Enhancing Doctoral Completion in Women: Evidence From a Qualitative Study of a Unique Federally Funded Program

In an era where campus environments were often unwelcoming to women, and there were few women role models, an innovative program funded by the National Institute of Education produced 100% completion by female and minority doctoral students. At a 25-year reunion, the graduates reflected on their program experiences and careers. Reflections were audiotaped and subjected to thematic narrative analysis. Five themes were identified through the assistance of a large interdisciplinary interpretive group: Freedom to Widen Horizons, We Were Kindred Souls, Women Who Wanted Us to Succeed, It Was a Gift, and Paying it Forward. Findings of the study are highly relevant today, given the persistence of sexism in academia, the underrepresentation of women among holders of doctoral degrees, and the need to better prepare women for faculty and leadership roles

Assessing the Quality of Decision Support Technologies Using the International Patient Decision Aid Standards instrument (IPDASi)

Objectives To describe the development, validation and inter-rater reliability of an instrument to measure the quality of patient decision support technologies (decision aids). Design Scale development study, involving construct, item and scale development, validation and reliability testing. Setting There has been increasing use of decision support technologies – adjuncts to the discussions clinicians have with patients about difficult decisions. A global interest in developing these interventions exists among both for-profit and not-for-profit organisations. It is therefore essential to have internationally accepted standards to assess the quality of their development, process, content, potential bias and method of field testing and evaluation. Methods Scale development study, involving construct, item and scale development, validation and reliability testing. Participants Twenty-five researcher-members of the International Patient Decision Aid Standards Collaboration worked together to develop the instrument (IPDASi). In the fourth Stage (reliability study), eight raters assessed thirty randomly selected decision support technologies. Results IPDASi measures quality in 10 dimensions, using 47 items, and provides an overall quality score (scaled from 0 to 100) for each intervention. Overall IPDASi scores ranged from 33 to 82 across the decision support technologies sampled (n = 30), enabling discrimination. The inter-rater intraclass correlation for the overall quality score was 0.80. Correlations of dimension scores with the overall score were all positive (0.31 to 0.68). Cronbach's alpha values for the 8 raters ranged from 0.72 to 0.93. Cronbach's alphas based on the dimension means ranged from 0.50 to 0.81, indicating that the dimensions, although well correlated, measure different aspects of decision support technology quality. A short version (19 items) was also developed that had very similar mean scores to IPDASi and high correlation between short score and overall score 0.87 (CI 0.79 to 0.92). Conclusions This work demonstrates that IPDASi has the ability to assess the quality of decision support technologies. The existing IPDASi provides an assessment of the quality of a DST's components and will be used as a tool to provide formative advice to DSTs developers and summative assessments for those who want to compare their tools against an existing benchmark

New directions for institutional research

Publ. comme no 59, fall 1988 de la revue New directions for institutional researchBibliogr. à la fin des textesIndex: p. 107-11

New directions for higher education

Publ. comme no 100, winter 1997 de la revue New directions for higher educationBibliogr. à la fin des textesIndex: p. 93-9

New directions for institutional research

Publ. comme no 82, summer 1994 de la revue New directions for institutional researchBibliogr. à la fin des textesIndex: p. 121-12