DEVELOPING AND USING INTERDISCIPLINARY CASE STUDIES IN TEACHING GERIATRICS TO PRACTICING HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS

Continuing education programs for health care professionals who practice in geriatrics are an important part of improving the health care provided to older adults. Programs utilizing active forms of learning that mimic the clinical environment are more successful at changing the behavior of health care professionals than traditional didactic styles of teaching. Problem-based learning methods allow learners to identify their own areas of strength and weakness and to work toward improvement in a manner best suited to their needs. This article describes an interdisciplinary team of educator-clinicians in geriatrics who developed clinical case studies embodying these approaches as one method of improving the learning process for adult health care providers. An actual sample case study is presented as an illustration of the principles embodied in this process. Lessons learned from the development and use of these case studies are summarized in the context of improving the quality of continuing education programs for health care professionals in geriatric practice.     

STAFF AND ELDERLY KNOWLEDGE AND ATTITUDES TOWARD ELDERLY SEXUALITY

This study compared staff and elderly knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to sexual expression by elderly persons in a long‐term care setting. Volunteers (N = 194) responded agree or disagree to 159 items. Significant differences were observed between the staff and elderly responses on 36 items. Areas of greatest differences involved knowledge and attitudes about consensual sex and sexual abuse, issues related to family attitudes toward remarriage and sexual expression, and age‐related changes and health problems related to sexuality. Items related to masturbation received the greatest percentage of no response. The staff had significantly higher total scores as compared to the elderly reflecting more knowledge, positive attitudes, and support for more proactive responses toward elderly sexuality. Findings have major implications for staff training in long‐term care settings.     

Orthographic learning in Spanish children

In order to read fluently, children have to form orthographic representations. Despite numerous investigations, there is no clear answer to the question of the number of times they need to read a word to form an orthographic representation. We used length effect on reading times as a measure, because there are large differences between long and short words for unknown words, differences that disappear when reading frequent words. Two lists of new words (half short and half long) were presented to 102 second‐grade to sixth‐grade Spanish children, to be read aloud six times. One of the lists was presented as part of a story and the other in isolation. Comparison of the length effect at the first and sixth exposure showed large differences between short and long words in the first presentation and small differences at the sixth presentation, indicating that Spanish children develop representations of words after just a few repetitions.