ResearchRural clinical training is not a new concept, especially for medical doctors, and is a global phenomenon. In South Africa (SA), the earliest account of medical rural training was the Pholela Health Centre, started in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) in the 1940s.[1] Later, in 1992, KZN tertiary educators pioneered multidisciplinary, rural clinical education for various allied health sciences (AHS) disciplines [2] along with medical and nursing education. SA has a history of an urban service bias, with 12% of SA's medical practitioners, 19% of nurses [3] and an unrecorded, but possibly small percentage of AHS practitioners being rural based.[4] The advent of compulsory community service inspired the development of Stellenbosch University's uKwanda Rural Clinical School, which began training medical doctors in 2011.[5] Training broadened from 2012 onwards to include final-year learners from AHS and included Human Nutrition (HN), Physiotherapy (PT), Speech-Language Therapy (SLT) and Occupational Therapy (OT). Rotations include clinical blocks and/or 1-year placements for students of some of the disciplines at rural sites and for others at urban sites. On average, 44 of 100 Stellenbosch University AHS students experienced the uKwanda Rural Clinical School training platform during their final year of training. We hope to increase the number in future. As this is a relatively new learning site, we are curious about what, or more specifically how, our learners experience practice changes, i.e. from urbanbased, individualised care and/or traditional medi cal training sites to the more rural-based clinical training.In this study, the Curriculum of Practice (Fig. 1), [6] a conceptual framework, was used to situate learners' practice experiences, the components of which include (i) clinical practices (and associated resources); (ii) professional educational curricular policies; and (iii) practice policies.Practice is promoted as integrally connected to theory, policy and factors such as clinical resources -and not as abstract, decontextualised things that we do. [7] Clinical practice activities are understood relative to what learners are taught in their professional curricula. For example, the manner in which a child with cerebral palsy eats, may, for an occupational therapist, mean focusing on the mealtime as an activity of daily living. However, a speech therapist will assess 'feeding/swallowing abilities' . They are also guided by best practice local and/or national or international guidelines from organisations such as the World Health Organization. Hence, policy interacts with practice.Clinical practice also comprises available resources. What happens when we have no standardised tests for isiXhosa speakers? Or, how does one begin Background. Rural clinical training is not widely established or documented for allied health sciences (AHS) learners. This article focuses on the experiences of AHS learners from Stellenbosch University's uKwanda Rural Clinical School. Objective. To explore learners' practices with regard to ru...
BackgroundChildren who enter school with limited vocabulary knowledge are at risk for reading failure. This study investigated the efficacy of an interactive e-book, implemented as a mobile application, to facilitate vocabulary learning in Grade 1 isiXhosa-speaking children (n = 65).ObjectiveThe purpose was to measure if an e-book intervention, specifically developed for use in the South African context, could facilitate the acquisition and retention of new words at different levels of lexical representation.MethodA randomised pre-test and/or post-test between-subject design was used where an experimental group that received the e-book intervention was compared to a control group before the control group received a delayed intervention. Follow-up testing was performed to measure retention of the new vocabulary after eight weeks. Mixed-model repeated-measure Analysis of Variance (ANOVAs) were used to determine differences between the participants in the experimental and control groups.ResultsThe short-term e-book intervention not only facilitated fast-mapping of new words but enabled participants to develop more robust lexical representations of the newly acquired words. Follow-up assessment showed that they retained their newly acquired word knowledge.ConclusionMultimedia technology can be used to provide explicit and embedded vocabulary training to young children at risk for academic failure. These findings are particularly relevant for South African environments where there is limited parental support and lack of educational resources to promote vocabulary learning in young children.
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