The Clinical Assessment in the Legal Field: An Empirical Study of Bias and Limitations in Forensic Expertise

According to the literature, psychological assessment in forensic contexts is one of the most controversial application areas for clinical psychology. This paper presents a review of systematic judgment errors in the forensic field. Forty-six psychological reports written by psychologists, court consultants, have been analyzed with content analysis to identify typical judgment errors related to the following areas: (a) distortions in the attribution of causality, (b) inferential errors, and (c) epistemological inconsistencies. Results indicated that systematic errors of judgment, usually referred also as "the man in the street," are widely present in the forensic evaluations of specialist consultants. Clinical and practical implications are taken into account. This article could lead to significant benefits for clinical psychologists who want to deal with this sensitive issue and are interested in improving the quality of their contribution to the justice system

AUDIT JUDGMENT: AUDITOR EXPERTISE, COMPLIANCE PRESSURE, AND TASK COMPLEXITY (Empirical Study of Auditors Working in Public Accounting Firms in the City of South Jakarta)

This study aims to analyze and obtain empirical evidence about the effect of auditor expertise, compliance pressure, and task complexity on audit assessments. This type of research is quantitative descriptive.The study population was auditors who worked at the Public Accountant Firm in the City of South Jakarta as many as 42 respondents. The sampling technique uses convenience sampling technique. Testing the hypothesis used is multiple linear regression which is processed using the IBM SPSS version 25 software.Based on the results of partial hypothesis testing shows that auditor expertise has an influence on audit assessment, but compliance pressure and task complexity do not have an influence on audit assessment. Based on the results of simultaneous hypothesis testing of auditor expertise, compliance pressure and task complexity have an influence on audit judgment. Keywords: Auditor Expertise, Compliance Pressure, Task Complexity, Audit Judgmen

Include medical ethics in the Research Excellence Framework

The Research Excellence Framework of the Higher Education Funding Council for England is taking place in 2013, its three key elements being outputs (65% of the profile), impact (20%), and “quality of the research environment” (15%). Impact will be assessed using case studies that “may include any social, economic or cultural impact or benefit beyond academia that has taken place during the assessment period.”1 Medical ethics in the UK still does not have its own cognate assessment panel—for example, bioethics or applied ethics—unlike in, for example, Australia. Several researchers in medical ethics have reported to the Institute of Medical Ethics that during the internal preliminary stage of the Research Excellence Framework several medical schools have decided to include only research that entails empirical data gathering. Thus, conceptual papers and ethical analysis will be excluded. The arbitrary exclusion of reasoned discussion of medical ethics issues as a proper subject for medical research unless it is based on empirical data gathering is conceptually mistaken. “Empirical ethics” is, of course, a legitimate component of medical ethics research, but to act as though it is the only legitimate component suggests, at best, a partial understanding of the nature of ethics in general and medical ethics in particular. It also mistakenly places medicine firmly on only one side of the science/humanities “two cultures” divide instead of in its rightful place bridging the divide. Given the emphasis by the General Medical Council on medical ethics in properly preparing “tomorrow’s doctors,” we urge medical schools to find a way of using the upcoming Research Excellence Framework to highlight the expertise residing in their ethicist colleagues. We are confident that appropriate assessment will reveal work of high quality that can be shown to have social and cultural impact and benefit beyond academia, as required by the framework

Exploring assessment of medical students\u27 competencies in pain medicine - A review

Introduction: Considering the continuing high prevalence and public health burden of pain, it is critical that medical students are equipped with competencies in the field of pain medicine. Robust assessment of student expertise is integral for effective implementation of competency-based medical education. Objective: The aim of this review was to describe the literature regarding methods for assessing pain medicine competencies in medical students. Method: PubMed, Medline, EMBASE, ERIC, and Google Scholar, and BEME data bases were searched for empirical studies primarily focusing on assessment of any domain of pain medicine competencies in medical students published between January 1997 and December 2016. Results: A total of 41 studies met the inclusion criteria. Most assessments were performed for low-stakes summative purposes and did not reflect contemporary theories of assessment. Assessments were predominantly undertaken using written tests or clinical simulation methods. The most common pain medicine education topics assessed were pain pharmacology and the management of cancer and low-back pain. Most studies focussed on assessment of cognitive levels of learning as opposed to more challenging domains of demonstrating skills and attitudes or developing and implementing pain management plans. Conclusion: This review highlights the need for more robust assessment tools that effectively measure the abilities of medical students to integrate pain-related competencies into clinical practice. A Pain Medicine Assessment Framework has been developed to encourage systematic planning of pain medicine assessment at medical schools internationally and to promote continuous multidimensional assessments in a variety of clinical contexts based on well-defined pain medicine competencies

Extending the branches of the Giving Tree: A community-university partnership to examine the impact of summer school support for disadvantaged youth

Drawing upon Ernest Boyer’s (1996) conception of the scholarship of engagement, this case study systematically integrates service and research and shows how quality empirical research can make meaningful differences in children’s lives. Proposed by The Giving Tree, a non-profit community organization located in metropolitan Green Bay, Wisconsin, this collaborative community-university project addresses issues of access to educational resources for economically disadvantaged youth. Using de-identified 2010 spring and fall test scores, this research assesses how summer gains and losses vary by student socio-economic status and summer school attendance. The application of social science expertise provides quality assessment measures for programmatic implementation and legitimates community organizations attempting to foster philanthropic support which prize empirical measures of assessment and evaluation

