International web survey of chiropractic students about evidence-based practice: a pilot study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Positive attitude toward evidence-based practice (EBP) principles in healthcare education may be one of the first steps for motivating a healthcare professional student to later apply EBP principles in clinical decision-making. The objectives for this project were to pilot an international web-based survey of chiropractic students and to describe student attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge about EBP principles.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We used SurveyMonkey™ to develop our survey based on an existing questionnaire used to measure basic knowledge, skills and beliefs about EBP among allied healthcare professionals and CAM practitioners. We invited 26 chiropractic educational institutions teaching in English and accredited by official organizations to participate. Academic officials and registrars at participating institutions forwarded an invitation email and two reminders to students between July and September 2010. The invitation contained a link to the 38-item web-based questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were performed for analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Fourteen institutions from Australia, Canada, US, Denmark and New Zealand participated. Among an estimated 7,142 student recipients of invitation letters, 674 participated in the survey for an estimated response rate of 9.4%. Most respondents reported having access to medical/healthcare literature through the internet, but only 11% read literature every week and 21% did not read literature at all. Respondents generally agreed that the use of research evidence in chiropractic was important. Although 76% of respondents found it easy to understand research evidence and 81% had some level of confidence assessing the general worth of research articles, 71% felt they needed more training in EBP to be able to apply evidence in chiropractic care. Respondents without previous training in research methods had lower confidence in assessing published papers. While more than 60% marked the correct answer for two knowledge items, the mean number of correct answers to the five knowledge questions was 1.3 (SD 0.9).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Although it is feasible to conduct an international web survey of chiropractic students, significant stakeholder participation is important to improve response rates. Students had relatively positive attitudes toward EBP. However, participants felt they needed more training in EBP and based on the knowledge questions they may need further training about basic research concepts.</p

Model‐based testing of Apache ZooKeeper: Fundamental API usage and watchers

In this paper, we extend work on model‐based testing for Apache ZooKeeper, to handle watchers (triggers) and improve scalability. In a distributed asynchronous shared storage like ZooKeeper, watchers deliver notifications on state changes. They are difficult to test because watcher notifications involve an initial action that sets the watcher, followed by another action that changes the previously seen state.We show how to generate test cases for concurrent client sessions executing against ZooKeeper with the tool Modbat. The tests are verified against an oracle that takes into account all possible timings of network communication. The oracle has to verify that there exists a chain of events that triggers both the initial callback and the subsequent watcher notification. We show in detail how the oracle computes whether watch triggers are correct and how the model was adapted and improved to handle these features. Together with a new search improvement that increases both speed and accuracy, we are able to verify large test setups and confirm several defects with our model.</p