Evaluating a collaborative and responsive project to develop language assessment literacy

This article presents a history of Shiken since it was first published in 1997 until 2019, followed by suggestions for areas of future research in assessment to which the publication may be well suited to contribute. In the historical overview, data is presented about the following: the origins, titles, editors, and distribution; the article types; the contents of research articles and the design and methodologies they have employed. Regarding research article content, four prominent themes were identified: mass market tests, entrance exams, statistics, and validity/reliability. Regarding design and methods, research articles have tended to focus on English language tests with university students in Japan, while utilizing test and/or instrument data and quantitative methods of analysis. Recommendations for future research areas include investigations into the validity of test interpretations and uses of four-skills, vocabulary and other tests used in Japan, and language assessment literacy. Recommendations for future research design and methods include focusing more on a range of test stakeholders; various contexts, such as pre-tertiary education; and the use of qualitative and mixed methods.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Young Australian Adults’ Food Practices

Sustainable Aquaculture Futures

BackgroundIn Illinois, an average of 88 pregnant and postpartum individuals died annually from 2018 to 2020. Of these, 66% had at least one emergency department (ED) visit. To improve maternal health outcomes, the Illinois Maternal Mortality Review Committees recommended ED education on obstetric care, mental health conditions, and substance use disorders (SUD).MethodsFrom January 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, the Maternal Health Emergency Department Toolkit (Toolkit) training was piloted in six diverse Illinois hospitals. The Toolkit's effectiveness was evaluated using electronic medical record (EMR) data to assess changes in practice within the ED.ResultsA total of 281 (63%) ED providers and staff completed the training. From pre‐ to post‐pilot, EMR documentation of pregnancy or postpartum status in female patients of reproductive age increased from 56.4% to 83.4%, and screening pregnant and postpartum patients for mental health or SUD rose from 52.2% to 69.6%.ConclusionsThe Toolkit is an evidence‐based training of educational modules that led to positive changes in ED provider and staff's practice when caring for pregnant and postpartum patients. By fostering education, engagement, and collaboration, the Toolkit has the potential to play a key role in helping reduce maternal mortality and morbidity in Illinois. The Toolkit is now available statewide for all Illinois EDs.

Heart failure is a major public health concern which contributes significantly to rising healthcare costs. Comprehensive discharge planning can improve health outcomes and reduce readmission rates which, in turn, can lead to cost savings. The aim of this project was to promote best practice in the discharge planning of heart failure patients admitted in the coronary care unit of Zhongshan Hospital. A clinical audit was undertaken using the Joanna Briggs Institute Practical Application of Clinical Evidence System tool. Five audit criteria that represent best practice recommendations for heart failure discharge planning were used. A baseline audit was conducted followed by the implementation of multiple strategies, and the project was finalized with a follow-up audit to determine change in practice. Improvements in practice were observed for all five criteria. The most significant improvements were in the following: completion of a discharge checklist (from 0% to 100% compliance), comprehensive (i.e. inclusion of six topics for self-care) discharge education for patients (from 7% to 100% compliance), and conducting a telephone follow-up (from 0% to 76% compliance). The compliance rates for the two remaining criteria, completion of a structured education for patients and scheduling an outpatient clinic visit, both increased from 93% to 100%.Strategies that were implemented to achieve change in practice included development of a local discharge planning checklist, provision of training for nurses, and development of resources. The project demonstrated positive changes in the discharge planning practices of nurses in the coronary care unit of Zhongshan Hospital. A formalized discharge planning is currently in place and plans for sustaining practice change are underway. A continuous cycle of audit and re-audit will need to be carried out in the future to determine the impact of this evidence implementation activity on heart failure patient outcomes.

Biopharma Is Going Digital … Bit by Bit

The National Diabetes Prevention Center (NDPC) is an emerging model for public health practice and partnership. It is rooted in a "promising practices" framework, one that looks at what works for community diabetes prevention, care, and treatment practices. Working with national and local partners to explore new approaches to diabetes prevention invites us to move beyond traditional models of community public health partnerships. Traditional community partnership models emphasized the technical assistance in research, surveillance, and program development that can be provided by partners from outside the community. While not diminishing the importance of these activities, the NDPC seeks to provide an environment for meaningful language and discourse that adequately honors the innovative and culturally rich approaches to diabetes prevention already being developed within many American Indian and Alaska Native communities, which have some of the highest rates of diabetes in the world. The NDPC strives to provide common ground for the emergent discussions around the power and practice of solid evaluation frameworks, new information technologies, capacity-building philosophies, health systems, and collaborative approaches.

