Development of a short and universal learning self-efficacy scale for clinical skills

Background Learning self-efficacy, defined as learners’ confidence in their capability to learn specific subjects, is crucial for the enhancement of academic progress, because it is positively correlated with academic achievements and effective learning strategy use. In this study, we developed a universal scale called the Learning Self-Efficacy Scale (L-SES) for Clinical Skills for undergraduate medical students and validated it through item analysis and content validity index (CVI) calculation. Design The L-SES was developed based on the framework of Bloom’s taxonomy, and the questions were generated through expert consensus and CVI calculation. A pilot version of the L-SES was administered to 235 medical students attending a basic clinical skills course. The collected data were then examined through item analysis. Results The first draft of the L-SES comprised 15 questions. After expert consensus and CVI calculation, 3 questions were eliminated; hence, the pilot version comprised 12 questions. The CVI values of the 12 questions were between .88 and 1, indicating high content validity. Moreover, the item analysis indicated that the quality of L-SES reached the qualified threshold. The results showed that the L-SES scores were unaffected by gender (t = −0.049; 95% confidence interval [−.115, .109], p > .05). Conclusion The L-SES is a short, well-developed scale that can serve as a generic assessment tool for measuring medical students’ learning self-efficacy for clinical skills. Moreover, the L-SES is unaffected by gender differences. However, additional analyses in relevant educational settings are needed

Enhancement of hole injection using ozone treated Ag nanodots dispersed on indium tin oxide anode for organic light emitting diodes

The authors report the enhancement of hole injection using an indium tin oxide (ITO) anode covered with ultraviolet (UV) ozone-treated Ag nanodots for fac tris (2-phenylpyridine) iridium Ir(ppy)3-doped phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and UV-visible spectrometer analysis exhibit that UV-ozone treatment of the Ag nanodots dispersed on the ITO anode leads to formation of Ag2O nanodots with high work function and high transparency. Phosphorescent OLEDs fabricated on the Ag2O nanodot-dispersed ITO anode showed a lower turn-on voltage and higher luminescence than those of OLEDs prepared with a commercial ITO anode. It was thought that, as Ag nanodots changed to Ag2O nanodots by UV-ozone treatment, the decrease of the energy barrier height led to the enhancement of hole injection in the phosphorescent OLEDs.This work was supported by Korea Research Foundation grant funded by Korean Government (MOEHRD: Basic Research Promotion Fund)(KRF-2006-003-D00243) and Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Energy

Magnetic Iron Oxide Nanoparticles: Synthesis and Surface Functionalization Strategies

Surface functionalized magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (NPs) are a kind of novel functional materials, which have been widely used in the biotechnology and catalysis. This review focuses on the recent development and various strategies in preparation, structure, and magnetic properties of naked and surface functionalized iron oxide NPs and their corresponding application briefly. In order to implement the practical application, the particles must have combined properties of high magnetic saturation, stability, biocompatibility, and interactive functions at the surface. Moreover, the surface of iron oxide NPs could be modified by organic materials or inorganic materials, such as polymers, biomolecules, silica, metals, etc. The problems and major challenges, along with the directions for the synthesis and surface functionalization of iron oxide NPs, are considered. Finally, some future trends and prospective in these research areas are also discussed

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe

Development of a short and universal learning self-efficacy scale for clinical skills

[[abstract]]Background Learning self-efficacy, defined as learners’ confidence in their capability to learn specific subjects, is crucial for the enhancement of academic progress, because it is positively correlated with academic achievements and effective learning strategy use. In this study, we developed a universal scale called the Learning Self-Efficacy Scale (L-SES) for Clinical Skills for undergraduate medical students and validated it through item analysis and content validity index (CVI) calculation. Design The L-SES was developed based on the framework of Bloom’s taxonomy, and the questions were generated through expert consensus and CVI calculation. A pilot version of the L-SES was administered to 235 medical students attending a basic clinical skills course. The collected data were then examined through item analysis. Results The first draft of the L-SES comprised 15 questions. After expert consensus and CVI calculation, 3 questions were eliminated; hence, the pilot version comprised 12 questions. The CVI values of the 12 questions were between .88 and 1, indicating high content validity. Moreover, the item analysis indicated that the quality of L-SES reached the qualified threshold. The results showed that the L-SES scores were unaffected by gender (t = −0.049; 95% confidence interval [−.115, .109], p > .05). Conclusion The L-SES is a short, well-developed scale that can serve as a generic assessment tool for measuring medical students’ learning self-efficacy for clinical skills. Moreover, the L-SES is unaffected by gender differences. However, additional analyses in relevant educational settings are needed