Advances in Medicine and Health Science Researches and Practice, Livre de Lyon

Current Progress in Biological Research presents new insights into key topics from different areas of the biological sciences. Some of the topics covered in the book are antibiotic susceptibility, genomic rearrangement, historical biogeography, biogeographic patterns, endemism and the use of microorganisms for pest control. The book is an interesting collection of 16 original research articles written by respected experts in their fields. It is hoped that readers will be stimulated and challenged by the contents of this book.

Student misconceptions have been studied for decades from a curricular/instructional perspective and from the assessment/test level perspective. Numerous misconception assessment tools have been developed in order to measure students’ misconceptions relative to the correct content. Often, these tools are used to make a variety of educational decisions including students’ achievement level, instructional method effectiveness, and curriculum related achievement progress. These tools have included qualitative and quantitative assessment methods. The quantitative analysis of misconceptions has mostly relied on classical test theory methods of test construction related to total raw score, percentage of correct responses, and/or percentage of misconception responses. More recently, researchers have begun to use modern test theory methods of test construction including item response theory and cognitive diagnostic models to assess misconceptions. However, to date, there has not been any test construction modeling that has scaled a student’s ability estimate and a student’s misconception level into a continuous metric. The purpose of this study was to investigate if it is possible to model misconceptions, which in the latent framework have been only measured using a latent class approach, as single or multiple factor continuous latent variables in addition to a latent variable of interest, and see if modeling misconceptions help provide additional test information. Bayesian (Markov Chain Monte Carlo, (MCMC) methods were used to estimate model parameters. This study investigated if test length, number of misconceptions, and the prior distribution specification affected model convergence, parameter estimation precision, and the value-added impact gained by the modeling of student misconceptions. The findings indicated that overall estimation precision was satisfactory for both item and person parameters when single factor misconception was used however increasing the number of misconceptions reduces estimation precision. Increasing the number of distractors measuring misconceptions increases the test information related to the misconception. Future research might consider test lengths other than 25 or 50 as well as different sizes of sample used in this study. The framework provided by this study could inform and guide the misconception instrument development processes.

The purpose of this book is to provide the advances in plant in vitro culture as related to perennial fruit crops and medicinal plants. Basic principles and new techniques, now available, are presented in detail. The book will be of use to researchers, teachers in biotechnology and for individuals interested to the commercial application of plant in vitro culture.

Potato is the world's fourth food crop after maize, wheat, and rice and is a staple crop in many diets throughout the world with a high source of proteins, carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins. Biotic and abiotic stress factors give rise to decrease in yield. That is why improvement of new cultivars resistant to stress factors by conventional and biotechnological methods is extremely important. The most important factor in production increase is the use of healthy seed tubers along with using drought-, heat-, and salt-tolerant cultivars. On the other hand, protection and storage of surplus crops, which are the most important stage in its marketability, are the main problems in potato. In this book, all these issues are discussed, and it is hoped that the book Potato will help growers and researchers in solving problems in potato cultivation.