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PubMed1975

Learning and behavioral correlates in learning-disabled pupils prone to heterozygous thalassemia and sicklemia.

The pilot study was designed to vindicate planning for large-scale detection and management of two parallel genetic blood disorders occurring in large numbers of Mediterranean- and black Americans; the heterozygous minor traits of thalassemia (Cooley's anemia) and sicklemia (sickle-cell anemia). Referred pupils (N=191) matched on schools, age, and learning difficulties associated with learning disabilities were compared as to presumed ethnic origin (n Mediterranean = 80; n black = 64; n "others" = 47) and incidence of trait-related learning and behavioral characteristics. Group mean differences on the study's criteria were found to be significant. Both minor-trait prone groups equally indicated the associative effects, while the control group without tradt-predisposition showed a nonsignificant relationship, thus supporting the hypotheses and the need for large-scale research.

Achievement↗
PubMed2002

Learning from demonstrations: the role of visual search during observational learning from video and point-light models.

In this study, we examined the visual search strategies used during observation of video and point-light display models. We also assessed the relative effectiveness of video and point-light models in facilitating the learning of task outcomes and movement patterns. Twenty-one female novice soccer players were divided equally into video, point-light display and no-model (control) groups. Participants chipped a soccer ball onto a target area from which radial and variable error scores were taken. Kinematic data were also recorded using an opto-electrical system. Both a pre- and post-test were performed, interspersed with three periods of acquisition and observation of the model. A retention test was completed 2 days after the post-test. There was a significant main effect for test period for outcome accuracy and variability, but observation of a model did not facilitate outcome-based learning. Participants observing the models acquired a global movement pattern that was closer to that of the model than the controls, although they did not acquire the local relations in the movement pattern, evidenced by joint range of motion and angle-angle plots. There were no significant differences in learning between the point-light display and video groups. The point-light display model group used a more selective visual search pattern than the video model group, while both groups became more selective with successive trials and observation periods. The results are discussed in the context of Newell's hierarchy of coordination and control and Scully and Newell's visual perception perspective.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Impact of age and situation-specific experience on maze learning and learning-sensitive open-field parameters in mice.

The effects of age and situation-specific experience on maze learning and learning-sensitive open-field parameters (OFP) in Swiss albino male mice were studied. We tested the mice longitudinally by means of repeated measures and in cross-section by taking independent samples between the ages of 1-16 months. Mice with situation-specific experience improved their performance up to the age of 11 months. For mice lacking prior experience there was a trend toward impaired performance with regard to error scores and running times with increasing age. The ages of 1, 8, and 10 months were most favorable for the occurrence of quantitative maze learning-sensitive OFP changes, and the ages of 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 12, and 13 months were most favorable for the appearance of qualitative changes. The effect of situation-specific experience was interpreted as indicative of decreased emotionality but increased reactivity to novel stimuli or enhanced territorial behavior at the age of 16 months.

Aging↗
PubMed2004

Problem-based learning in public health instruction: a pilot study of an online simulation as a problem-based learning approach.

UNLABELLED: Although increasingly used as a modality in medical education, Problem-Based Learning (PBL) remains somewhat overlooked in the training of public health students (Pham & Blumberg, 2000). This project involved a pilot test of a web-based community simulation as a PBL platform in an undergraduate health behavior course. PURPOSE: To develop and pilot test a web-based computer simulation as an implementation of problem-based learning in an undergraduate public health behavior course. METHOD: Using a web-based simulation platform, a virtual community was designed in which the effects of a mock infectious disease outbreak could be studied and various interventions could be tested. Upon completion of the semester course, 14 undergraduate public health education students completed a survey and participated in a focus group to determine issues related to the simulation. Research focused on whether the simulation was perceived as motivating and which aspects were found to be confusing, ineffective or unrealistic. FINDINGS: Results of the study suggested that a PBL experience based on a community simulation may be effective in providing a motivating and interesting PBL tool for instructing undergraduate public health students. A majority of students agreed that the experience was more motivating and interesting than a more traditional assignment. Design recommendations include an emphasis on incorporating a rich multimedia background, realistic communication and project management tools and the capability for students to submit formatted documents. Further study of attitudinal differences and attainment of learning objectives is recommended between students participating in the simulation experience and those engaging in a traditional assignment.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

What do residents learn by meeting with families of children with disabilities?: A qualitative analysis of an experiential learning module.

