Health And Safety Situation At Non-Public Primary Schools

@#Children are one of the most vulnerable groups in societies and promoting their health and safety in school should be one of the goals of education systems. Evaluating the current status of schools is the first step toward the prevention of crises in schools and coping with them. The present study investigates the health and safety status of non-public primary schools in Tehran. The present cross-sectional, descriptive-analytical study was conducted on a statistical population of non-public primary schools in Tehran, including 65 schools that were selected through multistage cluster sampling. The study tool was the School-Age Care Environment Rating Scale (SACERS), which was completed by the researcher upon observing the current status of schools, and a statistical analysis was then carried out in SPSS-23 using deductive analysis with the single-sample t-test and the cumulative percentage analysis. The results obtained showed that the schools met the required standards in indicators including health policies, safety policies, emergency conditions and personal hygiene; however, they lacked these standards in indicators including health measures, safety measures, attendance, departure and meals/snacks. In general, there was a significant difference between the mean health and safety indices in the schools and the required standards (t=-8.19, P<0.001), and the schools did not meet the required health and safety standards in view of the size of the mean difference. Regarding the role of supervisory authorities and attitudes of staff and parents related to educational environment, it seems that schools need to improve and resolve their deficiencies in various dimensions of health and safety in order to be ready to deal with emergencies. Assessments can be carried out in schools in the form of periodical self-evaluations to improve their performance. In this process, the school environment provides a safer and more enjoyable way for children to learn and create a sense of belonging to the school.

Information seeking and reading behavior in university of social welfare and rehabilitation sciences

The aim of this research was to study information seeking behavior and the pattern of reading behavior of faculty members of University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences in using printed and electronic resources. The descriptive research method was a survey method. The research was implemented by using an organized questionnaire which was distributed among the statistical population, 114 faculty members of the university. The findings show that meeting the faculty members' research needs is the most important purpose and stimulation for this group, because 91.2% of faculty members had chosen this objective. The mean of the central library role was 3.15 for meeting the faculty members' information needs. In faculty members' opinion, the mean of existing facilities in the website of University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences was 3.29. Finally, the most resources used by this group were the printed resources. Findings suggest that the facilities available in the central library and website of the university don't respond the faculty members' information needs. As the target group declared that they had problems in accessing information via the internet, it seems that they need for some formal training such as holding educational workshops about using library, internet and databases

Co-morbidity of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Tourette syndrome

Tourette syndrome is a disease with vocal and motor tics. This disorder is co-morbid with many psychiatric disorders, among which obsessive-compulsive disorder is the most common. During a one-year period, 30 patients with Tourette disorder were studied at an adolescent psychiatry referral clinic. It was an analytical-descriptive study. Subjects were selected by convenience sampling. The control group was selected from students in Tehran schools similar to the first group in terms of age and gender. K-SADS questionnaire was used to examine the existence of obsessive-compulsive disorder in both groups. The results were analyzed with SPSS software. The apparent co-morbidity of obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette syndrome was seen in this study, such that 53% of patients affected with it had obsessive-compulsive disorder. Statistics obtained was higher compared to earlier data. Although this co-morbidity was somewhat different in the two genders, it was not considered statistically significant [80% girls and 48% boys]. More focus should be laid upon the co-morbidity between Tourette and OCD. It is recommended to study patients with Tourette syndrome more extensively in terms of co-morbidity with other psychiatric disorders, especially the obsessive-compulsive disorder

Predicting developmental disorder in infants using an artificial neural network

Early recognition of developmental disorders is an important goal, and equally important is avoiding misdiagnosing a disorder in a healthy child without pathology. The aim of the present study was to develop an artificial neural network using perinatal information to predict developmental disorder at infancy. A total of 1,232 mother-child dyads were recruited from 6,150 in the original data of Karaj, Alborz Province, Iran. Thousands of variables are examined in this data including basic characteristics, medical history, and variables related to infants. The validated Infant Neurological International Battery test was employed to assess the infant's development. The concordance indexes showed that true prediction of developmental disorder in the artificial neural network model, compared to the logistic regression model, was 83.1% vs. 79.5% and the area under ROC curves, calculated from testing data, were 0.79 and 0.68, respectively. In addition, specificity and sensitivity of the ANN model vs. LR model was calculated 93.2% vs. 92.7% and 39.1% vs. 21.7%. An artificial neural network performed significantly better than a logistic regression model

Foreign accent syndrome in Iran: case report

Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare speech disorder caused by the damage sustained to left hemisphere of the brain, in which a combination of segmental and suprasegmental deviations in speech production creates foreign accent. Despite of segmental pronunciation problems, prosodic errors are mainly considered as the main characteristics of Foreign Accent Syndrome. The present paper offers a report on a 53-year Persian-speaking woman who is pronouncing the words and sentences with foreign accent after a stroke and central semiovale focal infarctions of left hemisphere. According to researchers' information and follow-up done, this patient is considered as the first case of FAS in Iran. Prosodic characteristics of the patient's speech have been compared with speech features of ordinary speakers of Persian language. Being in direction of previously reported research findings, the obtained results show that there are main deviations in prosodic characteristics of the patient's speech which are related to the speech rate, stress, and juncture