Citizenship education in Switzerland before, during and after the First World War

Citizenship education was intensively discussed during the 1910s. Patriotic ideals and the love of the fatherland were described with diligence in teachers' journals. After the outbreak of the World War I, Swiss teachers reacted immediately to the new circumstances and published lessons in their weekly teacher journals for every day of school for different grade levels. These lessons comprised current events and civic education as well as didactical instructions for the teacher. In pupils' essays, citizens are often depicted as religious members of society who are industrious and hardworking, whereas in the journals, religious aspects are related to peace but not to citizenship education. As a multilingual and neutral country, Switzerland struggled with major domestic problems due to the cultural conflict between the French- and the German-speaking regions, especially during wartime. However, teachers promoted unity from the beginning. Therefore, changes and continuities during this decade concerning citizenship education are of crucial research interest. The practical sections of teachers' journals, including lessons and didactical instructions, and pupils' essays provide insight into what happened in the classrooms. Which forms of national identity and citizenship were taught in classrooms before, during and shortly after WW1 in public schools in Switzerland? How did pupils describe the current issues of war and citizenship?

Implementing evidence-based patient and family education on oral anticoagulation therapy: a community-based participatory project.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: This study aimed at developing and implementing evidence-based patient and family education on oral anticoagulation therapy. BACKGROUND: The number of persons with chronic diseases who live at home is increasing. They have to manage multiple diseases and complex treatments. One such treatment is oral anticoagulation therapy, a high risk variable dose medication. Adherence to oral anticoagulation therapy is jeopardised by limited information about the medications, their risk and complications, the impact of individual daily routine and the limited inclusion of family members in education. Hence, improved and tailored education is essential for patients and families to manage oral anticoagulation therapy at home. DESIGN AND METHODS: A community-based participatory research design combined with the Precede-Proceed model was used including a systematic literature review, posteducation analysis, an online nurse survey, a documentation analysis and patient/family interviews. The study was conducted between April 2010-December 2012 at a department of general internal medicine in a teaching hospital in Switzerland. Participants were the department's nursing and medical professionals including the patients and their families. RESULTS: The evidence-based patient and family education on oral anticoagulation therapy emerged comprising a learning assessment, teaching units, clarification of responsibilities of nurse professionals and documentation guidelines. CONCLUSION AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE: The inclusion of the whole department has contributed to the development and implementation of this evidence-based patient family education on oral anticoagulation therapy, which encompasses local characteristics and patient preferences. This education is now being used throughout the department.

Education and Training in Forensic Intelligence: a New Challenge

From recent calls for positioning forensic scientists within the criminal justice system, but also policing and intelligence missions, this paper emphasizes the need for the development of educational and training programs in the area of forensic intelligence, It is argued that an imbalance exists between perceived and actual understanding of forensic intelligence by police and forensic science managers, and that this imbalance can only be overcome through education. The challenge for forensic intelligence education and training is therefore to devise programs that increase forensic intelligence awareness, firstly for managers to help prevent poor decisions on how to develop information processing. Two recent European courses are presented as examples of education offerings, along with lessons learned and suggested paths forward. It is concluded that the new focus on forensic intelligence could restore a pro-active approach to forensic science, better quantify its efficiency and let it get more involved in investigative and managerial decisions. A new educational challenge is opened to forensic science university programs around the world: to refocus criminal trace analysis on a more holistic security problem solving approach.

Transatlantic Influence in the Shaping of Business Education: The Origins of IMD, 1946-1990

The history of the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), one of the most prestigious business schools in the world, highlights the role of multinationals in establishing business education in Europe and the problem of legitimacy. The creation of IMD's predecessors CEI and IMEDE by Alcan and Nestlé also illuminates the role of Harvard Business School in their development and the reciprocal influences of American and European management education after World War II.

