An approach to using noncognitive variables in dental school admissions.

Dental school admissions committees continue to grapple with challenges associated with recruiting, admitting, and enrolling students who best meet the mission of the particular institution. For many students, particularly underrepresented minority students and those from non-traditional backgrounds, standardized tests such as the Dental Admission Test (DAT) are poor predictors of their potential for success. Noncognitive assessment methods can be used in conjunction with traditional cognitive measures in making admissions decisions. These methods have been employed by hundreds of higher education institutions, foundations, and scholarship programs, but are relatively new in dental education. This article describes a prevalent assessment model and discusses one dental school's implementation of the model, with the outcome of enrolling students from diverse backgrounds whose career goals parallel the mission of the school.

Social influence effects on automatic racial prejudice.

Although most research on the control of automatic prejudice has focused on the efficacy of deliberate attempts to suppress or correct for stereotyping, the reported experiments tested the hypothesis that automatic racial prejudice is subject to common social influence. In experiments involving actual interethnic contact, both tacit and expressed social influence reduced the expression of automatic prejudice, as assessed by two different measures of automatic attitudes. Moreover, the automatic social tuning effect depended on participant ethnicity. European Americans (but not Asian Americans) exhibited less automatic prejudice in the presence of a Black experimenter than a White experimenter (Experiments 2 and 4), although both groups exhibited reduced automatic prejudice when instructed to avoid prejudice (Experiment 3). Results are consistent with shared reality theory, which postulates that social regulation is central to social cognition.

Scholarship in the medical faculty from the university perspective: retaining academic values.

Academic medicine and research universities have enjoyed a close relationship that has strengthened both, spawning an era of discovery and scholarship in medicine that has earned the U.S. academic medical enterprise a high level of public trust and a deserved leadership position in the world. However, changes in the financing of medical care and in the organization of health care delivery have dramatically affected the medical school-university partnership. The growing emphasis on delivery of clinical services and the concomitant decrease in time for tenured and clinician-educator faculty to teach and do scholarly work jeopardizes both the potential for continued discovery and the education of the next generation of medical scholars. The background of the medical school-university relationship and the factors leading to the development of clinician-educator faculty tracks are reviewed, and recent trends that impact faculty scholarship are discussed. Both tenure-track and clinician-educator medical faculty, as members of the broader university community, should expect from their university colleagues a continued demand for scholarship and educational activity that reflects the underlying philosophy of the parent university. As a corollary, the university, through its medical school, must provide these faculty the time and the financial support necessary to fulfill their academic mission. The size of the clinician-educator faculty should be determined by the academic needs of the medical school rather than by the service demands of its associated health care delivery system. To accomplish this, academic medical centers will have to develop cadres of associated or clinical faculty whose primary focus is on the practice of medicine.

Herbicide movement and dissipation at four Midwestern sites.

This study was conducted to evaluate atrazine (2-chloro-4-ethylamino-6-isopropyl-1,3,5-triazine) and alachlor (2-chloro-N-(methoxymethyl)acetamide) dissipation and movement to shallow aquifers across the Northern Sand Plains region of the United States. Sites were located at Minnesota on a Zimmerman fine sand, North Dakota on Hecla sandy loam, South Dakota on a Brandt silty clay loam, and Wisconsin on a Sparta sand. Herbicide concentrations were determined in soil samples taken to 90 cm four times during the growing season and water samples taken from the top one m of aquifer at least once every three months. Herbicides were detected to a depth of 30 cm in Sparta sand and 90 cm in all other soils. Some aquifer samples from each site contained atrazine with the highest concentration in the aquifer beneath the Sparta sand (1.28 microg L(-1)). Alachlor was detected only once in the aquifer at the SD site. The time to 50% atrazine dissipation (DT50) in the top 15 cm of soil averaged about 21 d in Sparta and Zimmerman sands and more than 45 d for Brandt and Hecla soils. Atrazine DT50 was correlated positively with % clay and organic carbon (OC), and negatively with % fine sand. Alachlor DT50 ranged from 12 to 32 d for Zimmerman and Brandt soils, respectively, and was correlated negatively with % clay and OC and positively with % sand.

A model of survivors' psychological responses following a residential fire.

Residential fires result in loss of life, property, and displacement from one's neighborhood. It would be expected that grief experienced in the aftermath of residential fires has a significant impact on survivor's recovery and reintegration into the community. Although there is some research on psychological responses to community-wide fires and large scale disasters, little is known about such responses among survivors of home fires that occur episodically. Appropriate interventions cannot be developed until more is learned about variables influencing survivors' psychological response to a residential fire. A theoretical model of survivors' psychological response post-fire is proposed.

American Academy of Dermatology guidelines of care. Development and process.

Medical practice guidelines are being developed at an accelerating pace, in all areas of medicine, for a wide range of uses. The field of practice guideline development is not new, but a number of important economic and health care issues have renewed interest in their creation. In 1987, in response to many of these issues, the American Academy of Dermatology took a leadership role and began a process designed to develop guidelines for disease entities treated by dermatologists. The result was a set of clinical practice guidelines and the most comprehensive dermatology guideline development processes to date. Herein we describe the guideline development process in its current, refined form and discuss some of its unique and important characteristics. New applications of guidelines, outside of clinical practice improvement, have made their development controversial. Nevertheless, it is important for the medical profession to lead in this effort, and the American Academy of Dermatology continues to explore ways to refine and update its guidelines to reflect the latest medical science and technology.

Patch testing for contact dermatitis.

Patch testing is perhaps not an exact science, but it is the best method available for identifying and confirming contact sensitivity. Illustrated step-by-step instructions for the procedure are presented, with helpful hints to avoid some of the pitfalls.