PURPOSE: Attitudes of medical providers towards persons with disabilities can affect the quality of care their patients receive. The authors evaluated an experiential learning module to investigate what Paediatric and Medicine/Paediatric residents at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital learn from visiting the homes of families with children who have disabilities. METHODS: Families were recruited through a community-based parent organization. The families were instructed to discuss what it is like to have a child with a disability and to think about a primary message to give to residents during a 1-2 hour home visit. Since 1998, residents participated as part of the required Developmental Paediatrics rotation. They were instructed to write a one-page narrative description of their visit. The authors utilized the grounded theory of qualitative research and content analysis to count the key themes identified in the residents' descriptions. RESULTS: Twenty-four families and 63 residents participated in the learning module. The resident observations yielded four major themes. Twenty-four per cent stated families needed more information; 79% noted that families face various obstacles, including financial (33%), medical providers' pessimism (29%), inter-personal family conflicts (27%) and medical system problems (22%); 49% of residents commented that families adjust and cope with their child's disability; and 27% of residents stated that the experience changed their insight about children with disabilities. CONCLUSION: The authors' study suggests that a single home visit with the family of a child with a disability provides paediatrics and medicine/paediatrics residents with insights into the family's perspective on disability otherwise unattainable in a hospital-based training programme.

Child↗
PubMed1982

Concept learning by retarded children: a comparison of three discrimination learning procedures.

The effectiveness of stimulus delay and stimulus fading procedures was compared with differential reinforcement only in training developmentally delayed children on a concept learning task. Twenty-four children were randomly assigned to one of the three treatment conditions. All three experimental conditions contained five discrimination programmes, each designed to teach the child to discriminate one pair of exemplars from the target concepts bottle and jar. Following successful completion of one training programme, a concept acquisition probe was administered to determine whether the target concepts had been engendered. Alternate presentations of successively different training programmes and concept acquisition probes were continued until the subject passed the probe, failed to complete a training programme, or completed all five training programmes. Five 'stimulus fading' subjects, three 'stimulus delay' subjects, and four 'reinforcement only' subjects learned the concepts. All children who learned to discriminate one pair of exemplars displayed conceptual behaviour after training on two or fewer pairs of exemplars. It was suggested that the absence of pronounced differences between conditions may have been due to the complexity of the task or the type of prompts employed.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2004

Assessing the needs of people with learning disabilities and mental illness: development of the Learning Disability version of the Cardinal Needs Schedule.

BACKGROUND: People with learning disability (LD) experience a range of mental health problems. They are a complex population, whose needs are not well understood. This study focuses on the development of a systematic process of needs assessment for this population. METHODS: The Cardinal Needs Schedule used in general psychiatry was adapted for people with learning disabilities (LD). The Learning Disability version of the Cardinal Needs Schedule (LDCNS) was tested on a sample of 35 people with LD and mental illness for its inter-rater reliability. RESULTS: The inter-rater reliability (Kappa) was calculated for 22 areas of functioning assessed by the LDCNS. Overall, there was very good agreement in seven areas, moderate agreement in six areas, fair agreement in three areas and poor agreement in one area. In four areas of functioning, Kappa could not be calculated. More needs were found in the social domain than in the clinical domain. CONCLUSION: A systematic needs assessment schedule (LDCNS) was developed for people with LD and mental illness. The inter-rater reliability is generally acceptable, but requires further examination.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Involving users with learning difficulties in health improvement: lessons from inclusive learning disability research.

In this paper the author considers the lessons to be drawn from what is termed "inclusive" learning disability research for user involvement around health improvement. Inclusive learning disability research refers to research where people with learning difficulties (intellectual disability) are involved as active participants, as opposed to passive subjects. There is by now a considerable body of such research, developed over the past 25 years. From the review, the author draws attention to areas which can inform practice in involvement of users in a way that adds value.

Decision Making, Organizational↗
PubMed2006

Learning priorities and attitudes towards computer-assisted learning of general medical practitioners, general dental practitioners and dental hygienists.

OBJECTIVES: The objectives of this survey were to assess the attitudes and learning priorities of general medical practitioners (GMPs), general dental practitioners (GDPs), and dental hygienists (DHs) working at Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST), Irbid, Jordan in relation to post-graduate education, to gather information on their attitudes and skills in using computers and computer-assisted learning (CAL) and to see whether the material in this form is acceptable to participate as a means of teaching. METHODS: Data for this study was gathered via a questionnaire distributed to 63 health professionals including GMPs, general dental practitioners and DHs (mean age 24.79 +/- 2.69 years) working at JUST. RESULTS: Of the 63 participants, 80% of the participants have home computers, 38% have office computers at work and only 25% have both home and office computers. Approximately 53% of the participants had their first CAL experience at home. Seventy-three of the participants indicated that connection to Internet is necessary for their work. Seventy-one of the participants were interested in the possibility of using CAL to further improve and increase their medical knowledge. The most important topic for doctors was 'learning about new techniques which may supersede those in current use', for DHs it was 'improve knowledge or skill in radiology', and for dentists it was 'reinforcement of well established techniques commonly used in dental practice'. CONCLUSIONS: It is necessary for practicing health care professionals to update themselves by taking continuous education courses after graduation more conveniently via CAL methods.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

A comparison of student outcomes following problem-based learning instruction versus traditional lecture learning in a graduate pharmacology course.

