Kwalitatieve evaluatie van 10 jaar zorgcoördinatie en case management in de Oost-Vlaamse drughulpverlening: een rondvraag bij hulpverleners en cliënten

Sinds 10 jaar wordt door de Provincie Oost-Vlaanderen – in samenwerking met het provinciaal overlegplatform geestelijke gezondheidszorg (PopovGGZ) en alle betrokken voorzieningen – geïnvesteerd in zorgvernieuwing, coördinatie en afstemming van de zorg in de drughulpverlening. Dit heeft naast heel wat ‘onzichtbare’ realisaties (bv. grotere bekendheid van het zorgaanbod, de intakeprocedure en werkwijze van andere voorzieningen, betere samenwerking tussen voorzieningen als gevolg van meer (informele) contactmomenten), ook tot een aantal duidelijk tastbare resultaten geleid. Het betreft onder meer de oprichting van een netwerkcomité middelenmisbruik, de aanstelling van een zorgcoördinator, de uitbouw van een case managementteam en de organisatie van een driewekelijks cliëntenoverleg. Met name deze laatste twee realisaties komen in voorliggend onderzoeksrapport uitgebreid aan bod. We doen dit in de eerste plaats door de direct betrokkenen (cliënten, hulpverleners en verantwoordelijken) zelf aan het woord te laten. De bevindingen van onze kwalitatieve evaluatie worden afzonderlijk besproken met betrekking tot het cliëntenoverleg en case management. Vooreerst worden beide werkvormen beschreven en worden enkele cijfergegevens meegegeven over de interventie in kwestie. Daarna volgt een beknopte bespreking van de gevolgde methodologie. Bij de rapportage van de onderzoeksresultaten wordt een onderscheid gemaakt tussen de bevindingen van hulpverleners over het cliëntenoverleg, de visie van cliënten over case management en het perspectief van case managers en projectverantwoordelijken over deze laatste interventie. We sluiten af met een aantal globale conclusies en aanbevelingen voor de toekomstige praktijk, die we terugbrachten tot tien concrete suggesties ter optimalisatie van het cliëntenoverleg en het case management. In tegenstelling tot eerdere publicaties beroepen we ons in dit onderzoeksrapport slechts in beperkte mate op de literatuur. In voorliggend rapport wilden we vooral het ‘insider’-perspectief laten primeren en voor meer theoretische beschouwingen verwijzen we dan ook naar eerdere publicaties (cf. Vanderplasschen, 2004)

Applying Criteria to Examples or Learning by Comparison: Effects on Students' Evaluative Judgment and Performance in Writing

In higher education, writing tasks are often accompanied by criteria indicating key aspects of writing quality. Sometimes, these criteria are also illustrated with examples of varying quality. It is, however, not yet clear how students learn from shared criteria and examples. This research aims to investigate the learning effects of two different instructional approaches: applying criteria to examples and comparative judgment. International business students were instructed to write a five-paragraph essay, preceded by a 30-min peer assessment in which they evaluated the quality of a range of example essays. Half of the students evaluated the quality of the example essays using a list of teacher-designed criteria (criteria condition; n = 20), the other group evaluated by pairwise comparisons (comparative judgment condition; n = 20). Students were also requested to provide peer feedback. Results show that the instructional approach influenced the kind of aspects students commented on when giving feedback. Students in the comparative judgment condition provided relatively more feedback on higher order aspects such as the content and structure of the text than students in the criteria condition. This was only the case for improvement feedback; for feedback on strengths there were no significant differences. Positive effects of comparative judgment on students' own writing performance were only moderate and non-significant in this small sample. Although the transfer effects were inconclusive, this study nevertheless shows that comparative judgment can be as powerful as applying criteria to examples. Comparative judgement inherently activates students to engage with exemplars at a higher textual level and enables students to evaluate more example essays by comparison than by criteria. Further research is needed on the long-term and indirect effects of comparative judgment, as it might influence students' conceptualization of writing, without directly improving their writing performance

Comparative approaches to the assessment of writing: Reliability and validity of benchmark rating and comparative judgement

In the past years, comparative assessment approaches have gained ground as a viable method to assess text quality. Instead of providing absolute scores to a text as in holistic or analytic scoring methods, raters in comparative assessments rate text quality by comparing texts either to pre-selected benchmarks representing different levels of writing quality (i.e., benchmark rating method) or by a series of pairwise comparisons to other texts in the sample (i.e., comparative judgement; CJ). In the present study, text quality scores from the benchmarking method and CJ are compared in terms of their reliability, convergent validity and scoring distribution. Results show that benchmark ratings and CJ-ratings were highly consistent and converged to the same construct of text quality. However, the distribution of benchmark ratings showed a central tendency. It is discussed how both methods can be integrated and used such that writing can be assessed reliably, validly, but also efficiently in both writing research and practice

