Talking about death: Implementing peer discussion as a coping mechanism to overcome fears about dissection,death, and dying

Many studies have reported on the perceptions of medical students toward dissection. It is important to understand the feelings and symptoms experienced during dissection so that they can be adequately handled. Prior to dissection, first year students are given lectures on aspects of dissection, death and dying, and death rituals in various cultures. Two separate questionnaires, one given during the first week of dissection and another given one month into the program were then completed anonymously by dissection groups. The questions were designed to be open‐ended, thereby encouraging group discussion amongst students. The questionnaires were used to determine the perception of students to dissection and to discover if these perceptions change during the dissection program. The first questionnaire revealed that students do experience fears and anxiety prior to and at the beginning of dissection; however, most of these fears dissipated by the time of the second questionnaire. One month into dissection students cited talking to peers as their main coping mechanism and fewer students mentioned emotional detachment from their cadaver as a coping mechanism, as was the case in the first questionnaire. Dissection was perceived as a positive experience by our student cohort and most students cited the main advantage of dissection as the ability to visualize organs in three dimensions. The comprehensive answers received from the students indicated that thorough discussion of feelings amongst peers occurred, introducing students to an important coping mechanism at an early stage of their learning. Anat Sci Educ. © 2013 American Association of Anatomists.     

Why Do Historical Beeswax Seals Become Brittle Over Time?

ABSTRACT

Mechanical properties of aged beeswax were studied by an indirect measurement, using hydrogenated beeswax as a model material. The adequacy of the model was evaluated by comparison of its chemical composition and thermal properties with those of samples of historical beeswax. It was found that the gradual decrease in content of unsaturated compounds in beeswax contributes significantly to changes of its mechanical properties. As a consequence, beeswax artefacts become increasingly prone to mechanical damage during natural ageing. Understanding the difference between mechanical properties of recent and historical beeswax is primarily important from the point of view of safe handling and storage of such artefacts. Besides, this knowledge could help conservation scientists, e. g. when preparing model samples for testing new conservation methods.     

Gross motor coordination in junior tennis players

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to determine the gross motor coordination performance levels of junior tennis players and (2) to analyse the effects of age and gender. Participants were junior male (n = 50) and female (n = 51) tennis players aged 6–14. Körperkoordinationstest für Kinder (KTK) was used to assess the gross motor coordination of the participants. Results revealed that none of the participants performed lower than normal level in motor coordination. Besides, 40.6% of the participants performed above normal level. No gender differences were found on all subtests of KTK and also on total motor quotient. Although older players performed better on each test than their younger counterparts for the raw scores, no significant age effect was observed on motor quotient scores among different age groups.     

Teachers’ attitudes towards tracking: testing the socialization hypothesis

The paper examines how teachers’ attitudes towards tracking (separating pupils into groups with different curricula on the basis of their abilities and results) differ among various generations of teachers. Fundamental and quick changes in the educational system occurred in the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 as a unified educational system moved to a system strongly accenting tracking practices. We use this ‘policy discontinuity’ to validate teacher socialization theory and test three alternative socialization hypotheses based on different key periods in teachers’ development: the pupil experience hypothesis, the pedagogical preparation hypothesis and the pedagogical experience hypothesis. We work with a data-set from 2009 covering 1002 Czech teachers. The mean tests and the logistic regression analysis support the socialization theory, however only the pedagogical experience hypothesis was found to be most influential.     

Enhancing the MeSH thesaurus to retrieve French online health resources in a quality-controlled gateway

The amount of health information available on the Internet is considerable. In this context, several health gateways have been developed. Among them, CISMeF (Catalogue and Index of Health Resources in French) was designed to catalogue and index health resources in French. The goal of this article is to describe the various enhancements to the MeSH thesaurus developed by the CISMeF team to adapt this terminology to the broader field of health Internet resources instead of scientific articles for the medline bibliographic database. CISMeF uses two standard tools for organizing information: the MeSH thesaurus and several metadata element sets, in particular the Dublin Core metadata format. The heterogeneity of Internet health resources led the CISMeF team to enhance the MeSH thesaurus with the introduction of two new concepts, respectively, resource types and metaterms. CISMeF resource types are a generalization of the publication types of medline. A resource type describes the nature of the resource and MeSH keyword/qualifier pairs describe the subject of the resource. A metaterm is generally a medical specialty or a biological science, which has semantic links with one or more MeSH keywords, qualifiers and resource types. The CISMeF terminology is exploited for several tasks: resource indexing performed manually, resource categorization performed automatically, visualization and navigation through the concept hierarchies and information retrieval using the Doc'CISMeF search engine. The CISMeF health gateway uses several MeSH thesaurus enhancements to optimize information retrieval, hierarchy navigation and automatic indexing.     

The translation of preschoolers’ physical activity guidelines into a daily step count target

This study aimed at translating the physical activity (PA) guideline (180 min of total PA per day) into a step count target in preschoolers. 535 Flemish preschoolers (mean age: 4.41 ± 0.58) wore an ActiGraph accelerometer (GT1M, GT3X and GT3X+) – with activated step count function – for four consecutive days. The step count target was calculated from the accelerometer output using a regression equation, applying four different cut-points for light-to-vigorous PA: Pate, Evenson, Reilly, and Van Cauwenberghe. The present analysis showed that 180 min of total PA per day is equivalent to the following step count targets: 5,274 steps/day using the Pate cut-point, 4,653 steps/day using the Evenson cut-point, 11,379 steps/day using the Reilly cut-point and 13,326 steps/day using the Van Cauwenberghe cut-point. Future studies should focus on achieving consensus on which cut-points to use in preschoolers before a definite step count target in preschoolers can be proposed. Until then, we propose to use a provisional step count target of 11,500 steps/day as this step count target is attainable, realistic and helpful in promoting preschoolers’ PA.     

Examination of birthplace and birthdate in World Junior ice hockey players

The present study investigated birthdate (known as the Relative Age Effect; RAE) and birthplace as determinants of expertise in an international sample of elite ice hockey players. The sample included 566 World Junior (WJR) ice hockey players from four countries (Canada, n = 153; USA, n = 136; Sweden, n = 140; Finland, n = 137). Participants competed in the International Ice Hockey Federation World U20 Championship between 2001 and 2009. A series of Poisson regression models were conducted to examine the consistency of direct then interactive relationships between both birthdate and birthplace and WJR membership across the four countries (Canada, USA, Sweden, and Finland). Findings revealed a consistent RAE across the four countries for World Junior participation from 2000 to 2009. WJR players from the four countries were also less likely to be from major cities. In addition, there was no evidence in any of the four countries of an interaction between RAE and birthplace. Future research should explore the contextual and cultural factors that influence elite athlete development in smaller towns, cities and communities.