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PubMed2004

Best practices in incident investigation in the chemical process industries with examples from the industry sector and specifically from Nova Chemicals.

This paper will summarize best practices in incident investigation in the chemical process industries and will provide examples from both the industry sector and specifically from NOVA Chemicals. As a sponsor of the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), an industry technology alliance of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, NOVA Chemicals participates in a number of working groups to help develop best practices and tools for the chemical process and associated industries in order to advance chemical process safety. A recent project was to develop an update on guidelines for investigating chemical process incidents. A successful incident investigation management system must ensure that all incidents and near misses are reported, that root causes are identified, that recommendations from incident investigations identify appropriate preventive measures, and that these recommendations are resolved in a timely manner. The key elements of an effective management system for incident investigation will be described. Accepted definitions of such terms as near miss, incident, and root cause will be reviewed. An explanation of the types of incident classification systems in use, along with expected levels of follow-up, will be provided. There are several incident investigation methodologies in use today by members of the CCPS; most of these methodologies incorporate the use of several tools. These tools include: timelines, sequence diagrams, causal factor identification, brainstorming, checklists, pre-defined trees, and team-defined logic trees. Developing appropriate recommendations and then ensuring their resolution is the key to prevention of similar events from recurring, along with the sharing of lessons learned from incidents. There are several sources of information on previous incidents and lessons learned available to companies. In addition, many companies in the chemical process industries use their own internal databases to track recommendations from incidents and to share learnings internally.

Accidents, Occupational↗
PubMed1959

Self-regulation of brain-stimulating current intensity in the rat.

A modification of the self-stimulation technique of Olds enabled rats to regulate and maintain at a preferred level the amount of brain-stimulating current they received as reinforcement for lever pressing. The method used two levers to deliver brief brain shocks: each response at one lever increased the current intensity a small step and each response at the other lowered it one step.

Animals↗
PubMed1994

Procedural learning and the development and stability of character.

This manuscript presents a neuropsychological model of the development and stability of human character. We define character as those things which people do routinely, automatically, and unconsciously--those which make people knowable and predictable. According to the model, the substrate of character is comprised of one's phenotypically based temperamental predispositions. This substrate is modified as a result of experience. Research has indicated the existence of multiple, relatively independent memory systems, and we are particularly interested in the distinction that has been made between declarative and procedural learning. Declarative memory involves recall of information and events, while procedural memory involves the learning of skills and other processes. In neurologically intact persons, these systems work in concert, yet they are relatively independent of one another. This model constrains the concept of character in a manner that allows researchers to address several issues, including (1) the manner in which character develops over time, (2) the mechanisms involved in the stability of character, and (3) the processes likely to be associated with character change.

Brain↗
PubMed1999

[The medical advisor: a friend to count on?].

The medical advisor can be helpful for the practitioner as a source of information on drugs. However, the physician has to learn how to obtain basic rational information on therapy, how to identify whether the given information is relevant or not for the clinical decision, to distinguish between rational and irrational information during presentation and to validate all given information.

Consultants↗
PubMed1987

A four-year longitudinal study of dental student learning styles.

Based on research conducted simultaneously but independently in Europe, Australia, and North America, several new learning style inventories have been developed with well-recognized theoretical foundations and sound psychometric properties. One of the instruments, the Gregorc Learning Style Delineator, was used to study the perceived learning styles of 48 dental students as they proceeded through the four years of the curriculum. Students scored significantly higher on one of four possible learning style dimensions during each year of the curriculum. This dimension, the concrete sequential, is associated with the following learning style characteristics: preference for factual over abstract information, desire for a highly organized learning environment with considerable hands-on opportunity, but free from distractions or ambiguity about learning tasks. Students' preference for the concrete sequential dimension increased significantly as they progressed toward graduation, suggesting that the learning environment of the dental school actually served to reinforce the students' initial predisposition toward the concrete sequential orientation.

Curriculum↗
PubMed1994

Learning styles of nurse anesthesia students related to level in a master of science in nursing program.

