PubMed Health⌕ Search

SEARCH · PubMed Health

Results for “Informal learning”

Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 415 records · Page 23Linked to original sources
PubMed1994

Knowledge of and practices related to caries prevention among Koreans.

OBJECTIVES: This study assessed the knowledge and opinions of caries prevention and source of oral health information among Koreans. METHODS: A questionnaire consisting of 36 items was used to interview 2,000 Koreans 10 through 69 years of age. Results for only selected questions are reported. A multistage, stratified, random sampling method was used. RESULTS: Sixty-nine percent of the respondents had heard about fluoride. Only 16 percent knew that some community water supplies in Korea are fluoridated. Fifty-five percent of respondents who knew about community water fluoridation learned the information from television, whereas 28 percent read about it in a newspaper. Among those respondents who reported hearing about community water fluoridation, only 30 percent had precise information about its purpose. Fifty-five percent of the respondents reported that toothbrushing is the best way to maintain good oral health. Almost all respondents (97 percent) reported brushing their teeth one or more times a day. CONCLUSIONS: These data indicate that there is a relatively low level of accurate knowledge about dental caries prevention among Koreans 10 through 69 years of age. The majority of respondents report learning information about oral health from the mass media.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2000

The knowledge acquired during artificial grammar learning: testing the predictions of two connectionist models.

An artificial grammar learning experiment is reported which investigated whether three types of information are learned during this kind of task: information about the positions of single letters, about fragments of training strings, and about entire training strings. Results indicate that participants primarily learned information about string fragments and, to a lesser extent, information about positions of letters. Two connectionist models, an autoassociator and a simple recurrent network (SRN), were tested on their ability to account for these results. In the autoassociator simulations, similarity of test items to entire training items had a large effect, which was at variance with the experimental results. The results of the SRN simulations almost perfectly matched the experimental ones.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

A taste of nutrition--a nutrition resource for leaders working with mentally handicapped adults.

The trend towards deinstitutionalization for mentally handicapped adults has precipitated a need to provide these individuals with nutrition education and food preparation skills. Food, nutrition, and eating are important components of training programs for life skills, which lead to greater independence for the mentally handicapped. The types of nutrition information and learning activities needed for the mentally handicapped were determined through a literature review and a series of interviews with those working with this target group. The nutritional concerns of mentally handicapped adults include food selection to meet their nutritional needs, menu planning, food preparation, weight control, and nutrient-drug interactions. A Nutrition Resource Kit for Leaders Working with Mentally Handicapped Adults has been developed in The Regional Municipality of York in response to local demand for nutrition education programs and resources for mentally handicapped adults. The kit provides those working with mentally handicapped adults with background nutrition information, learning activities, resource materials, and references to additional resources. The topic areas covered include basic nutrition, nutritional concerns of mentally handicapped adults, nutrient-drug interactions, menu planning, shopping strategies, and food preparation. Dietitian-nutritionists can assist leaders who work with mentally handicapped adults by providing them with up-to-date nutrition information and motivating the to use available nutrition education resources.

Humans↗
PubMed2006

Broadening conceptions of learning in medical education: the message from teamworking.

BACKGROUND: There is a mismatch between the broad range of learning theories offered in the wider education literature and a relatively narrow range of theories privileged in the medical education literature. The latter are usually described under the heading of 'adult learning theory'. METHODS: This paper critically addresses the limitations of the current dominant learning theories informing medical education. An argument is made that such theories, which address how an individual learns, fail to explain how learning occurs in dynamic, complex and unstable systems such as fluid clinical teams. RESULTS: Models of learning that take into account distributed knowing, learning through time as well as space, and the complexity of a learning environment including relationships between persons and artefacts, are more powerful in explaining and predicting how learning occurs in clinical teams. Learning theories may be privileged for ideological reasons, such as medicine's concern with autonomy. CONCLUSIONS: Where an increasing amount of medical education occurs in workplace contexts, sociocultural learning theories offer a best-fit exploration and explanation of such learning. We need to continue to develop testable models of learning that inform safe work practice. One type of learning theory will not inform all practice contexts and we need to think about a range of fit-for-purpose theories that are testable in practice. Exciting current developments include dynamicist models of learning drawing on complexity theory.

