Using an audience response system to calibrate dental faculty assessing student clinical competence.

In order to best prepare students to become competent and confident practitioners in a clinical environment upon graduating dental school, it is imperative for them to receive consistent and productive feedback from the supervising faculty. Through academic engagement, and more specifically faculty calibration, it may be possible to eliminate the disconnect that sometimes exists between faculty expectations and terminology, and those of the students. In terms of definitions, academic engagement reflects faculty scholarly development activities that support integration of relevant, current theory of best practices consistent with the school\u27s mission, expected learner outcomes, and supporting strategies.1-6, 32 The difficulty lies in finding an effective, yet cost efficient way to conduct that faculty calibration and ensure that students are receiving consistent and reliable feedback in order to mold them into the most competent clinicians they are capable of becoming. It can be stated that professional faculty engagement is the cornerstone of providing consistent and calibrated clinical instruction to students for patient centered care learner outcomes.7-11 A significant part of faculty engagement with professional students is to provide foundational knowledge, attitude and skills for both formative and summative assessment of competence.12-18. We hypothesize that the introduction of faculty calibration to the clinical faculty will result in more consistent feedback, leading to more predictable results and ultimately more competent clinicians. This, in turn, will increase student perception of clinical faculty yielding an increase in the belief that they are receiving quality, accurate and consistent instruction.24-30

PLD.08 Influence of the duration of the second stage on the likelihood of obstetric anal sphincter injury: a retrospective cohort study.

To determine if duration of the second stage influences the likelihood of sustaining obstetric anal sphincter injuries (OASIS) in women undergoing spontaneous vaginal delivery.Othe

Demographic diversity in the measurement and meaning of unintended pregnancy

textUnintended pregnancy is a significant public policy issue in the United States, yet current understanding of the measurement and meaning of women’s pregnancy intentions is incomplete. The aim of this dissertation is to provide new theoretical insight into women’s childbearing intentions and feelings about pregnancy, particularly when these two measures appear to be incongruent (i.e. women report feeling happy about pregnancy, but at the same time report wanting no more children). Incongruence is particularly common among Hispanic women, and current literature tends to view such women as ambivalent, assuming that they lack a clear and strong desire to avoid conception. Ambivalence, in turn, has been linked to less effective contraceptive use. Using a mixed-methods approach, this dissertation examines the hypothesis that incongruent intentions and feelings are not necessarily a reflection of ambivalence but rather two distinct concepts: women may be quite resolute about avoiding future pregnancies, yet for various reasons still express happiness at the prospect of a pregnancy. In Chapter 1, we examine prospectively measured happiness and intentions among a cohort of Latina pill-users at the U.S.-Mexico border, providing evidence that feelings of happiness about pregnancy may co-exist with effective use of contraception and with plans to continue method use long-term to prevent conception. In Chapter 2, we investigate the relationship between happiness and contraceptive desires, demonstrating that women with incongruent intentions and feelings often desire highly effective or permanent methods that they do not have the ability to access. Finally, in Chapter 3, we explore the concepts of happiness and intentions and the factors underlying each from women’s own perspectives through in-depth interviews, and provide a range of explanations for why happiness about pregnancy may be expressed even when another child would be a significant financial or emotional burden. Findings strongly suggest that automatically classifying women with incongruent intentions and feelings as ambivalent may lead to inaccurate measurement of unintended pregnancy, hinder understanding of the difficulties these women face in obtaining effective contraception, and limit the ability to devise strategies to prevent unintended pregnancy and address disparities across racial and ethnic groups.Public Affair

Open-mindedness can decrease persuasion amongst adolescents: The role of self-affirmation

Objectives Self-affirmation (e.g., by reflecting on important personal values) has been found to promote more open-minded appraisal of threatening health messages in at-risk adults. However, it is unclear how self-affirmation affects adolescents and whether it has differential effects on the impact of these messages amongst those at relatively lower and higher risk. The current study explored moderation by risk. Design Participants were randomly assigned to either a self-affirmation or a control condition before receiving a health message concerning physical activity. Methods Older adolescents (N = 125) completed a self-affirmation or control writing task before reading about the health consequences of not meeting recommendations to be physically active for at least 60 min daily. Most of the sample did not achieve these levels of activity (98%, N = 123). Consequently, the message informed these participants that – unless they changed their behaviour – they would be at higher risk of heart disease. Participants completed measures of responses to the message and behaviour-specific cognitions (e.g., self-efficacy) for meeting the recommendations. Results For relatively inactive participants, self-affirmation was associated with increased persuasion. However, for those who were moderately active (but not meeting recommendations), those in the self-affirmation condition were less persuaded by the message. Conclusions Whilst self-affirmation can increase message acceptance, there are circumstances when the open-mindedness it induces may decrease persuasion. The evidence provided in this study suggests that caution may be needed when recommendations are challenging and it could be considered reasonable to be sceptical about the need to change behaviour

Losing Social Space: Phenomenological Disruptions of Spatiality and Embodiment in Moebius Syndrome and Schizophrenia

Social cognition and interpersonal relatedness are currently much-discussed topics in philosophy and cognitive science. Many of the debates focus on the causal mechanisms purportedly responsible for our ability to relate to and understand one another. When emotions and affectivity enter into these debates, they are generally portrayed as targets of social cognitive processes (i.e., as perceived in another person’s facial expressions, gestures, utterances, behavioural patterns, etc.) that must be interpreted or ‘decoded’ by the mechanisms in question. However, the role that emotions and affectivity play in facilitating interpersonal relatedness has not received the same level of attention. Nor has much thought been given to the spatiality of our interpersonal relations—that is, the common space in which we come together and engage with one another as social agents

Exploration: Past and Future Contributions of the Vertical Lift Community and the Flight Vehicle Research and Technology Division

Fulfillment of the exploration vision will require new cross-mission directorate and multi-technical discipline synergies in order to achieve the necessary long-term sustainability. In part, lessons from the Apollo-era, as well as more recent research efforts, suggest that the aeronautics and specifically the vertical lift research community can and will make significant contributions to the exploration effort. A number of notional concepts and associated technologies for such contributions are outlined