whether or not the OSCA tool developed by Bujack et al. (1991a) is the best tool to be used in this new context, where online teaching is supplemented by very short, annual, intensive periods of study. Skills acquisition theories dictate that time is required to produce an ideal skills acquisition environment (Quinn, 2000) but the time constraints placed on students in such intensive periods of study could influence skills acquisition. This cross-sectional qualitative study used semi-structured interviews and focus groups to collect data. 65% of the nursing faculty participated in the study. The teaching of the Bachelor of Nursing (BN) occurred on two campuses and staff from both areas participated. This group of nurse academics was employed across the range of academic levels (from lecturer to professor) at the University. Data analysis followed a generic thematic analysis framework. Findings in this study show that there are a variety of attitudes and underpinning beliefs amongst staff in relation to the OSCAs. Doubts were raised in regard to the suitability of the use of the OSCA tool in this setting. It also became apparent during this study that the OSCA tool possibly serves purposes other than an assessment tool.

Automatically learning structural units in educational videos with the hierarchical hidden Markov models

In this paper we present a coherent approach using the hierarchical HMM with shared structures to extract the structural units that form the building blocks of an education/training video. Rather than using hand-crafted approaches to define the structural units, we use the data from nine training videos to learn the parameters of the HHMM, and thus naturally extract the hierarchy. We then study this hierarchy and examine the nature of the structure at different levels of abstraction. Since the observable is continuous, we also show how to extend the parameter learning in the HHMM to deal with continuous observations.

Content structure discovery in educational videos using shared structures in the hierarchical hidden Markov models

In this paper, we present an application of the hierarchical HMM for structure discovery in educational videos. The HHMM has recently been extended to accommodate the concept of shared structure, ie: a state might multiply inherit from more than one parents. Utilising the expressiveness of this model, we concentrate on a specific class of video -educational videos - in which the hierarchy of semantic units is simpler and clearly defined in terms of topics and its subunits. We model the hierarchy of topical structures by an HHMM and demonstrate the usefulness of the model in detecting topic transitions.

Educational decentralization models in Latin America

Includes bibliography

Alternative education models : preliminary findings of the Job Corps educational improvement effort /

Mode of access: Internet.

Utilizing educational theoretical models to support effective physical education pedagogy

The influence of role models on students' entrepreneurial intentions

The Smart State initiative requires both improved education and training, panicularly in technical fields, plus entrepreneurship to commercialise new ideas. In this study, we propose an entrepreneurial intentions model as a guide to examine the educational choices and entrepreneurial intentions of first-year University students, focusing on the effect of role models. A survey of over 1000 first-year University students revealed that the most enterprising students were choosing to study in the disciplines of information technology and business, economics and law, or selecting dualdegree programs that include business. The role models most often identified for their choice of field of study were parents,followed by teachers and peers, with females identifying more role models than males. For entrepreneurship, students' role models were parents andpeers,followed by famous persons and teachers. Males and females identified similar numbers of role models, but males found starting a business more desirable and more feasible, and reponed higher entrepreneurial intention. The implications of these findings for Smart State policy are discussed.