Experiential Learning and Its Influence on Social Change

This research study is presented as a final project in fulfillment of the capstone requirement to the College of Professional Studies and the graduate school at Marquette University. This research study was presented with Dr. Jay Caulfield at the ISSOTL (International Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) conference, October 22, 2011. The research study included previous and current graduate students enrolled in the Nature of Cities course in the spring of 2008 and the Models of Sustainability course in the spring of 2011 within the public service program at Marquette University. Both of these courses were graduate courses that had substantial experiential learning experiences incorporated into their course design. This research study identified how experiential learning activities may add to a graduate student’s engagement and awareness of social issues. In addition, the research findings within this study are intended to give a general overview of how the participants’ experiential learning experiences have influenced and or changed their behavior. This study is inclusive to an introduction, literature review, overview of participants, methods, findings and discussion, limitations to research, additional research, and conclusion. It is the researcher’s intention to include an additional 10 participants within this study that will comprise of students enrolled in the Models of Sustainability course at Marquette University during the summer of 2010. Upon completion of this research study, it is the researcher’s objective to publish this study as an article within the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

To Ash: The Development of Converse Landscape

In response to theorists’ position that ecology is undergoing accelerating transformation due to planetary urbanism, converse landscape is positioned as a visual art and design practice. The intention is to disrupt the aesthetic and conceptual standardization of space through embodying a conceptual outside to a dominant ideology that promotes efficiency and competition as paramount. This post-disciplinary approach was developed as a result of the intersection between my graduate studies in fine art, my professional practice as a landscape architect and through the creation and implementation of three site sculptures during the same time period

Does university play significant role in shaping entrepreneurial intention? A cross-country comparative analysis

YesThe purpose of this article is To foster entrepreneurship among students and incubate more start-ups for economic prosperity, universities around the globe are required to play a key role in terms of developing an overall conducive eco-system for student fraternity. Some previous studies have analyzed student entrepreneurship and the effect of entrepreneurship courses. However, the role of university as provider and enabler of entrepreneurial environment and its impact on entrepreneurial intent among student has not studied in a cross-cultural context. Considering this, the present study seeks to examine the critical role played by university in fostering entrepreneurial intention among post-graduate students. For the said purpose, researcher has taken the broader framework suggested by Kraaijenbrink et al. (2010) to understand university environment and Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1975) to measure entrepreneurial intention and it’s antecedents among the sample of final year post-graduate management students of India, Malaysia and Singapore. The total sample size is 1097. The data has been analysed with the help of Exploratory Factor analysis, MANOVA and Structural Equation Modeling. Two factors that emerged out of analysis in relation to university environment and support were: a) Targeted cognitive and non-cognitive support and b) General educational support. With the help of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), an attempt was made to find the relationship between these two factors and entrepreneurial intention. It was found that university environment and support has significantly positive relationship with perceived behavioural control. With the help of MANOVA, it was found that there is statistically significant difference between perceived university environment and support factors among the students of India, Singapore and Malaysia. With this, it was also found that for both the factors, the highest mean score was found among the students of Malaysia, followed by the students of Singapore and India. The study has closely examined role played by University environment and support to foster entrepreneurship among young students. The findings of the study can be used by post-graduate educational institute to design pedagogy, create enabling entrepreneurship support system and work towards becoming an entrepreneurial university

An Analysis of the Influence of Students´ Technological Culture on Their Technology

decade has raised the interest among the research community on the acceptance and use of these systems by both teachers and students. At first, the implementation of LMS was based on their technical design and the adaptation of the learning processes to the virtual environment, neglecting students’ characteristics when the systems were deployed, which led to expensive and failing implementations. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) proposes a framework which allows the study of the acceptance and use of technology that takes into consideration the students’ characteristics and how they affect the acceptance and the degree of use of educational technology. This study questions the role of the user’s attitude towards use of LMS and uses the UTAUT to examine the moderating effect of technological culture in the adoption of LMS in Spain. The results from the comparison and analysis of three different models confirm the relevance of attitude towards use as an antecedent of intention to use the system, as well as the important moderating effect of gender and technological culture. The discussion of results suggests the need for a more in-depth analysis and interrelations of cultural dimensions in the adoption of educational technologies and learning management system

Entrepreneurial intentions among students: towards a re-focused research agenda

Purpose – This paper aims to address the need for a re-focused research agenda in relation to graduate entrepreneurship. An important theme for some years has been the effort to monitor attitudes and intentions of students towards starting up their own businesses. It is timely, however, to raise some questions about both the impact of this research and likewise the general approach it has taken in understanding the phenomenon of graduate entrepreneurship. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a large data set (over 8,000 students) from one UK region. Specifically, it presents data from the 2007/2008 Entrepreneurial Intentions (EI) survey within the Yorkshire and Humberside region and reflects back over previous iterations of this research. Findings – The paper identifies three key outcomes. First, it establishes that across all years of the survey a substantial minority of students consistently hold relatively strong start-up intentions. Second, the paper highlights that, despite considerable efforts to increase the numbers moving to start-up, little impact is discernible. Third, the paper suggests that, although the EI survey is useful as a stock-taking exercise, it fails to address critical questions around the impact of higher education on entrepreneurship and the transition from entrepreneurial intent to the act of venture creation. Originality/value – The paper provides an important positioning perspective on the relationship between higher education and graduate entrepreneurship. While highlighting the importance of the EI research, the paper establishes the need for a re-focused research agenda; one that is conceptually robust and with a focus on the student journey from higher education to graduate entrepreneur

