Waste-based materials in residential house construction

Waste from the construction sector has been increasing considerably in recent years, making it urgent to find alternatives to this waste that will enable us to preserve the environment and ecosystems. Many studies demonstrate the viability of using this and other waste in the construction sector, such as wood, ashes, and plastics. This article presents a review of research works where residual materials have been applied in the construction sector. To achieve this objective, a total of 35 articles were reviewed, published in English-speaking journals between 2015 and 2023. This review shows that, although in recent years efforts have been made for the application of waste materials in the construction sector has been significant, however, there is still work to be done in the study of the behavior of these residual materials, such as the emission of greenhouse gases, as well as the importance of residual materials pretreatment to ensure compatibility with the rest of the components. Another important aspect is that most studies consider environmental aspects without taking into account social and economic issues surrounding them in the construction sector

Cultural adaptation and validation of the Transcultural Self-Efficacy Tool for use with undergraduate nursing students in Spain.

BACKGROUND: The provision of culturally competent care helps reduce healthcare inequalities. There is a positive association between the cultural competence of nursing professionals and patient satisfaction, and also between nurses' self-efficacy and patients' adherence to treatment. While training in this respect is important, the self-assessment of skills should also be addressed. AIMS: To produce a culturally-validated Spanish-language version of the Transcultural Self-Efficacy Tool (TSET) for use in undergraduate nursing studies, and to evaluate its implementation within the Spanish educational system. METHODS: This cultural adaptation and psychometric validation study was carried out with student nurses from two universities. International standards were followed for the translation and cultural adaptation of the questionnaire. All students completed the questionnaire twice, the second time 14days after the first. Those who took the Transcultural Care course at the University of Malaga also completed the questionnaire a third time, after concluding this study subject. The reliability, discriminatory capacity, stability and sensitivity to change of the questionnaire were tested and confirmed, and a confirmatory factor analysis was performed. RESULTS: A total of 286 students took part in this study. Overall, the TSET obtained a reliability score of 0.978, according to Cronbach's alpha test. In relation to nationality of origin, the discriminatory capacity of the questionnaire was -1.067 (-1815 a -0,320)=0.005. Stability, assessed at 14days using the intraclass correlation coefficient, was 0.901 (0.873 a 0.923) <0.001. The before-after sensitivity to change for those who took the Transcultural Care course was 1.820 (1558 a 2083) <0.001. CONCLUSIONS: This Spanish-language version of the TSET is culturally suitable for the educational context of undergraduate nursing students in Spain, and its psychometric validation was performed with satisfactory results. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved

Spanish adaptation and validation of the Cultural Competence Assessment Tool (CCATool) for undergraduate nursing students

Aim To analyse and validate a contextually adapted version of the Papadopoulos’ Cultural Competence Assessment Tool (CCATool) for Spanish undergraduate nursing students Background Globalization has driven and intensified international migration. Thus, nurses must treat patients of many different cultural origins. Accordingly, both cultural competence and an appropriate tool with which to evaluate it are required. Methods The CCATool questionnaire was adapted for use in a Spanish context and was evaluated through a questionnaire completed by 262 undergraduate nursing students. Seven days later, the same students completed the questionnaire, without any intervention, and a subgroup of 144 students completed the questionnaire for a third time after taking a course in Transcultural Care. The reliability, sensitivity and stability of the questionnaire were assessed. Results The reliability of the questionnaire obtained an adequate Cronbach's alpha of 0.81. Stability was assessed at seven days, using the intraclass correlation coefficient, which showed good/excellent results. Moreover, the questionnaire was able to detect the changes related to the nursing educative programme, thus highlighting a good sensitivity of the tool. Conclusion Cultural competence is an essential element of nurses’ education, and instruction in this area should begin as soon as possible. In addition, an appropriate evaluation system is required. For this purpose, the present study describes and analyses a valid, reliable tool for use with undergraduate nursing students in Spain. (...)The project was funded by the University of Malaga as part of the Teaching Innovation Project (PIE19-045). Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málag

Dynamical analysis on cubic polynomials of Damped Traub s method for approximating multiple roots

