Exit Slips As Predictor of Academic Performance

Formative assessment plays a vital role in the delivery of quality and relevant education among learners. Data derived from the assessment results provide pieces of evidence for teachers to determine learners who need assistance, advance instructional objectives, track learners’ progress toward those standards, and identify what intervention and support are required. This descriptive-survey research examined the impact of exit slips in predicting intermediate pupils’ science achievement. Seventy-three pupils were involved in the study who were selected through a total sampling. Weighted mean, ranking, standard deviation, mean percentage score, frequency, Pearson correlation coefficient, and coefficient of determination were utilized to process and analyze statistically the data using SPSS. The findings of the study highlighted that exit slips can help learners in their learning since they reflect pupils’ understanding and increase accountability among them. The results revealed that there was a high positive association between the self-rating report and the academic performance of the respondents. The impact of self-reported rating was found significant on the performance of the pupils. Hence, when teachers took necessary and relevant remediation as well as enrichment based on the self-reported rating, academic performance may be improved. It was recommended that teachers may adapt the use of exit slips in their classes to improve academic performance among learners

The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Engineering and Computer Science, Spring 2014

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/lib-news/1154/thumbnail.jp

A Roadmap for the Journey Home - A Supplemental Tool Guiding Patients from Hospital to Home

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) have recognized readmission rates as a public health problem. CMS incentivizes hospitals to reduce readmission rates and reduce payments for hospitals with high readmission rates (Berry et al., 2013). Patient education and discharge planning are associated with decreased readmission rates. I gained fieldwork experience at Children’s Health System of Texas in Dallas. Children’s Health, a pediatric non-profit, is the 8th largest pediatric health care provider in the U.S. Prior to discharge patient education occurs on topics related to their diagnosis, plus patients are provided discharge instructions including their diagnosis, medications, and simple instructions for the patients to continue care at home. With current discharge practice, patients and their parents report feeling partially prepared for the transition from hospital to home. I created a supplemental discharge tool, also called a journey map, and piloted the discharge tool by meeting with patients and parents to help them understand the tool. The tool is provided with a survey to gather patient feedback. The survey questions measure qualitative and quantitative data to assess the tool’s efficacy. The feedback will influence tool revisions. The tool is used during an inpatient admission and is divided into seven topics: hospital, care, medicine, follow-up, home care needs, and home. Each topic provides question prompts to help patients and their parents understand if they are ready to take ownership for their care. The tool is distributed to patients on a general pediatrics floor with an average length of stay between one to two days. Future research implications include reviewing the readmission rates of patients who used the journey map. There is potential to create diagnosis specific discharge tools for specialties like Neurosurgery. Policy implications include exploring reimbursement rates determined by CMS and may impact National Patient Safety Goals by Joint Commission

The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Engineering and Computer Science, Spring 2016

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/lib-news/1246/thumbnail.jp

Control problems on infinite horizon subject to time-dependent pure state constraints

In the last decades, control problems with infinite horizons and discount factors have become increasingly central not only for economics but also for applications in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The strong links between reinforcement learning and control theory have led to major efforts towards the development of algorithms to learn how to solve constrained control problems. In particular, discount plays a role in addressing the challenges that come with models that have unbounded disturbances. Although algorithms have been extensively explored, few results take into account time-dependent state constraints, which are imposed in most real-world control applications. For this purpose, here we investigate feasibility and sufficient conditions for Lipschitz regularity of the value function for a class of discounted infinite horizon optimal control problems subject to time-dependent constraints. We focus on problems with data that allow nonautonomous dynamics, and Lagrangian and state constraints that can be unbounded with possibly nonsmooth boundaries

The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Engineering and Computer Science, Fall 2015

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/lib-news/1247/thumbnail.jp