To alleviate the shortage of anesthetists, nurse anesthesia programs are expanding and new programs are being developed while they simultaneously move into the master's degree framework. Students' learning style preferences can provide valuable information for educators engaged in facilitating and enhancing learning. This study identified the learning styles of nurse anesthesia students enrolled in 12 programs that confer a master of science in Nursing degree in relation to the students' gender and level in an anesthesia program. Learning profiles were determined by scores on the Learning Style Inventory (Kolb, 1985). A personal data sheet was used to elicit the students' demographic characteristics. Surveys were administered to a sample of 264 nurse anesthesia students, with 164 usable responses (62.8%). Results indicated a preference for the assimilator learning style (37.2%). A statistically significant relationship between learning style and level in an anesthesia program was found (chi-square = 11.14, df = 3, P < .05). Whereas students who had completed fewer than 12 months in an anesthesia program showed no dominant preference for a learning style, students who had completed more than 12 months were predominantly distributed in two learning style categories: assimilators (40.0%) and convergers (38.8%). No statistically significant relationships were identified between learning styles and gender.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Cooperative learning as an approach for educating diabetic patients and their spouses.

The purpose of this quasi-experimental pilot study was to investigate the effectiveness of applying cooperative learning theory when educating persons with diabetes and their spouses. The target population were patient-spouse pairs who had attended a diabetic outpatient program within the past 2 years. Members of the experimental group employed cooperative learning strategies to review information about diabetes; members of the control group were provided with a lecture reviewing information about diabetes. Results suggested an increase in knowledge about diabetes in both groups. Although the experimental group reported a favorable attitude toward cooperative learning, the results did not demonstrate that the cooperative learning instructional method contributed to more improved learning than the lecture method. Limitations of the study methodology are discussed to better understand the results.

Diabetes Mellitus↗
PubMed2001

Children's use of phonology to infer grammatical class in vocabulary learning.

Prior studies of the relationship between phonological information and grammatical category assignment have focused on whether these relationships exist and whether people have learned them. This study investigates whether these relationships affect preschool children's vocabulary acquisition in a laboratory setting. Child participants learned 12 vocabulary words (6 nouns and 6 verbs) under three conditions, in which, (1) the syllable number/grammatical category relationship matched English, (2) the syllable number/grammatical category relationship was opposite to English, or (3) there was no relationship between syllable number and grammatical category. In the initial presentation of the words, children assumed that the novel words matched the pattern found in English. When the syllable number/grammatical category pattern matched that of English, the children learned more of the words. Phonological information also predicted error patterns. These results suggest that any account of vocabulary acquisition should consider the role of phonological information.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1997

Realistic simulation of the Aplysia siphon-withdrawal reflex circuit: roles of circuit elements in producing motor output.

The circuitry underlying the Aplysia siphon-elicited siphon-withdrawal reflex has been widely used to study the cellular substrates of simple forms of learning and memory. Nonetheless, the functional roles of the different neurons and synaptic connections modified with learning have yet to be firmly established. In this study we constructed a realistic computer simulation of the best-understood component of this network to better understand how the siphon-withdrawal circuit works. We used an integrate-and-fire scheme to simulate four neuron types (LFS, L29, L30, L34) and 10 synaptic connections. Each of these circuit components was individually constructed to match the mean or typical example of its biological counterpart on the basis of group measurements of each circuit element. Once each cell and synapse was modeled, its free parameters were fixed and not subject to further manipulation. The LFS motor neurons respond to sensory input with a brief phasic burst followed by a long-lasting period of tonic firing. We found that the assembled model network responded to sensory input in a qualitatively similar fashion, suggesting that many of the interneurons important for producing the LFS firing response have now been identified. By selectively removing different circuit elements, we determined the contribution of each of the LFS firing pattern. Our first finding was that the monosynaptic sensory neuron to motor neuron pathway contributed only to the initial brief burst of the LFS firing response, whereas the polysynaptic pathway determined the overall duration of LFS firing. By making more selective deletions, we found that the circuit elements responsible for transforming brief sensory neuron discharges into long-lasting LFS firing were the slow components of the L29-LFS fast/slow excitatory postsynaptic potentials. The inhibitory L30 neurons exerted a significant braking action on the flow of excitatory information through the circuit. Interestingly, L30 lost its ability to reduce the duration of LFS firing at high stimulus intensities. This was found to be due to the intrinsic nature of L30's current-frequency relationship. Some circuit elements, including interneuron L34, and the electrical coupling between L29 and L30 were found to have little impact when subtracted from the network. These results represent a detailed dissection of the functional roles of the different elements of the siphon-elicited siphon-withdrawal circuit in Aplysia. Because many vertebrate and invertebrate circuits perform similar tasks and contain similar information processing elements, aspects of these results may be of general significance for understanding the function of motor networks. In addition, because several sites in this network store learning-related information, these results are relevant to elucidating the functional significance of the distributed storage of learned information in Aplysia.

