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This article is aimed at achieving two purposes: (a) challenging the common and often unrecognized assumption that the only way to ensure that students are exposed to course concepts is by personally going over the material in class and (b) describing how minitests (i.e., individual test -+ group test -+ appeals -- instructor input) can be used to ensure that students master basic content in a fraction of the class time that would normally be devoted to lectures. Other benefits of minitests are also described. These include increased focus on higher-level thinking and problem-solving skills, development of students' interpersonal and group interaction skills, and providing students with experience as a member of an effective team.

Background: Poorly organized health systems with inadequate leadership limit the development of the robust safety cultures capable of preventing consequential adverse events. Although safety culture has been studied in hospitals worldwide, the relationship between clinician perceptions about patient safety and their actual clinical practices has received little attention. Despite the need for mixed methods studies to achieve a deeper understanding of safety culture, there are few studies providing comparisons of hospitals in different countries. Purpose: This study compared the safety culture of hospitals from the perspective of nurses in four European countries, including Croatia, Hungary, Spain, and Sweden. Design: A comparative mixed methods study with a convergent parallel design. Methods: Data collection included a survey, participant interviews, and workplace observations. The sample was nurses working in the internal medicine, surgical, and emergency departments of two public hospitals from each country. Survey data (n = 538) was collected with the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPSC) and qualitative date was collected through 24 in-depth interviews and 147 h of non-participant observation. Survey data was analyzed descriptively and inferentially, and content analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data. Results: The overall perception of safety culture for most dimensions was 'adequate' in Sweden and 'adequate' to 'poor' in the other countries with inconsistencies identified between survey and qualitative data. Although teamwork within units was the most positive dimension across countries, the qualitative data did not consistently demonstrate support, respect, and teamwork as normative attributes in Croatia and Hungary. Staffing and workload were identified as major areas for improvement across countries, although the nurse-to-patient ratios were the highest in Sweden, followed by Spain, Hungary, and Croatia. Conclusions: Despite all countries being part of the European Union, most safety culture dimensions require improvement, with few measured as good, and most deemed to be adequate to poor. Dimension level perceptions were at times incongruent across countries, as observed patient safety practices or interview perspectives were inconsistent with a positive safety culture. Differences between countries may be related to national culture or variability in health system structures permitted by the prevailing European Union health policy.

In order to manage special provisions in U.S. wilderness, several research products are needed. Minimally, a complete understanding of the legislative intent of the provision, in-depth understanding of the deep meanings held by the particular stakeholder community of interest, and some knowledge about the larger population of interest are needed. In this study of jet boat use on the Salmon River in the Frank Church– River of No Return Wilderness, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods were used to understand the attachment jet boat users have to the activity and the place.

A sequential or RAP COM (rapid communication) display was compared with a more conventional spatial display as participants monitored dynamically changing sets of three-digit numbers and responded to occasional target stimuli. In an effort to equate the stimulus-response compatibility of the two displays, we had participants respond to the targets with a chord keyboard in Experiment 1 and vocally in Experiment 2. We examined the influence of display duration on performance with the RAP COM and spatial formats by presenting stimuli at three different durations (400, 800, and 1200 ms). The influence of practice on performance with the RAP COM and spatial displays was also investigated. Participants responded to targets more quickly in the RAP COM than in the spatial displays at each of the three presentation durations and across more than 2000 trials of practice. Accuracy was influenced by the display presentation duration. Accuracy was higher for the RAP COM than for the spatial display at the 800-ms stimulus presentation duration in Experiment 1 and at the 800- and 1200-ms presentation durations in Experiment 2. The results are discussed in terms of the potential utility of RAP COM displays for complex, real-world systems.

© 2017 The Authors. Energy is one of the cornerstones essential for human life, along with other services such as water and food. Understanding how the different services in the energy-water-food (EWF) nexus interact and are perceived by different actors is key to achieving sustainability. In this paper, we derive a model of the EWF nexus using fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM). Data were collected in a two-step approach from workshops with researchers and stakeholders involved in the three focal sectors. Four FCMs were developed; one for each of the EWF sectors, and one for the interactions that create the nexus between EWF. The FCM represents the combined views of the groups who participated in the workshops, the importance and limitations of which is discussed. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the aggregated FCM was applied to predict the impacts on the EWF nexus of four scenarios under which the United Kingdom would depart from the European Union (i.e. Brexit). The FCM indicated that energy-related concepts had the largest influence on the EWF nexus and that EWF demand will decrease most under a 'hard-Brexit' scenario. The demand for energy was shown to decline relatively less than other services and was strongly associated with gross domestic product (GDP), whereas UK population size had a stronger effect on water and food demand. Overall, we found a threefold change across all concepts in scenarios without freedom of movement, contribution to the EU budget, and increased policy devolution to the UK.

