BACKGROUND Hürthle cell carcinoma (HCC) is an unusual and aggressive variant of the follicular type of differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC), accounting for less than 3% of DTCs but posing the highest ...risk of metastasis. Brain metastases are uncommonly reported in the literature but pose a poor prognosis. The low rate of brain metastases from HCC coupled with ambiguous treatment protocols for the extracranial disease complicate successful disease management and definitive treatment strategy. The authors present the case of a patient with HCC metastasis to the skull base, cortex, and spine with recent tibial metastasis. OBSERVATIONS Despite the presence of metastasis to the cortex, skull base, and spine, the patient responded very well to radiation therapy, sellar mass resection, and cervical spine decompression and fixation and has made a remarkable recovery. LESSONS The authors’ multidisciplinary approach to the patient’s care, including a diverse team of specialists from oncology, neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, radiology, endocrinology, and collaboration with clinical trial researchers, was fundamental to her successful outcome, demonstrating the utility of intersecting specialties in successful outcomes in neuro-oncological patient care.
Hiccups are characterized by involuntary, intermittent, repetitive, myoclonic, and spasmodic contractions of the diaphragm. Hiccups are termed "intractable" when they last for over 1 month.
A rare ...case of intractable hiccups due to an uncommon location of cavernous hemangioma in the dorsal medulla is illustrated. With respect to the management, surgical excision was performed, and postsurgical complete recovery was witnessed, which has been reported only in six cases worldwide to date.
A mechanism of the hiccups reflex arc is discussed in detail with special reference to the need for equal emphasis on evaluating central nervous system causes and peripheral etiologies for pertinent hiccups.
This study sought to examine the impact of lesson study on teachers’ professional development. For this purpose, a quasi-experimental design involving 46 English teachers from 24 primary schools in ...Bahir Dar city, Ethiopia, was employed. Data were collected through questionnaires and analyzed quantitatively using means, standard deviations, independent samples t-tests, and pair sample t-tests. The findings of the study revealed that the teachers in the experimental group who participated in the lesson study intervention demonstrated better professional practices than those in the control group. This improvement was evident in the teachers' ability to prepare lesson plans, deliver classroom teaching, and reflect on lesson plans. Furthermore, the pre-test and post-test results of the experimental group showed that teachers had demonstrated better performance after the intervention. Generally, the study highlighted that a well-planned and implemented lesson study program can have a positive impact on the professional development of teachers.
BACKGROUND Prosopagnosia is a rare neurological condition characterized by the impairment of face perception with preserved visual processing and cognitive functioning and is associated with injury ...to the fusiform gyrus and inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF). Reports of this clinical impairment following resection of right temporal lobe diffuse gliomas in the absence of contralateral injury are exceedingly scarce and not expected as a complication of surgery. OBSERVATIONS The authors describe the case of a young female patient found to have an incidental diffuse glioma in the right inferior temporal lobe despite evidence of preoperative ILF disruption by the tumor. Following resection of the lesion, despite the preoperative disruption to the ILF by the tumor, the patient developed prosopagnosia. There was no evidence of contralateral, left-sided ILF injury. LESSONS Given the significant functional impairment associated with prosopagnosia, neurosurgeons should be aware of the exceedingly rare possibility of a visual-processing deficit following unilateral and, in this case, right-sided inferior temporal lobe glioma resections. More investigation is needed to determine whether preoperative testing can determine dominance of facial-processing networks for patients with lesions in the right inferior posterior temporooccipital lobe and whether intraoperative mapping could help prevent this complication.
