Enhancing practitioner-led education in social work: developing a secondment project

ABSTRACT

This paper illustrates the development of a secondment project designed to enhance practitioner-led social work education in a Higher Education Institution. The project was developed as part of a Teaching Partnership initiative to establish joint working and standardized approaches to social work education between Higher Education Institutes and Local Authorities across a UK region. Highlighted is how the project utilized a six-stage strategy designed to gather information to produce an evidence-base to support the implementation of a pilot practitioner secondment arrangement. The paper discusses strategies used to gather information from a range of stakeholders to inform the project, the project outcome and some considerations for future secondment arrangements. Contributing to a limited source of literature, challenges and limitations of developing formal secondment arrangements and delivering practitioner-led education in Higher Education Institutes are highlighted. This paper will assist Higher Education Institutes and Local Authorities in the design and implementation of formal secondment arrangements where these are identified as in need of development.     

基于OBE教育理念的土木工程专业英语教学改革实践

为提高土木工程专业学生的英语应用能力和《土木工程专业英语》课程的教学效果，本次教改实践以OBE（成果导向教育）教育理念为教改指导思想，以土木工程专业英语教学为教改对象，设计了土木工程专业英语教学的教学内容、教学组织和教学评价等教学环节，在河北工程大学土木工程专业学生中进行了教改实践。教改实践结果表明，基于OBE的土木工程专业英语教学模式在提升土木工程专业学生英语应用能力方面具有很好的效果。本次教改实践的成果值得本校其他工科专业和其他兄弟院校借鉴。     

我们需要什么样的研究性教学？——关于“一流教学”建设的思考

研究性教学在很多高校的教学实践当中陷入了叫好不叫座的尴尬当中，其原因在于将研究和研究性教学相混同。研究以发现新知为宗旨，而研究性教学则应以传播已有知识为己任。让研究作为教学的手段，不是为了以研代教，而是为了寓教于研，避免知识灌输的局面，提升知识传播的效果。要做到这一点，研究性教学应以已有知识为内容，坚持知识的确定性，以便合理设计研究问题，让学生明确自己在知识上的收获，从而为未来从事真正的研究打好基础。     

Toward an Application Guide for Safety Integrity Level Allocation in Railway Systems

The work in the article presents the development of an application guide based on feedback and comments stemming from various railway actors on their practices of SIL allocation to railway safety‐related functions. The initial generic methodology for SIL allocation has been updated to be applied to railway rolling stock safety‐related functions in order to solve the SIL concept application issues. Various actors dealing with railway SIL allocation problems are the intended target of the methodology; its principles will be summarized in this article with a focus on modifications and precisions made in order to establish a practical guide for railway safety authorities. The methodology is based on the flowchart formalism used in CSM (common safety method) European regulation. It starts with the use of quantitative safety requirements, particularly tolerable hazard rates (THR). THR apportioning rules are applied. On the one hand, the rules are related to classical logical combinations of safety‐related functions preventing hazard occurrence. On the other hand, to take into account technical conditions (last safety weak link, functional dependencies, technological complexity, etc.), specific rules implicitly used in existing practices are defined for readjusting some THR values. SIL allocation process based on apportioned and validated THR values is finally illustrated through the example of “emergency brake” subsystems. Some specific SIL allocation rules are also defined and illustrated.     

Interview schedule development for a Sequential explanatory mixed method design: complementary-alternative medicine (CAM) study among Indonesian psychologists

Sequential explanatory mixed method design is the most frequently applied in both health and social sciences literature. It is denoted by ‘QUAN → qual’ which represents the quantitative study occurs first and has greater weight in addressing the study’s aims, and the qualitative study follows to explain quantitative results. Despite the extensive use of sequential explanatory design, there are limited references to this design. Therefore, this methodological paper attempts to fill the gap by providing an illustration in developing a sequential explanatory interview schedule based on complementary-alternative medicine (CAM) study among clinical psychologists in Indonesia. The most important step to develop sequential explanatory interview schedule was the construction of aspects and questions that were immensely grounded on the most notable quantitative results. In this study, eight aspects of interview schedule were constructed after analyses of the nationwide survey. The interview schedule then piloted among participants with fairly similar characteristics to the participants in the main interviews. This process enhanced the quality of questions through feedback from participants and improved the interviewer’s skills through familiarization with questions. It is expected that this reflection report could be adopted as a practical guideline in developing interview schedule for sequential explanatory mixed method design, particularly in the field of psychology.     

