Building our future, a collaborative, participatory and motivating experience for undergraduates in chemistry

One of the aspects that best captures the interest of students, and the most neglected, is the possibility of offering the practical application of what is learned, favoring experiences that make this possible. Promoting interrelation and involvement with reality is one of the most motivating elements. For all these reasons, we present the action developed in which we are committed to participatory techniques, more specifically, to the development of projects related to the professional interests of the first-year students of the Degree in Chemistry. According to the surveys we carried out with our students, the main orientations were Research, Teaching and Bio-Entrepreneurship. The specific teaching objectives were: i) to strengthen the group, integrate, disinhibit, encourage; ii) to stimulate the exchange of experiences, ideas and opinions; iii) to develop divergent and creative thinking; iv) to quickly promote student participation, capturing their interest and involving them in the teaching/learning process; and v) to promote the learning of diverse knowledge and its collective construction, among others. The experience was carried out by all the students of the Biology subject, who were distributed in work teams of 4-6 students. The groups chose a topic from among the orientations requested by the students: i) Research (Support Centres); ii) Teaching (Institute of Education Sciences); iii) Bio-Entrepreneurship (Office for the Transfer of Research Results); iv) Forensic Science Police. The dynamic of the action is based on three main phases: - Initial session. In this session, objectives, methodology and evaluation criteria were clarified. The instructors involved provided the working groups with the corresponding contact. At this point, the enquiry of the group members began. - Development sessions. Throughout several meetings with the instructors, the members of the teams had to undertake the following objectives: i) search for information from the contact provided (description of the services studied, equipment, function and applications); ii) interview with experts; iii) contextualization according to their professional interests; iv) organization of the information and preparation of communications (posters). All this was supervised by the instructors involved. They were also presented with the "digital" portfolio that they had to prepare during the course of the action. - Final session. The students presented their work in a public event at the Building our Future Conference. Assessment for learning was carried out, taking into account the influence of this one on the motivation and self-esteem of the student; and the assessment of competences, having as indicators communication skills, teamwork and responsibility, among others. The development of a "digital" portfolio per team was used: i) to improve reflection on learning, ii) to stimulate student motivation, iii) to incorporate students in the evaluation and focus it on performance, and iv) to bring the learning achieved closer to the professional tasks of the discipline. We .can conclude that the action implemented had an impact on teaching practice to the extent that what was "investigated" was motivated by the reality of professional practice, putting into context all the subjects being reviewed in the Degree and contributing to the improvement of the quality of face-to-face teaching.Universidad de Alcal

Reassessing associations between white matter and behaviour with multimodal microstructural imaging

Several studies have established specific relationships between White Matter (WM) and behaviour. However, these studies have typically focussed on fractional anisotropy (FA), a neuroimaging metric that is sensitive to multiple tissue properties, making it difficult to identify what biological aspects of WM may drive such relationships. Here, we carry out a pre-registered assessment of WM-behaviour relationships in 50 healthy individuals across multiple behavioural and anatomical domains, and complementing FA with myelin-sensitive quantitative MR modalities (MT, R1, R2∗). Surprisingly, we only find support for predicted relationships between FA and behaviour in one of three pre-registered tests. For one behavioural domain, where we failed to detect an FA-behaviour correlation, we instead find evidence for a correlation between behaviour and R1. This hints that multimodal approaches are able to identify a wider range of WM-behaviour relationships than focusing on FA alone. To test whether a common biological substrate such as myelin underlies WM-behaviour relationships, we then ran joint multimodal analyses, combining across all MRI parameters considered. No significant multimodal signatures were found and power analyses suggested that sample sizes of 40–200 may be required to detect such joint multimodal effects, depending on the task being considered. These results demonstrate that FA-behaviour relationships from the literature can be replicated, but may not be easily generalisable across domains. Instead, multimodal microstructural imaging may be best placed to detect a wider range of WM-behaviour relationships, as different MRI modalities provide distinct biological sensitivities. Our findings highlight a broad heterogeneity in WM\u27s relationship with behaviour, suggesting that variable biological effects may be shaping their interaction

