Academic Risk-Taking in Higher Education

Little is known about how adults learn to take risks. However, learning to take risks can be beneficial to adults who fear uncertainty or struggle with academic achievement. Higher education can play a leading role in embracing risk-taking and raising the interest level of adult learners through strategic learning activities.

Evaluation of a six-week professional education curriculum designed to retain registered psychiatric nurses

During the past few years there has been a drastic shortage of registered nurses in the field. The shortage appears to have affected the field of psychiatric mental health nursing most intensely. The psychiatric nursing shortage is a multifaceted problem grounded in decreasing federal funds for advanced clinical training, inadequate undergraduate psychiatric experiences, lack of a well prepared articulate role model, the integrated curriculum and the confusion and blurring associated with the roles and functions of the psychiatric mental health nurse.^ This dissertation will describe the current nursing shortage; the decline in enrollment to nursing programs; the history of psychiatric nursing as a discipline; the shortage of psychiatric mental health nurses; factors contributing to the psychiatric nursing shortage and a plan for a solution to the nursing shortage in psychiatry.^ The paper focuses on an evaluation conducted on an internship curriculum designed to facilitate effective nursing care in the treatment of clients who exhibit emotional problems. The purpose of this study was to attract and retain nurses to employment opportunities in four Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) facilities, using a six week internship program.^ The study will yield an analysis of the effect of combining psychodynamic principles and knowledge with skills in the clinical area. The demands of educational practice have been merged with the discipline of psychiatric nursing in the development of this curriculum. ^

The effects of self-monitoring on homework completion and accuracy rates of students with disabilities in an inclusive general education classroom

This study investigated the effects of self-monitoring on the homework completion and accuracy rates of four, fourth-grade students with disabilities in an inclusive general education classroom. A multiple baseline across subjects design was utilized to examine four dependent variables: completion of spelling homework, accuracy of spelling homework, completion of math homework, accuracy of math homework. Data were collected and analyzed during baseline, three phases of intervention, and maintenance. ^ Throughout baseline and all phases, participants followed typical classroom procedures, brought their homework to school each day and gave it to the general education teacher. During Phase I of the intervention, participants self-monitored with a daily sheet at home and on the computer at school in the morning using KidTools (Fitzgerald & Koury, 2003); a student friendly, self-monitoring program. They also participated in brief daily conferences to review their self-monitoring sheets with the investigator, their special education teacher. Phase II followed the same steps except conferencing was reduced to two days a week, which were randomly selected by the researcher and Phase III conferencing was one random day a week. Maintenance data were taken over a two-to-three week period subsequent to the end of the intervention. ^ Results of this study demonstrated self-monitoring substantially improved spelling and math homework completion and accuracy rates of students with disabilities in an inclusive, general education classroom. On average, completion and accuracy rates were highest over baseline in Phase III. Self-monitoring led to higher percentages of completion and accuracy during each phase of the intervention compared to baseline, group percentages also rose slightly during maintenance. Therefore, results suggest self-monitoring leads to short-term maintenance in spelling and math homework completion and accuracy. ^ This study adds to the existing literature by investigating the effects of self-monitoring of homework for students with disabilities included in general education classrooms. Future research should consider selecting participants with other demographic characteristics, using peers for conferencing instead of the teacher, and the use of self-monitoring with other academic subjects (e.g., science, history). Additionally, future research could investigate the effects of each of the two self-monitoring components used alone, with or without the conferencing.^

Parent involvement on school advisory councils: A process evaluation at the middle school level

Increasing parental involvement was made an important goal for all Florida schools in educational reform legislation in the 1990's. A forum for this input was established and became known as the School Advisory Council (SAC). To demonstrate the importance of process and inclusion, a south Florida school district and its local teacher's union agreed on the following five goals for SACs: (a) to foster an environment of professional collaboration among all stakeholders, (b) to assist in the preparation and evaluation of the school improvement plan, (c) to address all state and district goals, (d) to serve as the avenue for authentic and representative input from all stakeholders, and (e) to ensure the continued existence of the consensus-building process on all issues related to the school's instructional program. ^ The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent and in what ways the parent members of one south Florida middle school's SAC achieved the five district goals during its first three years of implementation. The primary participants were 16 parents who served as members of the SAC, while 16 non-parent members provided perspective on parent involvement as “outside sources.” Being qualitative by design, factors such as school climate, leadership styles, and the quality of parental input were described from data collected from four sources: parent interviews, a questionnaire of non-parents, researcher observations, and relevant documents. A cross-case analysis of all data informed a process evaluation that described the similarities and differences of intended and observed outcomes of parent involvement from each source using Stake's descriptive matrix model. A formative evaluation of the process compared the observed outcomes with standards set for successful SACs, such as the district's five goals. ^ The findings indicated that parents elected to the SACs did not meet the intended goals set by the state and district. The school leadership did not foster an environment of professional collaboration and authentic decision-making for parents and other stakeholders. The overall process did not include consensus-building, and there was little if any input by parents on school improvement and other important issues relating to the instructional program. Only two parents gave the SAC a successful rating for involving parents in the decision-making process. Although compliance was met in many of the procedural transactions of the SAC, the reactions of parents to their perceived role and influence often reflected feelings of powerlessness and frustration with a process that many thought lacked meaningfulness and productivity. Two conclusions made from this study are as follows: (a) that the role of the principal in the collaborative process is pivotal, and (b) that the normative-re-educative approach to change would be most appropriate for SACs. ^

