Archive for the 'Education' Category

Hot housed Chinese schoolkids are getting ill from the stress

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

A third of Chinese children experience high levels of school-related stress, and these kids are about five times more likely to have the physical symptoms of stress – that is, headache or abdominal pain – then their less frazzled peers. Thanks to the combination of China’s recent economic growth – with the increased opportunities for [...]

Medical school entrance exam favours white public school boys

Monday, March 1st, 2010

New research has found that the UK Clinical Aptitude Test (UKCAT), introduced to level the playing field in selection for medical and dental schools, favours male applicants, white people, and students from a higher socioeconomic class or who attended an independent or grammar school. In the UK, students take advanced level (A level) exams aged [...]

Visiting the Natural History Museum Darwin Centre

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

Today my friends and I went to see the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum, and it was AMAZING! The aim of this shiny new wing is to show visitors “the hidden world of museum science”. The Natural History Museum is rightly most famous for it’s natural history collection, which comprises more than 70 [...]

Multiple choice medical school exams favour male students

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Urgh, exams. The epic ‘true-false-no idea’ multiple choicers of my undergraduate days are not a distant enough memory for me. The whole ‘get it right, get 1 point’, ‘get it wrong, lose 1 point’ approach always seemed horrendously unfair, regardless of the statistical basis for the strategy (i.e. examiners don’t want to reward people that [...]

Squeamish? Don’t worry, medical students are too

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

BMC Medical Education has just published an interesting study that examined the incidence of fainting among medical students observing surgery.  Apparently, more than 1 in 10 medical students almost or completely pass out in the operating theatre. The authors of this study surveyed 630 clinical medical students in their fourth or fifth (final) year of [...]