Implications of practical activities in the Skills and Simulation Laboratory on students' motivation and feelings

Objective: to verify the implications of practical activities in the Skills and Simulation Laboratory on the motivation and feelings expressed by undergraduate students when returning to face-to-face activities after the social isolation caused by COVID-19 pandemic. Method: a quasi -experimental study, with a single group and of the pre-and post-test type, carried out through an educational intervention based on skills training on medication administration and venipuncture, with medical students from a Brazilian public university. The sample was comprised by 47 students. The instruments of students' characterization and self-perceived feelings and the Situational Motivation Scale were used for data collection. Results: in the sample, 98% mentioned the lack of practical activities during the pandemic. The most frequently described feeling was anxiety. After carrying out the activity, there was a change in the frequency of expressed feelings, although there was no significant change in motivational levels. External Regulation (5.1 -5.6), Identified Regulation (6.1 -6.4) and Intrinsic Motivation (5.6 -6.0) presented high results, showing similarity to the feelings reported by the learners. Conclusion: motivation is essential for effective learning and the use of active methodologies reinforces skills built in an affective way in the students facing the learning process.

Rural territories against Covid-19: knowledge, actions and reflections from popular health education

This article is founded on the systematization of Oscar Jara's experiences to rebuild the paths of Participatory Action Research in Health in rural communities based on experiences of prevention and health care in coping with Covid-19. Since June 2020, we have been developing popular education experiences in rural health guided by Paulo Freire's pedagogy in northern territories and in the coastal lowlands of the state of Rio de Janeiro, specifically in areas of agrarian reform linked to the Landless Workers Movemen (MST);a quilombola territory;and a women's collective connected to the Working Group of Women of the Serramar Articulation of Agroecology (GT Mulheres Serramar). The analysis of these experiences points towards pedagogical alternatives produced from academic and popular knowledge, seeking support in popular communication, in the protagonism of rural communities, especially with regard to women as producers of knowledge, care practices and resistance.

A Tale of Two Doses: Model Identification and Optimal Vaccination for COVID-19

We address the model identification and the computation of optimal vaccination policies for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We consider a stochastic Susceptible- Infected-Removed (SIR) model that captures the effect of multiple vaccine treatments, each requiring a different number of doses and providing different levels of protection against the disease. We show that the inclusion of vaccination data enables the estimation of the state of the model and key model parameters that are otherwise not identifiable. This estimates can, in turn, be used to design strategic approaches to vaccination that aim at minimizing the number of deaths and the economic cost of the disease. We illustrate these results with numerical examples.