COVID-19 has presented significant challenges for higher education. These challenges were compounded for those teaching or studying towards healthcare degrees, where students were still undertaking clinical placements and delivering care in clinical practice. As the number of deaths from COVID-19 continued to rise, health disparities amongst Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) populations became increasingly apparent. In April 2020, a weekly virtual wobble room was created to support student  wellbeing, alleviate distress and to strengthen student-staff partnerships in a large School of Health Sciences in the East Midlands . The BAME virtual wobble room provided a 1.5 hour weekly virtual drop-in session. Each wobble room was facilitated by four staff sponsors on a rotational basis and were attended by an average of 20 students each week, from undergraduate and postgraduate healthcare courses, including nursing, midwifery, physiotherapy, and those studying for a PhD in health science. This paper reports on the approaches and outcomes of the wobble room, which continues to run, including lessons learnt through co-production methods between students and staff, in developing a safe space to address inequalities and structural disparities.

Aims. This study was aimed at comparing perceptions of portfolios between student nurses at the early and latter stages of their training and how they compare with their lecturers’ perceptions.Background. Portfolios are used widely in nurse education. There has been research into how portfolios are perceived and understood, but there is little evidence into how student nurses and lecturers compare quantitatively in perceptions of portfolio use.Design. Survey.Method. Forty‐eight nursing lecturers and 413 nursing students, from a multi‐centred School of Nursing in the UK, completed a questionnaire. Data were analysed with exploratory factor analysis, varimax rotation of the factor solution, internal consistency analysis, and analysis of variance.Results. Five factors were extracted, which were labelled: (1) portfolios as a means of skills acquisition, (2) other means of teaching and learning beyond using portfolios, (3) processes of showing the portfolio to others, (4) having favourable attitudes towards portfolios and (5) lecturers’ ability to share knowledge about portfolios. Scales developed from these five factors had high levels of internal consistency. Lecturers were the most positive of the three respondent groups in their views of portfolios, whereas third‐ and fourth‐year students were the least positive. There were significant differences between student nurses and their lecturers, concerning how information on portfolios is communicated by the lecturer.Conclusion. There were significant discrepancies between lecturers and student nurses in their views on how portfolios are used. The value of portfolios becomes less salient to student nurses towards the end of their training.Relevance to clinical practice. Lecturers and clinical mentors need to look at students’ perceptions and why some nursing students’ views on portfolios deteriorate. There could be regular discussions with students to see how and why the students begin to see portfolios as less useful for their education and continual professional development.

Aims. The aims of this study are to examine the knowledge, skills and attitudes of student nurses about the value and purpose of portfolios and their relevance for professional development. Background. Portfolios have become an integral aspect of student centred learning within nursing. The literature is generally positive about the benefits of portfolios but questions remain about their effective implementation. Method. A questionnaire was used to survey student nurses about the use of portfolios as a learning tool. The questionnaire was developed specifically for this study and was structured around a knowledge skills and attitude framework. Results. The sample was 413 preregistration student nurses in one school of nursing in the UK across course, year of study and branch of nursing. The main findings reveal that students are unclear but positive about the purpose and use of portfolios. Specifically, academic tutors do not provide sufficient direction in the development of their portfolios. There is also evidence that students found portfolios more useful for exploring the ‘art’ of nursing, rather than the ‘technical’ skills of nursing. Students also reported that they would welcome a dedicated portfolio module. Conclusion. Students struggle with what is useful about portfolios and are unsure about its purpose. Nonetheless, they are positive towards portfolios as a learning tool and seem to acknowledge the usefulness of portfolios for professional development. Relevance to clinical practice. The importance of portfolios for professional development is now being emphasized but how academic tutors and clinical mentors support their development remains unclear. This study provides understanding about what support students would value.

The study reports a questionnaire survey of female university students intended (1) to delineate their knowledge of cervical cancer and screening, and (2) to impute their valuation of the introduction of human papillomavirus (HPV) testing. It was found that almost 80% of respondents thought cervical cancer was a leading cause of cancer death amongst women. Most subjects consistently over-estimated the incidence of cervical cancer, consistent with the social amplification hypothesis. The major risk factors were accurately identified by the majority, although family history was emphasized to a degree unwarranted by epidemiological evidence. Subjects' knowledge of the screening programme was accurate in some respects, but not in others, e.g. the majority under-estimated the abnormality rate and over-estimated the age at which abnormalities typically occurred. Subjects placed a premium on the increased accuracy which HPV testing might potentially offer, predictable from their beliefs about the performance of the existing screening programme. Policy makers can be reassured that female university students appear unconcerned about undergoing a test for a sexually transmitted disease, although their beliefs about cervical cancer and the power of screening are distorted, and their enthusiasm for HPV testing relates to an, as yet, unconfirmed belief in its accuracy.

