Efficacy of A Nurse-Led Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) in the Management of Bipolar Disorders,in Selected Hospitals, Ondo State, Nigeria (Published)
Bipolar disorder is a common and often disabling major mental illness. It account for a high proportion of idiopathic psychotic illnesses. Antipsychotic, mood-stabilizing and antidepressant drugs are very effective in managing many prominent and distressing symptoms of these illnesses, but as many as one-third of medically treated patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder relapses after hospitalization, this calls for the use of an adjunctive psychosocial treatments like solution focused Brief therapy. This is a pre-test, post-test and control design structure in 2 x 2 factorial paradigm. Subjects were randomly selected and divided into experimental and control groups. The patients were administered with General Behaviour Inventory (GBI) a 73 item questionnaire (Depue et al, 1985). Three Hypotheses were set and tested and analysis was carried out using student “t” test at 0.05 level of significance. The subjects exposed to the brief solution focused therapy performed better than the control. The patient with Dysthymic disorder performed better when exposed to solution focused brief therapy. The patients with Bipolar were found to improve better when exposed to the therapy. The improvement was shown in the differences observed in the means of the statistical analysis. Women exposed to solution-focused therapy improved better than their men counterparts. It was concluded that adjunctive psychological management by psychiatric nurses should be offered simultaneously with the pharmacological management.
Keywords: Bipolar Disorders, Efficacy, Management, Ondo General Behaviour Inventory (GBI), SFBT
Efficacy of Advance Organizers Strategies on Chemistry Student’s Cognitive Achievements in Redox Reaction Concept (Published)
This study adopted a re-test, pre-test control group, quasi-experimental design in a 3×2 factorial matrix to investigate the efficacy of advance organizers strategies on chemistry students’ cognitive achievements in redox reaction concept. A total of two hundred and twenty (220) senior secondary two (SS2) chemistry students (118 males and 102 females) purposively selected from three out of six public co-educational senior secondary schools that met sampling criteria in Obio/Akpor education zone, Rivers State, Nigeria constituted three non-equivalent intact classes that participate in the study. A Redox Reaction Concept Achievement Test (RRCAT) instrument with Kuder-Richardson’s reliability co-efficient of 0.90 was used to obtain data. Descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation and percentages) and inferential statistics (ANCOVA and Scheffe’s post hoc analysis) were used for data analysis at 0.05 alpha level. The findings established that graphics advance organizers strategy consistently produced the highest levels of achievement gain and was therefore found to be most efficacious in promoting meaningful understanding and enhancing higher cognitive achievements in redox reaction concept at all levels of the cognitive domain among the three strategies compared. Gender did not significantly influence the achievement of students in redox reaction concept. It was recommended among others those chemistry teachers and educators should adopt graphics and textual advance organizers strategies as purposeful and efficient instructional strategies and resources in teaching redox reaction so that students could reap the full benefits of active classroom involvement.
Keywords: Advance Organizers Strategies, Cognitive Achievements, Efficacy, Meaningful Understanding