If You Build It, Will They Come? Exploring the Impact of Medical Student Engagement on Clerkship Curriculum Outcomes.

Introduction: Inconsistent or superficial access to workplace learning experiences can impede medical students' development. Well-designed clerkship curricula provide comprehensive education by offering developmental opportunities in and out of the workplace, explicitly linked to competency objectives. Questions remain about how students engage with clerkship curriculum offerings and how this affects their achievement. This study investigated student engagement as the source of an apparent clerkship curriculum malfunction: increasing rate of substandard summative clinical competency exam (SCCX) performance over 3 years following curriculum reform. Materials and Methods: We sampled from three cohorts of US medical students (classes of 2018-2020) based on their post-clerkship SCCX performance: substandard (N = 33) vs. exemplary (N = 31). Using a conceptually based, locally developed rubric, a five-person team rated students' engagement in a curriculum offering designed to provide standardized deliberate practice on the clerkship's competency objectives. We examined the association between engagement and SCCX performance, taking prior academic performance into account. Results: Rate of substandard SCCX performance could not be explained by cohort differences in prior academic performance. Student engagement differed across cohorts and was significantly associated with SCCX performance. However, engagement did not meaningfully predict individual students' SCCX performance, particularly in light of prior academic performance. Discussion: Engagement with a particular learning opportunity may not affect clerkship outcomes, but may reflect students' priorities when navigating curricular offerings, personal learning goals, and curriculum policy. Proposing four patterns of engagement in clerkship learning, this study prompts reflection on the complex interaction among factors that affect engagement and outcomes.

Genome Sequences and Characteristics of Six Cluster B1 Mycobacteriophages Discovered at Saint Joseph's University.

We report on six new siphoviruses infecting Mycobacterium smegmatis that were isolated from soil samples collected on the campus of Saint Joseph's University, on the western edge of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. All phages have circularly permuted genomes that are 68,721 to 68,929 bp long, with an average G+C content of 66.4%.

Modulation of the Electrochemical Reactivity of Solubilized Redox Active Polymers via Polyelectrolyte Dynamics.

Redox active polymers (RAPs) are electrochemically versatile materials that find key applications in energy storage, sensing, and surface modification. In spite of the ubiquity of RAP-modified electrodes, a critical knowledge gap exists in the understanding of the electrochemistry of soluble RAPs and their relation to polyelectrolyte dynamics. Here, we explore for the first time the intersection between polyelectrolyte behavior and the electrochemical response that highly soluble and highly substituted RAPs with viologen, ferrocene, and nitrostyrene moieties elicit at electrodes. This comprehensive study of RAP electrolytes over several orders of magnitude in concentration and ionic strength reveals distinct signatures consistent with surface confined, colloidal, and bulk-like electrochemical behavior. These differences emerge across polyelectrolyte packing regimes and are strongly modulated by changes in RAP coil size and electrostatic interactions with the electrode. We found that, unlike monomer motifs, simple changes in the ionic strength caused variations over 1 order of magnitude in the current measured at the electrode. In addition, the thermodynamics of adsorbed RAP films were also affected, giving rise to standard reduction potential shifts leading to redox kinetic effects as a result of the mediating nature of the RAP film in equilibrium with the solution. Full electrochemical characterization via transient and steady-state techniques, including the use of ultramicroelectrodes and the rotating disk electrode, were correlated to dynamic light scattering, ellipsometry, and viscometric analysis. These methods helped elucidate the relationship between electrochemical behavior and RAP coil size, film thickness, and polyelectrolyte packing regime. This study underscores the role of electrostatics in modulating the reactivity of redox polyelectrolytes.