Predictors of New Graduate Nurses’ Organizational Commitment During a Nurse Residency Program

Retaining newly graduated nurses is critical for organizations because of the significant cost of turnover. Since commitment to an organization is associated with decreased turnover intent, understanding factors that influence new graduates’ organizational commitment is important. In a sample of nurse residency program participants, predictors of organizational commitment over time were explored. Perceptions of the work environment, particularly job satisfaction and job stress, were found to be most influential. Nurse residency programs provide extended opportunities to model professional role behaviors for new nurses, enhance knowledge development and clinical application, and promote successful integration to the work environment (Bratt, 2009). Despite these benefits, only 21% of new graduates reported having a formal internship or residency program and 6% had no formal orientation (Kovner et al., 2007). In a national survey of registered nurses (RNs) conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services (2010), it was revealed that almost 40% of new graduates plan to leave their current position within 3 years and almost 22% had already changed position or employer. For those new nurses who left their position, most of the reasons (73%) centered on issues related to the characteristics of the workplace, with stressful work environment being cited most frequently, followed by lack of good management and inadequate staffing. Accreditation organizations including the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (2008) and the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (2009a) have advocated for the development of transition to practice programs for newly graduated nurses. In addition, the recently released report of the Institute of Medicine (2010) put forth a key recommendation for organizations to provide nurse residency programs for newly licensed nurses. This report also advocates for the need to evaluate the outcomes of these programs, including their influence on patient outcomes and the retention and competency development of new nurses

Job expectations of students graduating from agricultural and horticultural school

In Flanders a survey was organized in the agricultural and horticultural schools. In this survey the graduate students were questioned on what their expectations are for their professional life. Asked for their intention in the immediate future it was remarkable that 36 % of the graduate students had the intention to continue school. Of the students that will not continue their studies 17 % will work on the parental holding; this is 29 % of the students whose parents are entrepreneurs. Only 10 % of the graduates will start a new holding immediately after they finish school. In the long term 21 % of the graduate students want to take over the holding of their parents, 24 % want to start a brand new enterprise. This means that almost 50 % of the graduate students want to become an entrepreneur one day. Of these future entrepreneurs 45 % will manage an agricultural holding, 15 % will manage a horticultural holding, 23 % a landscape gardening holding and the other 17 % will manage another kind of holding. To maintain the number of holdings in Flanders 475 agricultural and 138 horticultural new holdings are needed every year. According to the study only 207 and 69 new entrepreneurs are available; this is not enough to replace all the holdings that disappear. On the other hand new holdings are larger than the average holding; to keep the total production potential of the sector less new holdings are required. For the graduate students the most important criterion for a job is a good income. On the second place, but very close to the first one is the expectation that the job would offer a varied work. To attract more future entrepreneurs it is necessary to improve the image of the sector

A New Scale for Measuring Engineering Identity in Undergraduates

Identity, or how people choose to define themselves, is gaining traction as an explanation for who pursues and persists in engineering. A number of quantitative studies have developed scales for predicting engineering identity in undergraduate students. However, the outcome measure of identity is sometimes based on a single item. In this paper, we present the results of a new two-item scale. The scale is adapted from an existing measure of identification with an organization that was developed by Bergami and Bagozzi [1] and refined by Bartel [2]. The measure focuses on the “cognitive (i.e., self-categorization) component of identification” (p. 556), and has been found to have high convergent validity with another, rigorous measure of identification with an organization or other entity created by Mael and Ashforth [3]. This measure utilizes one primarily visual and one verbal item to assess the extent to which an individual cognitively categorizes himself or herself as an engineer. The scale was administered to 1528 engineering undergraduate students during the 2016-2017 academic year. Internal consistency of the new engineering identity scale, as measured by Cronbach’s alpha, is 0.84. This new scale is an important step toward refining quantitative measures of, and the study of, engineering identity development in undergraduate students and other populations.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Keyword Search on RDF Graphs - A Query Graph Assembly Approach

Keyword search provides ordinary users an easy-to-use interface for querying RDF data. Given the input keywords, in this paper, we study how to assemble a query graph that is to represent user's query intention accurately and efficiently. Based on the input keywords, we first obtain the elementary query graph building blocks, such as entity/class vertices and predicate edges. Then, we formally define the query graph assembly (QGA) problem. Unfortunately, we prove theoretically that QGA is a NP-complete problem. In order to solve that, we design some heuristic lower bounds and propose a bipartite graph matching-based best-first search algorithm. The algorithm's time complexity is $O(k^{2l} \cdot l^{3l})$, where $l$ is the number of the keywords and $k$ is a tunable parameter, i.e., the maximum number of candidate entity/class vertices and predicate edges allowed to match each keyword. Although QGA is intractable, both $l$ and $k$ are small in practice. Furthermore, the algorithm's time complexity does not depend on the RDF graph size, which guarantees the good scalability of our system in large RDF graphs. Experiments on DBpedia and Freebase confirm the superiority of our system on both effectiveness and efficiency