Project description:BackgroundA Learning Health Care Community (LHCC) is a framework to enhance health care through mutual accountability between the health care system and the community. LHCC components include infrastructure for health-related data capture, care improvement targets, a supportive policy environment, and community engagement. The LHCC involves health care providers, researchers, decision-makers, and community members who work to identify health care needs and address them with evidence-based solutions. The objective of this study was to summarize the barriers and enablers to building an LHCC in rural areas.MethodsA systematic review was conducted by searching electronic databases. Eligibility criteria was determined by the research team. Published literature on LHCCs in rural areas was systematically collected and organized. Screening was completed independently by two authors. Detailed information about rural health care, activities, and barriers and enablers to building an LHCC in rural areas was extracted. Qualitative analysis was used to identify core themes.ResultsAmong 8169 identified articles, 25 were eligible. LHCCs aimed to increase collaboration and co-learning between community members and health care providers, integrate community feedback in health care services, and to share information. Main barriers included obtaining adequate funding and participant recruitment. Enablers included meaningful engagement of stakeholders and stakeholder collaboration.ConclusionsThe LHCC is built on a foundation of meaningful use of health data and empowers health care practitioners and community members in informed decision-making. By reducing the gap between knowledge generation and its application to practice, the LHCC has the potential to transform health care delivery in rural areas.
Project description:Teachers' online professional development (PD) has been valued as a crucial and effective way to promote teaching competencies. Forming a professional learning community has been recognized as a means to promote effective PD. Within this realm of research, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework was deemed as a collaborative-constructivist process model that describes successful online learning experiences. The CoI has been associated with many psychological and educational variables, such as learning achievement and self-efficacy. This study leveraged on the CoI framework to assess teachers' online professional learning quality and explored its relationship with their self-efficacy and online professional learning achievement. A total of 456 teacher participants from Chinese middle schools participated in our study. A suite of questionnaires (the Community of Inquiry Questionnaire, the Teacher Efficacy Scale, and the Perceived Online Learning Achievement Scale) was distributed. Linear regression, PROCESS Macro mediation, and moderation analyses were run on the data to answer the research questions. Results revealed a significant relationship between teachers' online learning quality and their self-efficacy and learning achievement. The mediating roles of self-efficacy and learning achievement were confirmed. The moderating role of time spent on receiving online professional learning was also recognized. Implications and future directions were discussed.
Project description:Teaching ecology effectively and experientially has become more challenging for at least two reasons today. Most experiences of our students are urban, and we now face the near immediate and continuing need to deliver courses (either partially or wholly) online because of COVID-19. Therefore, providing a learning experience that connects students to their environment within an ecological framework remains crucial and perhaps therapeutic to mental health. Here, we describe how prior to the pandemic we adapted our field-based laboratories to include data collection, analysis, and interpretation, along with the development of a citizen-science approach for online delivery. This design is simple to implement, does not require extensive work, and maintains the veracity of original learning outcomes. Collaboration online following field data collection in ecology courses within the context of cities offers further options to adapt to student experience levels, resource availability, and accessibility, as well as bringing instructors and students together to build an open well-curated data set that can be used in ecology courses where no laboratories are available. Finally, it promotes an open collaboration among ecology instructors that can drive lasting conversations about ecology curriculum.
Project description:ObjectivesSense of Community (SoC) refers to the cognitive or emotional connections established between physically separated learners; it is essential for study success. The recent COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for practical guidelines to facilitate building a SoC in online medical preclerkship education in the Netherlands. Therefore, this qualitative study aims to (a) examine perceptions of SoC from both students' and teachers' perspectives in an online elective course during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to (b) provide a conceptual framework with practical guidelines to medical educators on how to build SoC in online education.MethodsThe study had an exploratory qualitative design. Semi-structured focus groups with student (n = 15) and teacher (n = 5) volunteers were conducted. Participants discussed their experienced SoC using the storyline method. In addition, course developers (n = 2) were interviewed and lecturers (n = 5) wrote an experience story. Audio- and video-recordings were transcribed verbatim and both the ensuing transcripts and experience stories were analysed using an inductive thematic analysis.ResultsAll students experienced an increase of SoC during the eight-week course. Five themes were identified: 'social contacts made possible by a physical campus', 'group dynamics', 'teacher influence', 'education format' and 'teachers' Sense of Community'. The authors formulated challenges and practical guidelines on how to build SoC based on these themes.ConclusionsThis exploratory qualitative study provides a conceptual framework with practical guidelines for medical educators on how to build SoC in online medical preclerkship education. These guidelines provide a valuable starting point to build SoC in online education for medical educators and students alike.
Project description:Building rapport during police interviews is argued as important for improving on the completeness and accuracy of information provided by witnesses and victims. However, little experimental research has clearly operationalised rapport and investigated the impact of rapport behaviours on episodic memory. Eighty adults watched a video of a mock crime event and 24-hours later were randomly allocated to an interview condition where verbal and/or behavioural (non-verbal) rapport techniques were manipulated. Memorial performance measures revealed significantly more correct information, without a concomitant increase in errors, was elicited when behavioural rapport was present, a superiority effect found in both the free and probed recall phase of interviews. The presence of verbal rapport was found to reduce recall accuracy in the free recall phase of interviews. Post-interview feedback revealed significant multivariate effects for the presence of behavioural (only) rapport and combined (behavioural + verbal) rapport. Participants rated their interview experience far more positively when these types of rapport were present compared to when verbal (only) rapport or no rapport was present. These findings add weight to the importance of rapport in supporting eyewitness cognition, highlighting the potential consequences of impoverished social behaviours for building rapport during dyadic interactions, suggesting 'doing' rather than simply 'saying' may be more beneficial.
