[Comparison of the effect of WebQuest and lecture on students' learning of electrocardiogram interpretation]

Defects of instruction by traditional methods as well as worldwide technical advances have introduced new approaches to teaching and learning. WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet. The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of WebQuest and lecture on students' learning of electrocardiogram interpretation. Using a quasi-experimental design, 42 nursing students were allocated to examination and control groups by the stratified random sampling method equally. The educational content was consisted of the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac rhythm disturbances taught during four lecture sessions to the control group and in five stages' WebQuest activity to the experimental group. The learning outcomes in both groups were examined before and after the intervention and two weeks after the intervention. Data was analyzed using descriptive and analytical statistics. There was no difference between the groups' learning scores before the intervention [P>0.05]. After the intervention, the scores of both groups increased. However, the scores of the students in the WebQuest group were higher than the students in the lecture group [P=0.022]. Both the teaching methods resulted in improving students' knowledge, but the WebQuest method was more effective than the lecture method to the learning of nursing students. The results of this study can help nurse instructors to replace traditional teaching methods with new methods

[B and T lymphocyte and subsets in the peripheral blood in vitiligo patients]

Background: vitiligo is a dermatological disorder characterized by destruction of melanocytes and loss of pigmentation. The cause of vitiligo is not known. It has been suggested that immune mechanisms may be involved. In the present study, we evaluate B and T lymphocyte and subsets in the peripheral blood in vitiligo

Materials and methods: 36 patients suffering from vitiligo disease [23 of patients with active vitiligo and 13 of patients with stable vitiligo] and 22 persons as control were studied respectively for different immunological parameters such as: T Cell [CD[2]], Bcell [CD[19]], T [CD[4]], T [CD[8]], CD[4] / CD[8] ratio in the peripheral blood. The flow cytometry were used for determination of lymphocyte and subsets

Results: we have shown a decrease of B cell and T[CD[8]] cell with an increase of CD[4] / CD[8] ratio in the active vitiligo patients as compared to control. In the stable vitiligo patients, only T[CD[8]] cell is decreased, [p<0.05]

Conclusions: thus, our data show aberrations for lymphocyte and subsets in active vitiligo than stable vitiligo.we suggest that immune response, especially cell mediated immunity may play a important role in the pathogenesis of the disease