Scaffolding laboratory skills for first-year physics majors

One of the core utilities of a physics laboratory program is the acquisition and application of several core ‘laboratory skills’, such as accurate data logging, comparisons of theoretical and experimental data, and handling experimental uncertainties. Physics laboratory programs do not adequately reinforce content (Holmes et al., 2017), therefore, explicitly teaching laboratory skills is as vital as ever. At the University of New South Wales, we have a laboratory program for a small subset of physics students who intend to complete a physics major (approximately 60 of our yearly 1400). This small cohort offers a unique opportunity to efficiently implement adaptable interventions. In this presentation, we outline the implementation and immediate effects of an explicit scaffolding intervention designed to improve students’ uptake of laboratory skills. Laboratory skills are de-embedded from the laboratory manual and presented as separate learning modules that the students must progress through alongside their labs. The experiments themselves reference the learning modules but the teaching of the skills is now no longer done within the laboratory. Student laboratory submissions are also restructured to require explicit use of the relevant laboratory skills learned thus far. By presenting the lab skills week-by-week (e.g., proper data taking one week, followed by graphing/curve fitting the following, then uncertainties, etc.), we intend to reduce the cognitive load on the students (Plass et al., 2010); before this intervention, students were confused and overwhelmed when asked to incorporate all the term’s lab skills into each submission. We expect that explicit scaffolding of the laboratory skills as separate modules will improve students’ focus on the weekly relevant laboratory skill and the transferability of their newly gained knowledge.  REFERENCES Holmes, N. G., Olsen, J., Thomas, J. L., & Wieman, C. E. (2017). Value added or misattributed? A multi-institution study on the educational benefit of labs for reinforcing physics content. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 13(1), 010129. Plass, J. L., Moreno, R., & Brünken, R. (Eds.). (2010). Cognitive Load Theory. Cambridge University Press

Consolidating CCDs from multiple data sources: A modular approach

Background Healthcare providers sometimes receive multiple continuity of care documents (CCDs) for a single patient encompassing the patient’s various encounters and medical history recorded in different information systems. It is cumbersome for providers to explore different pages of CCDs to find specific data which can be duplicated or even conflicted. This study describes initial steps toward a modular system that integrates and de-duplicates multiple CCDs into one consolidated document for viewing or processing patient-level data. Materials and Methods The authors developed a prototype system to consolidate and de-duplicate CCDs. The system is engineered to be scalable, extensible, and open source. Using a corpus of 150 de-identified CCDs synthetically generated from a single data source with a common vocabulary to represent 50 unique patients, the authors tested the system’s performance and output. Performance was measured based on document throughput and reduction in file size and volume of data. The authors further compared the output of the system with manual consolidation and de-duplication. Testing across multiple vendor systems or implementations was not performed. Results All of the input CCDs was successfully consolidated, and no data were lost. De-duplication significantly reduced the number of entries in different sections (49% in Problems, 60.6% in Medications, and 79% in Allergies) and reduced the size of the documents (57.5%) as well as the number of lines in each document (58%). The system executed at a rate of approximately 0.009–0.03 s per rule depending on the complexity of the rule. Discussion and Conclusion Given increasing adoption and use of health information exchange (HIE) to share data and information across the care continuum, duplication of information is inevitable. A novel system designed to support automated consolidation and de-duplication of information across clinical documents as they are exchanged shows promise. Future work is needed to expand the capabilities of the system and further test it using heterogeneous vocabularies across multiple HIE scenarios

Finding qualitative research: an evaluation of search strategies

BACKGROUND: Qualitative research makes an important contribution to our understanding of health and healthcare. However, qualitative evidence can be difficult to search for and identify, and the effectiveness of different types of search strategies is unknown. METHODS: Three search strategies for qualitative research in the example area of support for breast-feeding were evaluated using six electronic bibliographic databases. The strategies were based on using thesaurus terms, free-text terms and broad-based terms. These strategies were combined with recognised search terms for support for breast-feeding previously used in a Cochrane review. For each strategy, we evaluated the recall (potentially relevant records found) and precision (actually relevant records found). RESULTS: A total yield of 7420 potentially relevant records was retrieved by the three strategies combined. Of these, 262 were judged relevant. Using one strategy alone would miss relevant records. The broad-based strategy had the highest recall and the thesaurus strategy the highest precision. Precision was generally poor: 96% of records initially identified as potentially relevant were deemed irrelevant. Searching for qualitative research involves trade-offs between recall and precision. CONCLUSIONS: These findings confirm that strategies that attempt to maximise the number of potentially relevant records found are likely to result in a large number of false positives. The findings also suggest that a range of search terms is required to optimise searching for qualitative evidence. This underlines the problems of current methods for indexing qualitative research in bibliographic databases and indicates where improvements need to be made

X-Phi within its Proper Bounds

Using two decades worth of experimental philosophy (aka x-phi), Edouard Machery argues in Philosophy within its Proper Bounds (OUP, 2017) that philosophers’ use of the “method of cases” is unreliable because it has a strong tendency to elicit different intuitive responses from non-philosophers. And because, as Machery argues, appealing to such cases is usually the only way for philosophers to acquire the kind of knowledge they seek, an extensive philosophical skepticism follows. I argue that Machery’s “Unreliability” argument fails because, once its premises are percisified, they are either self-defeating or without justification. This is a significant result because Machery’s arguments are the most widely cited and discussed x-phi arguments for philosophical skepticism and many hold that Machery provides the most empirically informed, convincing, and thus best case for this kind of skepticism. So, if my arguments are sound, then the best x-phi argument for philosophical skepticism fails. I further argue that this result provides strong reason to believe the more general conclusion that “negative” x-phi is likely doomed: x-phi likely can never support a substantive philosophical skepticism. Ultimately, I argue for the broad conclusion that all empirically minded arguments for philosophical skepticism are likely to fail for the same reasons that Machery’s does, i.e. they are (likely) self-defeating

No Hope for Conciliationism

Conciliationism is the family of views that rationality requires agents to reduce confidence or suspend belief in p when acknowledged epistemic peers (i.e. agents who are (approximately) equally well-informed and intellectually capable) disagree about p. While Conciliationism is prima facie plausible, some have argued that Conciliationism is not an adequate theory of peer disagreement because it is self-undermining. Responses to this challenge can be put into two mutually exclusive and exhaustive groups: the Solution Responses which deny Conciliationism is self-undermining and attempt to provide arguments which demonstrate this; and the Skeptical Responses which accept that Conciliationism is self-undermining but attempt to mitigate this result by arguing this is either impermanent and/or not very worrisome. I argue that, by Conciliationism’s own lights, both kinds of responses (almost certainly) fail to save Conciliationism from being self-undermining. Thus, Conciliationism is (almost certainly) permanently self-undermining. This result is significant because it demonstrates that Conciliationism is likely hopeless: there is likely nothing that can save Conciliationism from this challenge. I further argue that Conciliationism, like any view, should be abandoned if it is (almost certainly) hopeless