The evaluation of student-centredness of teaching and learning: a new mixed-methods approach.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study was to develop and consider the usefulness of a new mixed-methods approach to evaluate the student-centredness of teaching and learning on undergraduate medical courses. An essential paradigm for the evaluation was the coherence between how teachers conceptualise their practice (espoused theories) and their actual practice (theories-in-use). METHODS: The context was a module within an integrated basic sciences course in an undergraduate medical degree programme. The programme had an explicit intention of providing a student-centred curriculum. A content analysis framework based on Weimer's dimensions of student-centred teaching was used to analyze data collected from individual interviews with seven teachers to identify espoused theories and 34h of classroom observations and one student focus group to identify theories-in-use. The interviewees were identified by purposeful sampling. The findings from the three methods were triangulated to evaluate the student-centredness of teaching and learning on the course. RESULTS: Different, but complementary, perspectives of the student-centredness of teaching and learning were identified by each method. The triangulation of the findings revealed coherence between the teachers' espoused theories and theories-in-use. CONCLUSIONS: A mixed-methods approach that combined classroom observations with interviews from a purposeful sample of teachers and students offered a useful evaluation of the extent of student-centredness of teaching and learning of this basic science course. Our case study suggests that this new approach is applicable to other courses in medical education

A kinetic approach to homogeneous Ziegler type polymerization. Transient state

In this paper we present a kinetic approach to the analysis of transient-state homogeneous Ziegler-Natta polymerization activity data. The main features of the experimental data are discussed and fitted to transient kinetic models.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Polymerization of ethylene using metallocene and aluminoxane systems

This paper describes ethylene polymerization using a number of metal-locene and aluminoxane catalyst systems, Cp2MR2 and methylaluminoxane [M = Zr, W, Nb; R = Cl, CH3]. Two types of methylaluminoxane, MAO (1) and MAO (2), were used as cocatalysts. The polymerization activities of the complexes Cp2WCl2 and Cp2NbCl2 were compared with that of Cp2ZrCl2. The Nb and W complexes were found to be less active than the Zr complex. Polyethylene characterization was also carried out by the following methods: gel permeation chromatography (GPC), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Homogeneous Ziegler-Natta polymerisation: A kinetic approach .2. Transient-state kinetics

An integrated view is presented of several possible mechanisms applicable to the interpretation of homogeneous Ziegler-Natta polymerisation. In this paper, the transient aspects related to the kinetics of Ziegler-Natta polymerisation are investigated. Extensive data are used to construct kinetic profiles (rM vs. t) from a theoretical approach. Special attention is given to the duration of the transient period as a function of the different kinetic parameters. The kinetic models developed are fitted to experimental data, either directly obtained by the authors or published in the literature. These general models have a broad range of application.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Classical Yang-Mills Black hole hair in anti-de Sitter space

The properties of hairy black holes in Einstein–Yang–Mills (EYM) theory are reviewed, focusing on spherically symmetric solutions. In particular, in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space (adS) stable black hole hair is known to exist for frak su(2) EYM. We review recent work in which it is shown that stable hair also exists in frak su(N) EYM for arbitrary N, so that there is no upper limit on how much stable hair a black hole in adS can possess