Validity of Comparative Judgment Scores: How Assessors Evaluate Aspects of Text Quality When Comparing Argumentative Texts

The advantage of comparative judgment is that it is particularly suited to assess multidimensional and complex constructs as text quality. This is because assessors are asked to compare texts holistically and to make a quality judgment for each text in a pairwise comparison based upon on the most salient and critical differences. Also, the resulted rank order is based on the judgment of all assessors, representing the shared consensus. In order to be able to select the right number of assessors, the question is to what extent the conceptualization of assessors prevails in the aspects they base their judgment on, or whether comparative judgment minimizes the differences between assessors. In other words, can we detect types of assessors who tend to consider certain aspects of text quality more often than others? A total of 64 assessors compared argumentative texts, after which they provided decision statements on what aspects of text quality had informed their judgment. These decision statements were coded on six overarching themes of text quality: argumentation, organization, language use, language conventions, source use, references, and layout. Using a multilevel-latent class analysis, four different types of assessors could be distinguished: narrowly focused, broadly focused, source-focused, and language-focused. However, the analysis also showed that all assessor types mainly focused on argumentation and organization, and that assessor types only partly explained whether the aspect of text quality was mentioned in a decision statement. We conclude that comparative judgment is a strong method for comparing complex constructs like text quality. First, because the rank order combines different views on text quality, but foremost because the method of comparative judgment minimizes differences between assessors

Noise-induced distortion of nonequilibrium oscillator mean limit cycle

Under general conditions imposed on an active stochastic oscillator, we study change in the size and shape of its average limit cycle as a function of temperature. Such dynamics occur in a multitude of nonequilibrium systems, including the spontaneous oscillations of hair cells of the inner ear. We demonstrate one of the many mechanisms through which distortion of the mean curve may occur and identify regions in the driven oscillator phase space susceptible to corner-cutting due to noise. This we infer causes rounding of certain sharp features in the noiseless curve given by the underlying complex theoretical model, making them inaccessible under any amount of averaging of the experimentally obtained finite-temperature trajectory.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure

Learning to write syntheses: the effect of process feedback and of observing models on performance and process behaviors

Writing a synthesis text involves interacting reading and writing processes, serving the comprehension of source information, and its integration into a reader-friendly and accurate synthesis text. Mastering these processes requires insight into process’ orchestrations. A way of achieving this is via process feedback in which students compare their process orchestration with examples. Access to such examples of enacted process orchestration models might have an additional learning effect. In the present study we replicated and extended the study of Vandermeulen et al. (Written Communication, 40(1), 90–144, 2023) on the effect of keystroke logging data-based process feedback with feed-forward exemplars when compared to national baseline performances. In addition, we report the effect of a brief extension in which learners had the opportunity to observe an enacted model of their choice, showing one of three orchestrations of the initial stage of writing a synthesis task. A total of 173 10th—grade students were randomly assigned to a process feedback condition with or without added models. A baseline, consisting of a nationally representative sample of upper-secondary students’ texts and processes, served as an alternative control group. Results showed that the process feedback, both with and without observation, had a significant effect on text quality. Regarding the process data, students in the feedback condition had a more prominent focus on the sources as they spent more time in them and switched more often between text and sources, compared to the baseline. The observation task magnified this effect

STREAM (Spatiotemporal research infrastructure for early modern Brabant and Flanders) : sources, data and methods

This article presents the technical characteristics of the Belgian STREAM-project (2015-2019). The goal of STREAM is to facilitate and innovate historical research into local and regional processes through the development of a spatiotemporal infrastructure for early modern Brabant and Flanders, two of the most urbanized and developed areas of pre-industrial Europe. To this end, STREAM systematically collects a range of key data from a diversity of historical sources to provide a geographically comprehensive and long-run quantitative and spatial account of early modern society at the local level (parishes, villages, towns) regarding territory, transport, demography, agriculture, industry and trade, related to the development of a tailored historical geographical information system (GIS) based on the well-known Ferraris map (1770-1778). This article discusses the possibilities and pitfalls of the data collection and the construction of a spatial infrastructure for the pre-statistical era