Keeping up‐to‐date with current practice

Acknowledging the need for continuous improvement to keep health libraries at the forefront of patient care, Richard Bridgen considers the alternative ways in which library and knowledge services can be provided, from regional hubs to embedded services. Richard echo's the words of the CILIP Chief Executive Officer that services are likely to be judged on provision rather than breadth of collection and emphasises the need for a properly educated workforce to enable staff to keep up with changes in their professional domains.     

What's in a name: putting the skills of librarianship back into circulation

Anne Brice, recipient of the 2014 Cyril Barnard Memorial Prize, reflects on the themes of names and skills of the health library and information professions. She questions whether service users share the same concerns of librarians that this nomenclature is too narrow and too closely associated with the buildings that provide its name. She proposes that in mediation between the users and their required knowledge sits a unique opportunity to place the profession in the centre of knowledge translation.     

Written narratives of normal and learning disabled children

Writing samples of children in grades one through three were collected in two midwestern elementary schools using the Picture Story Language Test. Each story was scored for productivity, syntax, and level of abstraction. Results indicated that performance in all aspects of written language improved with age. A second study was conducted to compare the writing of normal children who were average readers in grades one through three with learning disabled children who were reading at comparable levels. The results indicated no significant differences in productivity but there were differences in syntax. Problems were noted particularly in morphology. Further observations indicated the learning disabled poor readers also had more problems with handwriting and spelling than average readers.     

The Dynamic Assessment of Reading Abilities

Dynamic assessment uses a response‐to‐instruction paradigm to complement traditional diagnostic assessment of word recognition and comprehension. The process helps the examiner to predict appropriate remedial intervention by exploring a student's responses to a series of instructional episodes in an interactive teaching‐learning relationship. Dynamic and traditional (or static) assessment differ in orientation (process vs product), procedure (response to instruction vs enumeration of existing abilities), and interpretation (patterns of response to instruction vs indices, for example percentiles or stanines). A dynamic approach to assessment provides the opportunity to evaluate systematically the instructional factors that influence reading performance.     

Short-term retention in rats: The effect of goal-arm confinement on delayed alternation performance

Gordon and his associates (e.g., Gordon & Feldman, 1978,Learning and Motivation,9, 164–178; Feldman & Gordon, 1979,Learning and Motivation,10, 198–210; Gordon, Taylor, & Mower, 1981,American Journal of Psychology,94, 309–322) have reported that a reactivation treatment significantly enhances memory for prior forcings in delayed alternation using rats. The reactivation treatment consisted of placing the rat in the goal arm to which it had been forced previously on that trial. The confinement occurred in the absence of food and was 5 sec in duration. The present experiments explored the possibility that the treatment might influence performance by affording an opportunity for new information to be acquired during the confinement period. Evidence consistent with this view was found in that (1) accuracy was reduced on trials in which the initial event was a 5-sec confinement to the arm opposite that of the target forcing and (2) increasing the duration of the confinement from 5 to 15 to 45 sec increased the magnitude of this effect. It was concluded that the effectiveness of goal-arm confinement as a reactivation treatment does not necessarily implicate processes of retrieval in delayed alternation behavior.