Living on the edge? Professional anxieties at work in academia and veterinary practice

Through empirical research on academics and veterinary surgeons, this article focuses on identity and how it is reflected in, and reproduced by, anxiety and insecurity at work. Three analytical themes – perfection, performativity and commodified service – each of which generates anxiety indicates a loss of autonomy as academics and vets are subjected to competitive market forces as well as an intensification of masculine managerial controls of assessment, audit and accountability. We see these pressures and their effects as reflecting a commodification of service provision where the consumer (student or client) begins to redefine the relationship between those offering some expertise and those who are its recipients, partly achieved through the performative gaze of constant and visible rating mechanisms. Our empirical research also identifies sources of anxiety concerns in their attempts to achieve perfection against this background of uncertain knowledge and precarious contexts of the performative nature of professional expertise

Physical literacy: Importance, assessment and future directions

Physical literacy (PL) has become a major focus of physical education, physical activity and sports promotion worldwide. PL is a multifaceted conceptualisation of the skills required to fully realise potentials through embodied experience. Substantial financial investments in PL education by governments are underpinned by a wide range of anticipated benefits, including expectations of significant future savings to healthcare, improved physical and psychological well-being of the population, increased work-force productivity and raised levels of expertise in sport and exercise participation. However, disappointingly, scientific evidence showing the efficacy of PL interventions to successfully meet such high expectation is limited. We suggest that contradictions in research findings are due largely to limitations in movement assessment batteries and consequent discrepancies between measurements used to assess the immediate outcomes of PL programmes. Notably, there is no robust empirical tool for evidencing skill learning in the physical movement component of PL, education and this presents a serious limitation to the design of, and claims that can be made for, such interventions. Considering the parameters of proficient PL skills and the limitations of current evaluation instruments, possible future directions for developing empirical measures of PL movement skills are presented

Modelling medical diagnostic processes

The thesis investigates the development of medical reasoning processes and how student modelling of such processes can be achieved in intelligent tutoring systems. The domain of orthopaedics was chosen for the research. Literature has shown that medical reasoning has been modelled mainly from an expert point of view. The research problem addressed is to model explicitly various levels of medical expertise in terms of reasoning strategies. The thesis reports on a system, DEMEREST (DEvelopment of MEdical REasoning STrategies), a developmental user model component which describes successive stages of medical reasoning and which could ultimately be part of a medical tutor. The system diagnoses physicians' reasoning strategies, determines the level of expertise and produces a plan corresponding to the application of these strategies. As a basis of doing so, a set of seven reasoning strategies was identified in the medical problem solving literature. These strategies are based on generalisation, specialisation, confirmation, elimination, problem refinement, hypothesis generation and anatomy. An empirical study was carried out to examine the development of these strategies. Protocols of ten physicians at various levels of expertise were collected and analysed. A number of interactions of strategies at different levels of expertise was identified in half of these protocols and this information was used to construct a model of changes of strategies over time. Planning in· artificial intelligence was used as a means of decomposing medical problem solving into a set of goals; the goals being associated with the reasoning strategies. By taking this approach, medical reasoning is viewed as a planning process. The remaining protocols from the empirical study were used to evaluate DEMEREST. The system was tested for its ability to determine a level of expertise for each protocol, model the reasoning strategies applied and their interactions, and generate a plan for each protocol. The assessment of the overall performance of the system showed that it was successful. This assessment also helped to identify conceptual as well as implementation constraints of the prototype system. The main result of the research undertaken in this thesis is that the design of the system DEMEREST demonstrates the feasibility of modelling the development of medical reasoning strategies and its usefulness for student modelling

Producing nuclear safety expertise in the field of human factors

International audienceAnalysing interactions between regulators and regulated is a major research theme in risk management which is little explored, despite their assumed impact on the reliability of high-risk organisations. The question is particularly topical in the nuclear sector, which forms the basis of the research presented in this article. Several models of expertise and control activities taken from the scientific literature are presented before being compared with empirical data from research-intervention performed in conjunction with experts from the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, specialists in human and organisational factors. The case studies show an expertise activity relatively remote from models presented previously, which take little account of the peculiarities of the system of relationships between the regulator and the regulated and do not place sufficient emphasis on the methods of constructing the bodies of knowledge of the expert assessment. Once the operations and products from the assessment process have been clarified, types of effectiveness are defined. These are used to suggest possible improvements and understand better the effects of a neglected activity. The results can seemingly be transposed to other institutional configurations and industrial sectors

Маркетингові дослідження в Internet

This paper uses a multidisciplinary and systematic review of 45 journal articles and two case interviews to investigate the role of public support organizations in the development of eco-innovations. Even though eco-innovations are regarded as a driving force within sustainable development, entrepreneurs developing such innovations face barriers such as lack of some technical expertise, limited financial, time and human resources. Generally, two aspects are needed for eco-innovation support i.e. support for technology as well as business development. The selected public support organizations offered business development support through networking, bridging and financing. However, preliminary findings on their current support activities indicate bridging to other actors who can provide technical expertise such as environmental impact assessment and eco-design could be a promising addition to business development. Potential further research includes deeper empirical investigations on the role of public support actors in the development of eco-innovations