Special educators and job satisfaction

This study examined how specific variables affected job satisfaction among special educators at a special education school district. The variables examined were gender, student population, number of years teaching, number of years teaching a specific population, and age of students. It was hypothesized that female teachers and teachers who worked with emotionally disturbed students would express less job satisfaction than male teachers and teachers working with other special education populations. It was further hypothesized that the greater the number of years teaching and working with a specific population, the greater the expressed job satisfaction. In addition, it was thought that teachers working with elementary students would express greater job satisfaction than teachers working with middle school or high school age students. An independent groups t test was performed on each of the conditions and no significant differences were found between job satisfaction and any of the five variables studied. A closer examination of the responses from all special educators revealed high job satisfaction in areas related to teaching as a profession and lower satisfaction scores in the areas of administrative support and recognition, having a meaningful reward system for teachers, and receiving adequate parental support

The Interpersonal Communication Course

The interpersonal communication course is one of the really great courses in the entire communication curriculum and, in fact, in the entire academic curriculum. It is relevant to just about everything you do — to your satisfaction with yourself, to your effectiveness on the job, to your success as a friend or lover. And students know this and quickly become involved and motivated. Even the research is exciting — it addresses significant issues in truly imaginative ways and is always advancing our knowledge and understanding of interpersonal communication and interpersonal relationships in important ways. It’s a great course to teach and a great course to write a textbook for. My task here is to look at the interpersonal communication course as a textbook writer as well as as a teacher of interpersonal communication and describe the course — its purposes, structure, teaching methods, and problems. My last task — the most difficult but also the most challenging — is to speculate on the future of the course

The experiences of patients and carers in the daily management of care at the end of life

Background Home is the preferred location for most people with an advanced disease and at the end of life. A variety of care professionals work in community settings to provide support to this population. Patients and their spouses, who also care for them (spouse-carers), are rarely accompanied by these sources of support at all times, and have to manage independently between their contact with care professionals. Aim To explore how patients and spouse-carers manage their involvement with care professionals in the community setting. Method Interpretive phenomenology informs the design of the research, whereby 16 interviews were conducted with the patients and spouse-carers. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed using phenomenological techniques including template analysis. Findings Patients and spouse-carers were interdependent and both parties played a role in co-ordinating care and managing relationships with professional care providers. The patients and spouse-carers actively made choices about how to manage their situation, and develop and modify managing strategies based on their experiences. Conclusions When daily management is effective and care professionals acknowledge the dyadic nature of the patient and spouse-carer relationship, people have confidence in living with advanced disease

Simplified Prescriptive Options in the Texas Residential Building Energy Code Make Compliance Easy

Texas recently adopted the 2000 International Residential Code (“IRC”) energy chapter and the 2000 International Energy Conservation Code (“IECC”) as its residential building energy code for new construction and existing homes. The range of code compliance options in the new Texas code spans from simplified prescriptive methods on one end to more complex performance (whole building) methods on the other. This paper addresses how energy code compliance is much simpler through the use of simplified, easy-to-follow prescriptive compliance options, particularly in a state like Texas, which historically has had no uniform building codes. This paper also provides samples of simplified prescriptive energy code compliance aids that could make it easier for energy code compliance in Texas

A complete characterization of phase space measurements

We characterize all the phase space measurements for a non-relativistic particle.Comment: 11 pages, latex, no figures, iopart styl

Collaboration Between Health Sciences Librarians and Faculty as Reflected by Articles Published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association

A recent study by Higgins and colleagues reports that the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) had the highest percentage of articles with both librarian and faculty co-authors out of 13 peer-reviewed journals in STEM librarianship and education between 2005 and 2014. A deeper and updated analysis of JMLA research articles and case studies published between 2008 and 2017 revealed that 29% of articles had both librarian and faculty co-authors. The main topics of librarian-faculty collaboration as described in these articles were related to patient and consumer health information and clinical information-seeking and decision-making by healthcare providers. Most faculty co-authors came from the disciplines of biomedical/health informatics and biostatistics and library and information science. The publication of these articles in JMLA provides evidence of health sciences librarians and information specialists’ ability to collaborate with faculty members to advance the knowledgebase and practice of librarianship and the health sciences