Background: Scientific education aims to be inclusive and to improve students learning achievements, through appropriate teaching and learning. Problem Based Learning (PBL) system, a student centered method, started in the second half of the previous century and is expanding progressively, organizes learning around problems and students learn about a subject through the experience of solving these problems.Objectives:To assess the opinions of undergraduate medical students regarding learning outcomes of PBL in small group teaching and to explore their views about the role of tutors and methods of evaluation. Type of the study: A cross-sectional study.Methods: This study was conducted in Kerbala Medical Colleges among second year students. A self-administered questionnaire was prepared to evaluate the newly applied teaching system. The study analysis included simple descriptive analysis and determining association through t-test, chi square test and regression analysis and using structural equation models to determine simultaneous association between different students’ demographic characteristics and potential predictors using SPSS-20 and Amos software at a significance level of < 0.05.Results:A total of 131 undergraduate medical students participated in the study with a response rate of 94%. The majority (93%) have indicated that PBL strategy contributed effectively to their knowledge development with a similar majority (92%) considering PBL successful new teaching method. About 86% reported that would choose PBL rather than conventional method and also 86% would advise PBL for others. Similarly, high majority indicated that various PBL activities are essential. Regarding the tutors’ role in PBL, the majority (92%) indicated that this role was positive and fundamental. According to two thirds (68%) of participants PBL application in Kerbala Medical college was very good application while a higher majority described various PBL sessions as successful and positive and fundamental role of tutors was stressed by most students.Conclusions: This study highlighted the benefits of soliciting student impressions of effective small group teaching. The students’ emphasized group atmosphere and facilitation skills of tutor in learning.Key words: Problem Based Learning, Medical Education, Small Group Teaching, Team Based Learning, Kerbala Medical College
<p>In combinatorial testing development, the fabrication of covering arrays is the key challenge by the multiple aspects that influence it. A wide range of combinatorial problems can be solved using metaheuristic and greedy techniques. Combining the greedy technique utilizing a metaheuristic search technique like hill climbing (HC), can produce feasible results for combinatorial tests. Methods based on metaheuristics are used to deal with tuples that may be left after redundancy using greedy strategies; then the result utilization is assured to be near-optimal using a metaheuristic algorithm. As a result, the use of both greedy and HC algorithms in a single test generation system is a good candidate if constructed correctly. T
... Show MoreThe load shedding scheme has been extensively implemented as a fast solution for unbalance conditions. Therefore, it's crucial to investigate supply-demand balancing in order to protect the network from collapsing and to sustain stability as possible, however its implementation is mostly undesirable. One of the solutions to minimize the amount of load shedding is the integration renewable energy resources, such as wind power, in the electric power generation could contribute significantly to minimizing power cuts as it is ability to positively improving the stability of the electric grid. In this paper propose a method for shedding the load base on the priority demands with incorporating the wind po
... Show MoreMultilocus haplotype analysis of candidate variants with genome wide association studies (GWAS) data may provide evidence of association with disease, even when the individual loci themselves do not. Unfortunately, when a large number of candidate variants are investigated, identifying risk haplotypes can be very difficult. To meet the challenge, a number of approaches have been put forward in recent years. However, most of them are not directly linked to the disease-penetrances of haplotypes and thus may not be efficient. To fill this gap, we propose a mixture model-based approach for detecting risk haplotypes. Under the mixture model, haplotypes are clustered directly according to their estimated d
Recommender Systems are tools to understand the huge amount of data available in the internet world. Collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the most knowledge discovery methods used positively in recommendation system. Memory collaborative filtering emphasizes on using facts about present users to predict new things for the target user. Similarity measures are the core operations in collaborative filtering and the prediction accuracy is mostly dependent on similarity calculations. In this study, a combination of weighted parameters and traditional similarity measures are conducted to calculate relationship among users over Movie Lens data set rating matrix. The advantages and disadvantages of each measure are spotted. From the study, a n
... Show MoreA new, Simple, sensitive and accurate spectrophotometric methods have been developed for the determination of sulfamethoxazole (SMZ) drug in pure and dosage forms. This method based on the reaction of sulfamethoxazole (SMZ) with 1,2-napthoquinone-4-sulphonic acid (NQS) to form Nalkylamono naphthoquinone by replacement of the sulphonate group of the naphthoquinone sulphonic acid by an amino group. The colored chromogen shows absorption maximum at 460 nm. The optimum conditions of condensation reaction forms were investigated by (1) univariable method, by optimizing the effect of experimental variables (different bases, reagent concentration, borax concentration and reaction time), (2) central composite design (CCD) including the effect of
... Show MoreSocial media is known as detectors platform that are used to measure the activities of the users in the real world. However, the huge and unfiltered feed of messages posted on social media trigger social warnings, particularly when these messages contain hate speech towards specific individual or community. The negative effect of these messages on individuals or the society at large is of great concern to governments and non-governmental organizations. Word clouds provide a simple and efficient means of visually transferring the most common words from text documents. This research aims to develop a word cloud model based on hateful words on online social media environment such as Google News. Several steps are involved including data acq
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