Taking advantage of unexpected WebCONSORT results

To estimate treatment effects, trials are initiated by randomising patients to the interventions under study and finish by comparing patient evolution. In order to improve the trial report, the CONSORT statement provides authors and peer reviewers with a guide of the essential items that would allow research replication. Additionally, WebCONSORT aims to facilitate author reporting by providing the items from the different CONSORT extensions that are relevant to the trial being reported. WebCONSORT has been estimated to improve the proportion of reported items by 0.04 (95% CI, –0.02 to 0.10), interpreted as “no important difference”, in accordance with the scheduled desired scenario of a 0.15 effect size improvement. However, in a non-scheduled analysis, it was found that, despite clear instructions, around a third of manuscripts selected for trials by the editorial staff were not actually randomised trials. We argue that surprises benefit science, and that further research should be conducted in order to improve the performance of editorial staff.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Notes on Oscillator-Like Interactions of Various Spin Relativistic Particles

The equations for various spin particles with oscillator-like interactions are discussed in this talk. Contents: 1. Comment on "The Klein-Gordon Oscillator"; 2. The Dirac oscillator in quaternion form; 3. The Dirac-Dowker oscillator; 4. The Weinberg oscillator; 5. Note on the two-body Dirac oscillator.Comment: LaTeX file, 12 pp. Talk given at the Second Workshop "Osciladores Arm\'onicos". Cocoyoc, M\'exico, March 23-25, 1994. To be published in NASA Conference Proceedings. Preprint IFUNAM FT-94-44, EFUAZ-94-0

Relevancia de la ruta de la anemia de Fanconi en la inestabilidad genética de las células de leucema mieloide crónica

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, Departamento de Fisiología Animal (Fisiología II), leída el 13-10-2014Depto. de Genética, Fisiología y MicrobiologíaFac. de Ciencias BiológicasTRUEunpu

Avaluació experimental de la millora de l’aprenentatge en estadística

Background: e-status is a web-based tool able to generate different statistical exercices and to provide immediate feed-back to students´ answers. Although the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is widely extended in undergraduate education, there are few studies formally evaluating its learning effects. Method: all the students (121) from a dentistry introductory statistical course were randomly assigned to use the tool with one of two sets of 6 problems. The exam includes questions related with topics covered by both types of problems. Exam evaluator was masked to the problems set. Results: 94 students used the tool, solving more than 1400 exercises over six weeks. Providing e status exercises to students has a learning effect of 0.96 points (95% CI from 0.20 to 1.72) in a ten points scale. Among those 94 students who employed e status, effect size was 1.27 (0.35 to 2.19). Conclusion: providing e-status exercises to students has a direct effect on learning statistical mechanical operations. Further effects on higher cognitive levels still to be explored. It is feasible to formally assess the learning effect of an innovative tool

Assessing Shiny apps through student feedback: recommendations from a qualitative study

This is the accepted version of the following article: Gonzalez, J., Lopez, M., Cobo, E., Cortes, J. Assessing Shiny apps through student feedback: recommendations from a qualitative study. "Computer applications in engineering education", Setembre 2018, vol. 26, núm. 5, p. 1813-1824., which has been published in final form at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cae.21932Teaching statistics has benefited from Java applets, the successful technology that appeared in the late 90s and which allowed real interactivity on an Internet browser. Combining dynamic functionality with the web provides an inspirational complement to the contents of many subjects in undergraduate statistics courses, especially for active learning activities. Since Java applets are becoming obsolete, we explore a different technology based on R (currently a popular statistical language) and Shiny, which is a web framework for developing interactive applications inside the R environment. Although the pedagogical value of these tools has been implicitly accepted so far, our aim is to consider the students' perspective while investigating more suitable means to accompany the use of apps in statistics. We conducted a qualitative study in which we tested 10 of our applications and collected student opinions through questionnaires and regular meetings. Our conclusions indicate that the students view these resources positively, although they demand more support, just enough to facilitate both getting started and using the tools effectively. In addition, programming in R is surely more accessible and satisfying for statistics lecturers than other languages and, consequently, implementing instructional activities can be specially tailored by the teacher.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A web-based learning tool improves student performance in statistics: a randomized masked trial

Background: e-status is a web-based tool able to generate different statistical exercises and to provide immediate feedback to students’ answers. Although the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is becoming widespread in undergraduate education, there are few experimental studies evaluating its effects on learning. Method: All of the students (121) from an introductory course for statistics in dentistry were randomly assigned to use the tool with one of two 6-problem sets, known as types A and B. The primary endpoint was the grade difference obtained in the final exam, composed of two blocks of questions related to types A and B. The exam evaluator was masked to the intervention group. Results: We found that the effect of e-status on the student grade was an improvement of 0.48 points(95% CI:0.10-0.86) on a ten-point scale. Among the 94 students who actually employed e-status, the effect size was 0.63 (95% CI: 0.17-1.10). Conclusions: It is feasible to formally assess the learning effect of an innovative tool. Providing e-status exercises to students has a direct effect on learning numerical operations related to statistics. Further effects on higher cognitive levels still have to be explored.Postprint (published version