This article reports on a post hoc study using a randomised controlled trial with 31,842 students in the Netherlands and an instrument consisting of 21 paired problems. The trial showed a variability in the differences of students’ results in solving contextual mathematical problems with either a descriptive or a depictive representation of the problem situation. In this study the relation between this variability and two task characteristics is investigated: (1) complexity of the task representation; and (2) the content domain of the task. We found indications that differences in performance on descriptive and depictive representations of the problem situation are related to the content domain of the problems. One of the tentative conclusions is that for depicted problems in the domain of measurement and geometry the inferential step from representation of the problem situation to the mathematical problem to be solved is smaller than for word problems.
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Het doel van dit proefschrift betrof het verkennen van attituden en afwegingen rond taakherschikking tussen tandartsen en mondhygiënisten. Daarnaast werd nagegaan welke sociale kenmerken studenten toeschrijven aan elkaar, zichzelf en beide beroepsgroepen. Vervolgens werd het effect van een psychologische interventie in een onderwijssetting onderzocht op interprofessionele communicatie en percepties ten aanzien van interprofessionele taakverdeling. Tandartsen en mondhygiënisten hebben verschillende attituden ten opzichte van taakherschikking, vooral wat betreft de vrijgevestigde praktijk van mondhygiënisten. Dit laatste wordt het minst gewenst door tandartsen. Tandartsen en mondhygiënisten hebben verschillende afwegingen wanneer men een voor- of tegenstander is van dit beleid. De interprofessionele relatie tussen tandartsen en mondhygiënisten komt tot uiting in de attributie van specifieke sociale kenmerken. Tandheelkunde en mondzorgkunde studenten zijn beide de mening toegedaan dat tandartsen meer dominant zijn dan mondhygiënisten. Het faciliteren van interprofessionele groepsvorming kan zowel interprofessionele hiërarchie als tandarts-gecentreerde taakverdeling reduceren. Tijdens het eerste onderzoek (Hoofdstuk 2) werden verschillen tussen tandartsen en mondhygiënisten ontdekt ten aanzien van de taakuitbreiding van de mondhygiënist. De helft van alle tandartsen en de meeste mondhygiënisten hebben hierover een positieve attitude. Een interprofessionele kloof werd gevonden ten aanzien van de zelfstandige praktijkvoering van mondhygiënisten. Een minderheid van alle tandartsen heeft hierover een positieve attitude vergeleken met een meerderheid van alle mondhygiënisten. Dit suggereert dat de acceptatie van een zelfstandige mondhygiënist een groot obstakel is wanneer men taakherschikking wil implementeren. Tandartsen willen controle over de mondhygiënist behouden, daarom is het waarschijnlijk dat taakdelegatie boven taaksubstitutie wordt verkozen. Dit laatste betreft taakherschikking met professionele autonomie.
This paper is a report of a review conducted to provide an overview of the evidence in the literature on task-oriented training of stroke survivors and its relevance in daily nursing practice. Background: Stroke is the second leading cause of death and one of the leading causes of adult disability in the Western world. The use of neurodevelopmental treatment in the daily nursing care of stroke survivors does not improve clinical outcomes. Nurses are therefore exploring other forms of rehabilitation intervention, including task-oriented rehabilitation. Despite the growing number of studies showing evidence on task-oriented interventions, recommendations for daily nursing practice are lacking. A range of databases was searched to identify papers addressing taskoriented training in stroke rehabilitation, including Medline, CINAHL, Embase and the Cochrane Library of systematic reviews. Papers published in English between January 1996 and September 2007 were included. There were 42 papers in the final dataset, including nine systematic reviews. Review methods: The selected randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews were assessed for quality. Important characteristics and outcomes were extracted and summarized. Results: Studies of task-related training showed benefits for functional outcome compared with traditional therapies. Active use of task-oriented training with stroke survivors will lead to improvements in functional outcomes and overall healthrelated quality of life. Conclusion. Generally, task-oriented rehabilitation proved to be more effective. Many interventions are feasible for nurses and can be performed in a ward or at home. Nurses can and should play an important role in creating opportunities to practise meaningful functional tasks outside of regular therapy sessions.