In the late 1970s, the embryonic UK research community in molecular simulation – physicists and physical chemists – organised itself around CCP5, one of a set of Collaborative Computational Projects in different fields. CCP5 acted to develop and use the software required by an evolving and expanding scientific agenda, to exploit quickly and efficiently the revolution in computing hardware and to educate and nurture the careers of future generations of researchers in the field. This collaboration formally began in 1980, and is still fully active now, 40 years later. Today, molecular simulation techniques, many of them pioneered by CCP5, are now used very widely, including in several other CCPs in the UK’s current family of Collaborative Computational Projects. This article tells the story of molecular simulation in the UK, with CCP5 itself at centre stage, using the written records in the CCP archives. The authors were, or are, all personally involved in this story.

In many scientific disciplines, research scholars not only hope to get published but aspire for a prominent authorship position on a journal paper. There is nothing vain about this; for a research scholar, a first-author publication opens doors to advancement because it shows that they can contribute substantially to a research project. But first, who is a research scholar? Definitions and notions vary. For this article, I define a research scholar as a student in a PhD program or a research-intensive Master’s program, or a research assistant in a similar league. If you are an early-stage research scholar in a scientific discipline, you might have some experience with research and even gained authorship credit, but have you played a major role in a collaborative project? Such a role is essential if you hope to see your name as the first author on a published research paper or obtain weighty authorship credit in another form. In this primer, I concentrate on the outcome—which I call “first significant publication”—and provide a set of tips to help you navigate your way. 1. Leadership: Take the Initiative to Lead By “lead,” I mean leading a research project, or a particular aspect of a project, under the direction of your research advisor. Perhaps everything has been agreed on and you find yourself playing a lead role without much deliberation. But sometimes—especially in research groups with many students, scholars, and postdocs—you should put yourself forward. You might have to be competitive. The first step is to […]

Aiming at a micro-analytic in-depth study of daily-life stress and coping and their effects on well-being, a new self-monitoring method combining event-based (stress episodes) and hourly time-based recordings (state monitoring of well-being indicators) has been developed and implemented on a palmtop computer. The study presents results of the first measures of a longitudinal design. N = 30 young adults entering the work force (nurses, cooks, electronic technicians, salesmen and bank clerks) are analyzed in this self-monitoring study, which includes training session, 15-day self-observation, and post-monitoring session. Subjects show good acceptance and compliance, and validity and reliability of the data are satisfying. Results reveal the stressful episodes recorded (compared to a student reference group) as less frequent but more “stressful”, the emotional stress reactions of the subjects as more anxious and angry. Coping behaviors evaluated through the behavior-rules approach (Reicherts, 1999) are rather functional. Agglutination of individual time series parameters reveals a marked, immediate impact of the stressful events on well-being indicators (e.g. mood, physical tension). Adequate coping has positive short-term effects in attenuating the stress impact on well-being and facilitates long-term adaptation (positive changes and well-being). Differences between occupational and non-occupational stress episodes are analyzed, and indications to enhance adequate coping of young adults are presented.

How can we address the complexity and cost of applying science to societal challenges? Open science and collaborative R&D may help [1]–[3]. Open science has been described as “a research accelerator” [4]. Open science implies open access [5] but goes beyond it: “Imagine a connected online web of scientific knowledge that integrates and connects data, computer code, chains of scientific reasoning, descriptions of open problems, and beyond …. tightly integrated with a scientific social web that directs scientists' attention where it is most valuable, releasing enormous collaborative potential.” [1]. Open science and collaborative approaches are often described as open source, by analogy with open-source software such as the operating system Linux which powers Google and Amazon—collaboratively created software which is free to use and adapt, and popular for Internet infrastructure and scientific research [6], [7]. However, this use of “open source” is unclear. Some people use “open source” when a project's results are free to use, others when a project's process is highly collaborative [4]. It is clearer to classify open source and open science within a broader class of collaborative R&D, which can be defined as scalable collaboration (usually enabled by information technology) across organizational boundaries to solve R&D challenges [8]. Many approaches to open science and collaborative R&D have been tried [1], [9]. The Gene Wiki has created over 10,000 Wikipedia articles, and aims to provide one for every notable human gene [10]. The crowdsourcing platform InnoCentive has reportedly facilitated solutions to roughly half of the thousands of technical problems posed on the site, including many in life sciences such as the $1 million ALS Biomarker Prize [11]. Other examples include prizes (X-Prize [12]), scientific games (FoldIt [13]), and licensing schemes inspired by open-source software (BIOS [14]). Collaborative R&D approaches vary in openness [15]. In some approaches, the R&D process and outputs are open to all—for example, open-science projects like the Gene Wiki described above. In other approaches which demonstrate what might be called controlled collaboration, there are strong controls on who contributes and benefits—for example, computational platforms like Collaborative Drug Discovery or InnoCentive that support both commercial and nonprofit research [9], [11]. Collaborative approaches can unleash innovation from unforeseen sources, as with crowdsourcing health technologies [11]–[13], [16]. They may help in global challenges like drug development [17], as with India's OSDD (Open Source Drug Discovery) project that recruited over 7,000 volunteers [16] and an open-source drug synthesis project that improved an existing drug without increasing its cost [18]. If you want to apply open science and collaborative R&D, what principles are useful? We suggest Ten Simple Rules for Cultivating Open Science and Collaborative R&D. We also offer eight conversational interviews exploring life experiences that led to these rules (Box 1). Box 1. Conversations on Open Science and Collaborative R&D Many commentators have considered challenges in translating open science and collaborative methods to biomedical research [2]–[4], [9], [17], [20], [24], [26], [28], [29]. How can protecting intellectual property be balanced with freeing researchers to build on previous knowledge? If R&D results are collaboratively created and freely available, who will take responsibility for costly clinical trials and quality control? What will be the Linux of open-source R&D? To explore such challenges and convey life experiences in biomedical open science and collaborative R&D, we offer eight conversational interviews by the first author of this article as supplementary material. The conversations were done on behalf of the Results for Development Institute and are with: Alph Bingham, cofounder of InnoCentive (Text S1) Barry Bunin, CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery (Text S2) Leslie Chan, open access pioneer and director of Bioline International (Text S3) Aled Edwards, director of the Structural Genomics Consortium (Text S4) Benjamin Good, coleader of the Gene Wiki initiative (Text S5) Bernard Munos, pharmaceutical innovation thought leader (Text S6) Zakir Thomas, director of India's Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) project (Text S7) Matt Todd, open science and drug development pioneer (Text S8)

