Volume 32: Issue 1

This editorial discusses the recent inclusion of the Journal of Chiropractic Education in Scopus and places this accomplishment in context of the growth of the journal over the past 12 years. New open access reference cross-linking is also introduced.

Objective:

To assess the force profiles of high-velocity low-amplitude thrusts delivered to a mannequin on a force platform by novice students given only verbal instructions.

Methods:

Student volunteers untrained in adjusting delivered a series of adjustments to a mannequin on a force platform. Participants performed 3 light, 3 normal, and 3 heavy thrusts on 5 listings specifying contact point, hand, and direction. Force profiles were analyzed for speed and amplitude, consistency, and force discrimination. Two recording sessions occurred 10 weeks apart.

Results:

Sixteen participants (11 females, 5 male) completed the study. Peak forces ranged from 880 to 202 N for heavy thrusts and 322- to 66 N for light thrusts. Thrust rate was from 8.1 to 1.8 Newtons per millisecond. Average coefficients of variability (CV = STD/mean) at each load level (initial/final) were heavy: 17%/15%; normal: 16%/15%; and light: 20%/20%, with 0 as ideal. A force ratio measured students' abilities to distinguish thrust magnitude. The heavy/normal ratio (initial/final) was 1.35/1.39, and the light/normal ratio was 0.70/0.67.

Conclusions:

At this point, without force feedback being used in the classroom, novice students can produce thrusts that look like those of their teachers and of experienced practitioners, but they may not produce similar speed and force values. They are consistent within and between sessions and can discriminate between light and heavy loads. A natural next step in our educational research will be to measure adjustment factors on more experienced cohorts of students with and without the presence of force-feedback training apparatus.

Objective:

There has been increasing scholarly interest in the role of environments in health care professional education, and the value of these has been widely acknowledged as an influential factor in educational quality. However, little is known about how teachers experience the environment, and there is a recognizable absence of a perspective from chiropractic and physiotherapy faculties. The aim of this study was to explore and contrast chiropractic and physiotherapy teachers' experiences and conceptualizations of the meaning of the educational environment.

Methods:

In this qualitative study, we performed semistructured interviews with 14 teachers, purposefully selected to obtain richness, variation, and breadth in the data. The data were analyzed using inductive qualitative content analysis.

Results:

The most noteworthy findings were, first, that chiropractic teachers experienced the meaning of the environment as motivating a vocational practice and modeling ideal, supporting and managing stressed students, and including students in the community of chiropractors. Physiotherapy teachers experienced the meaning of the environment as putting the pedagogical vision into practice, balancing students' expectations, and providing the prerequisites to grow within the profession. Second, both groups of teachers held common conceptualizations of the constituents of the environment as physical, organizational, relational, communicational, and pedagogical; however, they attached different connotations to these dimensions.

Conclusion:

The findings conveyed a variance in the experience of the meaning of the educational environment that can be attributed to contextual and cultural differences.

Peer-reviewer acknowledgements for the Association of Chiropractic Colleges Research Agenda Conference 2018

The conference organizers wish to thank the many reviewers for their wonderful and necessary service. Their work makes the program successful and we are quite grateful. Medhat Alattar, Robert Appleyard, Christopher Arick, Iben Axen, Samir Ayad, Barclay Bakkum, Angela Ballew, Deborah Barr, Jason Bartlett, Patrick Battaglia, Edward Bednarz, Judy Bhatti, Charles Blum, Karen Bobak, Ron Boesch, Breanne Bovee, Linda Bowers, James Boysen, Rick Branson, Teresa Brennan, Joseph Brimhall, Thomas Brodar, Leo Bronston, Myron Brown, Thomas Brozovich, Paul Bruno, Jeanmarie Burke, Kara Burnham, Andre Bussieres, Alana Callender, Jerrilyn Cambron,

Small Teaching Online

Carissa ManriquePhD,

Abdellatif AlsharifPhD,

Kelly BrownMS,

Cynthia CalongneDCS,

Terence CockerhamMA, and

Themba NgwenyaDCS