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PubMedDate not supplied

Information literacy: educating for life-long learning.

Creating information-literate nurses is a challenging and complex task for nurse educators. It requires expertise on the part of the instructor, and a solid commitment to the importance of acquiring information skills and a willingness to demand quality work from the students. A librarian shares her views on information literacy.

Education, Nursing↗
PubMed1993

Not worth the risk? Attitudes of adults with learning difficulties, and their informal and formal carers to the hazards of everyday life.

Twenty adults with learning difficulties (adults) living at home with informal carers, mostly parents, and attending Adult Training Centres (ATCs) were interviewed about their everyday lives and information was also obtained from informal and formal carers. The problem of dealing with the hazards of everyday life emerged as an important theme. The thinking of adults and informal carers could be understood in terms of the moral dimension of hazards, through the distinction between risks, to be calculated, and dangers, to be avoided. Adults and informal carers within families largely agreed in their categorization of hazards but differences were found. In families where the head of the household had had a professional or skilled manual occupation, adults and informal carers were most likely to agree that hazards for the adult were dangers to be avoided. In families which had a history of unemployment or unskilled occupations, adults and informal carers were most likely to treat certain hazards as risks to be taken. The latter families were also less likely to have 2 informal carers. Adults from more risk-tolerant families appeared to be achieving more of their potential in everyday living skills. Formal carers at ATCs were more accepting of risks for adults with learning difficulties than informal carers and there was misunderstanding and conflict between formal and informal carers as a result.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Providing explicit information disrupts implicit motor learning after basal ganglia stroke.

Despite their purported neuroanatomic and functional isolation, empirical evidence suggests that sometimes conscious explicit processes can influence implicit motor skill learning. Our goal was to determine if the provision of explicit information affected implicit motor-sequence learning after damage to the basal ganglia. Individuals with stroke affecting the basal ganglia (BG) and healthy controls (HC) practiced a continuous implicit motor-sequencing task; half were provided with explicit information (EI) and half were not (No-EI). The focus of brain damage for both BG groups was in the putamen. All of the EI participants were at least explicitly aware of the repeating sequence. Across three days of practice, explicit information had a differential effect on the groups. Explicit information disrupted acquisition performance in participants with basal ganglia stroke but not healthy controls. By retention (day 4), a dissociation was apparent--explicit information hindered implicit learning in participants with basal ganglia lesions but aided healthy controls. It appears that after basal ganglia stroke explicit information is less helpful in the development of the motor plan than is discovering a motor solution using the implicit system alone. This may be due to the increased demand placed on working memory by explicit information. Thus, basal ganglia integrity may be a crucial factor in determining the efficacy of explicit information for implicit motor-sequence learning.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The role of lectures in veterinary education.

OBJECTIVE: To study the role of lectures from the perspective of staff and students involved in the veterinary course at The University of Queensland. METHODS: The Nominal Group Technique of Delbecq et al, which provides the maximum opportunity for group members to put forward points, was used to help develop a questionnaire which was completed by 351 students (a response rate of 84%) and 35 staff (76%) from the five years of the veterinary course, and was analysed using the SAS System for Windows. RESULTS: Almost all the staff and students agreed that lectures should fulfil many roles including stimulating and motivating students and encouraging them to think, as well as presenting ideas and concepts and an indication of the structure and relevance of the material. They should provide a guide for effective deep learning, but not encourage rote (or superficial) learning. A smaller percentage of staff and even fewer students agreed that lectures did fulfil these roles, especially those directed at encouraging students to look beyond simple memorisation of facts. The perceived disparity between reality and the ideal was greater amongst the older, clinical students than amongst their more junior colleagues. CONCLUSIONS: The focus of attention in lectures needs to change from the superficial, rote learning of information to deep, active learning directed at using information to solve problems that are perceived by the students to be relevant. If done in a stimulating and interesting way, this should develop skills in reasoning and critical analysis as well as providing a framework for storage and recall. It should also increase the motivation towards learning both during the veterinary course, and over the professional lifetime. Furthermore, the place of the lecture in veterinary education needs to be reassessed regularly in the face of newly-emerging educational technology.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Olfactory cues potentiate learning of distant visuospatial information.