This study attempted to examine the characteristics of current high school Chinese textbooks by comparing and analyzing the educational content of 11 Chinese textbooks by linguistic element. ...Specifically, the 11 textbooks were compared based on their educational contents on linguistic elements such as phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, Chinese characters and culture, and organized by their unique characteristics. With respect to vocabulary education in particular, the percentage of basic vocabulary in the 11 textbooks varied from 64% to 86%, but, in general, all textbooks included more than two-thirds of basic vocabulary. Additionally, they utilized various teaching methods to teach vocabulary, and actively used real-life activities or games that piqued students’ interest. With respect to grammar education, they generally all covered the contents suggested in the 2015 revised curriculum, but there was a lack of diversity in teaching and learning methods and the need to plan new teaching methods that would keep students engaged. Lastly, some textbooks introduced the Chinese language and China in general in relation to linked subjects; these connections can help students to develop a deeper and broader understanding of China and the Chinese language and is in line with the goal of fostering creative convergence talents outlined in the 2015 revised curriculum. Moving forward, various teaching and learning methods should be designed to keep students interested and engaged in China and learning the Chinese language.
TPACK is a prominent model of teacher expertise for effectively teaching with digital technologies. While numerous studies have investigated teachers’ TPACK by means of self-report surveys, its ...relation to more objective outcomes like lesson planning has only recently come into focus. The aim of this study was to investigate whether differences in use of digital technologies in lesson plans are related to self-reported TPACK. Lesson plans of 173 pre-service teachers were coded for whether or not they included the use of digital technologies as well as for whether this use was intended for teachers or students. Independent t tests and ANOVAs were used to compare individual TPACK components among groups. Subsequently, unique profiles of all TPACK components were identified using cluster analyses and investigated for group differences via cross tabulation. Logistic and multinomial regressions were conducted to investigate the relations between TPACK profiles and technology use controlling for gender, age, and subject group. Overall results showed no significant group differences for either individual TPACK components or for the two- and five-cluster solutions of TPACK profiles. Subject group emerged as the only significant predictor and STEM pre-service teachers showed positive relations of TPACK components and technology use in lesson plans.
•Self-reported TPACK is compared with coded technology use in lesson plans.•Different TPACK profiles emerge from clustering of subscales.•TPACK profiles are unrelated to technology use in lesson plans.•Differences in technology use found for subject groups, but not for gender or age.•STEM pre-service teachers showed positive relations of TPACK and technology use.
This study investigated the perspectives of grade one and two teachers on the essential lesson preparation made and its usefulness in the teaching and learning process. Descriptive or transcendental ...phenomenology using semi-structured interviews collected data from 43 (18 first grade and 25-second grade) teachers sampled randomly among participants of in-service training programmes in Mufindi District Council and Mafinga Town Council in the Iringa region. Using thematic content analysis, the study established that teachers were aware of key preparation activities preceding a focused lesson. The lesson plan was their main activity for executing the selected learning activities using appropriate instructional strategies for equipping pupils with the desired learning competencies. Moreover, teachers prepared a lesson plan to guide and boost efficiency in terms of achieving lesson competency (ies), become confident; hence use for every lesson. The study concludes that most of the teachers supported the use of lesson plans to boost efficiency in teaching and learning and recommends that the production and distribution of the lesson plan be done by one unit/agency.
The prerequisites for the present article have been abstracting and moving away from the knowledge-based learning paradigm, creating innovative forms of lessons that carry elements of ...metadisciplinarity, and the transformation of a set of lessons combined into personally-significant topics into a complete technological complex. A personally significant topic, in its productivity, carries a change in the pupil’s attitude to the world. It is understood as a structural unit of this change. The article offers an invariant structure that includes image, analysis, meaning, action, and reflection, which corresponds to new types of lessons, namely, image lesson, thinking lesson, mood lesson, independent action lesson, as well as actualization and reflection lesson. In general, the proposed set of lessons represents a new technology, whose purpose is to address the subject content to the emotional sphere of pupils, to perceive the value-semantic basis of the topic as conditions for future digital analysis. The methods used included observing the work of the experimental and control classes, test tasks, using the valuable words of the text, and color analysis of emotional expressions. The results of this work have been aimed at improving the quality of pupils’ knowledge, developing ways of thinking, appealing to the value-semantic context of the humanities-based subjects, and embodying the acquired competencies in action situations as the basis for adaptation and socialization of the education subject.
PDF
