Problem-based learning case writing by students based on early years clinical attachments: a focus group evaluation.

To evaluate the perception of medical students of the new approach to problem-based learning which involves students writing their own problem-based learning cases based on their recent clinical attachment, and team assessment.Focus group interviews with students using purposive sampling. Transcripts of the audio recordings were analysed using thematic analysis.Imperial College School of Medicine, London.Medical students in the second year of the MBBS course, who attended the problem-based learning case writing session.To elicit the students views about problem-based learning case writing and team assessment.The following broad themes emerged: effect of group dynamics on the process; importance of defining the tutors role; role of summative assessment; feedback as a learning tool and the skills developed during the process.Overall the students found the new approach, writing problem-based learning cases based on patients seen during their clinical attachments, useful in helping them to gain a better understanding about the problem-based learning process, promoting creativity and reinforcing the importance of team work and peer assessment which are vital professional skills. Further tutor development and guidance for students about the new approach was found to be important in ensuring it is a good learning experience. We hope this evaluation will be of use to other institutions considering introducing students case writing to problem-based learning

A participatory action research study of key account management changes

Pure Participatory Action Research projects in the IMP research tradition are rather rare. This paper describes both the process and the outcomes of such a project carried out for a major business to retail firm in the UK. The issue at hand was, and is, Key Account Management, defined in a very broad way. The process is one of changing the ways in which the actors in the firm at different levels work together to try to coordinate the long term strategy and short term operations in relation to powerful retail customers. The outcomes for the firm have, so far, been very positive. The outcomes for the researchers are too early to fully evaluate but look very promising

One case study is enough

Case studies are becoming an increasingly popular research method. However the usual justification for their use is that they provide a rich picture of a particular situation. While this is certainly true there is a problem in linking the findings to theory. This is particularly true for single case research. However the philosophical position of Critical Realism can supply just such a justification based upon the concepts of theoretical entities having causal powers and liabilities that interact as particular mechanism to explain the occurrence of events

The social worker in the patient work program of a private psychiatric hospital

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Thirty Years of Turnstiles and Transport

To characterize transport in a deterministic dynamical system is to compute exit time distributions from regions or transition time distributions between regions in phase space. This paper surveys the considerable progress on this problem over the past thirty years. Primary measures of transport for volume-preserving maps include the exiting and incoming fluxes to a region. For area-preserving maps, transport is impeded by curves formed from invariant manifolds that form partial barriers, e.g., stable and unstable manifolds bounding a resonance zone or cantori, the remnants of destroyed invariant tori. When the map is exact volume preserving, a Lagrangian differential form can be used to reduce the computation of fluxes to finding a difference between the action of certain key orbits, such as homoclinic orbits to a saddle or to a cantorus. Given a partition of phase space into regions bounded by partial barriers, a Markov tree model of transport explains key observations, such as the algebraic decay of exit and recurrence distributions.Comment: Updated and corrected versio