Exploring peer tutoring from the peer tutor's perspective.

INTRODUCTION: Changing working practices, student numbers, workforce demands, and deficits, have created a need to consider new ways of radiography student training. One suggestion could be to implement Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) during clinical placements. PAL utilises social constructivist theories, where peer tutors teach lower or same level tutees, reinforcing and practicing material formally taught. The aim of this study was to trial an intervention of PAL, co-designed between the university and students and evaluated to identify opportunities and challenges. METHODS: Using participatory action research 8 final year student volunteers trialled a 3-week intervention, where they delivered PAL to first years, tutoring on first year radiographic clinical practice. Focus groups were held pre and post intervention to gather qualitative data. RESULTS: Focus group discussions were transcribed and collectively thematically analysed. Two students and the primary researcher took part in the analysis. CONCLUSION: Students identified benefits and challenges to PAL. Issue around preparing for and being a peer tutor are also discussed. Further study involving experiences of first year students and clinical colleagues is required. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: Peer-tutoring has potential benefits to students to facilitate the development of skills related to image analysis and critique as well as radiographic anatomy and patient positioning.

Diagnostic radiographers working in the operating theatre: An action research project.

INTRODUCTION: Failures in interprofessional communication are well-documented and are an established cause of medical error and negative health outcomes. Socio-historical issues like imbalances in power and status are particularly prevalent in the operating theatre environment, adding complications to interprofessional working. Simulation, used in healthcare education, may impact positively on interprofessional working. METHODS: The aim of this action research study was to develop, pilot and run a simulation experience for Diagnostic Radiography (DRAD) students. Action research was used to structure this study. The first phase of the action research was to look at the problem; this was undertaken using critical incident technique. Findings from the critical incident technique influenced the simulation event. A focus group was held immediately after the event for reflection. A second simulation using a cohort of 48 students and a reflection after a period of three months formed the second round of the project. The simulation took place in a hi-fidelity simulated operating theatre. Thematic content analysis was undertaken of the focus group, data from the critical incident technique, and the reflections. RESULTS: The findings are discussed under the themes; identification, clarity, preparation, and the expert. Identification and lack of clarity in communication were seen as an important issue in the operating theatre. Lack of preparation of the working environment was also highlighted. Lack of confidence in the operating theatre inhibits interprofessional working. CONCLUSION: Simulation can help prepare students for working in the operating theatre. Realism is important as is scheduling the event to ensure maximum benefit.

Development and validation of a spatially explicit individual-based mixed crop growth model.

Spatial disposition of plants in intercrops, and differences in sowing time between species, can strongly affect their ecological interactions and, in consequence, the system's viability and performance. Empirical exploration of a wide range of spatial and temporal plant arrangements is costly and time-consuming. Modelling the growth of mixed crops is a tool which, combined with empirical tests, can greatly reduce the time and investment required for this task. Spatially explicit, individual-based dynamic models seem well suited for this purpose; their exploration and experimental validation for the case of simple, two-species, artificial plant communities, can also provide further insight as to how the spatial and temporal scales of a plant's multispecific neighbourhood affect its growth and performance. The aim of this investigation was to further develop a published spatially explicit individual-based mixed crop growth model [Vandermeer, J. H. (1989). The Ecology of Intercropping, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, p. 237], and to validate it experimentally. With this purpose in mind: (1) computer programs to simulate individual plant growth and to perform statistical analysis of both deterministic and stochastic versions of the model were developed; (2) the model was parametrized using a complex experimental diculture with several cohorts and spatial arrangements; (3) the predictive capacity of the model was tested using independent spatio-temporal experimental arrangements; (4) a modified version of the model was written, which abandons the assumption of linearity of the neighbourhood index at the cost of increasing the number of parameters; (5) The performance of stochastic versions of both Vandermeer's and our modified model were compared, employing a non-parametric measure of goodness of fit. We conclude that this approach to modelling plant growth subject to intra and interspecific competition is a remarkably efficient, general, conceptually elegant, heuristic tool whose predictive power can be further improved when nonlinear terms are introduced into the neighbourhood competition index, as done in our modified version of Vandermeer's model.

Misrepresentation of sleep-laboratory dream research with children.

A recent article by Resnick, et al. misrepresents the methods and findings of sleep-laboratory dream research with children, and, hence, the significance of their own findings. Since these misrepresentations remain almost totally unretracted, I here undertake to correct them, so that the literature more accurately may reflect the current status of laboratory studies of children's dreaming.

Point of view in spontaneous waking thought.

In daytime thought-sampling, subjects predominantly experienced visually imagined events as if seeing through their own eyes. Own-eyes experiences were most variable in content, ranging from waking-plausible imaginings to frankly dream-like fantasies.

Point of view in nocturnal dreaming.

Most nocturnal dream reports of 4 young-adult subjects were of events reported to have been experienced from an own-eyes perspective. The alternative, see-oneself, perspective seems to be incompatible with full dream elaboration. This may help to explain the primitive form of dreaming in early development, when children are unable to imagine their own active participation in dream events.

Symposium: Normal and abnormal REM sleep regulation: Dreaming and REM sleep.

The discovery, 40 years ago, of REM sleep and of its putative association with dreaming in the adult human raised the possibility that neuroscientific investigations of REM-sleep physiology would someday 'explain' the distinctive features of dream experience. I argue here against the possibility, since replicated psychological data demonstrate that REM sleep is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for dreaming to occur. Dreaming depends, rather, upon the possession of conscious representational intelligence in conjunction with any psychophysiological state in which ideation is being driven neither volitionally nor by external stimulation.

