Learning goals

BACKGROUND: Implementation of evidence-based interventions to reduce depression among uninsured Latinx patients who are at high risk of depression are rare. OBJECTIVES: Our goal was to evaluate Strong Minds, a language and culturally tailored, evidence-based intervention adapted from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for mild-moderate depression and anxiety, delivered by community health workers (CHWs) in Spanish to uninsured Latinx immigrants. METHODS: As part of the pilot, 35 participants, recruited from a free community primary care clinic, completed Strong Minds...

Our theory of positively reinforced free-operant behavior (Perez & Dickinson, 2020) assumes that responding is controlled by two systems. One system is sensitive to the correlation between response and reinforcement rates and controls goal-directed behavior, whereas a habitual system learns by reward prediction error. We present an extension of this theory to the aversive domain that explains why free-operant avoidance responding increases with both the experienced rate of negative reinforcement and the difference between this rate and that programmed by the avoidance schedule...

BACKGROUND: It has been proposed that tics and premonitory urges in primary tic disorders (PTD), like Tourette syndrome, are a manifestation of sensorimotor noise. However, patients with tics show no obvious movement imprecision in everyday life. One reason could be that patients have strategies to compensate for noise that disrupts performance (ie, noise that is task-relevant). OBJECTIVES: Our goal was to unmask effects of elevated sensorimotor noise on the variability of voluntary movements in patients with PTD...

As educators at a small university, we are constantly trying to find new and innovative ways of getting high school students interested in a degree in Biology at our school. Thus, we designed an outreach program to draw interested high school students to our campus and participate in a day-long outbreak investigation. The investigation is composed of six distinct activities, each taking between 15 min and 1 h of active time. These activities can be used in conjunction or individually to engage students with basic epidemiology and microbiology...

With a primary objective to engage students in the process of science online, we transformed a long-standing laboratory course for first-year science students into a more accessible, immersive experience of current biological research using a narrow and focused set of primary literature and the Consider, Read, Elucidate a hypothesis, Analyze and interpret data, Think of the next Experiment (CREATE) pedagogy. The efficacy of the CREATE approach has been demonstrated in a diversity of higher education settings and courses...

BACKGROUND: Food-based strategies have a high potential of improving the diet quality and reducing the prevalence of nutrient deficiencies in agriculture-dependent communities. Their design is however complex with trade-offs that are rarely systematically presented to allow replication and efficient contextualization. OBJECTIVE: The systematic design of a food-based strategy to improve the dietary diversity of children in rural farming communities in Uganda. METHODS: The intervention mapping protocol was used to provide a systematic approach to developing theory-based and evidence-based intervention methods and strategy...

Big data is a computing term used to refer to large and complex data sets, typically consisting of terabytes or more of diverse data that is produced rapidly. The analysis of such complex data sets requires advanced analysis techniques with the capacity to identify patterns and abstract meanings from the vast data. The field of data science combines computer science with mathematics/statistics and leverages artificial intelligence, in particular machine learning, to analyze big data. This field holds great promise for behavior analysis, where both clinical and research studies produce large volumes of diverse data at a rapid pace (i...

INTRODUCTION: Over the past years, the evaluation and accountability of universities and higher education institutions in regard to the realization of their goals and the implementation of the expected performance have turned into a major issue, and those who benefit from or are relevant to the higher education system have placed a special emphasis on the use of evaluation mechanisms. The current study aimed to determine the quality of the medical curriculum approved in 2017 based on the Kano model...

The automatic speech identification in Arabic tweets has generated substantial attention among academics in the fields of text mining and natural language processing (NLP). The quantity of studies done on this subject has experienced significant growth. This study aims to provide an overview of this field by conducting a systematic review of literature that focuses on automatic hate speech identification, particularly in the Arabic language. The goal is to examine the research trends in Arabic hate speech identification and offer guidance to researchers by highlighting the most significant studies published between 2018 and 2023...

Sugar in the blood can harm individuals and their vital organs, potentially leading to blindness, renal illness, as well as kidney and heart diseases. Globally, diabetic patients face an average annual mortality rate of 38%. This study employs Chi-square, mutual information, and sequential feature selection (SFS) to choose features for training multiple classifiers. These classifiers include an artificial neural network (ANN), a random forest (RF), a gradient boosting (GB) algorithm, Tab-Net, and a support vector machine (SVM)...

