Academic performance of undergraduate dental students with learning disabilities

© 2017 British Dental Association. All rights reserved.Aims To compare the academic performance of undergraduate dental students with known learning disabilities (LDs) to their peers.Methods This study analysed the results of students in applied dental knowledge (ADK) progress tests across four cohorts of dental students. A mixed model analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to compare the performance of students with known disability to their peers. ADK test sitting was treated as a repeated measures variable, and the outcome variable of interest was percentage score on the ADK.Results Students' performance data on five ADK test sittings (ADK15, ADK16, ADK17, ADK18, and ADK19) by disability showed a significant main effect of test but no significant effect of disability or any interaction between disability and test.Conclusions This is the first study that explores the academic performance of dental students with a diagnosis of disability. The findings give reassurance to all stakeholders that, within the study population, students with LDs are not disadvantaged in knowledge-based assessments, demonstrating compliance with the legal obligations. Further research is required to explore how generalisable these findings are, as well as assess academic, clinical, and behavioural attributes of students with learning disabilities

The Shackles of Practice: History of psychology, research assessment and the curriculum

The history of psychology is being increasingly marginalized in British universities. In this article we argue that this marginalization has been brought about by a combination of material circumstances resulting from the marketization of the UK Higher Education sector. One consequence of this, the statutory audit known as the Research Excellence Framework, has made it increasingly difficult to undertake historical work as it has traditionally been done in UK Psychology Departments. At best such a situation challenges the ambition for historical work to have an impact on psychology. At worst it potentially renders the history of psychology irrelevant. Yet the theoretical justification for history of psychology has never been stronger. Psychology’s subject matter is neither exclusively natural nor entirely socially constructed, but lies on that “somewhat suspect borderland between physiology and philosophy” as Wilhelm Wundt put it. The discipline’s ontological claims are therefore always made from within epistemological frameworks which are themselves products of particular historical contexts. Such arguments have persuaded us that history of psychology has a fundamental role to play within the wider discipline. Yet as historians we cannot ignore the constraining social and material circumstances in which our field operates. We conclude that although the constraints of practice suggest that its prospects for influencing its parent discipline are seriously challenged, there are nevertheless opportunities for the history of psychology areas such as the undergraduate curriculum

Issues in the Conduct of PSSA

Aerospace Recommended Practices (ARPs) 4754 and 4761 introduce the concept of preliminary system safety assessment (PSSA) as a key stage in the safety process for systems on civil aircraft. PSSA is intended to follow functional hazard assessment (FHA). Its purpose is to assist in validating a proposed system architecture and to allocate (derived) safety requirements to components of that architecture. Although the ARPs claim to represent “best practise” some of their recommendations, including the conduct of PSSA, are novel, and it is not always clear how to interpret and apply them. The purpose of this paper is to give some guidelines on the conduct of PSSA, based on our experience of assisting a number of organisations in developing safety processes in response to the ARPs. We discuss some major issues which, in our experience, cause significant difficulties in using the ARPs. The ARPs are clear about the purpose of PSSA – but in our experience the purpose isn’t always adequately understood (in part this is due to the nature of the example in ARP 4761 Appendix L). Where practical, we illustrate our concerns by presenting a critique of the example in Appendix L of ARP 4761