Science Trends

The new data on hydroxychloroquine therapy is to discuss. The numbers will not clear anything up. First off is an abstract from the Marseilles IHU group of Dr. Didier Raoult. It presents 1061 patients treated for at least 3 days with their hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin combination, with followup of at least 9 days. It includes the statement “98% of patients cured so far” and says also “No cardiac toxicity was observed”, and also says that mortality figures were improved in these patients as compared with others receiving standard-of-care without such treatment. The other release is a data table on these patients (there is no full manuscript as of yet). It does not include any sort of control group, nor (as far as I can see) does it even have a comparison in it to those other patients mentioned in the abstract. Let’s hold on to these thoughts as we discuss the next data. Here is a preprint from a large multinational collaboration presenting data obtained from health care systems (clai...

WHAT IS EVALUATION? Evaluation is a set of approaches and techniques used to make judgments about the effectiveness or quality of a program or treatment; to improve its effectiveness; and to inform decisions about its design, development, and implementation ( National Research Council 2010 ).  For an informal STEM project, evaluation generally provides information that can guide the project, suggest how it might be improved, and provide evidence to demonstrate whether it worked as intended. When evaluating informal STEM education experiences, four main kinds of evaluation are often considered: Front-end, formative, remedial, and summative.  Front-end evaluation  occurs during the project planning process. It often takes the form of audience research as it gathers data about the knowledge, interests, and experiences of the intended audience.  Formative evaluation  guides project improvement during the development process by gathering data about a project's streng...