Technology adoption as process: a case of integrating an information-intensive website into a patient education helpline

This study followed the introduction of the Arthritis Source website into the existing teaching practices of Arthritis Foundation Helpline volunteers. The goal was to examine what factors may affect a particular group of educators adopt a potentially valuable Internet tool into an existing instructional environment. Defining the possible uses of the website in reference to the volunteers' actual job duties helped provide a clearer understanding of how the volunteers might use this new technology. The researchers used qualitative techniques to focus on three volunteers who experienced different physical, environmental and cognitive means that impacted their use of the new tool. Each volunteer experienced varying levels of motivation in areas of learning, satisfaction and responses to outside influences. Each volunteer also had varying amounts of opportunity prompts in which to interact or refer the website. Consequently, Helpline volunteers experienced different rates of adopting the information-intensive website into their traditional work system.     

A phase II trial of paclitaxel in refractory germ cell tumors

BACKGROUND: A significant percentage of patients with refractory germ cell tumors will not respond to standard salvage regimens. Thus there is a need for new active agents. Paclitaxel has demonstrated activity against a variety of solid tumors in both laboratory and clinical studies. METHODS: Eighteen patients with refractory germ cell tumors who failed initial cisplatin-based chemotherapy and a maximum of 2 salvage regimens were enrolled into a Phase II trial of paclitaxel at a dose of 170 mg/m2 by intravenous infusion over 24 hours every 21 days without growth factor support. The median age of the patients was 32.5 years (range, 18-49 years). The testis was the primary site of tumor for 13 patients (72%) and the tumor was extragonadal in 5 patients (28%). Six patients (33%) were late recurrences. Twelve patients (67%) had > or = 2 metastatic sites. The median number of previous chemotherapy cycles was six (range, four to nine). Three patients (17%) previously had undergone autologous bone marrow transplantation. RESULTS: Two patients (11%) responded to paclitaxel. Major toxicities were Grade 3-4 neutropenia (55% of patients) and Grade 3-4 neurotoxicity (2 patients). Neutropenic fever occurred in 3 patients (17%). CONCLUSIONS: Paclitaxel demonstrated minimal activity in heavily pretreated patients with multiple, poor risk clinical features. These results in part may be due to the unfavorable characteristics of the patients in the current study, specifically the high percentage of patients with late recurrences and extragonadal primary tumors, both of which are known to respond poorly to salvage therapy. Other trials with different patient populations and doses of paclitaxel reported response rates ranging from 13.3%-26%. The role of paclitaxel in the treatment of patients with refractory germ cell tumors remains to be defined in future studies.     

Engineering Design Processes: A Comparison of Students and Expert Practitioners

In this paper we report on an in‐depth study of engineering design processes. Specifically, we extend our previous research on engineering student design processes to compare the design behavior of students and expert engineers. Nineteen experts from a variety of engineering disciplines and industries each designed a playground in a lab setting, and gave verbal reports of their thoughts during the design task. Measures of their design processes and solution quality were compared to pre‐existing data from 26 freshmen and 24 seniors. The experts spent significantly more time on the task overall and in each stage of engineering design, including significantly more time problem scoping. The experts also gathered significantly more information covering more categories. Results support the argument that problem scoping and information gathering are major differences between advanced engineers and students, and important competencies for engineering students to develop. Timeline representations of the expert designers' processes illustrate characteristic distinctions we found and may help students gain insights into their own design processes.     

Comparison of heart rate biofeedback, false biofeedback, and systematic desensitization in reducing speech anxiety: Short- and long-term effectiveness.

Assessed the comparative effectiveness of heart rate biofeedback (HRB) training, false HRB training, and systematic desensitization (SD) in reducing speech anxiety for 27 students chosen for their high scores on the item "speaking before a group" of the Fear Survey Schedule. Results indicate that all 3 groups demonstrated a decrease in self-reported (Personal Report of Confidence as a Speaker) and overt motor components of anxiety during 2 posttreatment assessment periods. Physiological measures (HR and skin conductance), however, indicate that the HRB group was associated with less physiological responding during the posttreatment assessments of anxiety relative to the other 2 groups. Results demonstrate that the 3 behavioral component measures of anxiety are not always highly correlated. (4 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Measurements of soot, OH, and PAH concentrations in turbulent ethylene/air jet flames

This paper presents results from an investigation of soot formation in turbulent, non-premixed, C₂H₄/air jet flames. Tests were conducted using a H₂-piloted burner with fuel issuing from a 2.18 mm i.d. tube into quiescent ambient air. A range of test conditions was studied using the initial jet velocity (16.2-94.1 m/s) as a parameter. Fuel-jet Reynolds numbers ranged from 4000 to 23,200. Planar laser-induced incandescence (LII) was employed to determine soot volume fractions, and laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) was used to measure relative hydroxyl radical (OH) concentrations and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) concentrations. Extensive information on the structure of the soot and OH fields was obtained from two-dimensional imaging experiments. Quantitative measurements were obtained by employing the LII and LIF techniques independently. Imaging results for soot, OH, and PAH show the existence of three soot formation/oxidation regions: a rapid soot growth region, in which OH and soot particles lie in distinctly different radial locations; a mixing-dominated region controlled by large-scale motion; and a soot-oxidation region in which the OH and soot fields overlap spatially, resulting in the rapid oxidation of soot particles. Detailed quantitative analyzes of soot volume fractions and OH and soot zone thicknesses were performed along with the temperature measurement using the N₂-CARS system. Measurements of OH and soot zone thicknesses show that the soot zone thickness increases linearly with axial distance in the soot formation region, whereas the OH zone thickness is nearly constant in this region. The OH zone thickness then rapidly increases with downstream distance and approximately doubles in the soot-oxidation region. Probability density functions also were obtained for soot volume fractions and OH concentrations. These probability density functions clearly define the spatial relationships among the OH, PAH concentrations, the soot formation, and oxidation processes.     

Research on Engineering Student Knowing: Trends and Opportunities

What could we know about engineering student knowing? The answer to this question represents a form of scholarship of discovery in engineering education and a valuable complement to scholarship of teaching work in the field. To illustrate the state of this scholarship, we present twelve studies and analyze these studies across aspects of knowledge, level of experience, and research approach. We then use these analyses to identify trends in the existing research and opportunities for future research.     

Concept maps for engineering education: a cognitively motivatedtool supporting varied assessment functions

Assessment in the context of education is the process of characterizing what a student knows. The reasons to perform assessment are quite varied, ranging from a need to informally understand student learning progress in a course to a need to characterize student expertise in a subject. Finding an appropriate assessment tool is a central challenge in designing an assessment approach. The focus of this paper is on the use of concept maps for both course-level and program-level assessment in engineering education. Concept maps, which are node and arc representations of the relationships among concepts, provide one means to represent student knowledge. This paper presents background on concept maps and describes uses of concept maps at both the course and program level