One-hour Lecture Research Articles

Experiential Learning in an Arms Control Simulation

This paper discusses an arms control simulation that formed a central part of the course, Controlling Chemical and Biological Weapons. Based on the experiential learning approach this simulation sought to (a) provide an active learning context for students to acquire an in-depth understanding of central aspects of biological arms control, and (b) gain an appreciation for the complexities of multilateral diplomacy in general and arms control negotiations in particular. I taught this course in spring 2006 to a group of 16 final-year undergraduate students. The arms control simulation complemented the weekly one-hour lectures and replaced the standard one-hour student-led seminar sessions. At the beginning of the simulation I supplied students with a set of confidential country instructions to approach the simulation, which was subdivided into two negotiating rounds of three sessions each and a drafting exercise towards the end of the semester.

Geometric and Topological Combinatorics

The 2007 Oberwolfach meeting “Geometric and Topological Combinatorics” was organized by Anders Björner (KTH and Mittag-Leffler Institute, Stockholm), Gil Kalai (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), and Günter M. Ziegler (TU Berlin). It consisted of six one-hour lectures by Isabella Novik, Herbert Edelsbrunner, Carsten Schultz, Igor Pak, Alexander Barvinok and Roy Meshulam, as well as twenty-seven half-hour talks, a problem session (led by Gil Kalai, also documented below), two software demonstrations (on by Michael Joswig, and on by Jesus De Loera), and many more informal sessions, group discussions, and a great variety of small group and pairwise discussions. It was a lively week! As will become obvious from the sequence of extended abstracts presented below, the conference treated a broad spectrum of topics from Topological Combinatorics (such as poset topology, graph coloring, etc.), Discrete Geometry (polytopes, triangulations, arrangements, Coxeter groups, and polyhedral surfaces), as well as Geometric Topology (triangulated manifolds, persistent homology of geometric data, etc.). The manifold connections between these themes, with refinements of well-established bridges as well as completely new links between seemingly distant themes, problems, methods, and theories show that the area is very much alive. Even more so this is demonstrated by substantial progress on older problems, which on this conference included Isabella Novik's opening lecture about centrally symmetric polytopes (joint works with Nati Linial and with Alexander Barvinok), or still on the first day Ed Swartz' report about the f -vectors of triangulated manifolds. Of course there is no way to present the richness and depth of the work and presentations of the conference's program on a one page report, or a short collection of abstracts. All the following can offer is an overview of the official program of the conference. It does not cover all the additional smaller presentations, group discussions and blackboard meetings (for example, Tom Braden was coerced into an additional evening presentation of the topology of hypertoric varieties “by popular demand”), nor the lively interactions that occured during the week – for example, a surprising connection was made at the problem session between permutation patterns that appeared in Jonas Sjöstrand's lecture, and a conjecture posed by Alex Postnikov; in subsequent work, the problem was solved by Axel Hultman, Svante Linusson, John Shareshian, and Jonas Sjöstrand (paper in preparation). We are extremely grateful to the Oberwolfach institute, to its director and to all of its staff for providing a perfect setting for an inspiring, intensive week of “Geometric and Topological Combinatorics.”

Portable Digital Video Instruction in Predoctoral Education of Child Behavior Management

The goals of this exploratory study were to determine students' assessment of portable digital video instruction (using the Apple iPod) and to compare examination performance among groups of predoctoral dental students who did and did not utilize portable digital video instruction as a supplement to a conventional pediatric behavior management lecture. Dental students received a one-hour lecture on communication with the parent and child patient as part of their regular sophomore pediatric dentistry curriculum. Digital audio and digital video versions of this lecture were made available to all 113 students in the class. Eleven student volunteers were loaned portable digital video players (the iPod) containing the lecture for a two-week period. Upon completion of the study period, the entire class participated in an anonymous fifteen-minute post-intervention written assessment including a thirteen-item examination covering lecture material. Students who had used the iPod to review the digital video lecture material favored this medium as a pedagogical instrument and as a group performed significantly better on the examination than those who had not reviewed the digital material (p=0.034). In conclusion, portable digital instructional videos may be a useful educational methodology to help predoctoral dental students acquire knowledge in pediatric behavior management.

