Game versus Lecture-Based Learning in Disaster Risk Education; An Experience on Shiraz High School Students.

OBJECTIVE: To compare the effect of lecture and game methods in disaster risk education on high school students' knowledge. METHODS: This research was a randomized field trial of educational intervention for high school's students in Shiraz, Iran. Through cluster sampling, the 332 students were randomly selected and their knowledge was compared in two randomized allocated intervention groups by pretest and posttest. For one group a classic lecture about the basic concepts of disaster risk management were presented. In the other group through a game base method and demonstrations the mentors tried to educate the considered concepts. RESULTS:  In this study 332 students were participated in lecture (n=166) and game (n=166) groups. There was a significant increase between the mean of students' knowledge in the two groups of lectures and games method after educational intervention. The mean of students' disaster risk knowledge in the lecture and game methods were 17.47 and 29.77 percent respectively (p<0.001). CONCLUSION:  The game's educational method was more effective than the traditional lecture method on students' knowledge and it can be considered as a new approach for promoting the behaviors on disaster risk management. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRY: IRCT20171014036766N.

Disregarding population specificity: its influence on the sex assessment methods from the tibia.

Forensic anthropology has developed classification techniques for sex estimation of unknown skeletal remains, for example population-specific discriminant function analyses. These methods were designed for populations that lived mostly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their level of reliability or misclassification is important for practical use in today's forensic practice; it is, however, unknown. We addressed the question of what the likelihood of errors would be if population specificity of discriminant functions of the tibia were disregarded. Moreover, five classification functions in a Czech sample were proposed (accuracies 82.1-87.5 %, sex bias ranged from -1.3 to -5.4 %). We measured ten variables traditionally used for sex assessment of the tibia on a sample of 30 male and 26 female models from recent Czech population. To estimate the classification accuracy and error (misclassification) rates ignoring population specificity, we selected published classification functions of tibia for the Portuguese, south European, and the North American populations. These functions were applied on the dimensions of the Czech population. Comparing the classification success of the reference and the tested Czech sample showed that females from Czech population were significantly overestimated and mostly misclassified as males. Overall accuracy of sex assessment significantly decreased (53.6-69.7 %), sex bias -29.4-100 %, which is most probably caused by secular trend and the generally high variability of body size. Results indicate that the discriminant functions, developed for skeletal series representing geographically and chronologically diverse populations, are not applicable in current forensic investigations. Finally, implications and recommendations for future research are discussed.