Animals↗
PubMed1979

Cancer education for school personnel.

A large segment of our society associates cancer with doom and despair. This negative view appears to originate partially from the public's general lack of knowledge of the disease and of current treatment potential. In response to this lack of information and overall pessimistic attitude, a cancer education course was developed for school teachers and school nurses. The unique two-day course provides cognitive and affective learning experiences. Through the multiple teaching strategies employed, students are able to examine their own health practices, increase their knowledge of cancer and cancer treatment, interact with a person who is successfully living with cancer, and learn how to share information related to cancer. At the conclusion of the course, a comparison of the participants' pretest and posttest scores indicate a statistical improvement in both their cognitive and affective domains.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed1985

Oral interaction in cooperative learning groups: speaking, listening, and the nature of statements made by high-, medium-, and low-achieving students.

Oral interaction within cooperative learning groups was observed for high-, medium-, and low-achieving students. Initially, cooperative and individualistic learning situations were compared on achievement and attitudes. Forty-eight 4th-grade American students were assigned to learning situations on a stratified random basis controlling for ability and sex. They participated in the study for 55 min a day for 15 instructional days. Two observation schemes were used. The results for the cooperative situation were factor analyzed to determine the basic dimensions of oral interaction within cooperative learning groups. Five orthogonal factors were identified: Exchanging Task-Related Information, Elaborating on the Information, Encouraging Each Other to Learn, Disagreeing With Each Other's Conclusions, and Making Nontask Comments and Sharing Personal Feelings. The oral participation of students from different achievement levels was differentially related to achievement. Vocalizing was found to be more strongly related to achievement than was listening to other group members vocalize. Medium and low achievers especially benefited from cooperative learning experiences.

Achievement↗
PubMed1994

Serial pattern learning after head injury.

Nonverbal serial pattern learning in patients with traumatic brain injury was examined using a serial reaction time task developed by Nissen and Bullemer (1987). During four blocks of pattern acquisition trials, subjects responded to asterisks appearing in repetitions of a 10-element spatial sequence. An indirect measure of pattern learning was obtained by comparing response times in the fourth pattern acquisition block with response times in a fifth block where asterisks occurred in random sequence. A direct measure of pattern memory was provided by accuracy scores in a final pattern generation block in which subjects predicted the spatial sequence of asterisks. Prior research with this task has shown that individuals from several special populations--including the normal elderly, Korsakoff's syndrome patients, and Alzheimer's patients--show intact performance on the indirect measure of pattern learning, but are impaired on the direct measure. In contrast to these earlier findings, the results of this study showed that mild to moderately severe traumatic brain injury does not cause a marked disruption in the ability to learn and remember serial pattern information. There was evidence that the amount of practice required to learn the serial pattern increases after moderately severe head injury; however, the ability to use pattern memory to enhance prediction accuracy appears to be normal.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2002

Cardiovascular interactions: an interactive tutorial and mathematical model.