Cognition↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The inhibition of exogenous distracting information in children with learning disabilities.

Several studies have shown that children with learning disabilities (LD) have difficulty in inhibiting irrelevant information, which generates endogenous interference from working memory. Other inhibition capacities have not yet been investigated, however. This article reports on an experiment examining the capacities of children with LD to inhibit exogenous interference, such as automatic, prepotent responses and distractor interference. Fifteen 11-year-old children with LD and 15 matched controls completed four tasks of inhibition, using the Stroop and Eriksen's flanker paradigms. To test the hypothesis that inhibition can be differentiated in terms of the type of material it acts on, each paradigm was used with numerical and nonnumerical stimuli. Our results showed that children with LD did not exhibit significantly larger interference effects than controls. Moreover, the pattern of results did not differ according to the type of material used. These findings indicate that children with LD do not show impairment in the inhibition of exogenous information--a finding that contradicts the material-specific inhibition hypothesis.

Child↗
PubMed2004

Introducing a technology-enabled problem-based learning approach into a health informatics curriculum.

PURPOSE: To investigate the effect on learner satisfaction of introducing a technology-enabled problem-based learning (PBL) approach into a health informatics curriculum. Course redesign was undertaken to prepare students for three 4-month work terms and a rapidly changing professional environment upon graduation. METHODS: Twenty-six Canadian undergraduate students of a redesigned course in biomedical fundamentals completed a midterm questionnaire in 2002. Eight of these students participated in a focus group. RESULTS: Students agreed that seven of nine functions provided by the web-based online course management system enhanced their learning: private email (92.3%), calendaring (88.5%), course notes (88.5%), discussion forums (84.5%), online grades (84.5%) assignment descriptions (80.8%) and online quizzes (80.8%). Although students agreed that two PBL activities enhanced learning (learning to present information) (84.5%) and learning to identify information needed (73.1%), the majority of students (69.2%) expressed a preference for the traditional lecture approach over the PBL approach. Students reported feeling uncertain of what was required of them and related anxiety accounted for most of the negative feedback. CONCLUSION: These findings give us clear goals for improvement in the course beginning with a comprehensive, carefully guided introduction to the processes of PBL. The positive trends are encouraging for the use of web-enabled courseware and for the further development of the PBL approach.

Computer-Assisted Instruction↗
PubMed2002

How we implemented a service-learning elective.

This paper describes the process used to introduce a service-learning course into the medical curriculum at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. The rationale for taking the initiative to begin such a project is outlined and curriculum planning considerations are reviewed, including how to identify project team members, choose community agency partners, develop the instructional plan, and define roles and responsibilities of the participants. The importance of understanding the philosophy of service learning and taking time for reflection are underscored. Also discussed are program evaluation issues and strategies are suggested for evaluating service learning, obtaining information relevant to the continuation of the project, and disseminating information about the service learning outcomes.

Community-Institutional Relations↗
PubMed1998

Development and evaluation of an information booklet for adult survivors of cancer in childhood. The United Kingdom Children's Cancer Study Group Late Effects Group.

AIMS: To determine the need for information among survivors of childhood cancer, to assess the acceptability of an information booklet, and to investigate the effectiveness of the booklet in increasing knowledge and influencing health related behaviours. SUBJECTS: Fifty survivors of childhood cancer (age range 14-32 years) who were consecutive attendees at a long term follow up clinic. METHODS: The booklet was developed for young people aged 14 years and above by the United Kingdom Children's Cancer Study Group Late Effects Group. Included is information about treatment of cancer, general advice about a healthy lifestyle, the rationale for long term follow up, and information about employment and life insurance problems. Survivors were interviewed at the follow up clinic, offered the booklet, and contacted approximately one week later for a telephone interview. The clinic interview assessed survivor's understanding of their illness and treatment and its impact on their lives, and their preferences for further information. The telephone interview determined survivors' general reaction to the booklet, whether it increased knowledge and influenced health related behaviours. RESULTS: All those interviewed accepted the written information and agreed to a follow up interview. Survivors were enthusiastic about being given more information. Over three quarters learned new information from the booklet. There were no indications that the information was associated with anxiety for any demographic or clinical subgroups. After reading the booklet there was an increased awareness of the risk from sunbathing (p < 0.05), and greater appreciation of the importance of follow up (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that written information is likely to be an acceptable and effective supplement to discussions with medical professionals and may readily be incorporated into long term follow up clinics.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Evaluating characteristics of community riparian awareness program interactions.

