Medical students' biomedical and clinical knowledge: Combining longitudinal design, eye tracking and comparison with residents' performance

This study combines longitudinal and individual process-level analyses to investigate medical students' biomedical knowledge and how they generate a diagnosis for a patient case text. The diagnostic processes were investigated using the eye-tracking method, and students' processes were compared with those of residents. The results showed that students differed in their diagnostic performance in the beginning of the clinical phase. Of the students who had biomedical misconceptions in the preclinical phase, 69% ended up with an incorrect diagnosis, while 60% of students with accurate biomedical knowledge made a correct diagnosis. The processing of a patient case text was faster among better achieving students and residents. Furthermore, residents' illness-script activation could be seen from their eye-movement data as a relatively longer reading time regarding the sentence that concerned the enabling condition of the case. Based on the results of the study, pedagogical suggestions are discussed. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Measuring higher-order cognitive skills with multiple choice questions:potentials and pitfalls of Finnish teacher education entrance

Abstract This mixed methods study examines the structure of the multiple-choice exam for student selection in Finnish teacher education. Through qualitative content analysis, we categorized multiple-choice questions into items that assessed lower- and higher-order cognitive processes based on the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses yielded four factors that represented lower- and higher-order cognitive processing skills and comprehension of empirical and theoretical items. These were associated with matriculation examination grades, especially with the average grade and the mother tongue grade. When developing future multiple-choice exams for admissions, we recommend emphasizing higher-order processing skills and the role of source materials

The Application of JPEG2000 in Virtual Microscopy

Virtual microscopy (i.e., the viewing of entire microscope specimens on a computer display) is becoming widely applied in microscopy teaching and clinical laboratory medicine. Despite rapidly increasing use, virtual microscopy currently lacks of a universally accepted image format. A promising candidate is JPEG2000, which has potential advantages for handling gigabyte-sized virtual slides. To date, no JPEG2000-based software has been specifically suited for virtual microscopy. To study the utility of JPEG2000 in virtual microscopy, we first optimized JPEG2000 code-stream parameters for virtual slide viewing (i.e., fast navigation, zooming, and use of an overview window). Compression using ratios 25:1–30:1 with the irreversible wavelet filter were found to provide the best compromise between file size and image quality. Optimal code-stream parameters also consisted of 10 wavelet decomposition levels, progression order Resolution-Position-Component-Layer (RPCL), a precinct size of 128 × 128, and code-block size of 64 × 64. Tiling and the use of multiple quality layers were deemed unnecessary. A compression application (JVScomp) was developed for creating optimally parameterized JPEG2000 virtual slides. A viewing application (JVSview) was developed specifically for virtual microscopy, offering all of the basic viewing functions. JVSview also supports viewing of focus stacks, embedding of textual descriptions, and defining regions of interest as metadata. Combined with our server application (JVSserv), virtual slides can be viewed over networks by employing the JPEG2000 Interactive Protocol (JPIP). The software can be tested using virtual slide examples located on our public JPIP server (http://jvsmicroscope.uta.fi/). The software package is freely downloadable and usable for noncommercial purposes