Fidelity between teaching activities and assessment methods is an important goal of knowledge and performance evaluations in medical education. Ideally, assessment methods provide evidence of learning that reflects the types of knowledge described in the learning objectives of the course. The most reliable assessments involve the same or similar tasks as those used during the instructional components of the course. Our preclinical human anatomy course includes, in addition to traditional lecture and cadaver-based laboratory learning activities, a series of applied human anatomy learning activities intended to emphasize human anatomy as it is encountered in living human individuals...

BACKGROUND: This paper investigates the perceptions of medical interns regarding the usefulness of non-mother tongue communication skills taught during the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. In 2003, the university decided to incorporate Afrikaans and IsiXhosa communication skills into the new MBChB curriculum in order to meet the Faculty of Health Sciences goals to promote quality and equity in healthcare, and to prepare graduating health practitioners for multilingual communities where they would be serving...

BACKGROUND: This study evaluates the feasibility of a nine-month advanced quality-improvement program aimed at enhancing the quality of care provided by primary care physical therapists in the Netherlands. The evaluation is based on routinely collected health outcomes of patients with nonspecific low back pain, assessing three feasibility domains: (1) appropriateness, feasibility, and acceptability for quality-improvement purposes; (2) impact on clinical performance; and (3) impact on learning and behavioral change...

INTRODUCTION: This study investigated the impact of flipped learning versus traditional instruction on medical students' academic performance and self-efficacy in a haematology course, and examined gender differences. Flipped learning is an instructional approach where students review pre-recorded lecture content at home, and active learning occurs in the classroom. Self-efficacy refers to students' beliefs in their ability to succeed and accomplish learning goals. METHODS: A quasi-experimental study was conducted with 86 third-year Saudi medical students (46 males, 40 females) in a 10-week haematology course...

Goal-directed manipulation of internal representations is a key element of human flexible behaviour, while consciousness is commonly associated with higher-order cognition and human flexibility. Current perspectives have only partially linked these processes, thus preventing a clear understanding of how they jointly generate flexible cognition and behaviour. Moreover, these limitations prevent an effective exploitation of this knowledge for technological scopes. We propose a new theoretical perspective that extends our 'three-component theory of flexible cognition' toward higher-order cognition and consciousness, based on the systematic integration of key concepts from Cognitive Neuroscience and AI/Robotics...

BACKGROUND: The introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Australia in 2013 promised significant improvements in the lives of adults with intellectual disabilities. Although the scheme enables support, there are challenges associated with establishing eligibility and administering funds. This scoping review explored perceived barriers and enablers to effectively utilising the NDIS for adults with intellectual disabilities and their families. METHOD: A scoping review of the empirical literature on the NDIS and intellectual disabilities included nine studies in this review...

BACKGROUND: Feedback processes are crucial for learning, guiding improvement, and enhancing performance. In workplace-based learning settings, diverse teaching and assessment activities are advocated to be designed and implemented, generating feedback that students use, with proper guidance, to close the gap between current and desired performance levels. Since productive feedback processes rely on observed information regarding a student's performance, it is imperative to establish structured feedback activities within undergraduate workplace-based learning settings...

BACKGROUND: The learning curve in minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is lengthened compared to open surgery. It has been reported that structured feedback and training in teams of two trainees improves MIS training and MIS performance. Annotation of surgical images and videos may prove beneficial for surgical training. This study investigated whether structured feedback and video debriefing, including annotation of critical view of safety (CVS), have beneficial learning effects in a predefined, multi-modal MIS training curriculum in teams of two trainees...

OBJECTIVES: Indigenous public health theory and the voices of Canadian Indigenous communities remain under-represented in the literature despite the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action, and the perspectives of Inuit are further under-represented in this literature. The goal of this paper is to explore the perspectives of Iqalungmiut (people of Iqaluit), frontline staff, and decision-makers on the management of the COVID-19 outbreak in Iqaluit in April to June 2021 and to identify lessons learned and contributions to public health policy and practice specific to Inuit populations in Canada...

Platelet products are both expensive and have very short shelf lives. As usage rates for platelets are highly variable, the effective management of platelet demand and supply is very important yet challenging. The primary goal of this paper is to present an efficient forecasting model for platelet demand at Canadian Blood Services (CBS). To accomplish this goal, five different demand forecasting methods, ARIMA (Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average), Prophet, lasso regression (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator), random forest, and LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) networks are utilized and evaluated via a rolling window method...