A comparison between the efficacy of lectures given by emergency and non-emergency physicians in an international emergency medicine educational intervention

The Tuscan Emergency Medicine Initiative is an international collaboration designed to create a sustainable emergency medicine training and qualification process in Tuscany, Italy. Part of the program involves training all emergency physicians currently practicing in the region. This qualification process includes didactic lectures, clinical rotations and practical workshops for those with significant emergency department experience. Lectures in the didactic portion were given by both emergency medicine (EM) and non-EM faculty. We hypothesized that faculty who worked clinically in EM would give more effective lectures than non-EM faculty. Fifty-one emergency physicians from the hospitals surrounding Florence completed the course, which included 48 one-hour lectures. Twenty lectures were given by practicing emergency physicians and 28 were given by non-EM faculty. Participants completed an evaluation at the end of each session using a 5-point Likert scale describing the pertinence of the lecture to EM, the efficacy and clarity of the presentation, the accuracy of the information and the didactic ability of the lecturer. A mean of 38.5 evaluations was completed for each lecture. Every factor was significantly higher for lectures given by EM faculty: the pertinence of the lecture to EM (4.46 vs. 4.16, p < 0.001), the efficacy of the faculty (4.10 vs. 3.91, p < 0.001), the accuracy of the lecture content (4.16 vs 3.96, p < 0.001), and the didactic ability of the instructors (4.02 vs. 3.85, p = 0.001). When teaching EM, evaluations of lectures in this training intervention were higher for lectures given by EM faculty than by non-EM faculty.

La enseñanza de la atención farmacéutica en pregrado: la experiencia de una universidad de los EEUU de américa

La práctica de Farmacia continúa evolucionando de su función tradicional de dispensación de medicamentos hacia una más especializada. Esta modalidad enfatiza el manejo y utilización de productos farmacéuticos dirigidos al cuidado del paciente, en el cual se paga por los servicios del cuidado farmacéutico. El propósito del curso «Patient Care Management» (PCM) es proveer al estudiante la oportunidad de practicar e integrar todos los aspectos correspondientes al cuidado farmacéutico. Por dos semestres consecutivos, los estudiantes que cursan el tercer año de Farmacia en los diferentes centros de enseñanza a distancia y en el campus central universitario, toman el curso que combina la clase y el laboratorio de práctica. Estos cursos se componen de una hora de clase por semana y tres horas de laboratorio, alternando semanas para un total de quince semanas durante el semestre de otoño (agosto-diciembre) y catorce semanas en el semestre de primavera (enero-mayo). En las clases, se repasan las 200 drogas más utilizadas, al presentar a los estudiantes casos de pacientes con diferentes estados de enfermedad basados en situaciones clínicas encontradas mayormente en la farmacia comunitaria. Las áreas que se cubren son: asma, hipertensión, diabetes, enfermedades del corazón, entre otras. Cada laboratorio cuenta con un promedio de tres farmacéuticos con experiencia, que tienen doctorado en Farmacia. Se asigna un promedio de 20-24 estudiantes por día de laboratorio, divididos en grupos de cuatro estudiantes por mesa de trabajo. El manual utilizado en el laboratorio titulado «Patient Care Management Lab» es requerido en cada sesión de laboratorio para un mejor aprendizaje y desarrollo del futuro Farmacéutico. Los estudiantes deben poder identificar problemas de terapia, hacer consejería al paciente, habilidad de poder interpretar recetas y reproducir etiquetas para los medicamentos dispensados al paciente. Los estudiantes tienen que exponer sobre dos fármacos de su preferencia ante la clase, enfocados al manejo de terapia, detección y evaluación de problemas relacionados al medicamento. Los estudiantes son «filmados» durante la consejería al paciente para auto evaluación. Este curso está diseñado para educar a los futuros farmacéuticos clínicos en relación a objetivos prácticos asociados con la práctica de farmacia del futuro, y a su vez lograr calidad y uniformidad en todos los centros de enseñanza (Ft. Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Puerto Rico).