Everyone has the right to participate in society to the best of their ability. This right also applies to people with a visual impairment, in combination with a severe or profound intellectual and possibly motor disability (VISPIMD). However, due to their limitations, for their participation these people are often highly dependent on those around them, such as family members andhealthcare professionals. They determine how people with VISPIMD participate and to what extent. To optimize this support, they must have a good understanding of what people with disabilities can still do with their remaining vision.It is currently difficult to gain insight into the visual abilities of people with disabilities, especially those with VISPIMD. As a professional said, "Everything we can think of or develop to assess the functional vision of this vulnerable group will help improve our understanding and thus our ability to support them. Now, we are more or less guessing about what they can see.Moreover, what little we know about their vision is hard to communicate to other professionals”. Therefore, there is a need for methods that can provide insight into the functional vision of people with VISPIMD, in order to predict their options in daily life situations. This is crucial knowledge to ensure that these people can participate in society to their fullest extent.What makes it so difficult to get this insight at the moment? Visual impairments can be caused by a range of eye or brain disorders and can manifest in various ways. While we understand fairly well how low vision affects a person's abilities on relatively simple visual tasks, it is much more difficult to predict this in more complex dynamic everyday situations such asfinding your way or moving around during daily activities. This is because, among other things, conventional ophthalmic tests provide little information about what people can do with their remaining vision in everyday life (i.e., their functional vision).An additional problem in assessing vision in people with intellectual disabilities is that many conventional tests are difficult to perform or are too fatiguing, resulting in either no or the wrong information. In addition to their visual impairment, there is also a very serious intellectual disability (possibly combined with a motor impairment), which makes it even more complex to assesstheir functional vision. Due to the interplay between their visual, intellectual, and motor disabilities, it is almost impossible to determine whether persons are unable to perform an activity because they do not see it, do not notice it, do not understand it, cannot communicate about it, or are not able to move their head towards the stimulus due to motor disabilities.Although an expert professional can make a reasonable estimate of the functional possibilities through long-term and careful observation, the time and correct measurement data are usually lacking to find out the required information. So far, it is insufficiently clear what people with VZEVMB provoke to see and what they see exactly.Our goal with this project is to improve the understanding of the visual capabilities of people with VISPIMD. This then makes it possible to also improve the support for participation of the target group. We want to achieve this goal by developing and, in pilot form, testing a new combination of measurement and analysis methods - primarily based on eye movement registration -to determine the functional vision of people with VISPIMD. Our goal is to systematically determine what someone is responding to (“what”), where it may be (“where”), and how much time that response will take (“when”). When developing methods, we take the possibilities and preferences of the person in question as a starting point in relation to the technological possibilities.Because existing technological methods were originally developed for a different purpose, this partly requires adaptation to the possibilities of the target group.The concrete end product of our pilot will be a manual with an overview of available technological methods (as well as the methods themselves) for assessing functional vision, linked to the specific characteristics of the target group in the cognitive, motor area: 'Given that a client has this (estimated) combination of limitations (cognitive, motor and attention, time in whichsomeone can concentrate), the order of assessments is as follows:' followed by a description of the methods. We will also report on our findings in a workshop for professionals, a Dutch-language article and at least two scientific articles. This project is executed in the line: “I am seen; with all my strengths and limitations”. During the project, we closely collaborate with relevant stakeholders, i.e. the professionals with specific expertise working with the target group, family members of the persons with VISPIMD, and persons experiencing a visual impairment (‘experience experts’).
In order to stay competitive and respond to the increasing demand for steady and predictable aircraft turnaround times, process optimization has been identified by Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) SMEs in the aviation industry as their key element for innovation. Indeed, MRO SMEs have always been looking for options to organize their work as efficient as possible, which often resulted in applying lean business organization solutions. However, their aircraft maintenance processes stay characterized by unpredictable process times and material requirements. Lean business methodologies are unable to change this fact. This problem is often compensated by large buffers in terms of time, personnel and parts, leading to a relatively expensive and inefficient process. To tackle this problem of unpredictability, MRO SMEs want to explore the possibilities of data mining: the exploration and analysis of large quantities of their own historical maintenance data, with the meaning of discovering useful knowledge from seemingly unrelated data. Ideally, it will help predict failures in the maintenance process and thus better anticipate repair times and material requirements. With this, MRO SMEs face two challenges. First, the data they have available is often fragmented and non-transparent, while standardized data availability is a basic requirement for successful data analysis. Second, it is difficult to find meaningful patterns within these data sets because no operative system for data mining exists in the industry. This RAAK MKB project is initiated by the Aviation Academy of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdan, hereinafter: HvA), in direct cooperation with the industry, to help MRO SMEs improve their maintenance process. Its main aim is to develop new knowledge of - and a method for - data mining. To do so, the current state of data presence within MRO SMEs is explored, mapped, categorized, cleaned and prepared. This will result in readable data sets that have predictive value for key elements of the maintenance process. Secondly, analysis principles are developed to interpret this data. These principles are translated into an easy-to-use data mining (IT)tool, helping MRO SMEs to predict their maintenance requirements in terms of costs and time, allowing them to adapt their maintenance process accordingly. In several case studies these products are tested and further improved. This is a resubmission of an earlier proposal dated October 2015 (3rd round) entitled ‘Data mining for MRO process optimization’ (number 2015-03-23M). We believe the merits of the proposal are substantial, and sufficient to be awarded a grant. The text of this submission is essentially unchanged from the previous proposal. Where text has been added – for clarification – this has been marked in yellow. Almost all of these new text parts are taken from our rebuttal (hoor en wederhoor), submitted in January 2016.