Memory sources of REM and NREM dreams.

Sixteen male volunteers slept 4 nonconsecutive nights each in a sleep laboratory. They were awakened for one dream report per night. Awakenings were made, in counterbalanced order, from early-night and late-night rapid-eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep. Following dream reporting, subjects were asked to identify memory sources of their dream imagery. Two independent judges reliably rated mentation reports for temporal units and categorized memory sources as autobiographical episodes, abstract self-references, or semantic knowledge. We replicated earlier findings that semantic knowledge is more frequently mentioned as a dream source for REM than for NREM reports. However, with controls for length of reports, the REM-NREM difference disappeared, indicating that the stage difference in memory sources was not independent of stage difference in report lengths. There was a significant effect of time of night on source class, but only in REM sleep: Both without and with controls for report length, more semantic sources were cited for late than for early REM dreams.

Processing of memories and knowledge in REM and NREM dreams.

Over 4 nights, 16 young-adult males each reported 2 REM and 2 nonREM dreams. They then identified possible sources of dream imagery in their waking memory and/or knowledge. A judge, naive as to conditions of data collection, reliably judged the closeness of correspondence of dream event to identified source. Correspondence was lower for REM than for nonREM reports and for longer than for shorter reports from either stage.

Temporal sequence and unit composition in dream reports from different stages of sleep.

Mentation reports were collected from 23 subjects following awakenings from REM and NREM sleep and at sleep onset. Subjects organized these reports according to temporal sequence, and judges scored them for activity-based temporal units and for the composition of such units. The judgment data were subjected to analysis to determine whether reports differed systematically by state in either thematic sequencing (moment-to-moment setting and character continuity) or unit composition (density of characterization, setting articulation). Previous findings of inter-state differences in dream quantity (recall, length) were replicated. a sample of typical-length multiunit reports showed a number of stage differences, while samples of matched-length reports did not differ by stage in thematic sequence or the degree of articulation of single units. However, matched for length, REM reports continued to contain more per-unit self representation than did sleep onset reports and denser per-unit overall characterization than NREM reports. The results suggest that most inter-stage differences in dream "quality" are, in fact, by-products of inter-stage differences in dream quantity, but that there are residual stage differences that can coherently be attributed neither to differences in the continuity with which dream production processes are activated in different stages nor to differences in dream retrieval from different stages.

A cognitive-psychological model of REM dream production.

Based on the methodological assumption that cognitive-psychological study of dream processes (psychoneirics) can be pursued in like manner as in cognitive-psychological study of speech processes (psycholinguistics) and on the substantive assumption that speech and dreaming may share some common production routines, a cognitive-psychological model of dream formation is proposed. A generalized psycholinguistic model of speech production is presented, and then each sequential stage of that model is examined for its aptness to the process of dream production. It is concluded that there are major differences between speech and dream production at both the input and the output levels (message formulation in the linguistic sense is absent in the instigation of the dream; the dream itself is a multimodal perceptual simulation), but it is proposed that midrange stages of speech and dream production may be largely identical. This model is shown to be consistent with various formal properties of the dream, including its central paradox of controlled formal organization in the face of contents that may be "senseless," trivial, or obscure. The model also is shown to suggest several new research paradigms that might be employed both to test its own utility and to generate data more generally relevant to the question of how mental functions are organized during rapid eye movement sleep.

Right hemispheric mediation of dream visualization: a case study.

Our paper addresses, as did a recent study by Greenwood et al. (1977), the question of differential right vs. left hemispheric involvement in REM-sleep dreaming. A male subject with extensive lesioning of the right hemisphere and consequent contralateral homonymous hemianopia was studied for 2 nights in a sleep laboratory where a dream report was collected following each of 6 awakenings from REM sleep. The subject's dream reports were typically sequential and narrative in form, but were lacking specifically in continuous visual imagery. The occasional visual images that appeared in the subject's dreams were described as fragmentary and static in nature. The subject also was unable to perform waking tasks requiring the kinematic representation of extrapersonal space. These observations support the hypotheses that dream narratives may derive from different neurocognitive sources than do the specifically visual realizations of those narratives, and that the visual mediation of dream experience may depend on right-hemispheric processing. Differences between our findings and those of Greenwood et al. may be attributable to differences in dream interview technique.

Home and laboratory dreams: four empirical studies and a conceptual reevaluation.

Four empirical studies were presented on how the setting in which dreams are collected may influence the reporting and content of dreams of children on REM awakenings. In these studies it was shown that (1) with constant dream-sampling procedures, home and laboratory did not differ in the degree to which dream reports could be elicited from 4/5 year old children; (2) the rate of truly spontaneous reporting of dreams at home by 6/7 year olds is so minimal as to render these dreams an unfit base for generalization to typical dream life at these ages; (3) with constant dream sampling procedures, home and laboratory reports were not significantly different in content for 10/11 year olds; (4) results typically observed in uncontrolled home versus laboratory studies are replicable at the child level (ages 12/13), but probably reflect biased recall at home rather than effects of REM-monitoring procedures in the laboratory. The extant literature on home versus laboratory dream differences was reviewed, and it was concluded that even for normative dream studies, the REM-monitoring procedure is the method of choice.