An Assessment of the Impact of Multimedia, Technology-Based Learning Tools on the Cardiac Auscultation Skills of Third-Year Medical Students

:Background: Previous studies have shown that medical students and post-graduate trainees need to improve their proficiency in cardiac auscultation. Technologic advances have created new learner-centered opportunities to enhance proficiency in this important physical examination skill.Objectives: We sought to determine if technology-based, self-directed learning tools improved the cardiac auscultation skills of third-year medical students.Methods: Sixteen (16) third-year medical (M3) students were exposed to three educational inter-ventions: a one-hour cardiac auscultation lecture that featured computer-generated heart sounds, a PDA-based heart sounds/murmur form and a web-based cardiac auscultation program. Thirteen (13) internal medicine (IM) residents who served as a comparison group attended a cardiac auscultation lecture identical in content and format to the student lecture. At the end of the study period, we evaluated the ability of both groups to accurately identify heart sounds and cardiac murmurs via a twelve-item performance-based examination utilizing computer-generated heart sounds.Results: Following our teaching interventions, findingsM3 students correctly identified 80% of the computer-simulated heart sounds/murmurs while the comparison group of IM residents accurately detected 60% of the same cardiac findings (p<. 005).Conclusions: The combination of traditional lecture and multi-media, technology-based, self-directed learning tools appears to be an effective and efficient strategy for teaching and reinforcing cardiac auscultation skills to third year medical students.

AMTC 2004 Cincinnati

AMTC 2004 Cincinnati

University of Massachusetts Medical School.

University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Prosody on the hands and face

The analysis in this paper deals with the prosodic cues that were present in a one-hour lecture by a native signer of American Sign Language (ASL). Special attention is paid to the interaction of the dominant hand (H1) and the nondominant hand (H2), as well as to facial expressions articulated on the lower face. In our corpus, we found that H1 and H2 interact in several prosodic contexts; we analyze four of them here: Single Prosodic Word, Multiple Prosodic Words in an Intermediate Phrase, Parenthetical, and Forward- Referencing. Our main finding is that, while the spread of the nondominant hand (H2-Spread) is an important redundant cue to prosodic structure, the primary cue is on the lower face. Our findings also confirmed positional cues and domain effects of H2-Spread in Prosodic Words and Phonological Phrases that were previously found in Israeli Sign Language.

The Workshop That Went Wrong

It sounded like the easiest thing in the world: a one-hour lecture and discussion on staying focused and positive during a job search. The audience was a small support group meeting at a local church and although I had less than a week to prepare for the talk, my goals were modest: to give each participant two new ideas for reenergizing their search process. I was flattered to have been asked to present for group and had high regard for the person who asked me. Although a request for details solicited repeated emphasis that this group has heard it all before, I shrugged off my misgivings and forged ahead with preparations. Preparing for the Workshop I prepared for the talk in a thoughtful way, reading and writing and consulting a professional career counselor for some helpful tips to include in a handout. Between the lecture material and the combined life experience of the group, I assumed we would have an interesting evening of learning and discussion. And when all was said and done, I was confident that I had a presentation that would be at least somewhat helpful to such an experienced audience. Going in to the meeting that fateful Thursday night, I had no idea that ahead of me lay the most tortuous teaching experience I have ever encountered. Facing the Unexpected What happened that evening is every teacher's nightmare: the dead silence that greeted my questions, lingering and poisoning any opportunity for camaraderie; the runaway discussions hijacked by a dominant student; and the folded arms and resentful stares of the silent majority. A few minutes into the lecture, my words seemed to dry up and become brittle, blowing around the room like leaves in a stiff wind. My voice sounded shallow and pinched. My throat was unaccountably dry In a few short minutes, the collective anxiety seemed to vibrate off the walls and the outfit I had carefully chosen started to feel too small and too tight. Hoping for improvement during the discussion portion of the presentation, I only met with further resistance. I started to work like a bad juggler, generating a modicum of discussion out of the silence only to have the topic slide onto someone else's soapbox. In trying to move the topic back to the focus, I called on the various other participants: one wanted to talk about how to meet single women, another about her two dogs. It was like putting an octopus to bed. No sooner did I have one arm tucked beneath the sheet than another would pop out. After an hour and a half of going every which way down the road and trying to regain my original direction, the evening mercifully came to an end. I drove home in a fog of failure, positive I should never teach again. Reflecting on the Lesson Months later, when I finally summoned the courage to reflect on that evening, I discovered some good lessons among the ruin. Sometimes the lessons learned are the best, and the only, good thing to come out of an experience like this. …