Reviewed by: English prepositions explained by Seth Lindstromberg Stacy Johnson English prepositions explained. By Seth Lindstromberg. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998. Pp. vi, 309. cloth $83.00, paper $29.95. This book was intended to be a useful resource for teachers, translators, coursebook writers, and English speakers generally, rather than a specialized book for linguists. Lindstromberg believes that many seemingly idiosyncratic English prepositions actually reflect a predictable system of meaning, and uses icons, etymology, definitions, and example sentences to support his claim in an easy to understand manner. The book’s 23 chapters cover more than 70 prepositions. Each chapter begins with an overview or initial remarks. It is then broken into sections examining the prepositions’ relationships to place, direction, [End Page 384] metaphorical extensions, and time. The prepositions are often defined in relation to each other, as exemplified by the title of Ch. 5, ‘In vs. on & out; in vs. inside, within; in vs. on, during’. For prepositions expressing concrete physical relationships (as opposed to prepositions like of and for that don’t characterize a spatial relationship), L uses icons such as a circle with an arrow pointing away from it to represent from and a circle with an arrow pointing to it to represent to. In cases where two prepositions have similar meanings, L uses definitions and example sentences with paraphrases to explain the differences. For example, Ch. 3 addresses in vs. into. L defines in as stressing ‘ “resultant enclosure” without clear images of the preceding movement’, and into as giving ‘movement and result about equal emphasis’. He explains that ‘They jumped into the train’ can only mean jumping from outside the train (movement) to inside the train (result), while ‘They jumped in the train’ can mean jumping within the train (resultant enclosure) as well as jumping from outside to inside the train (29–30). The combination of example sentences and paraphrases works well to differentiate the nuances of prepositions with similar meanings. In cases where prepositions are true idioms, L attempts to make them easier to learn and understand by showing how they relate to literal and extended meanings of prepositions. For instance, to explain the phrase make up, L claims up has a perfective meaning implying completeness, so make up means returning a relationship to its complete state (23–4). However, in some cases the explanations he constructs seem somewhat complicated. For example, for the phrase ‘Look who’s just turned up’, L postulates that ‘when something comes up toward our face, it becomes easier to see. And since being seen is one of the main ways in which existence is noticed, visibility suggests existence, and becoming visible suggests coming into existence’ (189–90). This explanation seems more complicated to learn and remember than simply memorizing the phrase as idiomatic. Although this book would be a valuable reference tool for its intended audience (it contains a comprehensive index, an abbreviated glossary of terms that would be unfamiliar to a nonlinguist, and frequent cross-references), it lacks any analysis that reveals systematic relationships that would be of interest to linguists. Stacy Johnson University of Minnesota, Duluth Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

Johnson, Stacy R.. M.S., Ohio University, June 1995. Increasing TCP Throughput by Using an Extended Acknowledgement Interval. Major Professor: Dr. Shawn D. Ostermann. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a widely used network protocol that is usually layered over the Internet Protocol (IP). IP is not reliable; it does not insure data delivery. However, TCP is reliable, and insures data delivery through the use of acknowledgements and retransmissions. The receiving side of a TCP connection currently acknowledges at least every other data block (segment) that it receives. Some of these acknowledgements may be super uous. A large portion of a TCP connection's cost is the overhead of processing a new packet as it arrives. Consequently, it is possible that extending the acknowledgement interval may increase throughput by requiring less acknowledgement overhead per connection. We implemented extended acknowledgement intervals in UNIX 4.4 BSD compatible network code. We compiled the code on a Sun IPC workstation running SunOS. To test our hypothesis, we conducted throughput tests using machines on the same local network, a near network, and a distant network. Analysis of the data revealed that extending the acknowledgement interval does increase throughput by a statistically signi cant amount in the local and near network cases. In particular, in the local case the throughput was increased by as much as 4 percent in some cases. It is probable that congestion on the Internet and the resulting packet loss prevented the overall increase in throughput on the non-local connections. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to my family and my friends; your support over the past year is greatly appreciated. Special thanks to my fellow members of Ohio University's Internetworking Research Group for the lively discussions. Also, thanks to Dr. Ostermann for your ideas, patience, and for introducing me to the wide world of networking.