BackgroundThe conduct of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in low-resource settings may present unique financial, logistic, and process-related challenges. Middle-income countries that have comparable disease burdens to low-income countries, but greater availability of resources, may be conducive settings for RCTs. Indeed, the country of Botswana is experiencing a rapid increase in the conduct of RCTs. Our objective was to explore the experiences of individuals conducting RCTs in Botswana to gain an understanding of the challenges and adaptive strategies to their work.MethodsWe conducted in-depth interviews with 14 national and international individuals working on RCTs in Botswana. Participants included principal investigators, research coordinators, lab technicians, research assistants, and other healthcare professionals. Interviews were audiotaped, transcribed verbatim, and coded for thematic analysis.ResultsFive primary themes were identified: ethics board relationships (including delays in the process); research staff management (including staff attrition and career development); study recruitment and retention (including the use of reimbursements); resource availability (including challenges accessing laboratory equipment); and capacity-building (including issues of exporting locally sourced samples). These themes were explored to discuss key challenges and adaptive strategies.ConclusionsThis study offers a first-hand account of individuals engaged in conducting RCTs in Botswana, a nation that is experiencing a rapid increase in research activities. Findings provide a foundational understanding for researchers in Botswana and trial managers in similar settings when planning RCTs so that the conduct of research does not outpace the ability to manage, support, and regulate it.

Abstract: This article describes the development of an upper-division undergraduate course wherein students engage with periodical texts through digital materials, tools, and methods that are used in individual and collaborative projects. Rather than offering a literature survey framed by key contexts, this course requires students to engage with fiction and nonfiction texts in digital facsimile, actively excavating such contexts. The article demonstrates how the digital can be incorporated into different kinds of Victorian studies classrooms at different kinds of institutions, and it models how digital Victorian studies courses can be made attractive and successful at smaller, teaching-focused institutions.

Perceiving a lack of integrated information literacy curriculum at our colleges, the library directors of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) consortium resolved to create a series of online tutorials aimed at undergraduates in the fields of art and design. The collaborative project needed a partner to produce the tutorials and offer the finished project in an environment accessible to students. When approached about this partnership, Lynda.com, one of the Internet’s leading online learning companies, agreed to work with the AICAD libraries to create an online information literacy course. The course launched in July 2015, and the authors conducted an assessment of the course quality and use nearly one year later by surveying librarians and faculty. This article is a study of how that course was conceived and how it evolved from a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) into its current online tutorial version on Lynda.com.

Children and adolescents with complex musculoskeletal conditions may receive health care that requires at least 1 transfer between 4 specialized pediatric establishments in the Montreal region (Québec, Canada). This may result in challenges in navigating the system. A collaborative approach, aiming to make the inter-establishment care pathways seamless and to improve the integration of musculoskeletal health services, brought together key stakeholders including a research team. The aim of this paper is to describe the timeline of the collaborative approach's key milestones and activities and, more specifically, to describe the context, process, and outputs of the involvement of researchers in support of a continuous quality improvement project based on an integrated approach. The descriptive timeline was constructed from a qualitative document analysis of the project-related gray literature (n = 80 documents) and was validated and interpreted with key stakeholders. The results showed how the collaborative project was set up and operated, as well as what solutions were developed and implemented. The strategies on how the research team was involved in the integrated approach in addition to its research activities were also described. Conclusions suggest practice recommendations for creating change processes by integrating research, service evaluation and clinical audit into quality improvement projects.