Contingency, contiguity, and development: The ontogeny of contingency learning in northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) chicks

The purpose of this study was to investigate the ontogeny of auditory learning via operant contingency in Northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus ) hatchlings and possible interaction between attention, orienting and learning during early development. Chicks received individual 5 min training sessions in which they received a playback of a bobwhite maternal call at a single delay following each vocalization they emitted. Playback was either from a single randomly chosen speaker or switched back and forth semi-randomly between two speakers during training. Chicks were tested 24 hrs later in a simultaneous choice test between the familiar and an unfamiliar maternal call. It was found that day-old chicks showed a significant time-specific decrement in auditory learning when trained with delays in the range of 470–910 ms between their vocalizations and call playback only when training involved two speakers. Two-day-old birds showed an even more sustained disruption of learning than day-old chicks, whereas three-day-old chicks showed a pattern of intermittent interference with their learning when trained at such delays. A similar but less severe decrement in auditory learning was found when chicks were provided with motor training in which playback was contingent upon chicks entering and exiting one of two colored squares placed on the floor of the arena. Chicks provided with playback of the call at randomly chosen delays each time they vocalized exhibited large fluctuations in their responsivity to the auditory stimulus as a function of delay—fluctuations which were correlated significantly with measures of chick learning, particularly at two-days-of-age. When playback was limited to a single location chicks no longer showed a time-specific disruption of their learning of the auditory stimulus. Sequential analyses revealed several patterns suggesting that an attentional process similar or analogous to attentional blink may have contributed both to the observed fluctuations in chick responsivity to the auditory stimulus as a function of delay and to the time-specific learning deficit shown by chicks provided with two-speaker training. The study highlights that learning can be substantially modulated by processes of orienting and attention and has a number of important implications for research within cognitive neuroscience, animal behavior and learning.

Neural network based off-line handwritten text recognition system

This dissertation introduces a new system for handwritten text recognition based on an improved neural network design. Most of the existing neural networks treat mean square error function as the standard error function. The system as proposed in this dissertation utilizes the mean quartic error function, where the third and fourth derivatives are non-zero. Consequently, many improvements on the training methods were achieved. The training results are carefully assessed before and after the update. To evaluate the performance of a training system, there are three essential factors to be considered, and they are from high to low importance priority: (1) error rate on testing set, (2) processing time needed to recognize a segmented character and (3) the total training time and subsequently the total testing time. It is observed that bounded training methods accelerate the training process, while semi-third order training methods, next-minimal training methods, and preprocessing operations reduce the error rate on the testing set. Empirical observations suggest that two combinations of training methods are needed for different case character recognition. Since character segmentation is required for word and sentence recognition, this dissertation provides also an effective rule-based segmentation method, which is different from the conventional adaptive segmentation methods. Dictionary-based correction is utilized to correct mistakes resulting from the recognition and segmentation phases. The integration of the segmentation methods with the handwritten character recognition algorithm yielded an accuracy of 92% for lower case characters and 97% for upper case characters. In the testing phase, the database consists of 20,000 handwritten characters, with 10,000 for each case. The testing phase on the recognition 10,000 handwritten characters required 8.5 seconds in processing time.

