Use of Metacognitive Techniques in Occupational Therapy Education: A Scoping Review

Efficient and effective occupational therapy curricular and course design is essential to develop competent and reflective practitioners. The intentional use of metacognitive strategies could improve the development of higher-order thinking and learning outcomes. The study explored the use of metacognitive strategies to improve learning and higher-order thinking in students within occupational therapy higher education. A targeted search for occupational therapy journals only was the primary method to identify studies. Arskey and O’Malley’s (2005) five-stage framework guided this scoping review. All studies demonstrated some aspects of metacognition, this included thinking about their learning, reflection, self-assessment, or sense-making. Through the PRISMA process, the initial search yielded 260 studies; 27 duplicates were removed for a remaining total of 233 studies. Thirteen articles were included in the final study. The identification of the studies’ purpose, pedagogy, metacognitive strategies, and the level of Bloom’s taxonomy for the strategies was included in the analysis. Written reflection, peer-to-peer debate, self-directed learning, critical thinking, self-assessment, and reflection observation were the metacognitive strategies described in the articles. The metacognitive strategies were not specific to a pedagogy. Rather the strategies varied in use; however, all focused on learning outcomes to develop higher-order thinking skills and life-long learners. The selected studies reported improved learning outcomes and described metacognitive strategies. Transparency and intentionality in occupational therapy higher education related to metacognition may improve learning outcomes leading to practitioners whose self-reflection and critical thinking improve client and system outcomes

Flip to Learn & Learn to Flip in Occupational Therapy Education: A Scoping Review

Faculty seek methods that efficiently use their time, facilitate deep learning, and acquire competencies through the curriculum. The flipped classroom, a pedagogical approach, is proposed to be one solution to these issues. This study is a scoping review of how health care professional courses apply the flipped classroom model. The specific aims of this scoping review are: (a) determine the health care disciplines using and researching flipped classrooms, (b) identify and categorize instructional/course design and teaching and learning strategies used in flipped classroom literature, and (c) classify the levels of evidence-based education and trustworthiness in the studies as defined by Kirkpatrick\u27s hierarchy. Following the PRISMA guidelines for sectioning the study, twenty studies were included in this scoping review. This scoping review identified various health care professions that have implemented the flipped classroom model at multiple levels of courses and curriculum to enhance student learning experiences. The flipped classroom design model provides different ways of improving learning environments, which could benefit student learning outcomes in academic performance and satisfaction. Pre-class and in-class active learning is the most common teaching and learning strategies; although less common, there is value identified in the after-class learning activities. Research suggests that blended learning and flipped classrooms can be effective in health care professional education to learn, retain, apply, and think critically compared to traditional teaching. Occupational therapy educators can use various learning strategies discussed in this study as an alternative or supplement to enhance or replace the traditional lecture-based teaching style

Role of environment and sex differences in the development of autoimmune diseases: A roundtable meeting project

Autoimmune diseases (ADs) impose substantial health and financial burdens in the United States and in many parts of the world. Women are disproportionately affected by many of these disorders, which often contribute to lifelong disabilities. While the number of patients with some ADs appears to be rising, the complexities of conducting epidemiological studies prevent a thorough understanding of the prevalence and incidence of these various conditions. Research on environmental influences of these illnesses is limited, although they are generally hypothesized to result from the interaction of environmental agents in genetically susceptible individuals. Further, there is little known regarding the role of sex and gender in the environmentally influenced mechanisms leading to the development of AD. To address these issues, particularly the roles of environment and sex and gender in ADs and the factors that contribute to the rise in ADs, the Society for Women\u27s Health Research convened an interdisciplinary roundtable of experts from academia, medicine, and government agencies to share their expertise, address knowledge gaps in research, and propose future research recommendations

Advancing the Entry-Level Practitioner: A Curricular Model of the Professional Occupational Therapy Doctoral Degree

The recent growth of entry-level occupational therapy doctoral (EL-OTD) programs has been met with mixed opinions from both occupational therapy educators and practitioners. These opinions occasionally have been accompanied by uncertainty about the specific curricular components that differentiate the EL-OTD from the entry-level master’s degree. In an effort to address this uncertainty, the purpose of this article is to present one example of an EL-OTD curricular model and describe its distinct educational components. This curricular model integrates recommendations for doctoral education originally proposed by Case-Smith et al. (2014) and is characterized by the following three components: 1) Advanced Coursework; 2) the Doctoral Capstone Project; and 3) the Doctoral Capstone Experience. We share the lessons learned after matriculating three cohorts of EL-OTD students and describe influences from the field of implementation science that have informed the development of our curriculum

