Assessment of knowledge, attitude, and practices of research among faculties in medical college

Medical research aims to advance knowledge, skills, and professionalism. Lack of research could lead to the demise of the profession as a viable discipline. Research orientation is a concept that incorporates four subscales and provides insight into faculties' overall perception of research. To assess the knowledge, attitude, and practices regarding research and to identify barriers for research among medical faculty. Our study is a questionnaire-based cross-sectional study covering 110 faculties of medical college. Data collection was done through the Edmonton research orientation survey (EROS), a pre-validated tool. EROS questionnaire consists of 50 questions in two sections –the first section containing demographic variables (12 questions) and the second section (consist of 38 items) asks the respondents to rate on a five-point Likert’s scale. A high response rate (90.9%) was achieved. Sixty-five percent of respondents achieved an overall medium EROS score and 33% of respondents achieved a high EROS score (mean Eros score 132.3+21.7) indicating high research orientation. Respondents showed high subscale scores: valuing research (63%) and being at the leading edge of the profession (66%). While involvement in research (47%) and evidence-based practice (53%) scored lower. The study highlighted important barriers like lack of time, skills and support. The results suggest that although faculties value research they engage less in carrying out and applying research. The positive research orientation provides an opportunity for the profession to use the available potential to increase research output.

A Food Box Intervention to Reduce Blood Pressure in Native American Adults With Hypertension: The CHEERS Study

Diet-related chronic diseases, such as hypertension and obesity, are prevalent in Native American (NA) communities where poor food environments are prominent and healthy food access is limited. The Chickasaw Healthy Eating Environments Research Study (CHEERS) is an NIH-funded study aimed to improve Body Mass Index and blood pressure control among NA adults with uncontrolled hypertension. This multi-level randomized trial, guided by a community-based participatory research orientation, was co-created by tribal and university partners and is implemented within the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. We created hypertension-specific food boxes that contained DASH diet foods, coupons for purchasing vegetables and fruits, educational materials, and heart-healthy recipes for supporting healthy eating. Food boxes were packed and shipped monthly to intervention participants with a 30-day supply of: one fruit serving/day, one vegetable serving/day, one serving of unsalted nuts or seeds/day, one serving of beans or lentils/day, and two servings of fatty fish/week. We will present our participatory approach in co-developing the CHEERS study methods, findings with a focus on older adults, and lessons learned. CHEERS is the first innovative food box intervention to be conducted in NA communities. Food box interventions show promise in improving dietary intake and reducing hypertension and obesity in rural and poor food environments.

Configurable Offline Sensor Placement Identification for a Medical Device Monitoring Parkinson’s Disease

Sensor placement identification in body sensor networks is an important feature, which could render such a system more robust, transparent to the user, and easy to wear for long term data collection. It can be considered an active measure to avoid the misuse of a sensing system, specifically as these platforms become more ubiquitous and, apart from their research orientation, start to enter industries, such as fitness and health. In this work we discuss the offline, fixed class, sensor placement identification method implemented in PDMonitor®, a medical device for long-term Parkinson’s disease monitoring at home. We analyze the stepwise procedure used to accurately identify the wearables depending on how many are used, from two to five, given five predefined body positions. Finally, we present the results of evaluating the method in 88 subjects, 61 Parkinson’s disease patients and 27 healthy subjects, when the overall average accuracy reached 99.1%.

The North-South Divide, And Northernness in Road to Wigan Pier from George Orwell, A Novelist and Outsider’s View

During the time that George Orwell lived, the Britain society was on the edge of development and fluctuation, the north-south divide was an issue discussed by journalists and politics, nationally and regionally. George Orwell, by traveling up and down in the whole English territory, wrote down what exactly he saw and experienced in 1930s. In Road to Wigan Pier, he depicted the unemployment and living conditions in North of England, as well as the class division and his potential political views. Road to Wigan Pier influences historical and literature scholars and triggers huge amount of debates on the politics, economy and history of England. Most importantly, it is both a mirror of England in 1930s and a future-teller of the modern society that we are living in. As Benjamin Jonson has claimed, “ He was not of an age, but for all time!”. Most scholars consider the novel is in two parts: the first is the people he met and his physical experience in Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield (the north). The second is his critical view on socialism in England and the middle class. In Road to Wigan Pier, and contemplating his personal background, what we can conclude is that George Orwell is a novelist, and he is neither a “north” nor a “south”. We have no persuading reasons of his work is not as the same value as those first-hand such as scientific data and photography. However, it is worth analysing his work with the record of the broad social condition in England. As a novelist and an outsider, we can see from the whole novel Road to Wigan Pier that he has his own perspectives on “northernness” from the aspects of employment, working-class and class difference. All these comments of George Orwell, since subjective and personal, especially trigger the politics’ thinking and the improve the social research orientation.

