Changing Attitudes towards Occupational Medicine with Blended Learning Methods Is Possible among Medical Students in Spain: A Longitudinal Study

Medical students generally express a low interest in Occupational Medicine. We aimed to assess the attitudes and changes in attitudes of students towards this area after completing a course on Occupational Medicine in two Medical Universities in Spain (Zaragoza and Castilla-La Mancha). The teaching method included blended learning as a model that used online virtual patient platforms (CASUS) and/or EMUTOM, as well as traditional methods such as face-to-face teaching. A total of 526 students (98 of whom attended the University of Castilla-La Mancha) participated during three academic years (2015–2016, 2016–2017 and 2017–2018). The validation of the questionnaire was carried out using reliability, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. For the analysis of internal consistency and discrimination, Cronbach’s alpha was used. The adequacy of the factor analysis was measured by means of KMO, and a correlation matrix was examined by means of Bartlett’s test of sphericity. To identify differences between students before and after completing the course, the Mann–Whitney U-test for independent samples was used. Our results show that despite a negative or neutral attitude towards Occupational Medicine, the acquisition of competences and skills in this area and their training were recognized as fundamental for their future professional performance as doctors in any specialty.

Interprofessional Education: Perception of Professors and Students of Nursing, Physiotherapy, and Medicine Courses

Background The problems for training in interprofessional education (IPE) of health professionals for this new century are systemic: limitation in competencies for teamwork, persistent stratification of gender relations in the status of health workers, a focused emphasis on technical skills, difficulty in analysis and understanding of broader problematic issues of the context, sporadic instead of continuous care, quantitative and qualitative imbalances in the professional labor market, and fragility in leadership skills to improve the performance of the health system. This study evaluated the perception of students and teachers of health area courses at a private university in São Paulo regarding interprofessional education. Methods A sociodemographic questionnaire to delineate the participants’ profile and the RIPLS questionnaire that assesses the attitudes and perceptions of students and professionals to determine their readiness for interprofessional learning were applied. RIPLS is proposed to measure the change in attitudes, the effects of different interventions, and the effectiveness of interventions in changing attitudes and perceptions. Results The main results were that training in Medicine and Nursing is easier for interprofessional education than that in Physiotherapy. By comparing the perception of the academic community regarding gender, we find that participating women are more available for teamwork and collaborative practices. Conclusion To improve the perception of students and teachers in collaborative practice, the need for a teacher training program on IPE principles and an early and more frequent insertion of IPE practices in the curricula of courses is evident.

Cognitive Dissonance: Affecting Party Orientation and Selective Recall of Political Information

Cognitive dissonance theory posits that inconsistencies between attitudes and behaviors cause an uncomfortable arousal state, and people are motivated to reduce this discomfort by changing attitudes or behaviors to increase consistency. This principle applies to research on political affiliation. Due to dissonance processes, individuals focus less on political information that opposes their views and pay greater attention when it is congruent with their views. This study adds to this research by examining whether political orientation causes a similar pattern of selective attention bias during the recall stage. Participants (117) studied a political article on a social issue representing a viewpoint that was favorable to Democrats. Next, participants recalled as much information as possible by typing the information in a textbox. Using a sliding scale, they also rated how they felt about the article in terms of arousal and affect, and indicated whether the article was neutral, positive, or negative. Democrats were predicted to recall more positive information and more positive affect after reading the article than Republicans. Surprisingly, more Republicans, rather than Democrats, recalled more positive information about the article. Finally, those who scored more conservatively on the political slider also reported more positive affect toward the article. Although contrary to the study hypotheses, these results have implications for our current understanding of selective attention in a political context by showing the bias also occurs at the recall stage. It takes a special effort to be able to think outside the bubble. The purpose of this study is to find what it takes to pop the bubble and change the mindset of political engaged people. Keywords: cognitive dissonance, attentional bias, political orientation, selective recall

Introduction

The Introduction situates David Jones’s work as a poet–artist within the broader currents of high and late modernism, particularly within the context of a tradition of medievalism in twentieth-century poetry. It draws on Alexander Nagel’s conception of the medieval modern to show how Jones approaches the culture and history of the early Middle Ages as a form of live material open to play and adaptation. The Introduction also reframes our understanding of David Jones’s perception of himself as Anglo-Welsh in relation to changing attitudes to early medieval Welsh (Celtic) and English (Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic) history over the course of his lifetime. This discussion introduces the monograph’s central argument: as a poet of the medieval modern, Jones plays with and reworks early medieval English histories, narratives, and artefacts in order to challenge the singularity and exceptionalism of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ canon.

The Impact of National and School Contextual Factors on the Academic Performance of Immigrant Students

The issue of immigration has become central to the politics of nations across the world, impacting many aspects of life over the last decade. Researches investigating educational achievement through a cross-national lens have found that immigrant children tend to exhibit lower academic achievement than their native born peers, and that these differences are exacerbated by both family level variables (e.g., socioeconomic status) as well as the school climate. The goal of the current study was to build on earlier work in this area by investigating the nature and degree to which national attitudes towards immigration have changed over time, and whether any such changes were associated with academic achievement for immigrant and native born students. In particular, the relationship between changing attitudes towards immigration and the achievement gap between native and immigrant students. Results of the study demonstrated that nations with more negative attitudes towards refugees in general, and those for which these attitudes became more negative over time had greater achievement gaps than did those nations with more positive attitudes. In addition, these change trajectories moderated relationships between teacher attitudes towards multiculturalism and academic achievement.

infrastructure of life

The infrastructure of the city accompanies a person at all stages of their biography, including death as an integral attribute of life. This section includes three articles, the authors of which appear in our journal for the first time. The articles discuss strong trends that usually escape the attention of architectural theorists. There is a return of communal and other forms of housing where people unrelated to each other live under the same roof. Is it a global trend or a forced measure against economic hardships? A rethink of the rental house, a rapid shift in the balance from home ownership to rental housing – how will this affect the architecture of cities? In the general trend of changing attitudes to death and the process of dying, the subject of hospice architecture until recently was taboo, but now strongly attracts architects’ attention. The articles of our new authors are more of a question-posing and problematic nature, which is exactly in the style of our journal.

Are attitudes toward immigration changing in Europe? An analysis based on latent class IRT models

We analyze the changing attitudes toward immigration in EU host countries in the last few years (2010–2018) on the basis of the European Social Survey data. These data are collected by the administration of a questionnaire made of items concerning different aspects related to the immigration phenomenon. For this analysis, we rely on a latent class approach considering a variety of models that allow for: (1) multidimensionality; (2) discreteness of the latent trait distribution; (3) time-constant and time-varying covariates; and (4) sample weights. Through these models we find latent classes of Europeans with similar levels of immigration acceptance and we study the effect of different socio-economic covariates on the probability of belonging to these classes for which we provide a specific interpretation. In this way we show which countries tend to be more or less positive toward immigration and we analyze the temporal dynamics of the phenomenon under study.