Language Ability and Motivation among Foreigners in Survey Responding

With increasing migration and linguistic diversification in many countries, survey researchers and methodologists should consider whether data provided by individuals with variable levels of command of the survey language are of the same quality. This paper examines the question of whether answers from resident foreign respondents who do not master available survey languages may suffer from problems of comprehension of survey items, especially items that are more complicated in terms of content and/or form. In addition, it addresses the extent to which motivation may affect the response quality of resident foreigners. We analyzed data from two large-scale surveys conducted in Switzerland, a country with three national languages and a burgeoning foreign population, employing a set of dependent measures of response quality, including don't know responses, extreme responding, mid-5 responding, recency effects, and straight-lining. Results show overall poorer response quality among foreigners, and indicate that both reduced language mastery and motivation among foreigners are relevant factors. This is especially true for foreign groups from countries that do not share a common language with those spoken in Switzerland. A general conclusion is that the more distant respondents are culturally and linguistically from the majority mainstream within a country, the more their data may be negatively affected. We found that more complex types of questions do generally lead to poorer response quality, but to a much lesser extent than respondent characteristics, such as nationality, command of the survey language, level of education, and age.

Social justice in education : how the function of selection in educational institutions predicts support for (non)egalitarian assessment practices

Educational institutions are considered a keystone for the establishment of a meritocratic society. They supposedly serve two functions: an educational function that promotes learning for all, and a selection function that sorts individuals into different programs, and ultimately social positions, based on individual merit. We study how the function of selection relates to support for assessment practices known to harm vs. benefit lower status students, through the perceived justice principles underlying these practices. We study two assessment practices: normative assessment-focused on ranking and social comparison, known to hinder the success of lower status students-and formative assessment-focused on learning and improvement, known to benefit lower status students. Normative assessment is usually perceived as relying on an equity principle, with rewards being allocated based on merit and should thus appear as positively associated with the function of selection. Formative assessment is usually perceived as relying on corrective justice that aims to ensure equality of outcomes by considering students' needs, which makes it less suitable for the function of selection. A questionnaire measuring these constructs was administered to university students. Results showed that believing that education is intended to select the best students positively predicts support for normative assessment, through increased perception of its reliance on equity, and negatively predicts support for formative assessment, through reduced perception of its ability to establish corrective justice. This study suggests that the belief in the function of selection as inherent to educational institutions can contribute to the reproduction of social inequalities by preventing change from assessment practices known to disadvantage lowerstatus student, namely normative assessment, to more favorable practices, namely formative assessment, and by promoting matching beliefs in justice principles.

Directional dominance on stature and cognition in diverse human populations.

Homozygosity has long been associated with rare, often devastating, Mendelian disorders, and Darwin was one of the first to recognize that inbreeding reduces evolutionary fitness. However, the effect of the more distant parental relatedness that is common in modern human populations is less well understood. Genomic data now allow us to investigate the effects of homozygosity on traits of public health importance by observing contiguous homozygous segments (runs of homozygosity), which are inferred to be homozygous along their complete length. Given the low levels of genome-wide homozygosity prevalent in most human populations, information is required on very large numbers of people to provide sufficient power. Here we use runs of homozygosity to study 16 health-related quantitative traits in 354,224 individuals from 102 cohorts, and find statistically significant associations between summed runs of homozygosity and four complex traits: height, forced expiratory lung volume in one second, general cognitive ability and educational attainment (P < 1 × 10(-300), 2.1 × 10(-6), 2.5 × 10(-10) and 1.8 × 10(-10), respectively). In each case, increased homozygosity was associated with decreased trait value, equivalent to the offspring of first cousins being 1.2 cm shorter and having 10 months' less education. Similar effect sizes were found across four continental groups and populations with different degrees of genome-wide homozygosity, providing evidence that homozygosity, rather than confounding, directly contributes to phenotypic variance. Contrary to earlier reports in substantially smaller samples, no evidence was seen of an influence of genome-wide homozygosity on blood pressure and low density lipoprotein cholesterol, or ten other cardio-metabolic traits. Since directional dominance is predicted for traits under directional evolutionary selection, this study provides evidence that increased stature and cognitive function have been positively selected in human evolution, whereas many important risk factors for late-onset complex diseases may not have been.