Using Television for Astronomy Teaching

AbstractThe full potential of television for education has not been used in developing nations. It is relatively inexpensive to produce astronomy programs that can be broadcast taking advantage of satellite transmissions.We suggest that these programs should have the following elements in order to be efficient: 1Be in the local language.2Be short enough so that the teacher has a chance to comment on them during a one-hour lecture.3Show experiments specially if they are meant for schools that do not have laboratory facilities.4Be produced for several educational levels, including programs aimed for teacher training.Inexpensive books should be edited in the local language in order to serve as an educational complement to the television series.

Teaching Argument Construction

Most critical thinking textbooks tell students nothing about how to construct good arguments of their own. Their focus is on the identification and evaluation of other people's arguments as you would expect, since they are after all critical thinking textbooks. Although teaching students how to evaluate arguments is the primary goal of critical thinking courses, such courses also provide the ideal context for the teaching of argument construction. Writing courses sometimes instruct students in how to write an argumentative essay, but they tend not to go into any detail about what differentiates a good argument from a bad one. By the middle of a critical thinking course, in contrast, students should have acquired some idea of what makes a good argument good, so they are well placed to be told how to construct one themselves. Although learning the difference between a good argument and a bad argument goes some way towards showing you how to construct good arguments of your own, it does not go all the way. Some explicit instruction is needed. However, it is difficult to provide such instruction in a large lecture class. The best way to learn argument construction, once you have learned how to evaluate arguments, is to construct arguments and then have them evaluated either by your peers or by a tutor. How can you teach argument construction in a lecture? All that there is to say about it (given that the students already know how to evaluate arguments) can be conveyed in about five minutes. Here is a method of teaching argument construction which I have developed to suit a teaching situation in which there are two one-hour lectures and one onehour tutorial per week. The lecture class contains approximately two hundred students: each tutorial group contains between ten and twenty. One lecture and one tutorial are devoted entirely to argument construction. The lecture consists of a five-minute introductory spiel followed by an in-class exercise in which we construct arguments as a group. Then the students are given a homework assignment: of a list of statements, they are to choose one and construct the best argument they can for it. In the tutorial, their arguments will be presented to the class, and the class will make suggestions about how the argument could be improved.

Development Delayed: U.S. Economic Policy in Occupied Korea, 1945–1948

AbstractOn 9 September 1945, U.S. military forces landed at Inchon to begin American occupation of southern Korea. For almost three years thereafter, a U.S. military government under the command of Lieutenant General John R. Hodge was responsible for civil affairs south of the 38th parallel. Its policies resulted in delaying Korea's economic development. Early in World War II, the U.S. government had begun preparations for the postwar administration of military government and civil affairs. At first, the focus was on Germany and its occupied territories, but during 1944, training began for 1,500 army and navy officers to serve in occupied Japan. The program ignored Korea, with the exception of a one-hour lecture in some classes near the end of the war. Plans to prepare civil affairs handbooks summarizing conditions in target areas for over thirty nations did not include Korea. Not surprisingly, many civil affairs officers who served in postwar Korea had trained for duty in Japan. They knew nothing about the country they were to govern and of course did not speak the language. Historians have argued that this lack of preparation was largely responsible for the failures of the American occupation. But other factors were more important in explaining the lack,