Road traffic pollution and childhood leukemia: a nationwide case-control study in Italy

Background The association of childhood leukemia with traffic pollution was considered in a number of studies from 1989 onwards, with results not entirely consistent and little information regarding subtypes. Aim of the study We used the data of the Italian SETIL case-control on childhood leukemia to explore the risk by leukemia subtypes associated to exposure to vehicular traffic. Methods We included in the analyses 648 cases of childhood leukemia (565 Acute lymphoblastic–ALL and 80 Acute non lymphoblastic-AnLL) and 980 controls. Information on traffic exposure was collected from questionnaire interviews and from the geocoding of house addresses, for all periods of life of the children. Results We observed an increase in risk for AnLL, and at a lower extent for ALL, with indicators of exposure to traffic pollutants. In particular, the risk was associated to the report of closeness of the house to traffic lights and to the passage of trucks (OR: 1.76; 95% CI 1.03–3.01 for ALL and 6.35; 95% CI 2.59–15.6 for AnLL). The association was shown also in the analyses limited to AML and in the stratified analyses and in respect to the house in different period of life. Conclusions Results from the SETIL study provide some support to the association of traffic related exposure and risk for AnLL, but at a lesser extent for ALL. Our conclusion highlights the need for leukemia type specific analyses in future studies. Results support the need of controlling exposure from traffic pollution, even if knowledge is not complete

Assessing Reliability and Agreement of Repeated Measurements by Hierarchical Modeling

We present the use of linear hierarchical models to assess the repeatability and agreement of two or more measurement devices. The idea is illustrated by means of two sets of data. The first considers eight different protocols for the recording of distortion product otoacoustic emissions in Sprague-Dawley rats. The second data set was obtained from the calibration of two types of extremely low frequency magnetic field dosimeters

A hierarchical modelling approach for measuring reliability of and agreement between two types of magnetic field dosimeter

The paper describes how to use hierarchical models to assess the reliability of and agreement between two or more types of measurement device. The idea is illustrated by fitting a linear model with nested random effects to a set of data that was obtained from the calibration of two samples of extremely low frequency magnetic field meters. The paper focuses on the formulation of a suitable model that accounts for the various aspects of the calibration protocol and the subsequent interpretation of the parameter estimates. The approach is very flexible and can easily be tuned to the various needs arising in the measurement agreement framework. It can be seen as an extension of the common practice of using a one-way random-effects model to retrieve a measure of agreement. Copyright 2004 Royal Statistical Society.

Childhood leukemia and 50 Hz magnetic fields: Findings from the Italian SETIL case-control study

We report on an Italian case-control study on childhood leukemia and exposure to extremely low frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MF). Eligible for inclusion were 745 leukemia cases, aged 0\ue2\u80\u9310 years at diagnosis in 1998\ue2\u80\u932001, and 1475 sex- and age-matched population controls. Parents of 683 cases and 1044 controls (92% vs. 71%) were interviewed. ELF-MF measurements (24\ue2\u80\u9348 h), in the child\ue2\u80\u99s bedroom of the dwelling inhabited one year before diagnosis, were available for 412 cases and 587 controls included in the main conditional regression analyses. The magnetic field induction was 0.04 \uce\ubcT on average (geometric mean), with 0.6% of cases and 1.6% of controls exposed to >0.3 \uce\ubcT. The impact of changes in the statistical model, exposure metric, and data-set restriction criteria was explored via sensitivity analyses. No exposure-disease association was observed in analyses based on continuous exposure, while analyses based on categorical variables were characterized by incoherent exposure-outcome relationships. In conclusion, our results may be affected by several sources of bias and they are noninformative at exposure levels > 0.3 \uce\ubcT. Nonetheless, the study may contribute to future meta- or pooled analyses. Furthermore, exposure levels among population controls are useful to estimate attributable risk