A Multi-Code Analysis Toolkit for Astrophysical Simulation Data

The analysis of complex multiphysics astrophysical simulations presents a unique and rapidly growing set of challenges: reproducibility, parallelization, and vast increases in data size and complexity chief among them. In order to meet these challenges, and in order to open up new avenues for collaboration between users of multiple simulation platforms, we present yt (available at http://yt.enzotools.org/), an open source, community-developed astrophysical analysis and visualization toolkit. Analysis and visualization with yt are oriented around physically relevant quantities rather than quantities native to astrophysical simulation codes. While originally designed for handling Enzo's structure adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) data, yt has been extended to work with several different simulation methods and simulation codes including Orion, RAMSES, and FLASH. We report on its methods for reading, handling, and visualizing data, including projections, multivariate volume rendering, multi-dimensional histograms, halo finding, light cone generation and topologically-connected isocontour identification. Furthermore, we discuss the underlying algorithms yt uses for processing and visualizing data, and its mechanisms for parallelization of analysis tasks.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, emulateapj format. Resubmitted to Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series with revisions from referee. yt can be found at http://yt.enzotools.org

"Becoming a Values-Driven Self-Care User”: Development of a Grounded Theory Model and Group Intervention for Health Students

Self-care is generally understood as a multi-dimensional construct that involves using self-selected strategies in order to achieve a balance between personal and professional life, and to support and promote mental/emotional, physical, spiritual, and professional functioning (Jordan, 2010; Lee & Miller, 2013). Self-care is imperative for health students, as they are at a greater risk for burnout and given their collective responsibility for caring for others (Cecil et al., 2014; Duarte et al., 2016; Salyers et al., 2015). However, there is insufficient focus on self-care in training programs and students’ uptake of self-care is low (Bettney, 2017; El-Ghoroury et al., 2012; Furr & Brown-Rice, 2017). My dissertation aimed to understand this gap between knowledge and action by theorizing how health students who are in undergraduate and graduate programs naturalistically create and maintain self-care, and then by developing a theory-based intervention. In Study 1, I used grounded theory methodology to develop a theory delineating the process of a successful self-care user from the perspective of health students (N = 17). My grounded theory, Becoming a Values-Driven Self-Care User, comprised four phases that participants moved through iteratively: 1) Having a Wake-Up Call, 2) Building Skills, 3) Gaining Confidence, and 4) Building an Identity. In addition, my grounded theory explained why some students were unsuccessful at developing self-care practices and this helped to address the barriers of self-care reported by students. My theory showed that self-care skills are solidified into students’ identities in the context of a values disconnect along with practice and support. This is the first comprehensive theory to explain how health students develop effective self-care habits, and it informs the development of self-care interventions for this population. In Study 2, I used my grounded theory model, as well as previous theoretical work, to develop and evaluate a group self-care intervention, Values-Based Self-Care (VBSC), which comprised of six, 90-minute weekly sessions. I randomly assigned a heterogenous sample of health students (N = 61) into an intervention (VBSC) or waitlist control group. Pre- and post-group data was collected before and after the intervention/wait period and then analyzed for group differences. I also examined within-person changes before and after the intervention using the total sample. My hypotheses were partially supported. There were significant within-person pre-post intervention changes in self-care, emotional distress, valued living, and self-esteem. However, when comparing the intervention and waitlist control groups, meaningful differences were only found for self-care, valued living, and depression. My dissertation shows that values are essential for building and maintaining self-care. In addition, consolidating self-care behaviours into health students’ identities requires support, time, and practice. My dissertation encourages new avenues for future researchers to develop tailored self-care interventions that afford students with social support and feedback, which are necessary for skill mastery. My findings also have implications for how we operationalize self-care and measure it within research studies

Self-Directed Learning Development in PBL

Lifelong learning is an emphasized graduate outcome for engineering professionals at the international level by the Washington Accord and at the United States national level by ABET. When a new engineer enters the profession, she will be expected to acquire new technical knowledge in order to solve a problem or create a design. Unlike her experience in college, there will not be a professor to guide this learning. The planning, execution, monitoring, and control of this learning will now fall to the new engineer. The level of the ability to succeed in this self-directed learning modality will be a function of the extent to which the lifelong learning outcome has been met. This paper studies the importance of this graduate outcome and the development of self-directed learning as the way in which the outcome is achieved. Quantitative measures are taken using the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale. Quantitative results show a statistically significant difference between the developments of self-regulated abilities by students in a two-year PBL curriculum as compared to students who did not undergo the PBL treatment