Using a Reflective Framework to Study Teaching-learning Relationships

This paper explains how pre-service teachers used a reflective framework to study the relationship between teaching and learning in a 13-week science method course. The course was in the second year of a three-year Bachelor of Teaching (Primary) degree at the University of Wollongong, Australia. The students had a three-hour class each week made up of a one-hour lecture followed by two hours of hands-on activities. After each class the students had to reflect on their experiences to study the relationship between teaching and their learning. There were three phases which guided students in using a reflective journal: (i) analysis of their class experiences to identify influences on their learning according to four categories-personal, teaching, peer and situational; (ii) synthesis of their reflections in which the students collated and identified key factors for each of the four categories; and (iii) theorising to identify a metaphor as a representation of a relationship between teaching and learning. The metaphor represented an optimal learning environment in a university class and was labelled with key personal, social (teaching and peer) and situational factors identified in their reflections. Students were then requested to deduce implications for their future role as classroom teachers. All students were able to reflect on teaching and learning, but two issues need to be considered before students uses the framework. First, reflecting upon how they learn was a new experience for the pre-service teachers and the framework needs to be modelled to them at the beginning of a course. Second, there are ethical issues that need to be discussed with students when they are expected to constructively analyse teaching and learning. Although the pre-service students claimed that using the framework was the hardest task they had attempted at university, they gained insights into how they learned which had implications for how they planned to teach.

A BILITY OF EMT-BS TO D ETERMINE W HICH W OUNDS C AN B E R EPAIRED IN THE F IELD

Introduction. In certain emergency medical services (EMS) systems, emergency medical technicians-paramedics (EMT-Ps) repair lacerations in the field. This practice is supported by studies showing equivalence between nonphysicians and physicians regarding infection rates and cosmetic outcomes. Objective. To evaluate the ability of emergency medical technicians-basic (EMT-Bs) to identify wounds repairable in the field or requiring tetanus prophylaxis. Methods. This was a prospective, double-blind convenience sample study at an urban teaching hospital. Eleven EMT-B volunteers, trained by a one-hour lecture and bedside teaching, evaluated lacerations for prehospital repair by answering three questions: Could this wound be repaired in the field, and if no, why not? If on an adult forearm, could this wound be repaired in the field, and if no, why not? Does this patient need tetanus prophylaxis, and if no, why not? A blinded principal investigator also answered these questions, and a person uninvolved in the study correlated results. Statistical evaluation was performed using kappa statistics. Results. The EMT-Bs identified 17 of 17 potentially repairable wounds and 163 of 163 wounds excluded from prehospital repair. Placing the wound on the forearm, the EMT-Bs identified 82 of 87 potentially repairable wounds and 93 of 93 wounds excluded from prehospital repair (sensitivity 94%, specificity 100%, positive predictive value 100%, negative predictive value 95%, kappa 0.97). For five of five wounds, physicians disagreed with the EMT-Bs and thought the wound repairable prehospital. The EMT-Bs and physicians agreed on individual wound exclusion criteria in 207 of 239 (86.6%) instances. Finally, the EMT-Bs identified 108 of 108 patients requiring tetanus prophylaxis. Conclusions. Basic EMTs can accurately identify wounds eligible for prehospital repair and/or requiring tetanus prophylaxis.

