An Experimental Evaluation of a Direct Instruction Programme (Corrective Reading) with Remedial Readers in a Comprehensive School

A Direct Instruction approach to remedial reading (Corrective Reading Programme) was evaluated in an urban Comprehensive school over two school years. First year remedial readers were randomly allocated to one experimental and two control groups. Groups were matched for sex. A similar procedure was followed in the second study carried out with the following group of first year remedial readers.

In the first three months of the first study all groups were monitored while receiving the school's usual remedial reading programme. They made comparable gains during this baseline period. Covariance analysis indicated that in the first study the experimental group and control group I (a ‘novelty’ programme) made significantly greater gains, in accuracy and comprehension, than control group 2 (the usual remedial reading programme). Findings from the second study confirmed the suggestion that gains for the experimental group in the first study were partly due to ‘novelty’ effects. Both experimental groups developed better strategies for tackling oral reading tasks (as assessed by miscue analysis) than control groups, however.     

Information needs of specialist healthcare professionals: a preliminary study based on the West of Scotland Colorectal Cancer Managed Clinical Network

OBJECTIVES: Funded by Research in the Workplace Award (RIWA) 2001, the study investigated the information needs and use of NHS library services by members of the West of Scotland Colorectal Cancer Managed Clinical Network (MCN), a single subject, cross boundary, multi-professional organization. METHOD: A postal questionnaire sent out in October 2002 was returned by 100 members and follow-up interviews were held in March 2003 with 11 of the respondents. The questions related to access to resources, library services such as literature searches, current awareness and training. They also explored the use of electronic resources and the Internet. RESULTS: Respondents were mainly hospital doctors and a few nurses from across five health boards. Most had access to a library, although not all made use of it, possibly an indication of the need for improved communications between librarians and health-care staff. Generally, research and professional development were reported as reasons for needing cancer information, but on further investigation the motivation to conduct literature searches was more related to patient care. Examples included treatment of unusual cases, locating information for patients and identifying guidelines. There are indications of unmet needs for local contact information and evaluated patient information. CONCLUSION: Development of a cancer portal within the NHS Scotland e-Library available from May 2004 based on the Managed Knowledge Network (MKN) concept is attempting to address many of the issues raised in the survey, including inequities of access to services and signposting to a variety of types of information.     

Comparison of heart rate monitoring with indirect calorimetry for energy expenditure evaluation

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to compare established methods with newly-developed methods for estimating the total energy expenditure (TEE).MethodsThe study subjects comprised 46 individuals, including 16 middle-aged men (mean age 51.4 years), 14 middle-aged women (mean age 49.9 years) and 16 young women (mean age 19.1 years). The TEE was estimated from 24-h heart rate (HR) data using newly-developed software (MoveSense HRAnalyzer 2011a, RC1, Suunto Oy, Vantaa, Finland), and was compared against the TEE determined using doubly labeled water (DLW). Agreement between the two methods was analyzed using Bland and Altman plots.ResultsThe HR method yielded similar TEE values as the DLW method at the group level, with an average of 8.6 kcal/day in the difference in the mean, but with large individual variations. Forty-four (96%) out of 46 subjects fell within ±2SD of the mean difference in TEE comparisons, and there was no tendency towards under- or over-estimation.ConclusionOur results indicate that the current software using HR analysis for the estimation of daily TEE needs further development for use with free-living individuals.     

Child protection and justice systems processing of serious child abuse and neglect cases

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to examine the trajectory of cases through four systems: child protection, law enforcement, the dependency courts, and the criminal courts. METHOD: This study focused on a county selected from a 41-county telephone survey conducted for the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3). For this analysis prospective samples were drawn from law enforcement (n=225) and the county child protection (CPS) agency (n=225) and followed through in-depth case tracking across all agencies and through both the dependency and criminal court systems. RESULTS: The percentage of CPS cases opened in dependency court was similar to prior studies (29%), but the acceptance and prosecution rates were much higher--92% of the cases referred from CPS, including many cases of physical abuse. Compared to referrals from CPS to law enforcement (93%), few cases were referred from law enforcement to CPS (17%). Anecdotally, case referral patterns appeared to be influenced by communication patterns and mutual positive regard, regardless of the collaborative protocols in place. One of the most instructive findings was the degree of difficulty in tracking cases across organizations and the types of obstacles that impeded success. Disorganization was not an issue, rather internal structures set up to facilitate intra-organizational processing were the same structures that actually impeded cross-organizational case finding. CONCLUSIONS: It is not sufficient to rely on the existence of multi-disciplinary teams or Child Advocacy Centers to ensure collaboration. More attention to daily tasks and activities as well as the nature and quality of communication is warranted. On the technical side, use of common case identifiers on cases that are cross-referred is strongly recommended. Future studies should broaden the scope of inquiry to include the consequences of all case trajectories, rather than solely focusing on the justice system.     

Getting the picture: medical images on the Web

Visual representations are used to convey ideas and concepts. They add value to educational venues. Files digitized from hard-copy media or born-digital files are standard formats, and the Internet is a resource for locating billions of these files. Searchers should be cognizant of the legal and ethical implications of using images downloaded from the Internet. This article intends to inform users about medical images on the Internet, as well as providing a select list of Web-based medical image sources.