[EN] In this paper, the performance of a parametric family including Newton¿s and Traub¿s schemes on multiple roots is analyzed. The local order of convergence on nonlinear equations with multiple roots is studied as well as the dynamical behavior in terms of the damping parameter on cubic polynomials with multiple roots. The fixed and critical points, and the associated parameter plane are some of the characteristic dynamical features of the family which are obtained in this work. From the analysis of these elements we identify members of the family of methods with good numerical properties in terms of stability and efficiency both for finding the simple and multiple roots, and also other ones with very unstable behavior.This research was partially supported by Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad MTM2014-52016-C2-2-P Spain and Generalitat Valenciana PROMETEO/2016/089 SpainVázquez-Lozano, JE.; Cordero Barbero, A.; Torregrosa Sánchez, JR. (2018). Dynamical analysis on cubic polynomials of Damped Traub s method for approximating multiple roots. Applied Mathematics and Computation. 328:82-99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amc.2018.01.043S829932

¿Qué opinan los estudiantes de ingeniería de nuestras formas de enseñar?

La motivación es un elemento fundamental en el aprendizaje, sin ella, difícilmente existirá el esfuerzo necesario para aprender. El objetivo de este trabajo es conocer, desde la perspectiva de los estudiantes de ingeniería, qué modos de enseñar les resultan motivadores para su aprendizaje y en qué medida este impacto motivacional puede estar afectado por sus diferencias individuales. Conocer la opinión de los alumnos es importante, ya que no es la situación de aprendizaje en sí misma la que resulta determinante, sino el significado que tenga para el estudiante. En este estudio participaron un total de 501 alumnos de ingeniería de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Se les aplicó el cuestionario EMQ-B que permite medir el valor motivacional de las diferentes pautas docentes evaluadas. En general, los resultados del análisis descriptivo permiten clasificar las estrategias evaluadas en tres grupos. El primero incluye las estrategias consideradas como altamente motivadoras; el segundo, las claramente rechazadas y el tercero, las estrategias a las que los alumnos les atribuyen un cierto valor motivador, pero no muy alto. Este último grupo resulta relevante porque incluye algunas de las estrategias con las que más se viene trabajando en la actualidad –trabajo en grupo,realización de trabajos prácticos, etc. El análisis de varianza sugiere que el género puede estar modulando dichas valoraciones motivacionales

A Meta-modeling Approach to Take into Account Data Domain Characteristics and Relationships in Information Visualizations

[EN]Visual explanations are powerful means to convey information to large audiences. However, the design of information visualizations is a complex task, because a lot of factors are involved (the audience profile, the data domain, etc.). The complexity of this task can lead to poor designs that could make users reach wrong conclusions from the visualized data. This work illustrates the process of identifying features that could make an information visualization confusing or even misleading with the goal of arranging them into a meta-model. The metamodel provides a powerful resource to automatically generate information visualizations and dashboards that take into account not only the input data, but also the audience’s characteristics, the available data domain knowledge and even the data context

A Meta-Model Integration for Supporting Knowledge Discovery in Specific Domains: A Case Study in Healthcare

[EN]Knowledge management is one of the key priorities of many organizations. They face di erent challenges in the implementation of knowledge management processes, including the transformation of tacit knowledge—experience, skills, insights, intuition, judgment and know-how—into explicit knowledge. Furthermore, the increasing number of information sources and services in some domains, such as healthcare, increase the amount of information available. Therefore, there is a need to transform that information in knowledge. In this context, learning ecosystems emerge as solutions to support knowledge management in a di erent context. On the other hand, the dashboards enable the generation of knowledge through the exploitation of the data provided from di erent sources. The model-driven development of these solutions is possible through two meta-models developed in previous works. Even though those meta-models solve several problems, the learning ecosystem meta-model has a lack of decision-making support. In this context, this work provides two main contributions to face this issue. First, the definition of a holistic meta-model to support decision-making processes in ecosystems focused on knowledge management, also called learning ecosystems. The second contribution of this work is an instantiation of the presented holistic meta-model in the healthcare domain

Specifying information dashboards’ interactive features through meta-model instantiation

[EN]Information dashboards1 can be leveraged to make informed decisions with the goal of improving policies, processes, and results in different contexts. However, the design process of these tools can be convoluted, given the variety of profiles that can be involved in decision-making processes. The educative context is one of the contexts that can benefit from the use of information dashboards, but given the diversity of actors within this area (teachers, managers, students, researchers, etc.), it is necessary to take into account different factors to deliver useful and effective tools. This work describes an approach to generate information dashboards with interactivity capabilities in different contexts through meta-modeling. Having the possibility of specifying interaction patterns within the generative workflow makes the personalization process more fine-grained, allowing to match very specific requirements from the user. An example of application within the context of Learning Analytics is presented to demonstrate the viability of this approach

A meta-model to develop learning ecosystems with support for knowledge discovery and decisionmaking processes.

