An assessment of pancreatology education in North American pediatric gastroenterology fellowship programs.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Within the last two decades, an increased incidence of acute pancreatitis (AP) has been reported in childhood, with some progressing to acute recurrent pancreatitis (ARP) or chronic pancreatitis (CP). Training future pancreatologists is critical to improve the care of children with pancreatic diseases. There are no studies to assess whether the pediatric gastroenterology (GI) fellowship curriculum prepares specialists to care for children with pancreatic diseases. METHODS: An electronic survey was distributed to all North American Pediatric Gastroenterology Fellows. The survey included 31 questions on pancreatology training including academic resources, research experience, clinical exposure, clinical confidence, and career plans. RESULTS: A total of 112 (25.8%) fellows responded from 41 (41/72, 56.9%) training centers in North America. Pancreas-specific didactic lectures were reported by 90.2% (n = 101); 49.5% (50/101) had at least quarterly or monthly lectures. Clinical confidence (Likert 4-5) was highest in managing and treating AP (94.6% and 93.8% respectively), relatively lower for ARP (84.8% and 71.4%) and lowest for CP (63.4% and 42.0%). Confidence in diagnosing both ARP and CP was associated with the variety of pancreatic diseases seen (p < 0.001) and total number of patients followed over a 6 month period (p = 0.04). Nine (8%) reported interest in specializing in pancreatology, 12 (10.7%) in pursuing research in the pancreatology. CONCLUSIONS: Trainee confidence is highest in managing AP, lowest in CP, and seems to be directly correlated with the variety of pancreatic diseases and number of patients followed. Continued commitment is necessary to foster training of the next generation of pediatric pancreatologists.

The Role of Adequate Resources, Community and Supportive Leadership in Creating Engaged Academics.

The vast majority of research in academia focuses on the adverse working conditions and poor wellbeing. The present paper presents a positive view on the factors that may promote work engagement in academia. Based on conservation of resources theory, we suggest that academic resources may be related to a social community at work, which in turn creates work engagement among academics. Having positive leadership in the form of fair leadership may be an important contextual factor ensuring that resources are shared fairly and openly. In a study of 1499 academics in Norwegian universities, we found that sufficient administrative resources to support teaching duties were positively related with work engagement, and that a sense of community mediated the relationship between academic resources for teaching and work engagement. These results propose that building academics' social resources by providing them with the necessary resources to perform their jobs will buffer the impact of a leadership that is perceived to be unfair and help them to perform their work in a positive way. Our results carry important implications for how positive psychology may be used to support engaged workers in academia.

Characterizing Academic Help-seeking Moods for Enrollment Performance of Institutional Online Student.

Few could have anticipated the sudden and dramatic impact of COVID-19 on all aspects of life, including online academic help-seeking of institutional education. Academic help-seeking is a quite prevalent phenomenon that supports students to learn knowledge and improve academic performance. This study is aiming to understand learners and associate their performances via exploiting academic help-seeking moods with online learning of institutional education setting. Adopting the relevant theories, we propose a novel research model and identify three different online help-seeking moods, which are namely goal-directed seeker, exploratory seeker and avoidant seeker. Goal-directed seekers are described with preference for more challenging assignments and more posting on the platform discussion board frequently. Exploratory seekers hold the highest achievements during all help-seeking moods. Avoidant seekers are well-distinguished by holding the lowest frequency of posting among all moods and the most average time spent on the platform. Students have collective preferences for assignment submission in each help-seeking mood, and deviation from those preferences increases their probability of dropping academic grade significantly. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first work that characterizes the help-seeking moods and associates moods with the enrollment performance for online education of institutional student.