Instilling Dietetic Internship Values By Using Portfolio-Based Assessment

Values guide us in the ethical choices we make throughout our career, but they must be embraced to become a part of our decision-making process. The faculty from three dietetic internships identified the following six values as being important to the development of character: innovation, integrity, flexibility, respect for diversity, trust, and loyalty. The assimilation of such values must occur over a prolonged period of time rather than within a one-hour lecture. Our internship piloted a values-oriented, portfolio-based assessment as our teaching model. We began the year with a group discussion on the core values, where the interns wrote their definitions for each value. During the internship, each intern developed a portfolio which presented a collection of his/her work, demonstrating how each value influenced his/her ethical and professional behavior. The process provided opportunities for the intern to: spend time on moral reflection, decide the actual contents of his/her portfolio, determine what is professional caliber work, and evaluate his/her work. Quarterly, each intern presented his/her portfolio to the internship faculty for discussion. The process culminated at the end of the year with the interns sharing their portfolios with the staff. Completed portfolios also served as a springboard to their first duty assignments, where the interns shared them with their new supervisors. Preliminary evaluation of this teaching model suggests that the interns demonstrated an increased awareness of the core values. The interns believed they were more conscious of why they acted in certain ways when required to make values-based decisions and ethical choices. Implementing a values-oriented, portfolio-based assessment enhanced the integration of values and ethics into our dietetics training program.

The effects of a hospital staff training program on the treatment practices of postoperative pain in children under 8 years.

The widespread use of day case surgery for minor operations in children places increased emphasis on home care, parental responsibility and attention to suitable analgesia. This study evaluated a training program for doctors and nurses on postoperative analgesia in children by following up parental perceptions of pain relief after discharge. The main objective of our study was to determine the effects of a training program on treatment practices in the hospital and on the home care instructions provided. The study was carried out in two phases. A questionnaire was sent to parents of children aged under 8 years who had undergone a minor otorhinolaryngological operation (tonsillectomy, adenoidectomy, irrigation of maxillary sinus, insertion of grommets, or paracentesis) at the Day Case Unit in Kuopio University Hospital. The parents of 115 children returned the questionnaire in the preintervention study and those of 112 children in the postintervention study (response rates: 79% and 86% respectively). The training program for personnel (intervention) was organized between the two studies. It started with a one-hour lecture on postoperative pain and pain treatment in children, and the lecture was followed by two weeks of bedside teaching. The overall standard of pain treatment in the hospital was good. Most of the children had no pain or only mild pain on discharge (93% before the intervention and 90% after the intervention). The intervention had no effect on the likelihood of children receiving pain medication. Noticeable changes occurred in the selection of pain medicines and dosage forms, and in the increased number of home care instructions provided for parents. We conclude that the training program for both professional groups (doctors and nurses) can be beneficial in changing the treatment practice (especially the use of medicines and dosage forms). Such training programs also make it possible to emphasized the importance of proper instructions for home care and thus to improve the quality of information provided for parents.

Holiday Lectures Bring Tidings of Good Science

EACH December for the past 5 years, some of the country's most respected biomedical scientists have opened a window on their worlds to high school students in a series of "holiday lectures"—an event modeled after a tradition begun by the 19th-century English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday. This year, with a series named (with a nod to Jane Austen) "Sense and Sensitivity: Neuronal Alliances for Sight and Sound," 2 leading neuroscientists asked students to consider just what goes on in their brains when they see and hear. In 4 one-hour lectures, the speakers, A. James Hudspeth, PhD, MD, of The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, and Jeremy H. Nathans, MD, PhD, of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Md, explored the biological mechanisms that underlie the senses and enable humans and other organisms to detect and process stimuli such as sights and sounds. In previous years, Howard

The Kronig-Penney Model: A Single Lecture Illustrating the Band Structure of Solids

A simple model of a crystalline solid that leads to an electronic band structure is presented. The development requires no quantum mechanics beyond that taught in most physical chemistry courses and can be taught in a single one-hour lecture.

Using Technology to Tame the Large Oceanography Class

Comprehensive software tools have been created to support a large general-education Oceanography course. The class meets formally three times per week for a one-hour lecture and once per week for a two-hour section in a Macintosh computer laboratory. Students have access to the computer lab during open-access hours. The goal is to provide students with access to selected earth-science databases and guide them in the process of “discovering” earth processes. Part of the process involves group and class discussions, peer review of writing, and a technical paper describing their results and interpretations. In addition, students enter weekly homework problems into the computer and receive a score immediately. Extensive help software enables students to use the system with little outside instruction. Student activity is scored in a central location so that grades are available to the professor, the teaching assistants, and the student (the student can only see his/her own grade). The focus of the content is o...