Project description:This article presents new teaching methodologies implemented in subjects in the Ground Engineering Area. Specifically, it focuses on a series of activities carried out due to the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in restrictions on class attendance. The new teaching methodologies brought about substantial changes in the way students learn and are assessed. For the practice sessions, a series of videos were prepared so students could attend and take part in the laboratory practices remotely. As regards the final theory exam, a comprehensive multiple-choice question bank was made available to students prior to the exam to consolidate the concepts seen in the master classes, which we call training and learning. We evaluated the impact of these new methodologies, implemented during two academic years, through the analysis of voluntary and anonymous student surveys and a series of indicators related to the results of the final exams. After analyzing the impact of the new teaching methodologies, we conclude that students are positive about the video experience for laboratory practices, but only as a complementary activity to in-person laboratory sessions. The students also stated that they would like the multiple-choice question bank to continue to be available in successive academic years. Improvements in the final grades of the theory exams demonstrate the success of this new teaching methodology.
Project description:Online experiments are an alternative for researchers interested in conducting behavioral research outside the laboratory. However, an online assessment might become a challenge when long and complex experiments need to be conducted in a specific order or with supervision from a researcher. The aim of this study was to test the computational validity and the feasibility of a remote and synchronous reinforcement learning (RL) experiment conducted during the social-distancing measures imposed by the pandemic. An additional feature of this study was to describe how a behavioral experiment originally created to be conducted in-person was transformed into an online supervised remote experiment. Open-source software was used to collect data, conduct statistical analysis, and do computational modeling. Python codes were created to replicate computational models that simulate the effect of working memory (WM) load over RL performance. Our behavioral results indicated that we were able to replicate remotely and with a modified behavioral task the effects of working memory (WM) load over RL performance observed in previous studies with in-person assessments. Our computational analyses using Python code also captured the effects of WM load over RL as expected, which suggests that the algorithms and optimization methods were reliable in their ability to reproduce behavior. The behavioral and computational validation shown in this study and the detailed description of the supervised remote testing may be useful for researchers interested in conducting long and complex experiments online.
Project description:BackgroundWhile some findings indicate high levels of patient satisfaction with remote eating disorder treatment, others reflect feelings of disconnection due to unique telehealth treatment challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic presented circumstances that likely impacted the findings established thus far. As such, the present study sought to understand patient experiences of connection in an intentionally remote eating disorder treatment program, specifically in a context outside of pandemic transition.MethodsA secondary analysis of de-identified qualitative data previously obtained for quality improvement purposes via a client satisfaction survey was conducted. Adult patient responses (N = 38) were analyzed via reflexive thematic analysis within a critical realist framework.ResultsFour themes were generated from the data: (1) Embracing one's humanity paves the way for connection, (2) Discovering a "sense of community" in remote care, (3) "They made me feel I was worth recovering": connection as a vehicle for healing, and (4) Aligning expectations and reality: reconceptualizing the journey to connection in remote eating disorder care.ConclusionsOverall, findings suggest that it is possible for patients to form strong, impactful connections in remote treatment. Importantly, patient perspectives indicated that there were shifts in how these connections were experienced as a result of the remote care environment (e.g., how support could be provided and by whom). Considerations unique to remote care (e.g., offering training to improve clients' comfort with technology) may be important to fostering connection, thereby contributing to improved patient experiences and treatment outcomes.
Project description:Online communities are used across several fields of human activities, as environments for large-scale collaboration. Most successful ones employ professionals, sometimes called "community managers" or "moderators", for tasks including onboarding new participants, mediating conflict, and policing unwanted behaviour. Network scientists routinely model interaction across participants in online communities as social networks. We interpret the activity of community managers as (social) network design: they take action oriented at shaping the network of interactions in a way conducive to their community's goals. It follows that, if such action is successful, we should be able to detect its signature in the network itself. Growing networks where links are allocated by a preferential attachment mechanism are known to converge to networks displaying a power law degree distribution. Growth and preferential attachment are both reasonable first-approximation assumptions to describe interaction networks in online communities. Our main hypothesis is that managed online communities are characterised by in-degree distributions that deviate from the power law form; such deviation constitutes the signature of successful community management. Our secondary hypothesis is that said deviation happens in a predictable way, once community management practices are accounted for. If true, these hypotheses would give us a simple test for the effectiveness of community management practices. We investigate the issue using (1) empirical data on three small online communities and (2) a computer model that simulates a widely used community management activity called onboarding. We find that onboarding produces in-degree distributions that systematically deviate from power law behaviour for low-values of the in-degree; we then explore the implications and possible applications of the finding.
Project description:The use of the rapport-building and supportive techniques formulated by the R-NICHD protocol is intended to support children and increase the quality of their statements as well as disclosures without possessing suggestive potential. While the effectiveness of the entire R-NICHD protocol for children who have actually experienced child sexual abuse (CSA) has been supported by research, to date no study assessed the effect of each individual socio-emotional interview technique in both interviewees with and without CSA experiences. The current study aimed to address this gap in research by means of an online vignette-study, asking participants to rate the identified rapport-building and supportive techniques on the scales well-being, willingness to talk, and perceived pressure. A total of 187 participants were randomly assigned to either a hypothetical "abused" or a hypothetical "not abused" group by means of a vignette-manipulation. The results suggest that many socio-emotional interview techniques were perceived as supportive and non-suggestive, while a number of techniques were perceived as not supportive but suggestive. Few differences emerged between the hypothetical "abused" group and the hypothetical "not abused" control group. To conclude, most but not all rapport-building and supportive techniques proposed by the R-NICHD protocol had a positive effect on interviewees.