This study aims to identify the values of patients to inform policies and infrastructure for biobanking and precision medicine in the face of trade-offs between values. We surveyed breast cancer patients about conditions for receiving research results, partnerships between nonprofit health systems and for-profit companies, and the distribution of financial value generated from research. Survey questions presented trade-offs between values such as maintaining privacy versus receiving research results. Patients generally are willing to be re-identified to receive information about the use of their donated tissue---especially research results. They support public-private partnerships if they accelerate development of new therapies and tend to favor the idea of sharing in financial benefits generated from research on their tissue.

A well-designed assessment can assist educators on site. However, suitable large-scale, standardised, multiple text comprehension assessments for primary school children are still lacking. This study addresses this gap by developing the Measure of Children’s Multiple Text Comprehension (MCMTC), which adheres to the principles of the construction-integration and multiple-document models. The test suite, comprising 41 multiple-choice and 17 constructed-response items across a range of text genres, was administered to 1,790 students in grades 3-6. The MCMTC’s internal reliability was confirmed through Rasch analysis, with satisfactory Cronbach’s alpha and suitable item-model fit values. Correlations with established tests showed small to medium effect sizes, supporting the external validity of the MCMTC. In conclusion, this study provides a tool for assessing children’s multiple text reading comprehension, facilitating a deeper understanding across different grades and genders. It also exemplifies a practical model for test development and ability estimation using the Rasch approach.

A document by Carlan Peters. Click on the document to view its contents.

This research examines the efficacy and productivity disparities between pre- and post-pandemic educational approaches, navigating the intricate challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic in Indian higher education. Focused on stakeholders within education institutions, 582 responses were acquired through stratified random sampling using Google Forms. Meticulous SPSS analysis reveals a significant decline in productivity, particularly among 367 female respondents. The study underscores nuanced health challenges faced by learners and educators, including compromised vision, persistent distractions, and diminished attention spans. It advocates for integrating online pedagogical methods into mainstream academic practices, suggesting strategic models like flipped classrooms and blended learning. Emphasizing the need for a technologically adept pedagogical landscape, the study implicates an antiquated educational policy framework for inadequate responses to technological advancements. Recommendations stress proactive policy adjustments and the imperative of equipping educators and students with essential technological proficiencies to adeptly navigate unforeseen educational challenges.

Assessing group functioning can be part of group-based learning, referred to here as collaborative learning. The aim of assessment is to encourage collaboration and ensure individual accountability, thereby reducing social loafing and increasing fairness for members. There are many rules proposed by experts, behavioral criteria that promote effective group work, against which group members can be assessed (category-based assessment). In our group-assessment protocol, students define their own rules; a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 7. The main reason for this approach is to give students maximum autonomy. A possible objection to such an approach is that students may overlook some essential criteria and thus (learn to) collaborate incorrectly. To see to what extent expert- and student rules match, we compared expert rules (124 from 12 publications) with student rules (810 from 147 secondary school and university groups). We find that they create the same rules, but that there are some differences in emphasis. We conclude that students have sufficient understanding of collaboration and that when they participate in multiple projects in different groups, they are likely to be exposed to all of the experts’ rules.

Dementia outcomes are better for those who receive early diagnoses, however, much stigma and fear surrounds help-seeking behaviours for dementia assessment, preventing intervention and support both for people with dementia and carers. Pre-assessment counselling for dementia involves the provision of a counselling service that occurs after approaching a clinician with cognitive or memory complaints, but before undergoing formal diagnosis of dementia. Pre-assessment counselling may help people with suspected dementia and their carers to understand and address concerns with dementia assessment and disclosure. Using PRISMA guidelines, four peer-reviewed publications involving clinicians, people with suspected dementia and carers and pre-assessment counselling were identified and reviewed. These studies used designs including random controlled trials, quantitative questionnaires, qualitative interviews and mixed methods research. The included papers ranged from 2007 to 2020. The impact of pre-assessment counselling is examined using content analysis. Themes including psychological adjustment for people with dementia, quality in delivering diagnoses for healthcare practitioners and the importance of including family members in the diagnosis journey were identified as the most significant impact of pre-assessment counselling. Limited literature exists to empirically evaluate the impact of pre-assessment counselling but the findings suggest that preassessment counselling provision is critical within the process of diagnosis.

EFFECTS OF SOCIAL ELABORATION ON INTENTIONAL MEMORY OF WORDS HIROSHI TOYOTA

Studies have shown post-conflict power-sharing as one of the important institutional aspects of post-conflict peace. However, these studies have yet to explain why and how lower-tier insurgents can play an influential role during and after the power-sharing peace deals. The most important aspect about them is that they are the rational actors whose interests in ‘selective incentives’ are more likely to make them weigh post-power sharing terms in terms of their cost-benefit analysis. The central argument of this paper is that conflicts incurring a higher cost for the lower-tier insurgent are more likely to survive a peaceful transition only when their concern of ‘selective incentives’ has been taken care of. With a statistical analysis of the Power-sharing Event Datasets (PSED) of Ottomonn and Vullers (2015), this paper has found support for this argument.

This paper presents a model to use market indices to predict the daily net asset value of hedge funds that are not market observable. The model allows financial market participants to produce a daily mark-to-model for their hedge fund positions, and eventually options derived thereon. We use the historical data of indices to generate a robust estimate of the required index weighting parameters. Empirical study shows that the model makes reasonable predictions when appropriate index choices have been made and produces diagnostic information that can indicate the relative reliability of predicted daily hedge fund returns.

