Search

Presentations assessing public speaking skills are common features of undergraduate curricula. Performance feedback has often been traditionally limited to staff, yet students acting as peer assessors can also be a useful feedback source. Additionally, video recording offers a feedback method that can overcome a presentation’s transience and empower a student’s self-analysis. During 2016–17 a new 1st year module, ‘Core Skills in Biochemistry’, was implemented at the University of Nottingham. Peer assessment and video feedback were trialled as augmentations to lecturer-sourced presentation feedback. Student opinions were surveyed to gauge efficacy. Results indicate video feedback was appreciated to a greater extent than peer feedback, and both focussed on body language. As the year progressed students felt less confident in their colleagues’ judgement, and their willingness to receive peer feedback decreased. These results confirmed the validity of including these techniques within ‘Core Skills’, and laid the foundation for further innovations currently being trialled.

The impact and burden of working with people that hoard is largely unexplored.To explore professionals' varied experiences of engagement and intervention with this client group.Five semi-structured interviews were initially conducted with professionals with detailed experience of working with people that hoard. A thematic analysis then identified key statements for a 49-item Q-set. The Q-sort was subsequently administered to public sector professionals with wide experience of working with people who hoard (N= 36; fire-fighters, environmental health, housing and mental health). Organizational support and job-related wellbeing measures (anxiety/contentment and depression/enthusiasm) were also administered.Factor analysis identified three distinct clusters (a) therapeutic and client focused (N = 15), (b) shocked and frustrated (N = 2) and (c) pragmatic and task focused (N = 5). Therapeutic and client focused professionals were significantly more content and enthusiastic regarding their work with clients with hoarding difficulties.Professionals experience and approach their work with people that hoard in discrete and dissimilar ways. Service delivery and training implications are considered.

Multiple sclerosis is associated with high rates of depression. The extent to which this is related to living with chronic illness or part of the disease process remains unclear. This question was investigated by comparing rates of depression in MS with those in rheumatoid arthritis, which involves similar physical and psychosocial stressors but without central nervous system involvement. The study involved an on-line survey, which included measures of depression not confounded by somatic symptoms, medication use, self-reported physical functioning, pain, and other demographic variables. Results indicated that disease group (multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis) independently predicted depression above and beyond demographic and disease-related variables. Results support the hypothesis that depression in MS is partly determined by direct neurological consequences of the condition.