Provider documentation of patient education: a lean investigation

Purpose

The study evaluates how providers give patient education materials and identifies improvements to comply with Meaningful Use (MU) requirements.

Methods

Thirty-eight patient-provider interactions in two health care outpatient clinics were observed.

Results

Providers do not uniformly know MU patient education requirements. Providers have individual preferences and find gaps in what is available. Accessing and documenting patient education varies among providers. Embedded electronic health record (EHR) materials, while available, have technical access barriers.

Conclusions

Providers'' EHR skills and knowledge levels contribute to non-standardized patient education delivery.     

Visually Framing Press Freedom and Responsibility of a Massacre: Photographic and Graphic Images in Charlie Hebdo's Newspaper Front Pages Around the World

This research examines 441 front-page images published in 367 newspapers on the day following the shooting in Paris of 12 people at or near the Charlie Hebdo office. The aim of this study is to understand how mainstream media visually framed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo massacre and how these visual frames coalesced to represent collective narratives about press freedom. Through a collaborative visual analysis, this study attempts to understand how the selected visual frames worked to communicate the causes, effects, and responses to the massacre and also to press freedom—an ideological construct that news media had a vested interest in advancing.     

Vicarious learning from dialogue and discourse

This study examined learning in the domain of sentence parsing and syntax treediagram construction. The aim of the study was to assess whether subjects could learn vicariously from recordings of interactions between a previous student and a tutor.Four intervention conditions and a control condition were compared. Subjects in a dialogue group (DL) read printed tutorial notes and subsequently vicariously viewed dynamic (animated) recordings of tree diagrams being constructed by a previous student in the presence of a tutor.The discourse (DI) condition was similar except that subjects viewed recordings of tree diagrams being constructed by a tutor who concurrently verbalised instructional discourse.In a third condition (DO), subjects viewed tree-diagram construction animation clips which were not annotated with either dialogue or discourse. In a linear text (LT) condition, subjects were given only printed tutorial notes. A control (CO) condition involved pre and post testing without any intervention.Results indicated that the dialogue condition was as effective as the discourse condition. This provides support for contention that re-usable dialogue is a useful resource for the vicarious learner. Another finding was that un-annotated animated diagrams were surprisingly effective. Several reasons for their effectiveness are suggested from the literature on instructional animations.     

Predictors of Delinquent Behaviors Among Latino Youth

This study used an ecological framework to examine predictors of delinquent behaviors among 91 sixth-grade Latino youth. Both proximal and distal contextual factors were assessed to determine their impact on various forms of delinquency, such as violent behaviors, violent thoughts, substance abuse, and general delinquency (e.g., skipping school). Attitudes toward school, mobility (number of moves to new schools and neighborhoods), and exposure to community violence were distal variables, whereas attachment to parents and attachment to peers were considered more proximal variables. Environmental experiences or exposure to distressing community violence was the strongest predictor of delinquent outcomes. The results were discussed in terms of school officials' developing linkages with the community to promote safe environments for youth.     

Intentionality as measured in the persistence and elaboration of communication by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

In human infancy, 2 criteria for intentional communication are (a) persistence in and (b) elaboration of communication when initial attempts to communicate fail. Twenty-nine chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) were presented with both desirable (a banana) and undesirable food (commercial primate chow). Three conditions were administered: (a) the banana was delivered (successful communication), (b) half of the banana was delivered (partially successful communication), and (c) the chow was delivered (failed communication). The chimpanzees exhibited persistence in and elaboration of their communication in every condition except when the banana was delivered. Thus, their communication was about a specific item, demonstrating that both intentionality and nonverbal reference are capacities shared by humans with our nearest living relatives, the great apes.     

The effects of preferred representations on some tasks using solid geometrical figures

Privileged (typical, basic-level) representations are cognitive representations in which figurative features play a significant part. We specifically consider studies on the conventional point of view in object perception (Palmer, Rosch, & Chase, 1981). We propose an analysis of solid geometrical problems in the field of typicality theory and more generally in the theoretical field of mental models. Applied to this geometrical domain, the analysis suggests that individual cognitive representations — corresponding with different points of view from which a figure can be seen — are more or less representative examples of the category, that is to say they correspond more or less with the mental model built by the subject in this domain. Task 1 emphasizes the most representative point of view for four solid geometrical figures chosen by the experimenter. Then, we analyse two tasks on each figure from both the typical and non typical points of view. Errors occur most frequently when the geometrical figure is seen from its non typical viewpoints. Particular attention should be paid to this factor in analysing errors made by subjects.     

How New Caledonian crows solve novel foraging problems and what it means for cumulative culture

New Caledonian crows make and use tools, and tool types vary over geographic landscapes. Social learning may explain the variation in tool design, but it is unknown to what degree social learning accounts for the maintenance of these designs. Indeed, little is known about the mechanisms these crows use to obtain information from others, despite the question’s importance in understanding whether tool behavior is transmitted via social, genetic, or environmental means. For social transmission to account for tool-type variation, copying must utilize a mechanism that is action specific (e.g., pushing left vs. right) as well as context specific (e.g., pushing a particular object vs. any object). To determine whether crows can copy a demonstrator’s actions as well as the contexts in which they occur, we conducted a diffusion experiment using a novel foraging task. We used a nontool task to eliminate any confounds introduced by individual differences in their prior tool experience. Two groups had demonstrators (trained in isolation on different options of a four-option task, including a two-action option) and one group did not. We found that crows socially learn about context: After observers see a demonstrator interact with the task, they are more likely to interact with the same parts of the task. In contrast, observers did not copy the demonstrator’s specific actions. Our results suggest it is unlikely that observing tool-making behavior transmits tool types. We suggest it is possible that tool types are transmitted when crows copy the physical form of the tools they encounter.     

Representational Issues in Students Learning About Evaporation

This study draws on recent research on the central role of representation in learning. While there has been considerable research on students’ understanding of evaporation, the representational issues entailed in this understanding have not been investigated in depth. The study explored students’ engagement with evaporation phenomena through various representational modes. The study indicates how a focus on representation can provide fresh insights into the conceptual task involved in learning science through an investigation of students’ responses to a structured classroom sequence and subsequent interviews over a year. A case study of one child’s learning demonstrates the way conceptual advances are integrally connected with the development of representational modes. The findings suggest that teacher-mediated negotiation of representational issues as students construct different modal accounts can support enriched learning by enabling both (a) richer conceptual understanding by students, and (b) enhanced teacher insights into students’ thinking.