As part of its mandate to evaluate and monitor program delivery, the Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society (Cows and Fish) has commissioned independent evaluations to examine the effectiveness and applicability of the community-based riparian awareness and management program. The society's aim is to improve the understanding of landscape function, to better enable landowners and managers to make management decisions. The staff interaction evaluation examined staff ability to deliver certain valued characteristics, and identified whether the program and staff increased awareness and management action. Respondents rated staff highly on all characteristics. Landowners that participated in riparian health programming as part of community/watershed groups were 19% more likely to have learned new information and 21% more likely to implement management change than those that were not part of a group. Repeat interactions are critical to learning new information and influencing management. All those with frequent interactions had learned new information, compared to only 70% of those with very little interaction. A diverse array of interactions led respondents to alter their management, indicating the need for a wide variety of extension tools and activities. The results strongly support the need for a community-based approach in resource management and awareness activities, which enables repeat, ongoing and diverse interactions with extension staff.

Awareness↗
PubMed2001

Information theory approach to learning of the perceptron rule.

By recourse to a method based on information theory, we have studied the generalization problem in perceptrons. We considered different a priori distributions about the weights of the teacher perceptron. Our approach allows us to define the information gain from the examples used in the training procedure. The information gain can be used to choose a convenient example set for training the perceptron and to select the transfer function of the student perceptron.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2000

Consistency of Learning Styles of Undergraduate Athletic Training Students in the Traditional Classroom versus the Clinical Setting.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the learning styles of undergraduate athletic training students to determine their consistency in traditional classroom versus clinical settings. DESIGN AND SETTING: Subjects completed the Learning Styles Inventory twice, once focusing on learning new information in the classroom and the other focusing on learning new information in the clinical setting. The order of focus regarding setting (classroom or clinical) was counterbalanced across subjects. SUBJECTS: A total of 26 undergraduate athletic training students from a Committee on the Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs accredited athletic training education program (16 women and 10 men; mean age, 24.42 +/- 6.44 years) who were currently assigned to a clinical practicum as part of their academic program served as subjects. MEASUREMENTS: I performed 4 paired t tests, 1 for each learning mode, to determine if differences existed between the classroom and clinical settings. The percentage of respondents whose learning styles changed across settings was also calculated. RESULTS: The paired t tests revealed a significant difference between the Reflective Observation and Active Experimentation modes across settings. In addition, 58% of respondents' learning styles changed according to setting focus. CONCLUSIONS: It appears that learning styles do indeed shift, depending on the domain through which an individual is learning. Consequently, teaching strategies incorporated in 1 setting may not be equally effective in the other setting. Each learning setting should, therefore, be treated separately in order to accommodate individual learning styles and maximize learning achievement. Furthermore, if learning styles are to be considered when designing athletic training education, these findings indicate that in order to ensure the validity of the resulting learning style profile, it may be necessary to provide the respondent with a specific focus, either that of a classroom or clinical setting, before completing the Learning Styles Inventory.

Journal Article↗
PubMedDate not supplied

An anecdote of distance learning.

The Information Technology column in last quarter's issue provided an overview of continuing professional education options. The experience of a Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America member as a student in one of the previously described distance-education degree programs is related in this column. The Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, distance learning Masters of Public Health program provided a means for advancing this member's education that otherwise would not have been practical.

