The teaching of sciences has long been associated with practical work; an instructional tool that is believed to be effective in terms of both promoting learning as well as making the teaching of sciences enjoyable. However, empirical evidence on its effectiveness as a teaching method and whether it has any affective value for undergraduates is still lacking, when it has been deemed as one of the costliest aspects of science education. This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a mixed-methods case study conducted at a British university to examine the perceived aims of practical work as well as the effectiveness of practical work on conceptual understanding and motivating undergraduates according to the academic staff of a life sciences department. For the qualitative data presented here a questionnaire was administered to the academic staff who, along with Year 1 and Year 2 undergraduates, were interviewed and also observed during practical work classes. The preliminary findings showed that the perceived aims of practical work by the academic staff vary across years, while the observations revealed two types of lessons in which the importance of providing theoretical scaffolds during experiments so as to help undergraduates in linking concepts and theories with observables was prominent.

Thematic analysis is the most commonly used form of qualitative analysis used extensively in educational sciences. While the process is straightforward in the sense that a hermeneutic analysis is conducted so as to detect patterns and assign themes emerging from the data acquired, replicability can be challenging. As a result, there is significant debate about what constitutes reliability and rigour in relation to qualitative coding. Traditional thematic analysis in educational sciences requires the development of a codebook and the recruitment of a research team for intercoder reviewing and code testing. Such a process is often lengthy and infeasible when the number of texts to be analysed increases exponentially. To overcome these limitations, in this work, we use an unsupervised text analysis technique called the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify distinct abstract topics which are then clustered into potential themes. Our results show that thematic analysis in the field of educational sciences using the LDA text analysis technique has prospects of demonstrating rigour and higher thematic coding reliability and validity while offering a valid intra-coder complementary support to the researcher.

The familial occurrence of thymic pathology, even though rare, is widely reported in the literature and mainly concerns cases of familial autoimmune myasthenia gravis. Other less frequent cases of familial occurrence of thymoma, thymic carcinoid and thymic hyperplasia have been described. It seems that the familial occurrence is poorly recorded and thus its prevalence is underestimated. We report two families whose members presented different forms of thymic pathology and discuss the necessity of screening programs in family members of patients presenting a thymic lesion.