Rethinking Actor Training for the iPhone Generation

Increased technology use by college-age students (millennials) has created problems for the acting classroom. Constantin Stanislavski's technique is still the standard, but students arrive to campus unready or unable to engage in his methods or with each other, so new approaches are required. Classroom exercises are provided, many inspired by current social-science research.     

Sustainable Innovations: Bringing Digital Media and Emerging Technologies to the Classroom

Because traditional schools struggle to effectively understand, implement, and sustain digital learning initiatives, innovating with digital media in classrooms is a difficult endeavor. Practitioners need examples to better understand conditions necessary to move forward with digital media and learning (DML) in schools. This article provides examples and supports research proposing that context and culture matter when innovating in schools. Three classroom cases using Web 2.0, app development, and game design are discussed, offering educators a pathway to consider similar pedagogical and participatory approaches to foster learning. Classroom contexts, teachers' perspectives, district supports, technical requirements, and scalability are highlighted. The examples suggest innovative DML initiatives can flourish within schools when participants are mindful of context and when a participatory culture is supported (Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison, & Weigel, 2006).     

The influence of sport goggles on visual target detection in female intercollegiate athletes

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of sport goggles on visual target detection in female intercollegiate athletes. Participants were randomly divided into three groups that varied in goggle use (G) or no goggle use (NG) over a total of three 1-min trials during a visual target detection task. The NG-NG-NG group did not wear goggles for any of the trials, whereas the NG-G-NG group wore goggles for the second trial only, and the G-NG-G group wore goggles for the first and third trials. The task consisted of illuminated targets arranged in five concentric rings from central to peripheral visual angles. The effects of sport goggles on response time to detect targets were most evident in the peripheral rings. Those who did not wear sport goggles showed improved performance from the first to second trials. This improvement was impaired, however, in those who wore sport goggles. Moreover, there was a reversal of the performance improvements achieved without goggles in those who wore goggles on the third trial. Together, these findings suggest the sport goggles not only impaired the expected initial performance but also impaired visual target detection after performance improvements were seen. These findings suggest sport goggles may impair detection of peripheral visual stimuli in athletes.     

Prospective Elementary Teachers’ Analysis of Children’s Science Talk in an Undergraduate Physics Course

We investigated how prospective teachers used physics content knowledge when analyzing the talk of elementary children during special activities in an undergraduate physics content course designed for prospective teachers. We found that prospective teachers used content knowledge to reflect on their own learning and to identify students’ science ideas and restate these ideas in scientific terms. Based on this research, we inferred that analyzing children’s ideas through videos provides a meaningful context for applying conceptual physics knowledge in physics courses. Activities that are embedded within a disciplinary curriculum, such as those studied here, may help prospective teachers learn to use disciplinary knowledge in exactly the type of activity in which their content knowledge will be most useful: listening to and interpreting children’s science ideas.     

Searching ClinicalTrials.gov and the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform to inform systematic reviews: what are the optimal search approaches?

Background:

Since 2005, International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) member journals have required that clinical trials be registered in publicly available trials registers before they are considered for publication.

Objectives:

The research explores whether it is adequate, when searching to inform systematic reviews, to search for relevant clinical trials using only public trials registers and to identify the optimal search approaches in trials registers.

Methods:

A search was conducted in ClinicalTrials.gov and the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) for research studies that had been included in eight systematic reviews. Four search approaches (highly sensitive, sensitive, precise, and highly precise) were performed using the basic and advanced interfaces in both resources.

Results:

On average, 84% of studies were not listed in either resource. The largest number of included studies was retrieved in ClinicalTrials.gov and ICTRP when a sensitive search approach was used in the basic interface. The use of the advanced interface maintained or improved sensitivity in 16 of 19 strategies for Clinicaltrials.gov and 8 of 18 for ICTRP. No single search approach was sensitive enough to identify all studies included in the 6 reviews.

Conclusions:

Trials registers cannot yet be relied upon as the sole means to locate trials for systematic reviews. Trials registers lag behind the major bibliographic databases in terms of their search interfaces.

Implications:

For systematic reviews, trials registers and major bibliographic databases should be searched. Trials registers should be searched using sensitive approaches, and both the registers consulted in this study should be searched.Clinical trials registers such as ClinicalTrials.gov and portals to trials registers such as the World Health Organization (WHO) International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) are increasingly used to identify ongoing or completed clinical trials. These resources offer important information on the methods and progress of trials likely to be of interest to a range of users, including researchers, clinicians, and patients. The extent to which these resources can be relied upon as a sole source of trials for inclusion in systematic reviews, including Cochrane systematic reviews (CSRs), is the subject of the research study reported here. This study also investigates the most efficient ways that librarians, information professionals, and other searchers can search these resources. Search efficiency was investigated by evaluating the overlap and unique yield of searches in the two resources and by testing four search approaches. The tested search approaches ranged from the very precise (single specific condition search term combined with a single specific intervention search term) to the very sensitive (at least two interventions terms).     

Does media affect learning: where are we now?

TechTrends - A careful review of the arguments and counter arguments presented by Clark (1983; 1994) and Kozma (1991; 1994), responses published in the past 20 years (Jonassen, Campbell &...     

Dissecting the role of sessional anatomy teachers: A systematic literature review

Worldwide there is a growing reliance on sessional teachers in universities. This has impacted all disciplines in higher education including medical anatomy programs. The objective of this review was to define the role and support needs of sessional anatomy teachers by reporting on the (1) qualifications, (2) teaching role, (3) training, and (4) performance management of this group of educators. A systematic literature search was conducted on the 27 July 2017 in Scopus, Web of Science, and several databases on the Ovid, ProQuest and EBSCOhost platforms. The search retrieved 5,658 articles, with 39 deemed eligible for inclusion. The qualifications and educational distance between sessional anatomy teachers and their students varied widely. Reports of cross‐level, near‐peer and reciprocal‐peer teaching were identified, with most institutes utilizing recent medical graduates or medical students as sessional teachers. Sessional anatomy teachers were engaged in the full spectrum of teaching‐related duties from assisting students with cadaveric dissection, to marking student assessments and developing course materials. Fourteen institutes reported that training was provided to sessional anatomy teachers, but the specific content, objectives, methods and effectiveness of the training programs were rarely defined. Evaluations of sessional anatomy teacher performance primarily relied on subjective feedback measures such as student surveys (n = 18) or teacher self‐assessment (n = 3). The results of this systematic review highlight the need for rigorous explorations of the use of sessional anatomy teachers in medical education, and the development of evidence‐based policies and training programs that regulate and support the use of sessional teachers in higher education. Anat Sci Educ 11: 410–426. © 2017 American Association of Anatomists.