Professional storytelling in clinical dental anatomy teaching

The aim of the present work was to see if storytelling in a clinical dental anatomy course would increase student satisfaction. We enhanced teaching by spontaneous storytelling in problem‐based learning, in half of the third‐year dentistry class. At the end of the course, we administered an anonymous questionnaire to the students in the class, consisting of 12 questions that students had to answer on a Likert scale of 1–5. An overall satisfaction score was obtained and we used a linear mixed model to compare differences in satisfaction between the two groups, with “group” as the fixed effect. We also conducted an exploratory factor analysis of the responses to investigate whether there were distinct constructs within the data. Overall satisfaction is high, with students “with stories” having higher satisfaction than those “without stories.” The former group consistently gives higher satisfaction scores, regardless of which question is being asked. Factor analysis provides evidence that storytelling nurtures reflective learning, while students work on their clinical anatomy problems. Anat Sci Ed 1:84–89, 2008. © 2008 American Association of Anatomists.     

1990 editor's annual report

A variety of viewing measures were constructed to tap the ways people moved through an evening of television viewing, with particular focus on transitions between programs and channels. Based on these behaviors, five different styles of viewing were identified in a sample of adolescents. Of these, only one appeared to correspond to stereotypes of viewers as exercising little choice and just watching what was available. The viewing behaviors of the other four groups all indicate different ways of being active viewers.     

Capturing Citation Activity in Three Health Sciences Departments: A Comparison Study of Scopus and Web of Science

Scopus and Web of Science are the two major citation databases that collect and disseminate bibliometric statistics about research articles, journals, institutions, and individual authors. Liaison librarians are now regularly called upon to utilize these databases to assist faculty in finding citation activity on their published works for tenure and promotion, grant applications, and more. But questions about the accuracy, scope, and coverage of these tools deserve closer scrutiny. Discrepancies in citation capture led to a systematic study on how Scopus and Web of Science compared in a real-life situation encountered by liaisons: comparing three different disciplines at a medical school and nursing program. How many articles would each database retrieve for each faculty member using the author-searching tools provided? How many cited references for each faculty member would each tool generate? Results demonstrated troubling differences in publication and citation activity capture between Scopus and Web of Science. Implications for librarians are discussed.     

‘Becoming and being writers’: the experiences of doctoral students in writing groups

The use of writing groups to support students undertaking post-graduate research within universities has begun to receive attention from academic supervisors and doctoral researchers. Very little has been written by doctoral students themselves on the benefits of working within such writing groups. In this article, the experiences of working within a doctoral writing group at an Australian University are presented, primarily from the perspective of students. The authors identify two main benefits they have experienced through participating in a writing group using a ‘multi-voiced’ approach. First, they discuss the kind of learning that they achieved through working in a writing group. They do this with reference to key principles of peer learning and of peer review. Second, they focus on the ways the group worked as a community of discursive social practice. An overarching message for them in participating in the group and now writing this article is the shift in their thinking and experience of writing from seeing writing as an essentially private and implicit process to writing becoming a matter of public and shared work. These two notions are bound by the concept of identity building, drawing from the literature on communities of practice.     

Developing a Model of Medication Adherence among Filipino Elderly

While adherence to medication remains a problematic area in the care of chronically ill elderly, an extended model that incorporates the interaction of studied variables remains a blank spot. Anchored on Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior, this article details our efforts to develop and test a model of medication adherence among Filipino elderly relative to their medication belief, follow-up visits, consultation satisfaction, memory task, trust with physician, perceived stress, memory strategies, social support, memory load, depression, length of time taking the medication, number of conditions, and self-efficacy with medication adherence. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to study causalities among all parameters. With the participation of 325 older adults located in District IV, Sampaloc, Manila, data needed were gathered through a multiaspect questionnaire consisting of a robotfoto, a memory strategy usage measure, an eight-scale Morisky Medication Adherence Scale, a 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale, a General Self-efficacy Scale, a Consultation Satisfaction Questionnaire, and a Perceived Stress Scale. Data were analyzed using AMOS version 19. Results revealed that depression, trust with physician, and number of conditions affect adherence positively, while event-based memory, consultation satisfaction, memory load, and external memory strategy affect it otherwise. Some suggested variables were found to have no impact at all. As this study reveals, careful consideration should be given to multiple factors, and their interrelationship should be examined well. Because many factors can influence medication adherence behavior of the elderly, and because the reasons for their noncompliance are also varied, multifaceted solutions must be developed.     

Reenacted Case Scenarios for Undergraduate Healthcare Students to Illustrate Person-Centered Care in Dementia

Healthcare practitioners have suggested that interpreting person-centered care for people who have dementia to undergraduate students requires guidance in practical application. This article describes the production of a written and digital interdisciplinary educational resource for tertiary students. It uses real-life case scenarios provided by healthcare practitioners to illustrate person-centered care in practice with people who have dementia. The resource provides students with the theoretical underpinning of person-centered care and dementia as well as reflective questions that relate to the reenacted case scenarios to guide their application of this theory in practice.     

The effect of vocabulary knowledge on novel word identification

The study investigated the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and novel word reading. Fourth-grade students were assessed on standardized measures of word identification, decoding, and receptive vocabulary, as well as on an experimental word identification measure using words that students in the fourth grade are unlikely to have seen before in print. In the experimental measure, pairs of words were matched on printed frequency and orthographic pattern (with a variety of spelling patterns represented), but differed in terms of the frequency of expected oral exposure for children (i.e., higher vs. lower). Results showed that students’ receptive vocabulary knowledge was significantly related to performance on both the standardized and experimental measures of word identification, even after accounting for the substantial amount of variance explained by decoding ability. Students performed better reading the words with higher expected oral frequencies on the experimental task than on those items with lower expected oral frequencies. The results point to the benefits, albeit modest, of oral word familiarity for reading words when they are first encountered in print and suggest that this top-down effect is not limited to exception words, as has been suggested, but has a wider scope.