Occupational Therapy Student Readiness for Transition to the Fieldwork Environment: A Pilot Case Study

The classroom and the field represent diverse and unique teaching and learning environments that students are required to navigate successfully. Facilitating student success in these environments requires the efforts of educators and the students themselves. This qualitative pilot study sought to elucidate perspectives regarding student readiness from the viewpoint of occupational therapy academic and fieldwork educators. Data for the study was collected from interviews and a focus group. The results of the study revealed that academic and fieldwork educators value similar characteristics of student readiness for transition to fieldwork. However, there is a need for collaborative strategies between the academic and fieldwork settings to improve awareness of the value of theory-driven practice and to support authentic incorporation of theory into practice as part of the educative process of supervising fieldwork students

A Case Study to Determine Classroom and Field Educator Perspectives on Occupational Therapy Student Readiness for Transition to Clinical Practice

In occupational therapy education, fieldwork is essential to preparing students for licensure and practice. Fieldwork is where students are afforded opportunities to assimilate knowledge gained through didactic coursework into newly constructed knowledge developed through practice in authentic clinical environments. The classroom and the field represent diverse and unique teaching and learning environments which students are required to successfully navigate. Facilitating student success these environments requires the efforts of educators and the students themselves. Understanding educator perspectives about student readiness for practice in fieldwork settings can advance organized professional educator development, lead to improved academic curriculums, and more productive communication between academic and field educators. This qualitative case study sought to elucidate perspectives regarding student readiness from the viewpoint of occupational therapy academic and field educators. Data for the study was collected from open-ended survey questions, interviews, and a focus group. Results of the study revealed that educators in both the academic and clinical learning environment value similar characteristics of student readiness for transition to fieldwork. The study also revealed a limited ability in all the educators to clearly articulate the educative processes they employ to improve student readiness. These findings provide evidentiary support that academic programs might use to address their admissions criteria and their curriculums. In addition, the results of this study support the growing need for organized educator preparation and development programs in the profession

Student Perceptions and Grade Comparisons after Exposure to Instructor-Made Skills Videos in a Kinesiology Course

The purpose of this mixed method, descriptive case study was to determine whether the use of pre-recorded instructor-made videos (PRIMVs) in a kinesiology course, along with curricular design changes, facilitated increased conceptual and practical student learning. The study examined three student cohorts in one occupational therapy program. Two of the student cohorts had unrestricted access to the PRIMVs designed to support student learning of bone and muscle palpation and joint actions. Students from the two cohorts completed a survey about their experience of having access to the videos. Exam data from the student cohorts who had access to the videos was compared to exam data from an earlier cohort who had not been exposed to the videos. While no significant differences in the lab exam grades were noted, quantitative and qualitative data collected from the surveys revealed that students perceived that their overall course grade was higher and they were better prepared for clinical fieldwork as a result of having access to the videos. This study adds to the growing body of evidence that supports video technology as a supplemental learning tool in occupational therapy education

Exploring Fieldwork Educator Development: Preparation Methods and Support Tools

Fieldwork education is a critical piece to professional development and competency in occupational therapy. As part of their core curriculum, all students enrolled in accredited occupational therapy programs must complete full-time fieldwork experiences under the direct supervision of a licensed occupational therapy practitioner. This component of the student’s education relies on the skills and training of the fieldwork educator. Academic programs are expected to support occupational therapy practitioners in their role as fieldwork educators in the form of resource provisions to enhance supervisory skills. However, there are no clear standards that describe how to vet, effectively disseminate, or implement the use of fieldwork educator resources. This study sought to identify and explore how occupational therapy practitioners prepare for the role of fieldwork educator, and how they maintain professional competence in that role through the use and effectiveness of available support tools for fieldwork educators. Results of the study highlight underutilization of readily available materials, effective programs that may not be readily accessed due to cost, and the need to establish more structured educational experiences that would serve to support the role of the fieldwork educator. These findings point to potential areas of fieldwork educator development that may be designed and addressed by Academic Fieldwork Coordinators through both continued research and program development. Future research examining pre and post tool use assessment would provide further insight on effectiveness and progression of growth in the fieldwork educator role

Phase I Clinical Trials in Acute Myeloid Leukemia: 23-Year Experience From Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program of the National Cancer Institute

Therapy for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) has largely remained unchanged, and outcomes are unsatisfactory. We sought to analyze outcomes of AML patients enrolled in phase I studies to determine whether overall response rates (ORR) and mortality rates have changed over time

Improving Educational Outcomes of English Language Learners in Schools and Programs in Boston Public Schools

Using 4 years of student-level demographic, enrollment and testing and school-level characteristics, this study analyzes the enrollment and outcomes of English Language Learners (ELLs) in Boston Public School between SY2006 and SY2009 and assess the relative impact of individual and school level factors in testing outcomes of ELLs. The study reports on the improvement in ELL dropout rates and testing outcomes during the period of observation. It reports also on the outcomes of ELLs at different levels of English proficiency and finds (1) higher dropout rates and lower testing performance among low English proficiency students; (2) a minimal proportion of students reaching academic language proficiency within the period of observation; and (3) particularly deep vulnerability among ELLs of low English proficiency entering district school in middle school and high school. In the assessment of individual and school-level factors in the testing outcomes of ELL students, the study finds English proficiency and designation as a student with disabilities are the strongest predictors of testing outcomes. Finally, the report focuses on the policy implications of these findings in view of the state’s language restrictive policies affecting the education of ELLs in Massachusetts. District level administrative and programmatic recommendations as well a state policy recommendations are provided

Identifying Success in Schools and Programs for English Language Learners in Boston Public Schools

The Gastón Institute collaborates with government agencies, community organizations and foundations in applied research aimed at evaluating the impact of policies, programs and practices. This poster describes a three-way collaboration among researchers and practitioners from Boston Public Schools (BPS), the Gastón Institute and the Center for Collaborative Education (CCE) which yielded two comprehensive studies: 1. The enrollment and outcomes of English language learners in BPS; 2. Best ELL practices in four schools that were consistently high performing or steadily improving with respect to ELL student outcomes

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity are associated with genetic variants affecting gene expression in a variety of tissues

Variability in SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity between individuals is partly due to genetic factors. Here, we identify 4 genomic loci with suggestive associations for SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and 19 for COVID-19 disease severity. Four of these 23 loci likely have an ethnicity-specific component. Genome-wide association study (GWAS) signals in 11 loci colocalize with expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) associated with the expression of 20 genes in 62 tissues/cell types (range: 1:43 tissues/gene), including lung, brain, heart, muscle, and skin as well as the digestive system and immune system. We perform genetic fine mapping to compute 99% credible SNP sets, which identify 10 GWAS loci that have eight or fewer SNPs in the credible set, including three loci with one single likely causal SNP. Our study suggests that the diverse symptoms and disease severity of COVID-19 observed between individuals is associated with variants across the genome, affecting gene expression levels in a wide variety of tissue types

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe