Assessing student engagement in a multi-media teaching tool in Pharmacy

The School of Pharmacy at the University of Waterloo offers an Integrated Patient Focused Care (IPFC) course series to students with the first of nine courses being taught in their second year. IPFC1 includes sections on Pharmacokinetics, Clinical Biochemistry, Immunology, Critical Appraisal and Patient Focused Care. The Pharmacokinetics section is taught using an online and in-class blended approach. A survey of the 2009 cohort demonstrated that this format aided in student learning and that enthusiasm for this section of the course increased over time. A more traditional, lecture-based section of this course, Clinical Biochemistry, was not well received by students; their feedback suggested that they were not able to make clear links between laboratory data and patient assessment. We used student feedback from the 2010 course offering to drive the development of a multi-media online learning module and face-to-face instructor-led tutorial to teach the Clinical Biochemistry section of the course this winter. The design and implementation of the new modules provided us with an opportunity to investigate whether the introduction of multi-media based teaching using virtual field trips, self-assessments and a single face-to-face tutorial increased student understanding of the connections between the results from lab measurements and patient assessment and whether this teaching format enhanced student engagement. We will present how assessment of student learning and engagement was accomplished before and after the introduction of the online components, the results of our analysis of exam grades from both years and our qualitative analysis of students’ feedback from the 2011 class

Technique Integration for Requirements Assessment

In determining whether to permit a safety-critical software system to be certified and in performing independent verification and validation (IV&V) of safety- or mission-critical systems, the requirements traceability matrix (RTM) delivered by the developer must be assessed for accuracy. The current state of the practice is to perform this work manually, or with the help of general-purpose tools such as word processors and spreadsheets Such work is error-prone and person-power intensive. In this paper, we extend our prior work in application of Information Retrieval (IR) methods for candidate link generation to the problem of RTM accuracy assessment. We build voting committees from five IR methods, and use a variety of voting schemes to accept or reject links from given candidate RTMs. We report on the results of two experiments. In the first experiment, we used 25 candidate RTMs built by human analysts for a small tracing task involving a portion of a NASA scientific instrument specification. In the second experiment, we randomly seeded faults in the RTM for the entire specification. Results of the experiments are presented

Assessing Traceability of Software Engineering Artifacts

The generation of traceability links or traceability matrices is vital to many software engineering activities. It is also person-power intensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and lacks tool support. The activities that require traceability information include, but are not limited to, risk analysis, impact analysis, criticality assessment, test coverage analysis, and verification and validation of software systems. Information Retrieval (IR) techniques have been shown to assist with the automated generation of traceability links by reducing the time it takes to generate the traceability mapping. Researchers have applied techniques such as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), vector space retrieval, and probabilistic IR and have enjoyed some success. This paper concentrates on examining issues not previously widely studied in the context of traceability: the importance of the vocabulary base used for tracing and the evaluation and assessment of traceability mappings and methods using secondary measures. We examine these areas and perform empirical studies to understand the importance of each to the traceability of software engineering artifacts

An evaluation of a series of exercises in functional grammar

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

A tale of 3 tracers : contrasting uptake patterns of 18F-fluciclovine, 68Ga-PSMA, and 18F-FDG in the uterus and adnexa

A 41-year-old woman with newly diagnosed invasive lobular carcinoma of the breast underwent sequential 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT and 18F-fluciclovine PET/CT as part of an ongoing clinical trial (NCT04750473). 68Ga-PSMA PET/CT showed increased radiotracer uptake in the uterine endometrium and left adnexa. 18F-fluciclovine PET/CT showed increased radiotracer uptake in an enlarged uterus in a known uterine leiomyoma. A clinical 18F-FDG PET/CT demonstrated radiotracer uptake in the endometrium and a circumferential area of uptake in the left adnexa, a pattern more similar to the 68Ga-PSMA uptake pattern. This case highlights the discordance in the uptake pattern of two radiotracers in different benign gynecological conditions. While these tracers are approved for prostate cancer imaging, they are increasingly being used in other malignancies.http://journals.lww.com/nuclearmed/pages/default.aspxhj2023Nuclear Medicin

COPD uncovered: an international survey on the impact of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD] on a working age population

Background: Approximately 210 million people are estimated to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD] worldwide. The burden of disease is known to be high, though less is known about those of a younger age. The aim of this study was to investigate the wider personal, economic and societal burden of COPD on a cross country working-age cohort. Methods: A cross-country [Brazil, China, Germany, Turkey, US, UK] cross-sectional survey methodology was utilised to answer the research questions. 2426 participants aged 45-67 recruited via a number of recruitment methods specific to each country completed the full survey. Inclusion criteria were a recalled physician diagnosis of COPD, a smoking history of > 10 pack years and the use of COPD medications in the previous 3 months prior to questioning. The survey included items from the validated Work Productivity and Activity Impairment [WPAI] scale and the EuroQoL 5 Dimension [EQ-5D] scale. Disease severity was measured using the 5-point MRC [Medical Research Council] dyspnoea scale as a surrogate measure. Results: 64% had either moderate [n = 1012] or severe [n = 521] COPD, although this varied by country. 75% of the cohort reported at least one comorbid condition. Quality of life declined with severity of illness [mild, mean EQ-5D score = 0.84; moderate 0.58; severe 0.41]. The annual cost of healthcare utilisation [excluding treatment costs and diagnostic tests] per individual was estimated to be $2,364 [1,500] pound. For those remaining in active employment [n: 677]: lost time from work cost the individual an average of$880 [556] pound per annum and lifetime losses of $7,365 [4,661] pound amounting to$596,000 [377,000] pound for the cohort. 447 [similar to 40%] of the working population had retired prematurely because of COPD incurring individual estimated lifetime income losses of $316,000 [200,000] pound or a combined total of$141 m [89.6 pound m]. As the mean age of retirees was 58.3 and average time since retirement was 4 years, this suggests the average age of retirement is around 54. This would mean a high societal and economic impact in all study countries, particularly where typical state retirement ages are higher, for example in Brazil, Germany and the UK [65] and the US [65,66,67], compared to Turkey [58 for women, 60 for men] and China [60]. Conclusions: Although generalisation across a broader COPD population is limited due to the varied participant recruitment methods, these data nevertheless suggest that COPD has significant personal, economic and societal burden on working age people. Further efforts to improve COPD diagnosis and management are required

International genome-wide meta-analysis identifies new primary biliary cirrhosis risk loci and targetable pathogenic pathways.

Primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) is a classical autoimmune liver disease for which effective immunomodulatory therapy is lacking. Here we perform meta-analyses of discovery data sets from genome-wide association studies of European subjects (n=2,764 cases and 10,475 controls) followed by validation genotyping in an independent cohort (n=3,716 cases and 4,261 controls). We discover and validate six previously unknown risk loci for PBC (Pcombined<5 × 10(-8)) and used pathway analysis to identify JAK-STAT/IL12/IL27 signalling and cytokine-cytokine pathways, for which relevant therapies exist