AbstractTests of nonword repetition (NWR) have often been used to examine children's phonological knowledge and word learning abilities. However, theories of NWR primarily explain performance either in terms of phonological working memory or long‐term knowledge, with little consideration of how these processes interact. One theoretical account that focuses specifically on the interaction between short‐term and long‐term memory is the chunking hypothesis. Chunking occurs because of repeated exposure to meaningful stimulus items, resulting in the items becoming grouped (or chunked); once chunked, the items can be represented in short‐term memory using one chunk rather than one chunk per item. We tested several predictions of the chunking hypothesis by presenting 5–6‐year‐old children with three tests of NWR that were either high, medium, or low in wordlikeness. The results did not show strong support for the chunking hypothesis, suggesting that chunking fails to fully explain children's NWR behavior. However, simulations using a computational implementation of chunking (namely CLASSIC, or Chunking Lexical And Sub‐lexical Sequences In Children) show that, when the linguistic input to 5–6‐year‐old children is estimated in a reasonable way, the children's data are matched across all three NWR tests. These results have three implications for the field: (a) a chunking account can explain key NWR phenomena in 5–6‐year‐old children; (b) tests of chunking accounts require a detailed specification both of the chunking mechanism itself and of the input on which the chunking mechanism operates; and (c) verbal theories emphasizing the role of long‐term knowledge (such as chunking) are not precise enough to make detailed predictions about experimental data, but computational implementations of the theories can bridge the gap.

Marketing has long had a place in the planning and management of public sector recreation. In particular, the use of market segmentation has allowed leisure providers to better understand their clients' needs and to tailor their services to the diversity of those needs. However, the use of marketing approaches is not without controversy and is sometimes perceived to be at odds with the public service or stewardship mandates often associated with recreation management. We suggest that wholesale adoption of basic marketing principles (such as the notion of giving people exactly what they want at a great price) may be inappropriate. An alternative form, relational marketing, may be better suited to public purpose organizations. Relational marketing focuses on the development or fostering of a relationship between the public and the public agency. Thus, relational marketing focuses on building confidence in the agency's ability to guard the short- and long-term interests of the public. For example, for land management agencies, these objectives are embedded in legislative and policy mandates to provide outstanding opportunities for recreation, while at the same time protecting and enhancing the environment. Relational marketing seems better suited to these objectives compared with transactional marketing, which is more dominant in private sector businesses. Whereas transactional marketing focuses on fostering current and continuing purchases of goods and services, relational marketing extends beyond the direct economic exchange. In the public recreation settings, the public is considered more than a current or potential customer, they are also considered an owner or shareholder of the agency. Thus, repeat purchases or customer satisfaction are not sufficient measures of success for organizations with a public service mandate. Instead, relational marketing considers the perceptions that the many different groups of the public (e.g. participants and non-participants, supporters and non-supporters) have of the agency and its actions. The research reported here conceptualizes the relationship between the public and the agency into three dimensions: social trust (the degree to which individuals perceive the agency to share their views, goals, and values); commitment (the investment, attachment, and longevity of the relationship to the agency); and social responsibility (which includes attitudes towards the goals or public purposes of the agency). A market segmentation based on these dimensions yielded distinct subpopulations of the general public. The challenge for public agencies, such as the Forest Service, is to be responsive to the different relationships the public has with the agency. Collaborative planning efforts must acknowledge and incorporate knowledge of these differences in social trust, commitment, and social responsibility. Any public action or policy change should consider how it potentially affects the varying public's relationship with the agency and the services it provides. Managers must demonstrate stewardship, care, responsiveness, and continuing service to today's public and future generations. Any interaction with the public (e.g., marketing) should focus on the intended public purpose which guides the agency.