Students' Attitude towards Note-taking and Reading Pamphlets/handouts in Courses

Background: the inappropriate use of handouts and notes is a common academic problem among students. Students' notes are too brief and incomplete in compare with references; hence they may not cover the required content for the courses. The aim of this paper is to analyze students' attitude toward reading handouts and notes instead of references. Methods: In this analytical and descriptive study a representative sample of 201participants, including medical, paramedical, nursing and midwifery students of Golestan University of Medical Sciences, has been drawn. The data derived from this research has been collected by a valid and reliable questionnaire. There have been 39 questions in the questionnaire ranging from 1 to 5, based on Likert scale; five represents that students are proponent of reading notes. The sum of scores was 20; the 16th version of SPSS, T-test, one-way and two-way variance analysis at significance level pFindings: 66.7% of participants were female. ANOVA test showed that there were significant differences among the mean of attitudes of medical students (18.15±1.37), nursing (17.15±1.46), and paramedical (17.67±1.35) (P=0.008). The overall results revealed that the huge amount of content of references is the main factor for students' tendency to use notes instead of references. Conclusion: the final result was that students have got positive attitude to note-taking during courses and use their notes as their direct reference material, while the class notes are not reasonably efficient, particularly when used as the main learning strategy

Survey the status and trend of traffic accidents in Qazvin Province (2006-2015)

Background: The road traffic accidents (RTAs) have caused life losses and economical damages in Iran. In spite of the high rate of RTAs and related death, no study has been conducted on RTAs in Qazvin province. Objective: The aim of this study was to explore the status and trend of RTAs in Qazvin from 2006 to 2015. Methods: This is a 10 years epidemiological study on documented data in accidents recording system (ARS) at non-communicable disease control center of Qazvin. ARS is an intelligent managed system in which the figures of all accidents and injuries records. All data from ARS were extracted from RAS by an expert staff and analyzed. Findings: Total number of traffic accidents in Qazvin from 2006 to 2015 was 65945; the central city (Qazvin) with 50168 and Takestan city with 7213 were in the top position of RTAs in Qazvin. The number of RTAs was associated with fluctuation, annually. The lowest and highest number of RTAs have been occurred in 2014 (n=5720) and 2012 (n=9718), respectively. Conclusion: This study revealed the increasing trend of RTAs specific rates per thousands of population from 2013 which has direct and indirect cost effects on the community. Keywords: Traffic Accidents, Accidents, Qazvi