The purpose of this study was to determine if online mentoring increases pre-service teachers’ confidence in teaching mathematics and science. Previous research has shown that traditional face-to-face mentoring increased self-confidence in new teachers (Fresko, 1999; Yost, 2002). The present study measured confidence to teach mathematics using a subscale of three items that assess confidence le...

Germ line variants at chromosome 8q24 have been associated with prostate, colorectal, and breast cancer risk (1-7). This region is also frequently amplified in many tumor types (8, 9) including endometrial cancer (10-13). The involvement of germ line and somatic variations at 8q24 suggests a common biological mechanism in the pathogenesis of epithelial cancers. In the present analysis, we used ...

BACKGROUND Breast cancer is by far the most frequent cancer of women. It is the second leading cause of death in women worldwide. Approximately one out of eight women develops breast cancer all over the world. Majority of cases of cancer of the breast are detected by women themselves, stressing the importance of breast self-examination. The main objective of this study was to assess predictors ...

'Communication skills' is now very well established in medical education as an area that needs to be taught at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. But it is a discipline with a low level of challenge--it allows itself constantly to take seriously questions about its fundamentals (such as whether it works at all) although common sense and everyday experience tell us that skills are indeed...

The concept of self-efficacy was originally developed by Albert Bandura, and has been defined as the personal belief that one is capable of performing in an appropriate and effective manner to attain certain goals. As such, self-efficacy is a self-system that controls most personal activity, including appropriate use of professional knowledge and skills. Teacher selfefficacy is the belief that ...

In this study, eight Chinese student teachers' beliefs and the role of teaching experiences in their belief development were explored using qualitative approaches. Within- cross-case content analyses indicate that, first, most teachers held both pupil- teacher-centred beliefs, some these contradicted each other. Second, three types processes identified describing development: confirmation, chan...

This paper begins by acknowledging the established and powerful link between educational beliefs and the teaching and learning practices of teaches and students. Based on this belief-practice connection, the paper documents the findings of a study that investigated the beliefs of a group of higher education teachers and students, most of whom were teaching and learning in a teacher education co...

Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) have become accepted and used widely to model uncertain reasoning and causal relationships. We have developed an interactive visualization tool (VisNet) that allows students and/or teachers to inspect BBNs. Using VisNet it is possible to experiment with concepts such as marginal probability, changes in probability, probability propagation and cause-effect relatio...

Mentalization research focuses on different aspects of this topic, highlighting individual differences in mentalizing and proposing programs of intervention for children and adults to increase this ability. The "Thought in Mind Project" (TiM Project) provides training targeted to adults-teachers or parents-to increase their mentalization and, consequently, to obtain mentalization improvement in...