Conditional design of the EWMA median chart with estimated parameters

The exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) chart is often designed assuming the process parameters are known. In practice, the parameters are rarely known and need to be estimated from Phase I samples. Different Phase I samples are used when practitioners construct their own control chart's limits, which leads to the “Phase I between-practitioners” variability in the in-control average run length (ARL) of control charts. The standard deviation of the ARL (SDARL) is a good alternative to quantify this variability in control charts. Based on the SDARL metric, the performance of the EWMA median chart with estimated parameters is investigated in this paper. Some recommendations are given based on the SDARL metric. The results show that the EWMA median chart requires a much larger amount of Phase I data in order to reduce the variation in the in-control ARL up to a reasonable level. Due to the limitation of the amount of the Phase I data, the suggested EWMA median chart is designed with the bootstrap method which provides a good balance between the in-control and out-of-control ARL values.     

提升中小学生阅读兴趣的实证研究——基于MIMIC模型的教学效能分析

提升学生的阅读素养是当前我国阅读课程教学改革的重要目标之一。本研究首次尝试将群文阅读这种新兴的阅读教学方式与传统的单本阅读教学方式进行对比研究，主要从提升学生阅读兴趣的效能方面进行分析与探讨。实验涉及我国中西部5个省市、6个区县共计1 231名中小学生，并使用MIMIC模型，在有效控制测量误差的基础上，对实证数据进行了量化建模与分析，通过分析发现，群文阅读教学对激发学生阅读的“情境兴趣”有更加显著的作用，具体表现为对学生阅读注意力、情感体验、探索意愿、价值感知的影响更大，同时也验证了Knogler提出的“情境兴趣模型”在阅读教学领域的适用性，从而为进一步推进我国中小学阅读课程教学改革提供了科学的数据支撑。因此，为提升中小学生阅读素养，在阅读教学中引入群文阅读这一新兴的教学方式，具有重要的实践价值和现实意义。     

Evaluating and Visualizing the Economic Impact of Commercial Districts Due to an Electric Power Network Disruption

Critical infrastructure networks enable social behavior, economic productivity, and the way of life of communities. Disruptions to these cyber–physical–social networks highlight their importance. Recent disruptions caused by natural phenomena, including Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017, have particularly demonstrated the importance of functioning electric power networks. Assessing the economic impact (EI) of electricity outages after a service disruption is a challenging task, particularly when interruption costs vary by the type of electric power use (e.g., residential, commercial, industrial). In contrast with most of the literature, this work proposes an approach to spatially evaluate EIs of disruptions to particular components of the electric power network, thus enabling resilience‐based preparedness planning from economic and community perspectives. Our contribution is a mix‐method approach that combines EI evaluation, component importance analysis, and GIS visualization for decision making. We integrate geographic information systems and an economic evaluation of sporadic electric power outages to provide a tool to assist with prioritizing restoration of power in commercial areas that have the largest impact. By making use of public data describing commercial market value, gross domestic product, and electric area distribution, this article proposes a method to evaluate the EI experienced by commercial districts. A geospatial visualization is presented to observe and compare the areas that are more vulnerable in terms of EI based on the areas covered by each distribution substation. Additionally, a heat map is developed to observe the behavior of disrupted substations to determine the important component exhibiting the highest EI. The proposed resilience analytics approach is applied to analyze outages of substations in the boroughs of New York City.     

基于理想解和灰关联度的动态评价方法及其应用研究

为了对多个多属性（指标）待评价对象（方案）在多个时间点的发展状态和该时间段内的总体发展水平进行比较分析，根据理想解法和灰关联度法优缺点，提出基于理想解和灰关联度的动态评价方法。该方法基于三维数据，将欧氏距离和灰色关联度相结合，提出一种新贴近度，同时反映了位置关系和数据曲线的相似性差异，兼顾评价指标值差异程度和增长程度。最后将该方法应用于"十二五"期间省域循环经济生态效益评价，通过实例验证该方法实际应用上的有效性。     

Smoothed bootstrap bandwidth selection for nonparametric hazard rate estimation

A smoothed bootstrap method is presented for the purpose of bandwidth selection in nonparametric hazard rate estimation for iid data. In this context, two new bootstrap bandwidth selectors are established based on the exact expression of the bootstrap version of the mean integrated squared error of some approximations of the kernel hazard rate estimator. This is very useful since Monte Carlo approximation is no longer needed for the implementation of the two bootstrap selectors. A simulation study is carried out in order to show the empirical performance of the new bootstrap bandwidths and to compare them with other existing selectors. The methods are illustrated by applying them to a diabetes data set.