1,720,958 research outputs found
The perceptions of clinical associate students about the decentralised learning environment at Walter Sisulu University
Get PDFThesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2022.Background: The hospital setting provides a unique environment for health professions students to learn and apply the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are gained in the classroom to practical situations. Walter Sisulu University (WSU) allocates Clinical Associate students (ClinAs students) for clinical placement to various district hospitals in order to acquire requisite knowledge, skills and attitudes. The allocation of ClinAs students to these decentralised clinical placement sites ought to provide a supportive learning environment that is conducive to learning. However, the clinical learning environment at the decentralised sites may not always be optimal. Understanding how the students perceive the influence of these decentralised clinical learning environments on their learning is important, as it can affect what and how they learn. This study was conducted with the aim of exploring the views of second- and third-year ClinAs students regarding the influence of the decentralised clinical learning environment on their acquisition of knowledge, skills and attitudes across the teaching sites of WSU using the Manchester Clinical Placement Index (MCPI). Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional design was employed using the MCPI tool. The data were collected in November 2019 from the second- and third-year ClinAs students who gave consent to participate in the study. The MCPI is an eight-item questionnaire that collects both quantitative and open text responses. The quantitative aspect of the tool required the students to rate their agreement or disagreement with each of the items on a Likert scale. The open text responses explored strengths, weaknesses and suggestions for improvement for each item. The significance of the perceived differences among sites was tested using Cramer’s V test. The reliability of the MCPI tool was done using Cronbach’s alpha. Findings: At the time when the study was conducted there was a total of 104 second and third year ClinAs students at WSU, of which 57 are second year students and 47 are third year students. Ninety-five (95) out of 104 ClinAs students consented to participate in the study. The age distribution of the participants was between 19 and 27 years, with a mean age of 20.9 years. The majority of the participants (53%) were male. More than 70% of students strongly agreed with the appropriateness of the Leadership, People and Instruction items within the MCPI, while the Facilities, Feedback and Observation items scored the least. About one-third of students neither agreed nor disagreed that the placement was appropriately organised. The eight themes that were generated from free text responses were staff related issues, the nature of the welcome into the environment, the character of the staff, theory meets practice, the opportunities for learning, the characteristics of feedback, availability of resources and the structure of the programme. There was a statistically significant difference in the way that the students perceived Leadership, Observation and Feedback in different hospitals. The Cronbach’s alpha was 0.6. Discussion: The findings of this study pointed out the strengths and weaknesses of the decentralised clinical learning environment at WSU as perceived by ClinAs students. The ClinAs students were satisfied with the contribution of Instructions and People towards their learning, however, there were challenges that were expressed which related to Feedback, Observation and Leadership. These aspects relate to the qualities of the staff and the need for faculty development. There seems to be an apparent contradiction when the students are satisfied with Instruction but not with the Observation. Physical and virtual spaces and equipment were also reported to affect the learning experience of the ClinAs students adversely. Conclusion: The training of ClinAs in decentralised sites brings with it some challenges as the students are placed in rural sites where the learning environment may not be optimal. This study has, however, highlighted a number of learning opportunities for students as well as opportunities to enhance the teaching offering.Master
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Clinical outcomes of hospitalised COVID-19 patients at Mthatha Regional Hospital, Eastern Cape, South Africa: A retrospective study
Get PDFAppropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Clinical outcomes of hospitalised COVID-19 patients at Mthatha Regional Hospital, Eastern Cape, South Africa: A retrospective study
Get PDFOpportunity for change: Undergraduate training in family medicine
No full textThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has changed the world as we knew it, and medical education is not an exception. Walter Sisulu University (WSU) has a distributed model of clinical training for the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBChB) programme. To address the challenges occasioned by the pandemic, the Department of Family Medicine and Rural Health undertook a modification of its MBChB VI programme. The changes aim to ensure the protection of all stakeholders and maintain the integrity of the programme, including the assessment. Changes were made in the delivery of the programme and in the way people interact with one another. Continuous assessment was modified, and the oral portfolio examination was introduced as the summative assessment tool. Although COVID-19 threatened the traditional way of teaching and learning, it however provided us with the opportunity to refocus and reposition our undergraduate medical programme
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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