Research on the Quality and Promotion Path of Master Degree Thesis

The quality of dissertations is the basic core of the development of professional degree postgraduate education. With the transformation of economic development mode and the steady progress of the construction of an innovative country, the demand for professional degree postgraduates in economic and social development has increased significantly. The result is that the number of significant growth and the quality is difficult to guarantee. The most prominent is that the quality of professional degree postgraduates represented by dissertations has declined to varying degrees. Through on-the-spot investigation, this paper concludes that there are four prominent problems in the quality of professional degree master 's degree thesis : the topic is not suitable, the research is not deep enough, the content is not innovative and the writing is not standardized. Therefore, it is possible to achieve the goal of improving the quality of professional degree master ' s degree papers only by strictly controlling the topic selection, adhering to the problem research orientation and implementing the basic attributes of innovation.

Innovative Models of Pedagogical Education at the Classical University

The article is devoted to the role of classical university education in the training of highly qualified, highly competitive teaching staff capable of forming the image of a new school in modern conditions. The achievement of such a complex task is ensured by identifying and implementing the heuristic capabilities of a classical university in the development of pedagogical education. The author associates such opportunities with its fundamentalization, research orientation, advanced character, etc. The purpose of the article is to present the results of a scientific study related to the definition and theoretical justification of possible ways to implement models of teacher education as an optimal “scenario” for training elite teachers in a classical university. Methodology and methods of research. The methodological basis of the research is the philosophical provisions about a person as a subject of his own life activity; the unity and interrelation of processes and phenomena, general and special. The general methodology of the research is represented by a system-synergetic approach that allows us to consider professional and pedagogical training in a classical university as an open developing system in the “school-university-school”continuity relations; a holistic approach as a methodological orientation towards the formation of a holistic personality of a future teacher, as well as the integrity of the system of professional and pedagogical training at a classical university; an individual-personal approach that provides an opportunity to study along an individual educational trajectory. The main research methods were the analysis of scientific literature, theoretical generalization and modeling. The results of the study. As a result of the theoretical and experimental work carried out, it is proved that the quintessence of the heuristic capabilities of the classical university determines the development and implementation of innovative models for the development of pedagogical education. The author gives a description of each model, indicating its features and “contribution” to the training of future teachers in the system of university classical education. In conclusion, it is concluded that the proposed innovative variable models for the development of pedagogical education at a classical university will ensure the success of professional pedagogical training of future teachers, bring it to a fundamentally new level by realizing the valuable potential of a classical university.

Theme-Based Teaching to Promote Oral Fluency in a University in Colombia

The present qualitative study with an action research orientation focuses on the strengthening of students’ oral fluency in English through the implementation of six theme-based teaching workshops. The participants were students of an EFL pre-intermediate English language course in the institute of foreign languages at the Technological University of Pereira, in Risaralda State, Colombia. Besides the implementation of theme-based teaching, this study includes the speaking phases of rehearsal, performance, and debriefing to impact students’ oral fluency. This project emerged from an exhaustive needs analysis which showed that the university’s students, as future professionals, had difficulties with their oral performance i.e. their being unable to speak about topics related to their university life in English; hence, the need of including themes aligned with their academic contexts was highlighted with the purpose of helping them improve their oral fluency in English. The findings indicate that the students improved in their oral fluency in terms of vocabulary, intonation, and a reduction in the number of long pauses when speaking in English.

Efficiency in university-industry collaboration: an analysis of UK higher education institutions

We examine the determinants of university involvement in knowledge transfer activities, focusing on the value of external services provided by higher education institutions. Data come from 164 universities in the UK and are drawn from the HE Business and Community Interaction Survey (HE-BCI), with a variety of university- and region- specific explanatory variables grafted onto the data from other official sources. The production function for such external services is estimated using the appropriate stochastic frontier methods, and unobserved heterogeneity across institutions of higher education is accommodated by adopting a latent class framework for the modelling. We find strong effects of scale and of research orientation on the level of knowledge transfer. There are, however, two distinct latent classes of higher education institutions, and these differ especially in terms of how external service provision responds to subject specialization of universities and to economic conditions in the region. Research-intensive universities are concentrated in one of the latent classes and, in these institutions, the provision of external services appears to be highly efficient, while in the second latent class there is greater variation in the efficiency of universities.