Dietary intake according to gender and education : a twenty-year trend in a Swiss adult population

We assessed trends in dietary intake according to gender and education using repeated cross-sectional, population-based surveys conducted between 1993 and 2012 in Geneva, Switzerland (17,263 participants, 52.0 ± 10.6 years, 48% male). In 1993-1999, higher educated men had higher monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA), carotene and vitamin D intakes than lower educated men, and the differences decreased in 2006-2012. In 1993-1999, higher educated women had higher fiber, iron, carotene, vitamin D and alcohol intakes than lower educated women, and the differences decreased in 2006-2012. Total energy, polyunsaturated fatty acids, retinol and alcohol intakes decreased, while mono/disaccharides, MUFA and carotene intake increased in both genders. Lower educated men had stronger decreases in saturated fatty acid (SFA) and calcium intakes than higher educated men: multivariate-adjusted slope and 95% confidence interval -0.11 (-0.15; -0.06) vs. -0.03 (-0.08; 0.02) g/day/year for SFA and -5.2 (-7.8; -2.7) vs. -1.03 (-3.8; 1.8) mg/day/year for calcium, p for interaction <0.05. Higher educated women had a greater decrease in iron intake than lower educated women: -0.03 (-0.04; -0.02) vs. -0.01 (-0.02; 0.00) mg/day/year, p for interaction = 0.002. We conclude that, in Switzerland, dietary intake evolved similarly between 1993 and 2012 in both educational groups. Educational differences present in 1993 persisted in 2012.

Continuing Medical Education Self-Assessment Questions Vol. 50, No. 2 - April 2014. Focal vibration in neurorehabilitation.

During the last decade, many studies have been carried out to understand the effects of focal vibratory stimuli at various levels of the central nervous system and to study pathophysiological mechanisms of neurological disorders as well as the therapeutic effects of focal vibration in neurorehabilitation. This review aimed to describe the effects of focal vibratory stimuli in neurorehabilitation including the neurological diseases or disorders like stroke, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's' disease and dystonia. In conclusion, focal vibration stimulation is well tolerated, effective and easy to use, and it could be used to reduce spasticity, to promote motor activity and motor learning within a functional activity, even in gait training, independent from etiology of neurological pathology. Further studies are needed in the future well- designed trials with bigger sample size to determine the most effective frequency, amplitude and duration of vibration application in the neurorehabilitation.

Continuing Medical Education Self-Assessment Questions Vol. 50, No. 1 - January 2014. Actual evidence in the medical approach to adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis

Idiopathic scoliosis (IS) is a three-dimensional deformity of the spine and trunk. The most common form involve ado- lescents (AIS). The prevalence for AIS is 2-3% of the population, with 1 out of 6 patients requiring treatment of which 25% progress to surgery. Physical and rehabilitation medicine (PRM) plays a primary role in the so-called conservative treatment of adolescents with AIS, since all the therapeutic tools used (exercises and braces) fall into the PRM domain. According to a Cochrane systematic review there is evidence in favor of bracing, even if it is of low quality. Another shows that there is evidence in favor of exercises as an adjunctive treatment, but of low quality. Three meta-analysis have been published on bracing: one shows that bracing does not reduce surgery rates, but studies with bracing plus exercises were not included and had the highest effectiveness; another shows that full time is better than part-time bracing; the last focuses on observational studies following the SRS criteria and shows that not all full time rigid bracing are the same: some have the highest effectiveness, others have less than elastic and nighttime bracing. Two very important RCTs failed in recruitment, showing that in the field of bracing for scoliosis RCTs are not accepted by the patients. Consensuses by the international Society on Scoliosis Orthopedic and Rehabilitation Treatment (SOSORT) show that there is no agree- ment among experts either on the best braces or on their biomechanical action, and that compliance is a matter of clinical more than patients' behavior (there is strong agreement on the management criteria to achieve best results with bracing). A systematic review of all the existing studies shows effectiveness of exercises, and that auto-correction is the main goal of exercises. A systematic review shows that there are no studies on manual treatment. Research on conservative treat- ment of AIS has continuously decreased since the 1980s, but this trend changed only recently. The SOSORT Guidelines offers the actual standard of conservative care.