How to improve the formal analytic reasoning and scientific motivation in the intellectual training of medical students

A review article of the The New England Journal of Medicine refers that almost a century ago, Abraham Flexner, a research scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, undertook an assessment of medical education in 155 medical schools in operation in the United States and Canada. Flexner’s report emphasized the nonscientific approach of American medical schools to preparation for the profession, which contrasted with the university-based system of medical education in Germany. At the core of Flexner’s view was the notion that formal analytic reasoning, the kind of thinking integral to the natural sciences, should hold pride of place in the intellectual training of physicians. This idea was pioneered at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s, but was most fully expressed in the educational program at Johns Hopkins University, which Flexner regarded as the ideal for medical education. (...)

L' Aula de Teatre de la Universitat de Vic (ATUV) : una aproximació a la seva trajectòria

El present treball de recerca explora i descriu alguns dels aspectes més rellevants del que ha estat la trajectòria de l’Aula de Teatre de la UVic (ATUV) al llarg dels anys. Consta de dues parts diferenciades. En la primera, presento de forma breu alguns dels elements bàsics de caràcter històric que configuren la relació del teatre amb l’educació, fent una especial referència al teatre universitari a l’estat espanyol i a Catalunya. La segona part del treball es desdobla, a la vegada, en dues perspectives. En una, dono compte de l’evolució realitzada per l’Aula de Teatre de la Universitat de Vic, des del punt de vista de la seva organització, característiques i funcionament, i produccions. S’ha fet una memòria descriptiva dels 18 anys de trajectòria de l’ATUV. La segona perspectiva aporta la visió del conjunt de persones (estudiants i exestudiants) que han passat per l’ATUV i que fan, a partir d’un qüestionari tramès prèviament, una valoració dels objectius de dinamització cultural de la Universitat que es proposa l’aula, així com dels aspectes de formació humanística que comprenen el treball de valors, d’habilitats i d’actituds com a procés de creixement personal que han viscut en la seva experiència a l’ATUV..

Passive modernization? the new human development index and its components in Italy’s regions (1871-2007)

The article presents and discusses estimates of social and economic indicators for Italy’s regions in benchmark years roughly from Unification to the present day: life expectancy, education, GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, and the new Human Development Index (HDI). A broad interpretative hypothesis, based on the distinction between passive and active modernization, is proposed to account for the evolution of regional imbalances over the long-run. In the lack of active modernization, Southern Italy converged thanks to passive modernization, i.e., State intervention: however, this was more effective in life expectancy, less successful in education, expensive and as a whole ineffective in GDP. As a consequence, convergence in the HDI occurred from the late XIX century to the 1970s, but came to a sudden halt in the last decades of the XX century.

Education as a mirror of Spanish society: challenges and policies towards multiple diversity

The ways in which the dominant cultural majority frames the educationalsystem determine perceptions of its own identity and understandings ofthe ‘other.’ In this article I take a political approach, by examining themanagement of cultural diversity within Spanish education policies, treating“education as the mirror of society”. This article analyzes Spanish challengesand policies approaches towards the management of immigrationrelated diversity in education. The main finding is that there is not one approach,but several, due to both the decentralized character of the educationsystem and the multiplicity of diversity that is at stake (i.e. language,religion, culture etc.)

Specialization and rent-seeking in moral enforcement: The case of confession

Moral codes are produced and enforced by more or less specialized means and are subject to standard economic forces. This paper argues that the intermediary role played by the Catholic Church between God and Christians, a key difference from Protestantism, faces the standard trade-off of specialization benefits and agency costs. It applies this trade-off hypothesis to confession of sins to priests, an institution that epitomizes such intermediation, showing that this hypothesis fits cognitive, historical and econometric evidence better than a simpler rent-seeking story. In particular, Catholics who confess more often are observed to comply more with the moral code; however, no relationship is observed between mass attendance and moral compliance. The data also links the current decline in confession to the rise in education, which makes moral self-enforcement less costly, and to the productivity gap suffered by confession services, given its necessarily interpersonal nature.

The long-run and intergenerational education impacts of intergovernmental transfers

This paper provides regression discontinuity evidence on long-run and intergenerational education impacts of a temporary increase in federal transfers to local governments in Brazil. Revenues and expenditures of the communities benefiting from extra transfers temporarily increased by about 20% during the 4 year period from 1982 to the end of 1985. Schooling and literacy gains for directly exposed cohorts established in previous work that used the 1991 census are attenuated but persist in the 2000 and 2010 censuses. Children and adolescents of the next generation --born after the extra funding had disappeared-- show gains of about 0.08 standard deviation across the entire score distribution of two nationwide exams at the end of the 2000s. While we find no evidence of persistent improvements in school resources, we document discontinuities in education levels, literacy rates and incomes of test takers' parents that are consistent with intergenerational human capital spillovers.