This paper aims to provide a perspective on the way scientific evidence collected in times of crises can inform current debates in the literature on energy consumer behaviour, but also the decision-making process. Data such as the one that resulted from our quasi-experimental interventions in Romania during overlapping crises such as the COVID-19 pandemics and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine-affecting energy prices and consumer behaviour. While we acknowledge the well documented challenges of replicating pilot studies based on convenient sampling to full population surveys, we also suggest that the latter are ultimately a feasible and cost-effective measurement of changes in contexts of sudden shocks. Such data collection efforts could become the object of an ongoing multi-stakeholder engagement process leading to better-designed and deployed policies that can deliver much better in both short-term goals (e.g. managing price fluctuations in energy crises) and more medium and long-term scenarios (e.g. just energy transition).

Abstract 

Azi Emmanuel John1;1Public Health Department, Faculty of Health Sciences, Plateau State University, Bokkos, Pleautue State, Nigeria.

This paper critically examines the nexus between the scientific method and the study of race in the contemporary world. It begins by historicizing the emergence of the scientific method as indispensable to the advent of European modernity. The development of modernity collapsed into the racialization of black subjects as subhuman and criminal. This criminalization of blackness occurs at two critical junctures: the arrest of blacks via plantation enslavement and the concomitant imprisoning of black bodies of thought. The consequence of modernity’s carceral methods implicates the study of race, particularly the formation of Black Studies, by criminalizing black reason. As such, the paper contends for an Afromodern scientific revolution, understood as the emancipation of method and the decarceralizing of science in order to procure black liberation in the modern world.

Remote work has become increasingly common due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but this has presented workers with new difficulties and barriers that may have an effect on their performance and productivity. In this paper, we explored the barriers to remote work and how a certain personality trait - grit: passion and perseverance in achieving long-term goals - could influence how workers copied with this reality. A total of 203 participants (69.5% female) with mean age of 41.90 (SD = 12.60) years completed an online survey, during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Portugal, investigating grit, perceived stress/anxiety, perception of remote work as a barrier, and self-reported productivity during this period. The findings suggest that grit negatively predicts the number of barriers identified during the transition to remote work and consequently positively predicts worker self-reported productivity. Thus, self-reported productivity is positively related to grit, and this relationship is mediated by the number of identified barriers.

To get published in academic journals academics follow detailed instructions on how to report on their results. Reviewers follow instructions on how to review manuscripts. A compliant attitude to format is a prerequisite for publication. Examples from the organization and management disciplines illustrate how isolation from society at large represent a distorted version of Taylorism. But although standardized research reports dull the interest of readers and affect the research content, standardization may be understood as an emancipatory device. It allows for an efficient production process and opportunities for many to make an academic career.

Determinants of Human Milk Donation and Use among Postpartum Women at a City Hospital Nairobi, KenyaBackground: World Health Organization advocates donor human milk as a superior substitute for newborns unable to obtain mother’s milk. Calls have been made for the scale-up of human milk banks to provide infants without access to mother’s milk safe donor human milk.Research aim: To assess determinants of human milk donation and use among postpartum women at a city hospital with human milk banking facilities.Methods: This was a cross-sectional study. Consecutive sampling method was used to recruit three hundred and seventy mothers. Data was collected using a pre-tested interview-based questionnaire. Data was analyzed using R-4.3.0 software and descriptive statistics were done for all variables. Further inferential statistics including Chi-Square test and multivariate logistics regression were computed with significance level set at α=0.05.Results: The mean age of the participants was 27 years (±6.3). A majority (78.6%) of the women were married and slightly above half (57%) had attained secondary school education. Only 27.3% were aware of human milk banking. Mother’s willingness to donate human milk and use donor human milk was 78.1% and 70.8% respectively. The respondent’s age (OR 0.423; 95% CI 0.19-0.942) was significantly associated with willingness to donate. Religion (OR 0.266; 95% CI 0.097-0.718) and prior knowledge of human milk banking (OR 0.894; 95% CI 1.066-3.364) were significant predictors of willingness to use donor human milk.Conclusion: Human milk banking awareness was low among the study population; however, mothers are willing to donate human milk as well as feed their infants’ donor human milk.

A growing body of research is focusing on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and computational thinking (CT) to enhance student learning outcomes. Many researchers have designed instructional activities to achieve various learning goals within this field. Despite the prevalence of studies focusing on instructional design and student learning outcomes, how instructional efforts result in the integration of AI and CT in students’ learning processes remains unclear. To address this research gap, we conducted a systematic literature review of empirical studies that have integrated AI and CT for student development. We collected 18 papers from four prominent research databases in the fields of education and AI technology: Web of Science, Scopus, IEEE, and ACM. We coded the collected studies, highlighting the students’ learning processes in terms of research methodology and context, learning tools and instructional design, student learning outcomes, and the interaction between AI and CT. The integration of AI and CT occurs in two ways: the integration of disciplinary knowledge and leveraging AI tools to learn CT. Specifically, we discovered that AI- and CT-related tools, projects, and problems facilitated student-centered instructional designs, resulting in productive AI and CT learning outcomes.

Mohammed Gbanja Abdulaia 1 Salifu Mubarikb Paul Bata DomanbancCorresponding Author: