Critical thinking and its importance in the present days for social workers

Critical thinking is multidimensional, it encompasses the intellectual (logic, rationality), psychological (self-awareness, empathy), sociological (in terms of socio-historical context), ethics (norms and moral evaluation) and philosophical (meaning of nature and the human being). As a competency, or set of competencies, critical thinking can be developed and assessed. In this sense, the exploratory study that we intend to present aims to contribute to the evaluation of the importance that students attribute to critical thinking, as well as to the evaluation of critical thinking as a competence in the present situation. Before the pandemic situation we conducted a study with a universe of the 1st year social work students recently graduated, whose training included the critical thinking curricular unit in their study plan, we used as a data collection technician, a questionnaire with likert scale to measure the students opinions. The results were very positive and students admit that it helped them to analyze information (the importance of details), to practice curiosity and skepticism (to ask questions and compare with other sources) and to question (particularly, their own beliefs), including problem solving or decision making. With this recent challenge, consequence of Covid-19, it was necessary to alter all the previous model and adjust it to the pandemic situation through distance learning. Due to the characteristics of this curricular unit, we understand that in addition to the contents and usual dynamic, it was important to support students in adapting to the new methods and use this situation in favor of the benefits of thinking critically. Being a new situation for all (teachers and students) systematic evaluations were made to perceive if the results of the changes introduced were promoting the desired effect. Subsequently, in a total of 6 classes, with about 35 students each, we selected a non-probabilistic sample of 2 students of each class and each student was asked to make a critical assessment of the impact of this curricular unit in their learning process. Among other results that we intend to present, the key was to achieve a balance between the need for security and the need to know other ways of doing or thinking and classifying the critical thinking skills acquired as potentialities to support the uncertainty of the moment. This is where critical reflection (especially involving others) can play a key role in building trust by analyzing strengths-based practice, but it also allows considering alternative options, points of view, increase their ability to assess and position themselves in different contexts and learn to be prepared for unexpected situations.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Surface abundances of ON stars

Massive stars burn hydrogen through the CNO cycle during most of their evolution. When mixing is efficient, or when mass transfer in binary systems happens, chemically processed material is observed at the surface of O and B stars. ON stars show stronger lines of nitrogen than morphologically normal counterparts. Whether this corresponds to the presence of material processed through the CNO cycle or not is not known. Our goal is to answer this question. We perform a spectroscopic analysis of a sample of ON stars with atmosphere models. We determine the fundamental parameters as well as the He, C, N, and O surface abundances. We also measure the projected rotational velocities. We compare the properties of the ON stars to those of normal O stars. We show that ON stars are usually helium-rich. Their CNO surface abundances are fully consistent with predictions of nucleosynthesis. ON stars are more chemically evolved and rotate - on average - faster than normal O stars. Evolutionary models including rotation cannot account for the extreme enrichment observed among ON main sequence stars. Some ON stars are members of binary systems, but others are single stars as indicated by stable radial velocities. Hence, mass transfer is not a simple explanation for the observed chemical properties. We conclude that ON stars show extreme chemical enrichment at their surface, consistent with nucleosynthesis through the CNO cycle. Its origin is not clear at present.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures (+ appendix). A&A accepte

Electron Transport through a Molecular Conductor with Center-of-Mass Motion

The linear conductance of a molecular conductor oscillating between two metallic leads is investigated numerically both for Hubbard interacting and noninteracting electrons. The molecule-leads tunneling barriers depend on the molecule displacement from its equilibrium position. The results present an interesting interference which leads to a conductance dip at the electron-hole symmetry point, that could be experimentally observable. It is shown that this dip is caused by the destructive interference between the purely electronic and phonon-assisted tunneling channels, which are found to carry opposite phases. When an internal vibrational mode is also active, the electron-hole symmetry is broken but a Fano-like interference is still observed

Unified model for vortex-string network evolution

We describe and numerically test the velocity-dependent one-scale (VOS) string evolution model, a simple analytic approach describing a string network with the averaged correlation length and velocity. We show that it accurately reproduces the large-scale behaviour (in particular the scaling laws) of numerical simulations of both Goto-Nambu and field theory string networks. We explicitly demonstrate the relation between the high-energy physics approach and the damped and non-relativistic limits which are relevant for condensed matter physics. We also reproduce experimental results in this context and show that the vortex-string density is significantly reduced by loop production, an effect not included in the usual `coarse-grained' approach.Comment: 5 pages; v2: cosmetic changes, version to appear in PR