Acute pancreatitis has many causes, all leading to a common pathway of changes within the pancreatic acinar cell. Key amongst these changes is premature intracellular activation of digestive enzymes but this is also accompanied by the appearance of cytosolic vacuoles, co-localization of digestive and lysosomal enzymes, activation of NF-kappaB, and release of pro-inflammatory cytokines. The exact mechanism responsible for enzyme activation remains the subject of much research effort and not a little debate, however it is clear that all of these changes are triggered by an abnormal, sustained rise in cytosolic calcium concentration, which is itself dependent both on release of calcium from endoplasmic reticulum stores and uptake from the extracellular milieu. Activated enzymes are directly damaging to the acinar cell themselves, but recruitment of circulating neutrophils leads to further cellular damage. Cytokines and neutrophil activation are also responsible for the systemic inflammatory response typically seen in severe acute pancreatitis.
We report on semi-quantitative research into students' difficulties with integration in an intermediate-level electromagnetism course with cohorts of about 50 students. We have found that before they enter the course, students view integration primarily as a process of evaluation, even though viewing integration as a summation process would be more fruitful. We confirm and quantify earlier results that recognizing dependency on a variable is a strong cue that prompts students to integrate and that various technical difficulties with integration prevent almost all students from getting a completely correct answer to a typical electromagnetism problem involving integration. We describe a teaching sequence that we have found useful in helping students address the difficulties we identified.
We report on the design of an introductory thermal physics module taught through Problem Based Learning ͑PBL͒ within a lecture-based curriculum and discuss how some of the potential benefits of PBL, in particular, effective mixed-ability teaching and increased student motivation, can be realized within such a framework. We describe how the transition from lecture-based to PBL teaching has taken place and illustrate the development and implementation of our methodology with two problems from the module.
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