Is there a place for e-learning in clinical skills? A survey of undergradute medical students experiences and attitudes

e-learning is established in many medical schools. However the effectiveness of e-learning has been difficult to quantify and there have been concerns that such educational activities may be driven more by novelty, than pedagogical evidence. Where some domains may lend themselves well to e-learning, clinical skills has been considered a challenging area for online learning.

Changing Attitudes of Community Through the Design Charrette Process

The traditional planning process in the UK and elsewhere takes too long to develop, are demanding on resources that are scarce and most times tend to be unrelated to the needs and demands of society. It segregates the plan making from the decision making process with the consultants planning, the politicians deciding and the community receiving without being integrated into the planning and decision making process. The Scottish Planning system is undergoing radical changes as evidenced by the publication of the Planning Advice Note, PAN by the Scottish Executive in July 2006 with the aim of enabling Community Engagement that allow for openness and accountability in the decision making process. The Public Engagement is a process that is driven by the physical, social and economic systems research aimed at improving the process at the level of community through problem solving and of the city region through strategic planning. There are several methods available to engage the community in large scale projects. The two well known ones are the Enquiry be Design and the Charrette approaches used in the UK and US respectively. This paper is an independent and rigorous analysis of the Charrette process as observed in the proposed Tornagrain Settlement in the Highlands area of Scotland. It attempts to gauge and analyse the attitudes, perceptions of the participants the Charrette as well as the mechanics and structure of the Charrette. The study analyzes the Charrette approach as a method future public engagement in and its effectiveness within the Scottish Planning System in view of PAN 2005. The analysis revealed that the Charrette as a method of engagement could be effective in changing attitudes of the community to the design process under certain conditions as discussed in the paper.

Once a Criminal, Always a Criminal?: ‘Redeemability’ and the Psychology of Punitive Public Attitudes

Several studies have sought to link punitive public attitudes to attribution style and/or lay theories of crime. This research finds that those who believe criminal acts are the result of freely chosen and willful behavior are more likely to be punitive than those who feel crime is the result of external circumstances and constraints. These analyses focus on only one dimension of attributions: locus of control (internal/external). In this analysis, we include a second dimension, thought to be a better predictor of attitudes in social psychological research: stability/instability. In addition to measuring lay theories of crime causation, we also test for “belief in redeemability” (or beliefs about the ability of deviants to change their ways). Our hypothesis is that this other dimension of personal attributions (stability/instability) may be as critical in explaining support for highly punitive criminal justice policies as beliefs about criminal responsibility. We find evidence supportive of this model in an analysis of data from postal survey of residents of six areas in England.

The role of previous experience and attitudes toward statistics in statistics assessment outcomes among undergraduate psychology students

Previous research has demonstrated that students’ cognitions about statistics are related to their performance in statistics assessments. The purpose of this research is to examine the nature of the relationships between undergraduate psychology students’ previous experiences of maths, statistics and computing; their attitudes toward statistics; and assessment on a statistics course. Of the variables examined, the strongest predictor of assessment outcome was students’ attitude about their intellectual knowledge and skills in relation to statistics at the end of the statistics curriculum. This attitude was related to students’ perceptions of their maths ability at the beginning of the statistics curriculum. Interventions could be designed to change such attitudes with the aim of improving students’ learning of statistics.

The Macroeconomic Factors Conditioning the Impact of Identity on Attitudes towards the EU

Factors relating to identity and to economics have been shown to be important predictors of attitudes towards the European Union (EU). In this article, we show that the impact of identity is conditional on economic context. First, living in a member state that receives relatively high levels of EU funding acts as a 'buffer', diluting the impact of an exclusive national identity on Euroscepticism. Second, living in a relatively wealthy member state, with its associated attractiveness for economic migrants, increases the salience of economic xenophobia as a driver of sceptical attitudes. These results highlight the importance of seeing theories of attitude formation (such as economic and identity theories) not as competitors but rather as complementary, with the predictive strength of one theoretical approach (identity) being a function of system-level variation in factors relating to the other theoretical approach (macro-level economic conditions).

The relationship between the stockperson's personality and attitudes and the productivity of dairy cows

This study investigated the relationships amongst personality traits and attitudes of 311 dairy stockpeople and the milk yield they obtained. A questionnaire pack consisting of a big-five measure of personality (which includes the traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and intellect), a four-factor attitude questionnaire and associated demographic and production questions was posted out to Northern Ireland dairy farmers. Pearson correlations were used to assess the relationship between personality and attitudes and partial correlations were calculated between milk yield and these psychometric measures. The personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness were most strongly correlated to positive attitudes towards working with dairy cows. None of the stockpeople's personality traits were significantly correlated with the milk yield they obtained. Three of the attitude scales, however, were significantly correlated with milk yield; milk yield was related to higher levels of empathy and job satisfaction and lower levels of negative beliefs, These findings, along with previous research, suggest stockperson attitudes may be important in relation to dairy cow welfare and production.

Determinants of human rights attitudes and behavior: A comparison and integration of psychological perspectives

Following several political-psychological approaches, the present research analyzed whether orientations toward human rights are a function of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), basic human values in the sense of Schwartz (1992), and political ideology. Three dimensions of human rights attitudes (endorsement, restriction, and enforcement) were differentiated from human rights knowledge and behavior. In a time-lagged Internet survey (N = 479), using structural equation modeling, RWA, universalism and power values, and political ideology (measured at Time 1) differentially predicted dimensions of human rights attitudes (measured at Time 2 five months later). RWA and universalism values also predicted self-reported human rights behavior, with the effects mediated through human rights endorsement. Human rights knowledge also predicted behavior. The psychological roots of positive and negative orientations toward human rights, consequences for human rights education, and the particular role of military enforcement of human rights are discussed.