Discovering which experiences physiotherapy students identify as learning facilitators in practical laboratories: An action research project

Purpose: Students enrolled in courses that focus on patient contact participate in practical laboratories to learn clinical skills but this can be challenging in a pre-clinical environment. A simulated case based format using role play in small groups is commonly undertaken. Students may find it difficult to actively engage in learning and effective role playing without prior clinical experience. The aim of this study was to discover what type of experiences facilitated student learning in practical laboratory sessions. Method: Design: Action research study. Participants: Thirty two undergraduate second year physiotherapy students who were engaging in practical laboratories. Data collection and analysis: Teacher observations, minute papers and semi structured interviews were conducted over a nine week teaching period to gain the student perspective on what facilitated their learning. Data from these three sources were categorised and coded. A concept mapping technique was then used to represent the construct of learning facilitators identified, from which the final survey was developed. Results: Learning facilitators identified by students were categorised under three key units: those provided by the teacher, those initiated by the students themselves and material resources. Concept mapping revealed three emergent themes: provide multiple opportunities for learning that address all learning styles, formative learning support and resources to consolidate learning. Students rated timely feedback from the teacher while they practiced the required skills and behaviours as the highest valued learning facilitator (strongly agreed 78.6%, agreed 21.4%) followed by watching the teacher modelling the skill or behaviour required (strongly agreed 67.9%, agreed 25.0%). Students also reported that using a peer feedback checklist constructed by the teacher clarified their expectations of engaging in observation and feedback (strongly agreed 32.1%, agreed 50.0%) and guided their performance in the skills and behaviours expected (strongly agreed 35.7%, agreed 53.6%). Conclusions: Students at a pre-clinical level can identify which experiences facilitate their learning in practical laboratories, if given the opportunity. While these students place the highest value on teacher feedback they can actively engage in peer learning if given constructive guidance on the skills and behaviours required. Discovering what students identify as facilitating their learning in practical laboratories can guide successful evaluation of laboratory teaching plans to modify and create new learning opportunities and resources. This has the potential to improve student satisfaction and achievement of intended learning outcomes

High-growth firms: introduction to the special section

High-growth firms (HGFs) have attracted considerable attention recently, as academics and policymakers have increasingly recognized the highly skewed nature of many metrics of firm performance. A small number of HGFs drives a disproportionately large amount of job creation, while the average firm has a limited impact on the economy. This article explores the reasons for this increased interest, summarizes the existing literature, and highlights the methodological considerations that constrain and bias research. This special section draws attention to the importance of HGFs for future industrial performance, explores their unusual growth trajectories and strategies, and highlights the lack of persistence of high growth. Consequently, while HGFs are important for understanding the economy and developing public policy, they are unlikely to be useful vehicles for public policy given the difficulties involved in predicting which firms will grow, the lack of persistence in high growth levels, and the complex and often indirect relationship between firm capability, high growth, and macro-economic performance

Anti-infective surface coatings: design and therapeutic promise against device-associated infections

Patient safety and well-being are under increasing threat from hospital-acquired infections [1]. The root cause of a large number of these infections arises from microbial biofilms that colonise on surfaces of medical devices such as the millions of catheters, endotracheal tubes, and prosthetics implanted every year [2]. Biofilm infections are accompanied by increased resistance to antimicrobial therapy and immune clearance, severely limiting treatment options and leading to life-threatening disease [3,4]. Device-associated infections are caused by both bacteria and fungi and, while most studies have focused on single-species biofilms, biofilm-related infections are often polymicrobial [5–8]. Multi-species biofilms, particularly those involving bacterial and fungal pathogens, are more challenging to treat, likely as a consequence of their combined architecture, protective extracellular matrix, and potential synergism in protecting against antimicrobials and host immunity [9–11]. Among the fungi, Candida species are the most important biofilm pathogens [12,13] and the fourth leading cause of blood-stream infections in United States hospitals [7]. Fungal diseases remain difficult to diagnose, mortality rates remain high, and antifungal drug resistance continues to limit therapeutic options [14,15]. We are in desperate need of innovative strategies that target the mechanisms of pathogenesis of polymicrobial biofilms on medical devices. This is a grand challenge because it requires multidisciplinary collaboration and breakthrough research involving physical chemistry, materials science, and microbiology. Communication between these disciplines has not been common, but recent advances show greater convergence in the development of anti-infective devices. At this nexus, we outline the therapeutic promise of anti-infective coatings for medical devices and discuss pitfalls and strategies for overcoming them.Bryan R. Coad, Hans J. Griesser, Anton Y. Peleg, Ana Trave

Death is not a success: reflections on business exit

This article is a critical evaluation of claims that business exits should not be seen as failures, on the grounds that may constitute voluntary liquidation, or because they are learning opportunities. This can be seen as further evidence of bias affecting entrepreneurship research, where failures are repackaged as successes. This article reiterates that the majority of business exits are unsuccessful. Drawing on ideas from the organisational life course, it is suggested that business ‘death’ is a suitable term for describing business closure. Even cases of voluntary ‘harvest liquidation’ such as retirement can be meaningfully described as business deaths

Historical roots of Agile methods: where did “Agile thinking” come from?