Measures of sun exposure and sun protection practices for behavioural and epidemiological research

Objective: To develop, in a collaborative project, core measures of sun exposure and sun protection habits, since the lack of standard outcome measures hampers comparison of population surveys and interventions used in skin cancer prevention research. Design: A work group of investigators evaluated available questionnaire measures of sun exposure and protection. Their deliberations led to a proposed set of core questionnaire items for adults, adolescents aged 11 to 17 years, and children 10 years or younger. These core items were used in cognitive testing by the investigators. Cross-site summaries of methods, response samples, and descriptive data were prepared. Setting: Nine locations across the United States. Participants: The study population comprised 81 individuals. Results: No unusual response patterns were detected in any of the respondent groups or for any specific question. Some revisions to the survey items resulted from the need for clarification or emphasis of frames of reference such as adding or underlining key phrases in a question. Conclusions: The combination of expert review followed by cognitive interviewing yielded standardized core survey items with good clarity and applicability for measuring sun exposure and sun protection behaviors across a broad range of populations. They are appropriate for studies tracking morbidity and/or mortality and evaluating prevention program effects

Gleam: the GLAST Large Area Telescope Simulation Framework

This paper presents the simulation of the GLAST high energy gamma-ray telescope. The simulation package, written in C++, is based on the Geant4 toolkit, and it is integrated into a general framework used to process events. A detailed simulation of the electronic signals inside Silicon detectors has been provided and it is used for the particle tracking, which is handled by a dedicated software. A unique repository for the geometrical description of the detector has been realized using the XML language and a C++ library to access this information has been designed and implemented.Comment: 10 pages, Late

Race-associated biological differences among Luminal A breast tumors

African American (AA) women have higher breast-cancer specific mortality rates. A higher prevalence of the worse outcome Basal-like breast cancer subtype contributes to this, but AA women also have higher mortality even within the more favorable outcomes Luminal A breast cancers. These differences may reflect treatment or health care access issues, inherent biological differences, or both

The naked truth: Sphynx and Devon Rex cat breed mutations in KRT71

Hair is a unique structure, characteristic of mammals, controlling body homeostasis, as well as cell and tissue integration. Previous studies in dog, mouse, and rat have identified polymorphisms in Keratin 71 (KRT71) as responsible for the curly/wavy phenotypes. The coding sequence and the 3′ UTR of KRT71 were directly sequenced in randomly bred and pedigreed domestic cats with different pelage mutations, including hairless varieties. A SNP altering a splice site was identified in the Sphynx breed and suggested to be the hairless (hr) allele, and a complex sequence alteration, also causing a splice variation, was identified in the Devon Rex breed and suggested to be the curly (re) allele. The polymorphisms were genotyped in approximately 200 cats. All the Devon Rex were homozygous for the complex alterations and most of the Sphynx were either homozygous for the hr allele or compound heterozygotes with the Devon-associated re allele, suggesting that the phenotypes are a result of the identified SNPs. Two Sphynx carrying the proposed hr mutation did not carry the Devon-associated alteration. No other causative mutations for eight different rexoid and hairless cat phenotypes were identified. The allelic series KRT71+ > KRT71hr > KRT71re is suggested

KG-COVID-19: A Framework to Produce Customized Knowledge Graphs for COVID-19 Response.

Integrated, up-to-date data about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 is crucial for the ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic by the biomedical research community. While rich biological knowledge exists for SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses (SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV), integrating this knowledge is difficult and time-consuming, since much of it is in siloed databases or in textual format. Furthermore, the data required by the research community vary drastically for different tasks; the optimal data for a machine learning task, for example, is much different from the data used to populate a browsable user interface for clinicians. To address these challenges, we created KG-COVID-19, a flexible framework that ingests and integrates heterogeneous biomedical data to produce knowledge graphs (KGs), and applied it to create a KG for COVID-19 response. This KG framework also can be applied to other problems in which siloed biomedical data must be quickly integrated for different research applications, including future pandemics