There are software solutions to solve most of the problems related to information management in any company or institutions, but still, there is a problem for transforming information into knowledge. Technological ecosystems emerge as a solution to combine existing tools and human resources to solve different problems of knowledge management. In particular, when the ecosystem is focused on learning processes associated with knowledge are named learning ecosystems. The learning ecosystem metamodel defined in previous works solves several problems related to the definition and implementation of these solutions. However, there are still challenges associated with improving the analysis and visualization of information as a way to discover knowledge and support decision making processes. On the other hand, there is a metamodel proposal to define customized dashboards for supporting decision-making processes. This proposal aims to integrate both metamodels as a way to improve the definition of learning ecosystems

Planificación, comunicación y metodologías activas: Evaluación online de la asignatura ingeniería de software durante la crisis del COVID-19

The coronavirus pandemic has had a high impact worldwide. The health crisis has not only had an impact on people's own health and on health systems, but has also affected other areas. In the educational context, the lockdown measures implemented by different governments have challenged the learning ecosystem. In the case of higher education in Spain, with a strong attendance factor in most public universities, face-to-face classes were interrupted after a month in the second term, ending the academic year in the online mode. This change has meant a great effort on the teachers’ side to transform the face-to-face teaching into the online approach, which in many cases has meant quite a comprehensive new design of the subject, changing the evaluation process and the methodologies used. This work presents a success case of online assessment developed in the Software Engineering I subject of the Degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Salamanca. The objective is to show how the previous use of active methodologies and the integration of educational technologies in classroom-based teaching facilitates the transformation of assessment to an online or blended approach while maintaining a high degree of student involvement and satisfaction. After presenting a comparison between the face-to-face approach and the adaptation to the online approach, an analysis is made of the learning results and student satisfaction concerning previous academic years. The results show that the change of approach has not reduced the satisfaction results obtained in previous courses. In terms of learning outcomes, there is an overall increase in the grades obtained by students in all assessment items.La pandemia de coronavirus ha tenido un alto impacto a nivel mundial. La crisis sanitaria no solo ha tenido un impacto en la propia salud de las personas y en los sistemas de salud, sino que ha afectado a otros ámbitos. En el contexto educativo, las medidas de confinamiento implementadas por los diferentes gobiernos han supuesto un reto para el ecosistema de aprendizaje. En el caso de la educación superior en España, con un fuerte componente presencial en la mayoría de las universidades públicas, se interrumpieron las clases presenciales un mes después del inicio del segundo cuatrimestre, finalizando el curso académico en modalidad online. Este cambio ha supuesto un gran esfuerzo por parte de los docentes para transformar la enseñanza presencial al enfoque online, lo que en muchos casos ha supuesto un rediseño casi integral de la asignatura, cambiando el proceso de evaluación y las metodologías utilizadas. El presente trabajo presenta un caso de éxito de evaluación online desarrollado en la asignatura Ingeniería de Software I del Grado en Ingeniería Informática de la Universidad de Salamanca. El objetivo es sustentar cómo el uso previo de metodologías activas y la integración de tecnologías educativas en la docencia presencial facilita la transformación de la evaluación a un enfoque online o mixto, a la par que mantiene un alto grado de implicación y satisfacción por parte de los estudiantes. Para ello, tras presentar una comparativa entre el enfoque presencial y la adaptación al enfoque online, se realiza un análisis de los resultados de aprendizaje y la satisfacción de los estudiantes respecto a los cursos académicos previos. Los resultados muestran que el cambio de enfoque no ha mermado los resultados de satisfacción obtenidos en los cursos anteriores. En cuanto a los resultados de aprendizaje, hay un aumento general de las calificaciones obtenidas por los estudiantes en todos los ítems de evaluación