The influence of proximal olfactory cues on place learning and memory was tested in two different spatial tasks. Rats were trained to find a hole leading to their home cage or a single food source in an array of petri dishes. The two apparatuses differed both by the type of reinforcement (return to the home cage or food reward) and the local characteristics of the goal (masked holes or salient dishes). In both cases, the goal was in a fixed location relative to distant visual landmarks and could be marked by a local olfactory cue. Thus, the position of the goal was defined by two sets of redundant cues, each of which was sufficient to allow the discrimination of the goal location. These experiments were conducted with two strains of hooded rats (Long-Evans and PVG), which show different speeds of acquisition in place learning tasks. They revealed that the presence of an olfactory cue marking the goal facilitated learning of its location and that the facilitation persisted after the removal of the cue. Thus, the proximal olfactory cue appeared to potentiate learning and memory of the goal location relative to distant environmental cues. This facilitating effect was only detected when the expression of spatial memory was not already optimal, i.e., during the early phase of acquisition. It was not limited to a particular strain.

Animals↗
PubMed2002

Evaluation of distance learning delivery of health information management and health informatics programmes: a UK perspective.

The aim of the article is to review evaluations of distance learning programmes in health information management, in order to identify the critical success factors for such programmes and discuss future directions. The emphasis is on the UK experience, based partly on reflections on the experience of one programme at University of Wales Aberystwyth (now over 10 years old), and partly on a policy review conducted for the NHS Information Authority and the NHS Information Policy Unit. The methods are, as far as possible, those of a systematic review of existing research, with, additionally, an overview of relevant policy developments for lifelong learning. The topics covered include the aims, objectives and educational philosophies of the programmes. The evidence, combined with the UWA experience, indicates the importance of face-to-face interaction, to complement distance or virtual learning. A student-centred approach to curriculum design and delivery is essential.

Competency-Based Education↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Memory for everyday information in students with learning disabilities.

This study compared students with and without learning disabilities (LD) on their recall of academic information and information encountered in the students' everyday lives. The academic recall measures included a sentence listening span test, a rhyming words working memory test, and a visual matrix working memory task. Students' cued recall of all the tasks was also measured. The everyday working memory tasks included a dance episode event recall test; a library procedure recall test; and recall tests of commonly found objects, such as a coin, a telephone, and a McDonald's sign. Compared to students without LD, students with LD performed poorly on both the academic recall tasks and the everyday recall tasks. These results support the notion that some students with LD may have working memory problems that affect their performance on tasks other than reading. The results of the cued recall showed that the availability of cues significantly decreased the ability group differences on many of the academic and everyday tasks. This result replicates prior research findings that students with LD do not use retrieval strategies effectively and that some students with LD may have a production deficiency that affects their retrieval of previously encoded information.

Child↗
PubMed2006

Effect of adjuvant breast cancer chemotherapy on cognitive function from the older patient's perspective.

PURPOSE: This longitudinal prospective study describes the older breast cancer patient's perception of the cognitive impact of adjuvant chemotherapy. METHODS: A total of 50 patients > or =age 65 with stage I to III breast cancer enrolled in this IRB-approved prospective study. Of the 50, 3 refused postchemotherapy testing and 2 had a cerebrovascular accident (CVA) during therapy, leaving 45 evaluable patients. The Squire Memory Self-Rating Questionnaire, given before and 6 months after chemotherapy, measured patients' perceptions of the ability to learn new information, of working memory, and of remote learning capabilities. RESULTS: Mean age was 70 years (range 65-84). Breast cancer stages were: I (33%), II (64%), III (2%). A 51% (23/45) of study participants perceived a decline in memory from before to 6 months after completion of chemotherapy. Patients who perceived a poorer memory than average before chemotherapy were more likely to report further memory deterioration after chemotherapy (19/30, 63%) than patients who perceived that their memory was average or better than average prior to chemotherapy (4/15, 27%). The memory domain most likely to be perceived as affected was the ability to learn new information (22/45, 49%) compared to remote memory (9/45, 20%) or working memory (13/45, 29%) capabilities. CONCLUSION: Approximately half of these older women perceived a decline in cognitive function from before to 6 months after chemotherapy. This perceived decline in cognitive function was most pronounced in patients with preexisting memory complaints. Further prospective study is needed to confirm these observations, correlate perceived memory changes with objective findings, and identify subgroups at special risk.

Aged↗