PURPOSE: To determine if there would be a difference in students' performance and level of satisfaction when taught pharmacology in a problem-based learning format as compared to traditional lecture format. DATA SOURCES: Control (n = 12) and experimental (n = 10) group means for middle-of-term examinations, final examinations, end-of-course numerical averages, and numerical scores of satisfaction were analyzed with a t test for statistically significant differences. CONCLUSIONS: There was no significant difference between groups for any of the items measured, suggesting that problem-based learning and traditional lecture format may be equally effective course delivery methods. Replication with a larger sample is recommended. IMPLICATIONS: The small sample size precludes generalizing results to the entire population, but outcomes of this pilot study suggest that problem-based learning may be at least as effective as traditional lecture and should be explored in larger studies.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed2001

Design and evaluation of a national set of learning objectives: the medical physiology learning objectives project.

In 1998, the American Physiological Society (APS) and the Association of Chairs of Departments of Physiology (ACDP) began collaboration on a project to develop a set of physiology learning objectives for medical students. Over the next 2 years, more than 50 physiologists collaborated in the development a comprehensive draft containing its 695 learning objectives. Faculty in 31 medical schools in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico evaluated these objectives. On the basis of this evaluation, the ACDP recommended deleting 13 of them. The final project, containing 682 objectives, was approved in December 2000 by the ACDP and published on the APS website http://www.the-aps.org/education/MedPhysObj/medcor.htm. The identification of the "content" of medical physiology instruction provides the APS and the ACDP with a tool to introduce emerging topics, such as the physiology of aging and gender differences, at a national level. The medical physiology learning objectives project provides a guide for directing current and future medical physiology instruction in the United States.

Education, Medical↗
PubMed2004

Greedy learning of multiple objects in images using robust statistics and factorial learning.

We consider data that are images containing views of multiple objects. Our task is to learn about each of the objects present in the images. This task can be approached as a factorial learning problem, where each image must be explained by instantiating a model for each of the objects present with the correct instantiation parameters. A major problem with learning a factorial model is that as the number of objects increases, there is a combinatorial explosion of the number of configurations that need to be considered. We develop a method to extract object models sequentially from the data by making use of a robust statistical method, thus avoiding the combinatorial explosion, and present results showing successful extraction of objects from real images.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2002

Learning and the evolution of language: the role of cultural variation and learning costs in the Baldwin effect.

The Baldwin effect has been explicitly used by Pinker and Bloom as an explanation of the origins of language and the evolution of a language acquisition device. This article presents new simulations of an artificial life model for the evolution of compositional languages. It specifically addresses the role of cultural variation and of learning costs in the Baldwin effect for the evolution of language. Results show that when a high cost is associated with language learning, agents gradually assimilate in their genome some explicit features (e.g., lexical properties) of the specific language they are exposed to. When the structure of the language is allowed to vary through cultural transmission, Baldwinian processes cause, instead, the assimilation of a predisposition to learn, rather than any structural properties associated with a specific language. The analysis of the mechanisms underlying such a predisposition in terms of categorical perception supports Deacon's hypothesis regarding the Baldwinian inheritance of general underlying cognitive capabilities that serve language acquisition. This is in opposition to the thesis that argues for assimilation of structural properties needed for the specification of a full-blown language acquisition device.

Algorithms↗
PubMed1989

A homogeneous group of persons with learning disabilities: adults with severe learning disabilities in vocational rehabilitation.

The results of a comprehensive psychoeducational assessment of adults having learning disabilities (LD) and participating in vocational rehabilitation are presented. The subjects were found to have low-average general intelligence; lower verbal than performance IQs; attention, reasoning, and auditory memory deficits; academic achievement at the fourth-/fifth-grade level; language problems; and low self-esteem. These results were contrasted with other studies of adults with LD in vocational rehabilitation, and all studies on this population reported similar findings. A comparison of studies of adults with LD who were clients of vocational rehabilitation with those in college or employed and with those who had been labeled as learning disabled in childhood indicated that the adults with LD in vocational rehabilitation seem to constitute a homogeneous group of persons with severe deficits. The need to subtype learning disabilities by severity and criteria for making such determinations are proposed.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Using informed strategies for learning to enhance the reading and thinking skills of children with learning disabilities.

