Background: Learning style is a factor influencing academic achievement. There are contradictory results in studies on the relationship between learning styles and academic achievement. The current study aimed at investigating the relationship between learning styles and academic achievement in dental students. Methods: In the current descriptive-analytical study, 184 dental students were selected by simple random sampling. The VARK questionnaire was used as the data collection tool. The grade point average (GPA) of previous semester was used as an indicator of academic achievement, and accordingly, students were divided into two groups of strong (GPA ≥15) and weak (GPA ≤14.99). Results: The most common learning styles in strong students were unimodal (n = 55, 42%) and bimodal (n = 41, 31.3%), while they were unimodal (n = 28, 47.2%) and bimodal (n = 24, 45.3%) in the weak students. There was no significant relationship between learning styles and academic achievement in the two groups of strong and weak students. Conclusion: No significant relationship was found between learning style and academic achievement. Further studies with larger sample sizes are recommended. Further studies with larger sample sizes are recommended.

Background: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease that decreases the physical ability and affects the mental health of the patients. This descriptive-analytical study investigated the prevalence of depression, anxiety and stress in MS patients. Methods: A total of 87 MS patients were recruited in this study through simple random sampling method using a random number table. Data were collected by Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21) and analyzed by descriptive and analytical statistics. Results: The mean age of the patients was 35.5 ± 9.2 years. Of them, 41 (47.1%) had moderate depression, 34 (39.1%) had moderate anxiety, and 39 (44.8%) had moderate stress. There was a significant relationship between depression and job, education, and economic status of the participants. There was also a significant association between the participants’ economic status and anxiety. There was no significant relationship between stress and any of the variables. Conclusion: Given the relatively high prevalence of anxiety, depression, and stress in MS patients as well as the significant relationship between their economic status and depression and anxiety, interventional measures are required to be taken to decrease their problems and to provide a favorable ground for their employment. Periodic examinations by psychologists / psychiatrists and treatment of patients with symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression are also essential.

Background. Self-directed learning plays an important role in nursing education and is associated with academic achievement, communication self-efficacy, assertiveness, responsibility, and students’ clinical competencies. This study was conducted to analyze the existing research on the level of self-directed learning in nursing students. Methods. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, all studies that had examined the level of self-directed learning in nursing students until March 2, 2020, were searched in Science Direct, Ovid, Scopus, PubMed, ProQuest, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases. In the meta-analysis section, I² index and the random effects model were used. Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software (version 2) was used for data analysis. Results. The mean score of self-directed learning in 12 articles with 3830 samples was 156.73 ± 1.47 out of 200 (95% CI: 153.3–160.1). These scores were 153.50 ± 2.71 (95% CI: 148.18–158.82) and 154.67 ± 1.32 (95% CI: 157.50–159.32) in the male and female students, respectively. There was a significant relationship between self-directed learning and sample size, year of study, and semester ( ). Conclusion. The mean self-directed learning in nursing students was at a moderate level, which does not seem to be sufficient. Given the positive role of self-directed learning in nursing education, it is essential that nursing professors teach self-directed learning skills to students via training courses.

Cardiovascular diseases, like arrhythmia, as the leading causes of death in the world, can be automatically diagnosed using an electrocardiogram (ECG). The ECG-based diagnostic has notably resulted in reducing human errors. The main aim of this study is to increase the accuracy of arrhythmia diagnosis and classify various types of arrhythmias in individuals (suffering from cardiovascular diseases) using a novel graph convolutional network (GCN) benefitting from mutual information (MI) indices extracted from the ECG leads. In this research, for the first time, the relationships of 12 ECG leads measured using MI as an adjacency matrix were illustrated by the developed GCN and included in the ECG-based diagnostic method. Cross-validation methods were applied to select both training and testing groups. The proposed methodology was validated in practice by applying it to the large ECG database, recently published by Chapman University. The GCN-MI structure with 15 layers was selected as the best model for the selected database, which illustrates a very high accuracy in classifying different types of rhythms. The classification indicators of sensitivity, precision, specificity, and accuracy for classifying heart rhythm type, using GCN-MI, were computed as 98.45%, 97.89%, 99.85%, and 99.71%, respectively. The results of the present study and its comparison with other studies showed that considering the MI index to measure the relationship between cardiac leads has led to the improvement of GCN performance for detecting and classifying the type of arrhythmias, in comparison to the existing methods. For example, the above classification indicators for the GCN with the identity adjacency matrix (or GCN-Id) were reported to be 68.24%, 72.83%, 95.24%, and 92.68%, respectively.

Self-medication is the use of one or more medications without physician’s diagnosis, opinion, or prescription and supervision, which includes the use of herbal or chemical drugs. Todays, self-medication is one of the biggest socio-health and economic problems among nursing students of various societies, including Iran, and because this issue can affected by contextual factors, this study aimed to explore the perceived factors that affect self-medication among nursing students. In this qualitative study, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 11 nursing students. The transcript of each interview was reviewed several times and classified into main categories and sub-categories by content analysis. To evaluate this study, Guba and Lincoln’s four criteria, including credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability were considered for trustworthiness. After analyzing the qualitative content of the interviews, four main categories, including educational backgrounds, nature of the disease, access to the media, and beliefs and personal experiences, and ten subcategories, including contact with clinical environment, relative knowledge about medications, simplicity of the disease, recurrence of the disease, influence of the media, use of the internet, believing in own knowledge, positive experiences of traditional medicine, and using own and others’ experiences, were extracted. It seems that, having a relative awareness about various diseases and medications, which is sometimes associated with taking a few educational courses with an internship, creates a false confidence in student for self-medication and prescribing drugs to others. It would be beneficial if the education system and associated tutors could inform the students about the possible consequences of this issue. By knowing the internal and subjective factors that influence the self-medication, this arbitrary practice can be largely prevented.

The delivery method is one of the primary concerns of primiparous women. Today, due to the fear of delivery, the number of cesarean sections has increased significantly. Considering the importance of choosing the type of delivery and the lack of study in this regard, the present study was conducted to explain the attitude of primiparous women towards their preference for delivery method. In this qualitative study, in-depth interview was conducted with 12 primiparous women. The transcripts of the interviews were read carefully by the researcher for several times. Finally, using the analytical method, the codes were extracted and subsequent subcategories and main categories were determined. To assess the credibility of the data, the Denzin & Lincoln’s criteria were used, which include Credibility, Transferability, Dependability, and Confirmability. Because of inexperience in delivery and ambiguity in process, most of the woman had a specific fear and they commonly affected by other advices and experiences. The majority of the participants had desire to vaginal delivery with announcing its advantages such as shortage of pain process, easy breast feeding, and mother ability to better carryout the newborn works. Other participants believed on adverse effects of normal vaginal delivery including bladder prolapse, uterus rupture, and probability of experience of both happenings (CS and NVD), frequent examination, pain and urine incontinence. Some stated cesarean section have benefits of less injury to neonate and preserving her/his beauty. Results showed that, choosing a delivery method is difficult for primiparous women, and their attitude toward the type of delivery is influenced by subjective and internal factors. Giving awareness to primiparous women greatly enhances their tendency towards vaginal delivery.