Background: With the development of multidisciplinary addictology teams, the ability of an addictologist to reliably assess personality psychopathology can be considered an important prerequisite that significantly enters the process of treatment planning. Because the addictologist is often the first professional to come into contact with the client, verification of the accuracy of clinical judgment seems to be one of the key indicators of addictologist competence. Aims: Verification of the reliability and validity of the clinical assessment of personality psychopathology in master students of addictology based on the course on scoring the Structured Interview of Personality Organization (STIPO). Methods: 31 master students of addictology independently evaluated 7 protocols of the STIPO on the basis of recordings. The presented patients were unknown to the students. Data was collected as part of the STIPO scoring course. The resulting scores of students were compared with: 1. the expert scores of a clinical psychologist with many years of experience with the STIPO; 2. the scores of 4 other psychologists without previous experience with the STIPO who attended the course; 3. information on previous clinical experience and previous education of the students. The comparison of scores was performed by...

When autism interventionists within behavioral intervention programs continually assess the child's behavior and context and adjust their teaching behaviors accordingly, the child can quickly progress towards their goals. While evaluations of flexible behavior-change techniques implemented by experienced clinicians are present in the literature, systematic evaluations of staff training procedures to train interventionists in responsive decision making are lacking. In the current study, flexible training procedures were utilized to not only teach direct-line staff to make decisions based on the learner's behavior, but also to understand and articulate the variables they were responding to. During in vivo training sessions, trainers tailored their use of instructions, modeling, practice, feedback, narration modeling and shaping, and decision-making guidance to the dynamic needs of the staff and child. The effects of the treatment package, which consisted of an in-service training and in vivo training sessions, were measured by observing staff teach vocal manding, which was chosen based on the importance of the skill for the child and because it afforded many opportunities for the staff to learn to make decisions about how to occasion and shape responses. The three children with autism who participated in the study made progress in terms of increasing their frequency of independent mands and producing more topographically complex responses. The three staff also improved in their narration of the child's behavioral goals, the decisions they made to reach those goals, and their rationales, which may have served as a mediator in their ability to respond to the child's behavior across varied conditions.

The health care field has become increasingly more complex, requiring new nurses to be prepared upon graduation to respond to a variety of complex situations. Unfortunately, many graduates from associate degree nursing (ADN) programs are not able to think critically upon entering the work force. This presents a major problem for the nurse and for the employer. The purpose of the study, therefore, was to gain a deeper understanding of the graduates' perceptions of their ability to critically think during their first year of clinical practice, and if they believed their program prepared them to be critical thinkers. The key research questions focused on how the novice nurses reconciled their performance on a critical thinking, online assessment, the Health Sciences Reasoning Test (HSRT), with their perception of their critical thinking skills, and if they felt prepared, during their first year of clinical practice, to critically think. The conceptual framework applied was Bloom's Taxonomy and Tanner's clinical judgment model. A purposeful sampling of 7 novice nurses from 3 ADN programs was chosen. After completing the HSRT, audio-taped phone interviews were conducted. The data indicated that the participants felt unprepared to respond to emergent patient situations, thus undermining their self-worth and clinical competency. The participants agreed there was a need for a critical thinking course in ADN curriculum. A project was created for a 9-week critical thinking course, incorporating theory, clinical practice, and simulation exercises. Social change is expected to occur when student nurses are able to critically think upon graduation, resulting in positive patient outcomes, both of which will benefit patients, their families, and their communities.

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