INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to explore the learning effect of engaging trainees by assessing peer performance during simulation-based training. METHODS Eighty-four final year medical students participated in the study. The intervention involved trainees assessing peer performance during training. Outcome measures were in-training performance and performance, both of which were meas...

Previously we showed that weekly, written, timed, and peer-graded practice exams help increase student performance on written exams and decrease failure rates in an introductory biology course. Here we analyze the accuracy of peer grading, based on a comparison of student scores to those assigned by a professional grader. When students graded practice exams by themselves, they were significantl...

The peer review of scientific manuscripts is a cornerstone of modern science and medicine. Peer reviewed journals rely on expert and objective review by knowledgeable researchers to ensure the quality of the papers they publish. Moreover, the recommendations the reviewers make concerning publication and the advice they give to authors set the scientific standards of the discipline. In addition,...

The high attrition rate among science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors has long been an area of concern for institutions and educational researchers. The transition from introductory to advanced courses has been identified as a particularly "leaky" point along the STEM pipeline, and students who struggle early in an introductory STEM course are predominantly at risk. Peer...

+ T he European Respiratory Journal (ERJ) has a long history of success [1]. This success, which has allowed the Journal to keep its impact factor (IF) above 5 for 5 consecutive years, has been paralleled by the impressive growth of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) and its membership [2]. No doubt, a strong society needs a strong journal. In order to be effective, each individual manuscri...

BACKGROUND Although peer review is widely considered to be the most credible way of selecting manuscripts and improving the quality of accepted papers in scientific journals, there is little evidence to support its use. Our aim was to estimate the effects on manuscript quality of either adding a statistical peer reviewer or suggesting the use of checklists such as CONSORT or STARD to clinical r...

In this paper first results are presented of a study on the correlation between bibliometric indicators and the outcomes of peer judgements made by expert committees of physics in the Netherlands. As a first step to study these outcomes in more detail, we focus on the results of an evaluation of 56 research programmes in condensed matter physics in the Netherlands, a subfield which accounts for...

0020-0255/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Inc doi:10.1016/j.ins.2009.08.003 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (I. [email protected] (D. Polemi), [email protected] (V One of the main challenges that organizations face nowadays, is the efficient use of individual employee intelligence, through machine-facilitated understanding of the collected corporate knowledge, ...

In December 2003, seventeen years after the first UK research assessment exercise, Italy started up its first-ever national research evaluation, with the aim to evaluate, using the peer review method, the excellence of the national research production. The evaluation involved 20 disciplinary areas, 102 research structures, 18,500 research products and 6,661 peer reviewers (1,465 from abroad); i...