Graduate labor mismatch in Central and Eastern Europe

[cat] Utilitzant l’enquesta REFLEX/HEGESCO, aquest article explora la probabilitat de desajustament entre educació i treball a l’Europa de l’Est i Central. Classifiquem els països en dos grups segons la transparència dels títols educatius al mercat de treball. Polònia, la República Txeca i Eslovènia formen el grup amb més transparència, i Hongria, Lituània i Estònia formen el grup amb més opacitat. Analitzem tres tipus de desajustaments: el vertical (infra‐, sobre‐educació), l’horitzontal (desajustament del camp d’estudi) i el desajust en habilitats. Focalitzem l’anàlisi en l’efecte dels camps d’estudi i les competències dels individus en el desajustament del mercat laboral en aquests països. Els resultats mostren importants diferències entre els dos grups de països estudiats.

Graduate labor mismatch in Central and Eastern Europe

[cat] Utilitzant l’enquesta REFLEX/HEGESCO, aquest article explora la probabilitat de desajustament entre educació i treball a l’Europa de l’Est i Central. Classifiquem els països en dos grups segons la transparència dels títols educatius al mercat de treball. Polònia, la República Txeca i Eslovènia formen el grup amb més transparència, i Hongria, Lituània i Estònia formen el grup amb més opacitat. Analitzem tres tipus de desajustaments: el vertical (infra‐, sobre‐educació), l’horitzontal (desajustament del camp d’estudi) i el desajust en habilitats. Focalitzem l’anàlisi en l’efecte dels camps d’estudi i les competències dels individus en el desajustament del mercat laboral en aquests països. Els resultats mostren importants diferències entre els dos grups de països estudiats.

The Arts (Music, Arts&Crafts and Drama) as a procedure for learning pre-school content: Grupo Edebé Project

There is nothing as amazing and fascinating as children learning process. Between 0 and 6 years old, a child brain develops in a waythat will never be repeated. At this age, children are eager to discover and they have great potential of active and affective life.Because of this, their learning capacity in this period is incalculable. (Jordan-Decarbo y Nelson, 2002; Wild, 1999).Pre-school Education is a unique and special stage, with self identity, which aims are:attending children as a whole,motivate them to learn,give them an affective and stable environment in which they can grow up and get to be balanced and confident people and inwhich they can relate to others, learn, enjoy and be happy.Arts, Music, Visual Arts and Drama (Gardner, 1994) can provide a framework of special, even unique, personal expression.With the aim of introducing qualitative improvements in the education of children and to ensure their emotional wellbeing, and havingnoticed that teachers had important needs and concerns as regards to diversity in their student groups, we developed a programbased on the detection of needs and concerns explained by professionals in education.This program of Grupo edebé, object of our research, is a multicultural, interdisciplinary and globalizing project the aims of which are:developing children's talent and personality,keeping their imagination and creativity and using these as a learning resource,promoting reasoning, favouring expression and communication,providing children with the tools to manage their emotions,and especially, introducing Arts as a procedure to increase learning.We wanted to start the research by studying the impact (Brice, 2003) that this last point had on the learning of five-year-old childrenschooled in multicultural environments.Therefore, the main goal of the research was the assessment of the implementation of a child education programme attending todiversity in a population of five-year-old children, specifically in the practice of procedures based on the use of Arts (music, arts andcrafts and theatre) as a vehicle or procedure for learning contents in Pre-school stage.Because children emotional welfare was a subject of our concern, and bearing in mind that the affective aspects are of vitalimportance for learning and child development (Parke and Gauvain, 2009), Grupo Edebé has also evaluated the starting, evolving andfinal impact in five-year-old children given that they finish Pre-school education at that age.

Are we living longer but less healthy? Trends in mortality and morbidity in Catalonia (Spain), 1994-2011

Evidence on trends in prevalence of disease and disability can clarify whether countries are experiencing a compression or expansion of morbidity. An expansion of morbidity as indicated by disease have appeared in Europe and other developed regions. It is likely that better treatment, preventive measures and increases in education levels have contributed to the declines in mortality and increments in life expectancy. This paper examines whether there has been an expansion of morbidity in Catalonia (Spain). It uses trends in mortality and morbidity from major causes of death and links of these with survival to provide estimates of life expectancy with and without diseases and functioning loss. We use a repeated cross-sectional health survey carried out in 1994 and 2011 for measures of morbidity; mortality information comes from the Spanish National Statistics Institute. Our findings show that at age 65 the percentage of life with disease increased from 52% to 70% for men, and from 56% to 72% for women; the expectation of life unable to function increased from 24% to 30% for men and 40% to 47% for women between 1994 and 2011. These changes were attributable to increases in the prevalences of diseases and moderate functional limitation. Overall, we find an expansion of morbidity along the period. Increasing survival among people with diseases can lead to a higher prevalence of diseases in the older population. Higher prevalence of health problems can lead to greater pressure on the health care system and a growing burden of disease for individuals.

Creative and Multidisciplinary Etching in the Digital Age

In our capacity as creative artists, researchers and fine arts professors, most part of our activity focuses on the relationships between people and creativity, technology, and resources, and, most frequently, what we aim to offer are new enjoyable and subversive ways of interacting with these three fields. As art teachers, we ask 'why and how' to teach dynamic bearing in mind that digital technology will undoubtedly impact on contemporary art practice.

Creativity in Collaborative Learning across the Life Span

Peer-reviewed