Therapeutic effect of methane and its mechanism in disease treatment

Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE B - Methane is the simplest hydrocarbon, consisting of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. It is abundant in marsh gas, livestock rumination, and...     

Increasing state public health professionals' proficiency in using PubMed

Objective: The paper provides an overview of a strategy to increase utilization of online bibliographic databases by public health workers.Methods: A web-based survey of professional staff in the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services was conducted to assess their use of and interest in training in online bibliographic databases. Based on the findings from the assessment, the department, in collaboration with the state university, provided brief ninety-minute training sessions for interested staff on the use of PubMed.Results: Seventy of 115 (61%) of staff completed the survey. Only 39% of staff reported using an online bibliographic database to conduct a literature search in the past year, and only 10% (n=7) reported having ever received any training in their use. Perceived proficiency with the use of PubMed was higher upon completion of the brief training. The majority of training participants (n=27) indicated that they were very likely to use PubMed in the next year to search the literature.Conclusions: A collaboratively designed training can increase public health workers'' proficiency in and intentions of using online bibliographic databases.

Highlights

• A web-based assessment of Montana public health workers identified a lack of training in and use of online bibliographic databases and an interest in receiving training in their use.
• Brief training in the use of online bibliographic databases increased state public health workers'' self-assessed proficiency in and intentions of using these resources.

Implications

• Low-cost strategies, such as inexpensive web-survey tools, to assess staff needs and brief training sessions for public health workers were effective in increasing public health workers'' self-assessed proficiency in using online bibliographic databases.
• Collaboration between state health departments and universities to design and provide relevant training in the use of online bibliographic databases is an effective approach to addressing public health workers'' skills in using these resources.

     

Will Teachers Create Opportunities for Discussion when Teaching Proof in a Geometry Classroom?

This study presents an analysis of whether geometry teachers create opportunities for student discussion when engaging students in proving as revealed through the use of a multimedia survey instrument. We presented 42 secondary mathematics teachers with 8 multimedia narratives set in the situation of doing proofs in high school geometry and asked them to choose what they would do next, presenting options that included a normative instructional action which closed off discussion and less typical actions that encouraged student discussion. Our analysis provides insight into the professional obligations that teachers use to justify their departure from the norm in order to encourage student talk as well as the background variables that are associated with such decisions. We found that while secondary mathematics teachers frequently chose to promote discussion in their classrooms, the rationale that they chose for this decision and the reasons they might choose not to immediately encourage discussion differed according to the amount of experience they had teaching geometry. We use these differences to illustrate how the professional obligations can be used to better understand how teacher decisions are rationalized at the level of the instructional situation.     

Co-operatives and education in the Basque Country: the ikastolas in the final years of Franco’s dictatorship

This article analyses the creation of the schools called ikastolas throughout the Basque Country from the 1960s onwards. The name ikastola refers to a unique school model whose major characteristic is to teach the majority of subjects in the Basque language, or euskera. It outlines the reasons why some of these schools took a co-operative organisational form and describes their major characteristics. The first part analyses the opportunities created under the Francoist regime for this kind of school, despite the repressive character of the dictatorship in other fields. The second part of the paper examines the important influence of the Mondragón co-operative movement, especially through its financial institution, in the creation of these educational co-operatives. The third and last part emphasises the role played by social mobilisation in defence of the Basque language in the creation of these schools and how this factor tied in with a co-operative governance system.