Curriculum↗
PubMed2005

Emphatic, interactive volume rendering to support variance in user expertise.

Various levels of representation, from abstract to schematic to realistic, have been exploited for millennia to facilitate the transfer of information from one individual to another. Learning complex information, such as that found in biomedicine, proves specifically problematic to many, and requires incremental, step-wise depictions of the information to clarify structural, functional, and procedural relationships.Emerging volume-rendering technique, such as non-photorealistic representation, coupled with advances in computational speeds, especially new graphical processing units, provide unique capabilities to explore the use of various levels of representation in interactive sessions. We have developed a system that produces images that simulate pictorial representations for both scientific and biomedical visualization. The system combines traditional and novel volume illustration techniques. We present examples from our efforts to distill representational techniques for both creative exploration and emphatic presentation for clarity. More specifically, we present our efforts to adapt these techniques for interactive simulation sessions being developed in a concurrent project for resident training in temporal bone dissection simulation. The goal of this effort is to evaluate the use of emphatic rendering to guide the user in an interactive session and to facilitate the learning of complex biomedical information, including structural, functional, and procedural information.

Computational Biology↗
PubMed1999

Spatiotemporal coding in the cortex: information flow-based learning in spiking neural networks.

We introduce a learning paradigm for networks of integrate-and-fire spiking neurons that is based on an information-theoretic criterion. This criterion can be viewed as a first principle that demonstrates the experimentally observed fact that cortical neurons display synchronous firing for some stimuli and not for others. The principle can be regarded as the postulation of a nonparametric reconstruction method as optimization criteria for learning the required functional connectivity that justifies and explains synchronous firing for binding of features as a mechanism for spatiotemporal coding. This can be expressed in an information-theoretic way by maximizing the discrimination ability between different sensory inputs in minimal time.

Action Potentials↗
PubMed2006

Neural correlates of rule-based and information-integration visual category learning.

An emerging theory of the neurobiology of category learning postulates that there are separate neural systems supporting the learning of categories based on verbalizeable rules (RB) or through implicit information integration (II). The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is thought to play a crucial role in successful RB categorization, whereas the posterior regions of the caudate are hypothesized to support II categorization. Functional neuroimaging was used to assess activity in these systems during category-learning tasks with category structures designed to afford either RB or II learning. Successful RB categorization was associated with relatively increased activity in the anterior MTL. Successful II categorization was associated with increased activity in the caudate body. The dissociation observed with neuroimaging is consistent with the roles of these systems in memory and dissociations reported in patient populations. Convergent evidence from these approaches consistently reinforces the idea of multiple neural systems supporting category learning.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Internet-based electronic health portal.

BACKGROUND: Use of the World Wide Web (WWW) and electronic media to facilitate medical care has been the subject of many reports in the popular press. However, few reports have documented the results of implementing electronic health portals for essential medical tasks, such as prescription refills and appointments. METHODS: At Walter Reed Army Medical Center, "Search & Learn" medical information, Internet-based prescription refills and patient appointments were established in January 2001. A multiphase retrospective analysis was conducted to determine the use of the "Search & Learn" medical information and the relative number of prescription refills and appointments conducted via the WWW compared with conventional methods. RESULTS: From January 2001 to May 2002, there were 34,741 refills and 819 appointments made over the Internet compared with 2,275,112 refills and approximately 500,000 appointments made conventionally. WWW activity accounted for 1.52% of refills and 0.16% of appointments. There was a steady increase in this percentage over the time of the analysis. In April of 2002, the monthly average of online refills had risen to 4.57% and online appointments were at 0.27%. Online refills were projected to account for 10% of all prescriptions in 2 years. The "Search & Learn" medical information portion of our web site received 147,429 unique visits during this same time frame, which was an average of 326 visitors per day. CONCLUSIONS: WWW-based methods of conducting essential medical tasks accounted for a small but rapidly increasing percentage of total activity at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Subsequent phases of analysis will assess demographic and geographic factors and aid in the design of future systems to increase use of the Internet-based systems.

Appointments and Schedules↗