The maintenance of an adequate cardiac output and systemic arterial blood pressure is a complex process with intricacies that are often difficult to understand. Cardiovascular Interactions is an active learning tool that demonstrates the interactions between the functions of the heart and peripheral circulation. This learning package consists of a Lab Book, a Model, and an Information file. The Lab Book is an interactive tutorial for exploring the relative influences of parameter changes on the cardiovascular system under normal, stressful, or pathophysiological conditions. The learners are guided to predict the direction and relative magnitude of changes of key variables in the cardiovascular system, evaluate the accuracy of their predictions, and describe the cause-and-effect mechanisms involved. Consequences of heart failure, hemorrhage, exercise, and changes in intrathoracic pressure can be explored. The results obtained in the Lab Book are based on a five-compartment mathematical Model, which reflects our current understanding of the basic control of the cardiovascular system. The Model was designed to be complex enough to be realistic, yet not so complex as to be overwhelming. An Information File contains definitions and descriptions of classical physiology about key concepts, including figures, and a detailed description of the Model. Hypertext tags embedded in the Lab Book are used to access the Information File. The Cardiovascular Interactions learning package was designed to run from its CD and so does not need to be installed.

CD-I↗
PubMed1979

How can I improve my teaching?

There is nothing mysterious about improving teaching. To learn to teach better teachers should: (a) be prepared and motivated to learn; (b) consider their needs and interests in order to specify whay they want to learn; (c) secure feedback and information in relation to the performance or skill they want to learn; and (d) try new teaching methods suggested by the feedback.

Australia↗
PubMed2026

Learning a pairwise epigenomic and transcription factor binding association score across the human genome.

MOTIVATION: Identifying pairwise associations between genomic loci is an important challenge for which large and diverse collections of epigenomic and transcription factor (TF) binding data can potentially be informative. RESULTS: We developed Learning Evidence of Pairwise Association from Epigenomic and TF binding data (LEPAE). LEPAE uses neural networks to quantify evidence of association for pairs of genomic windows from large-scale epigenomic and TF binding data along with distance information. We applied LEPAE using thousands of human datasets. We show using additional data that LEPAE captures biologically meaningful pairwise relationships between genomic loci, and we expect LEPAE scores to be a resource. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The LEPAE scores and the software are available at https://github.com/ernstlab/LEPAE.

Humans↗
PubMed1988

Learning human anatomy: does learning occur during a lecture?

Information uptake during a formal lecture was evaluated using a sample of 43 second-year medical students to whom a topic on human developmental anatomy was presented. The sample was divided into two groups: Blue (group B) (21 students) and Red (group R) (22 students). Prior to the lecture, a pre-test of 20 multiple choice questions was administered to each group. The lecture was then delivered over 50 minutes. Both in its preparation and presentation, the lecture conformed to the principles of programmed instruction. After a 10-minute students' question-and-answer session, a post-test was served. For group B, this was group R's pretest while group R, in turn, received group B's pretest. No question in the pre-test was repeated in the post-test. Intergroup comparisons of pre-test scores and of post-test scores revealed non-significant differences (P greater than 0.05), thus confirming that the pre- and the post-tests were of comparable difficulty. In each group, the mean post-test score was significantly higher than the pre-test score (P less than 0.001). The pooled scores indicated that the percentage mastery of material presented during the lecture increased from -1.8% to 58.4%. These results demonstrate that significant learning can occur during a lecture prepared and delivered in accordance with sound pedagogical principles.

Anatomy↗
PubMed1992

Technique for training schizophrenic patients in illness self-management: a controlled trial.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether schizophrenic outpatients receiving low-dose neuroleptic therapy could learn and retain complex information and skills related to self-management of their illness, a novel technique of teaching, using cognitive and behavioral methods, was designed to compensate for the patients' learning disabilities. METHOD: The subjects were 41 patients with DSM-III-R schizophrenia who were receiving constant maintenance neuroleptic drug therapy. They were randomly assigned to structured, modularized skills training or to supportive group psychotherapy. RESULTS: The patients who received skills training made significant gains in each of the areas taught, while those participating in group therapy did not. The skills learned during training were retained without significant erosion over a 1-year follow-up period. CONCLUSIONS: The effectiveness of modularized teaching of illness self-management skills to schizophrenic patients appears to be largely independent of baseline psychology and symptom improvement. Such an approach is useful for overcoming or compensating for the enduring cognitive and information processing deficits commonly found in schizophrenia.

Activities of Daily Living↗