The appearance of Agile methods has been the most noticeable change to software process thinking in the last fifteen years [16], but in fact many of the “Agile ideas” have been around since 70’s or even before. Many studies and reviews have been conducted about Agile methods which ascribe their emergence as a reaction against traditional methods. In this paper, we argue that although Agile methods are new as a whole, they have strong roots in the history of software engineering. In addition to the iterative and incremental approaches that have been in use since 1957 [21], people who criticised the traditional methods suggested alternative approaches which were actually Agile ideas such as the response to change, customer involvement, and working software over documentation. The authors of this paper believe that education about the history of Agile thinking will help to develop better understanding as well as promoting the use of Agile methods. We therefore present and discuss the reasons behind the development and introduction of Agile methods, as a reaction to traditional methods, as a result of people's experience, and in particular focusing on reusing ideas from histor

Business experience and start-up size: buying more lottery tickets next time around?

This paper explores the determinants of start-up size by focusing on a cohort of 6247 businesses that started trading in 2004, using a unique dataset on customer records at Barclays Bank. Quantile regressions show that prior business experience is significantly related with start-up size, as are a number of other variables such as age, education and bank account activity. Quantile treatment effects (QTE) estimates show similar results, with the effect of business experience on (log) start-up size being roughly constant across the quantiles. Prior personal business experience leads to an increase in expected start-up size of about 50%. Instrumental variable QTE estimates are even higher, although there are concerns about the validity of the instrument

Predicting new venture survival and growth: does the fog lift?

This paper investigates whether new venture performance becomes easier to predict as the venture ages: does the fog lift? To address this question we primarily draw upon a theoretical framework, initially formulated in a managerial context by Levinthal (Adm Sci Q 36(3):397–420, 1991) that sees new venture sales as a random walk but survival being determined by the stock of available resources (proxied by size). We derive theoretical predictions that are tested with a 10-year cohort of 6579 UK new ventures in the UK. We observe that our ability to predict firm growth deteriorates in the years after entry—in terms of the selection environment, the ‘fog’ seems to thicken. However, our survival predictions improve with time—implying that the ‘fog’ does lift

Participatory risk management approaches for water governance: Insights from Australia and Bulgaria

Multiple decision makers and managers, competing interests and values, scarcity of resources, complex legislative requirements, and vast uncertainties about the future due to a more connected and rapidly changing world and the impacts of climate change, are just some of the issues that impact upon the capacity to carry out effective water planning and management. Throughout the world these issues are becoming increasingly difficult to handle, and there have been calls for more adapted approaches to aid the decision making processes required for water planning and management. Participatory risk management approaches appear appropriate to such situations as they can be designed to increase collaboration and manage conflict, explicit uncertainties, and structure complexity in more understandable forms. This paper will outline some insights and lessons learnt from the design and implementation of two different participatory risk management processes for water planning and management: a values-based method based on the Australian and New Zealand Standard for Risk Management for the development of the Lower Hawkesbury Estuary Management Plan in Australia; and a participatory modelling approach to manage the risks of living with floods and droughts in the Iskar basin in Bulgaria. Both processes were designed and implemented with the aid of researchers, local managers, government representatives at various levels of jurisdiction, community stakeholders and external legislative, scientific or engineering experts. The Australian process was an initiative driven and funded by the Hornsby Shire Council, a peri-urban municipality of Sydney. It consisted of three interactive stakeholder workshops with an average of 20 participants, held over a period of four months, as well as an external scientific and legislative review. The workshops focussed on establishing estuarine values, issues and current management practices; performing a risk assessment based on the stakeholder defined values (assets) and issues (risks); and formulating strategies to treat the highest prioritised risks as input to the estuary management "risk response" plan. The Bulgarian process in the region of Sofia formed part of the European Project "AquaStress", funded by the European Union, and was primarily driven from a research perspective. The participatory process was more elaborate in design than the Australian process with around 60 stakeholders divided into 6 groups taking part in a series of 15 workshops, individual interviews and evaluation exercises over a one year period. The process included cognitive mapping of the current management context and physical system, values, visions and preference elicitation for actions, strategy development and evaluation. Both cases provided rich insights into the value and constraints of participatory risk management approaches in different regulatory and political environments, as well as some important recurrent issues that organising teams of participatory approaches need to appreciate including: impacts of last minute process changes; how to deal with divergent objectives in a multi-institutional organising team; and the unintended ethical issues that can arise when working in "real-world" management situations. Increasing awareness of the value and potential issues associated with participatory risk management approaches should aid their adoption and the subsequent improvement of water planning and management around the world. (Résumé d'auteur

Quark propagator in Landau and Laplacian gauges with overlap fermions

The properties of the momentum space quark propagator in Landau gauge and Gribov copy free Laplacian gauge are studied for the overlap quark action in quenched lattice QCD. Numerical calculations are done on two lattices with different lattice spacing a and the same physical volume. We have calculated the nonperturbative wave-function renormalization function Z(q) and the nonperturbative mass function M(p) for a variety of bare quark masses and perform a simple linear extrapolation to the chiral limit. We focus on the comparison of the behavior of Z(q) and M(p) in the chiral limit in the two gauge fixing schemes as well as the behavior on two lattices with different lattice spacing a. We find that the mass functions M(p) are very similar for the two gauges while the wave-function renormalization function Z(q) is more strongly infrared suppressed in the Laplacian gauge than in the Landau gauge on the finer lattice. For Laplacian gauge, it seems that the finite a error is large on the coarse lattice which has a lattice spacing a of about 0.124 fm.J. B. Zhang, Patrick O. Bowman, Ryan J. Coad, Urs M. Heller, Derek B. Leinweber, and Anthony G. Williams (CSSM Lattice Collaboration