An evaluation of an intervention strategy for retention and determination of predictors of success for high -risk students in an associate degree nursing program

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to evaluate the effect of a specific instructional Intervention, a Nursing Theory Laboratory, on increasing the retention of high risk students in the associate degree nursing program at Miami-Dade Community College in Miami, Florida; and (2) to identify predictors of success of high risk nursing students in this associate degree nursing program.^ Data were collected from the 195 nursing students enrolled in Nursing Fundamentals during the 1985-1987 academic years, and identified as high risk students. Control and experimental groups were selected based on enrollment in the Nursing Theory Laboratory.^ Results were determined by analyzing several cross-tabulations of selected variables and yielding chi square values, t-tests, and two discriminant analyses. There was no significant relationship between age or ethnic background and enrollment in the Nursing Theory Laboratory. There was no significant relationship between enrollment in the Nursing Theory Laboratory and success in Nursing 1 (Nursing Fundamentals). There was a significant relationship between enrollment in the Nursing Theory Laboratory and success in Nursing 3 (Medical-Surgical Nursing). Writing assessment test scores in two entrance tests and high risk categories, based on the number of enrollments in required science courses, were identified as predictors of success in this program.^ The conclusion was that the Nursing Theory Laboratory does not significantly improve retention of high risk associate degree nursing students if they are enrolled in this intervention at the same time they are enrolled in Nursing Fundamentals. Since those students who were enrolled in the Nursing Theory Laboratory had a significantly higher success rate in Nursing 3, than those students who were not enrolled in the Nursing Theory Laboratory, a recommendation of this study was to offer the Nursing Theory Laboratory to high risk students prior to the beginning of nursing courses. Another recommendation was that students deficient in reading and writing skills should be required to enroll in developmental courses prior to enrollment in the nursing course. ^

The effects of health education on student health -related behaviors

During their transitional period from childhood to adulthood, adolescents engage in risk-taking behaviors that become public health concerns. It is important for school health education professionals to design instructional programs that focus on adolescents' developmental needs and foster healthier lifestyles. The goal of health education is to help students acquire health skills that are necessary to succeed in school and in life. This is especially important because the increase in teenagers' risky behaviors can affect their health, well being, and eventually the course of their lives. ^ This study examined the effects of health education on health-related behaviors of public high school students. A multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to determine whether the comprehensive approach based on The Jessors' Problem Behavior Theory (PBT) had a greater impact on adolescents' risk-taking behaviors than the traditional approach. After 18 weeks of health instruction using one of these approaches, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) was administered to measure the level of subjects' self-reported behaviors in six categories of adolescent risky behaviors: the use of tobacco; the use of alcohol and other drugs; engagement in injurious activities; consumption of unhealthy diet; an inadequate level of participation in physical activities; and engagement in risky sexual activities. ^ The results of this study did not support the hypothesis that using the comprehensive health education approach was more influential than the traditional health education approach in improving students' health-risk behaviors. Further research studies based on bio-psychosocial theories are needed to develop and evaluate methods of instruction and delivery of health skills. ^

The relationship between scaffolding metacognitive strategies identified through dialogue journals and second graders' reading comprehension, science achievement, and metacognition using expository text

Poor informational reading and writing skills in early grades and the need to provide students more experience with informational text have been identified by research as areas of concern. Wilkinson and Son (2011) support future research in dialogic approaches to investigate the impact dialogic teaching has on comprehension. This study (N = 39) examined the gains in reading comprehension, science achievement, and metacognitive functioning of individual second grade students interacting with instructors using dialogue journals alongside their textbook. The 38 week study consisted of two instructional phases, and three assessment points. After a period of oral metacognitive strategies, one class formed the treatment group (n=17), consisting of two teachers following the co-teaching method, and two classes formed the comparison group ( n=22). The dialogue journal intervention for the treatment group embraced the transactional theory of instruction through the use of dialogic interaction between teachers and students. Students took notes on the assigned lesson after an oral discussion. Teachers responded to students' entries with scaffolding using reading strategies (prior knowledge, skim, slow down, mental integration, and diagrams) modeled after Schraw's (1998) strategy evaluation matrix, to enhance students' comprehension. The comparison group utilized text-based, teacher-led whole group discussion. Data were collected using different measures: (a) Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading (FAIR) Broad Diagnostic Inventory; (b) Scott Foresman end of chapter tests; (c) Metacomprehension Strategy Index (Schmitt, 1990); and (d) researcher-made metacognitive scaffolding rubric. Statistical analyses were performed using paired sample t-tests, regression analysis of covariance, and two way analysis of covariance. Findings from the study revealed that experimental participants performed significantly better on the linear combination of reading comprehension, science achievement, and metacognitive function, than their comparison group counterparts while controlling for pretest scores. Overall, results from the study established that teacher scaffolding using metacognitive strategies can potentially develop students' reading comprehension, science achievement, and metacognitive awareness. This suggests that early childhood students gain from the integration of reading and writing when using authentic materials (science textbooks) in science classrooms. A replication of this study with more students across more schools, and different grade levels would improve the generalizability of these results.