The purpose of this study was to improve the reading performance of children with learning disabilities using a classroom-based metacognitive reading program. The participants were third- and fourth-level 8- and 9-year-olds (13 boys and 5 girls) at a school for children with learning disabilities. A cross-sectional time series design was used. During pre- and posttesting participants were assessed on two measures of strategy awareness and a measure of perceived self-competence. During the instructional phase the metacognitive reading program was introduced. Participants were assessed on measures of reading performance throughout the study. In general, the findings were positive: Students increased in performance and awareness of strategies from pre- to posttesting. In addition, participants were placed in subgroups based on pretesting assessments. The subgroups differed on their improvements over time. This study provides preliminary evidence that a metacognitive reading program can be used with children with learning disabilities to improve their awareness about reading and their comprehension skills.

Awareness↗
PubMed2003

What can we learn from facilitator and student perceptions of facilitation skills and roles in the first year of a problem-based learning curriculum?

BACKGROUND: The small group tutorial is a cornerstone of problem-based learning. By implication, the role of the facilitator is of pivotal importance. The present investigation canvassed perceptions of facilitators with differing levels of experience regarding their roles and duties in the tutorial. METHODS: In January 2002, one year after problem-based learning implementation at the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, facilitators with the following experience were canvassed: trained and about to facilitate, facilitated once only and facilitated more than one six-week theme. Student comments regarding facilitator skills were obtained from a 2001 course survey. RESULTS: While facilitators generally agreed that the three-day training workshop provided sufficient insight into the facilitation process, they become more comfortable with increasing experience. Many facilitators experienced difficulty not providing content expertise. Again, this improved with increasing experience. Most facilitators saw students as colleagues. They agreed that they should be role models, but were less enthusiastic about being mentors. Students were critical of facilitators who were not up to date with curriculum implementation or who appeared disinterested. While facilitator responses suggest that there was considerable intrinsic motivation, this might in fact not be the case. CONCLUSIONS: Even if they had facilitated on all six themes, facilitators could still be considered as novices. Faculty support is therefore critical for the first few years of problem-based learning, particularly for those who had facilitated once only. Since student and facilitator expectations in the small group tutorial may differ, roles and duties of facilitators must be explicit for both parties from the outset.

Education, Medical↗
PubMed2006

Helping each other to learn--a process evaluation of peer assisted learning.

BACKGROUND: The benefits of Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) are well established with positive effects on examination scores, student satisfaction and personal and professional development reported. PAL is increasingly utilised as a resource within medical education where the restrictions on resources have forced teachers to look at creating new educational environments which can be delivered at a lower cost. This study sought to evaluate the processes at work as the emphasis of PAL research to date has largely been on the consideration of student outcomes. METHODS: Fifth-year medical undergraduates, who had completed their communication skills modular training and attended a preparatory workshop, facilitated a role-play session for their second-year colleagues within an Early Patient Contact programme. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were used to collect data at different time points in order to establish the views of peer learners and tutors towards this new method of teaching. The data was analysed according to the principles framework analysis using N-vivo software. Themes were shared and debated with the multidisciplinary team of authors and a concordance of views on common themes was reached after discussion and debate. RESULTS: Analysis of the data resulted in the emergence of three thematic categories: Learning Environment, Educational Exchange and Communication and Modelling. The data demonstrated a concordance of the views between peer tutors and learners on barriers and levers of this approach as well as a heightened awareness of the learning environment and the educational exchange occurring therein. CONCLUSION: The data is significant as it not only demonstrates a high level of acceptability among tutors and learners for PAL but also indicates the reciprocity of educational exchange that appears to occur within the PAL setting. This study highlights some of the unique characteristics of PAL and we recommend the development of further qualitative studies around peer learners and tutors views of this process.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Examining the multidimensionality of approaches to learning through the development of a revised version of the Learning Process Questionnaire.

AIM: This study aimed to produce a revised two-factor version of the Learning Process Questionnaire (R-LPQ-2F) with deep and surface approach scales, measured by a reasonably small number of items, suitable for use by teachers in secondary schools to evaluate the learning approaches of their students. METHOD: A set of 41 items was derived, with modification, from the original version of the LPQ and from items used to develop the revised version of the SPQ. These items were tested using reliability procedures and confirmatory factor analysis and items were deleted until scales were of a suitable length and confirmatory factor analysis indicated a good fit to the intended two-factor structure. SAMPLE: The sample consisted of 841 students from 20 secondary schools in Hong Kong. RESULTS: The final two-factor version of the questionnaire had good Cronbach alpha values and reasonable goodness-of-fit values for the confirmatory analysis. There was a much better fit, though, to a hierarchical structure with motive and strategy subscales for each approach, each of which, in turn, had two subcomponents. CONCLUSION: Approaches to learning have a hierarchical dimensionality with motive and strategy elements. Each motive and strategy element is itself multidimensional. The results are used to question the conventional approach to the testing and acceptance of instruments, which place sole reliance upon reliability tests. The use of confirmatory factor analysis is recommended as a routine procedure in the development and testing of instruments.

Adult↗