Faculty Teaching Improvement: Opportunities Within a Graduate Student & Faculty Community of Practice

Improving higher-education teaching is a growing focus on American colleges. A program was developed to train current PhD students in effective pedagogy practices. The Community of Practice resulted in current teaching faculty pedagogical improvement

Coastal River Basins Water Resource Assessment An Evaluation of Water Use and Availability in Seven Coastal River Basins

Georgia has experienced a persistent drought for the last four years. While the drought conditions have subsided, the need for effective river basin planning continues. Effective water planning for our river basins will ensure adequate resource availability for the immediate future as well as over the long run.Basin planning consists of four primary steps: 1) understanding current and future water demands, 2) understanding existing resources (water supply), 3) anticipating potential shortfalls and other issues that might arise from the discrepancies between supply and demand, and 4) devising policy solutions which adequately resolve items identified in step 3).This report explores the available data for water demands and supplies across the seven river basins that make up the coastal region served by the Coastal Rivers Water Planning and Policy Center at Georgia Southern University. The permit issuing and water use reporting processes have made it difficult to accurately estimate water demand across the region. Moreover, the river data is sparse, sporadic, and insufficient to determine the unimpaired flows for any of our rivers. Our intent is to highlight the areas for future data collection such that our state policy makers may successfully establish river basin water use plans that ensure sustainable economic growth, with minimal environmental impacts. Working Paper # 2003-00

Intentional STEM Infusion (ISI) Approach for 4-H Non-STEM Project Volunteers: Finding STEM in Plain Sight

STEM literacy is identified as a necessary skill for participation in the future workforce. 4-H has responded to this need to develop STEM-ready youth by expanding access to project areas like Robotics. It has been acknowledged that recruiting and training STEM competent staff and volunteers is a limitation in expanding these types of programs. At the same time, 4-H youth are enrolled in many traditional non-STEM projects that are imbued with STEM concepts. 4-H volunteers with increased awareness of their role in fostering STEM education and STEM literacy can be a valuable resource in preparing 4-H youth with STEM-ready professional skills. 4-H professionals can train front-line volunteers to use an intentional STEM infusion approach within the experiential learning process. It is posited that volunteers will be better able to facilitate STEM learning in real-world contexts for a wide-range of 4-H youth by using this approach. The use of the ISI approach provides an opportunity for 4-H to develop more STEM-ready youth than by only serving those youths who are attracted to STEM-focused projects alone

Assessing Patient-centered Care: One Approach to Health Disparities Education

Patient-centered care has been described as one approach to cultural competency education that could reduce racial and ethnic health disparities by preparing providers to deliver care that is respectful and responsive to the preferences of each patient. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of a curriculum in teaching patient-centered care (PCC) behaviors to medical students, we drew on the work of Kleinman, Eisenberg, and Good to develop a scale that could be embedded across cases in an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE). To compare the reliability, validity, and feasibility of an embedded patient-centered care scale with the use of a single culturally challenging case in measuring students′ use of PCC behaviors as part of a comprehensive OSCE. A total of 322 students from two California medical schools participated in the OSCE as beginning seniors. Cronbach’s alpha was used to assess the internal consistency of each approach. Construct validity was addressed by establishing convergent and divergent validity using the cultural challenge case total score and OSCE component scores. Feasibility assessment considered cost and training needs for the standardized patients (SPs). Medical students demonstrated a moderate level of patient-centered skill (mean = 63%, SD = 11%). The PCC Scale demonstrated an acceptable level of internal consistency (alpha = 0.68) over the single case scale (alpha = 0.60). Both convergent and divergent validities were established through low to moderate correlation coefficients. The insertion of PCC items across multiple cases in a comprehensive OSCE can provide a reliable estimate of students′ use of PCC behaviors without incurring extra costs associated with implementing a special cross-cultural OSCE. This approach is particularly feasible when an OSCE is already part of the standard assessment of clinical skills. Reliability may be increased with an additional investment in SP training

Extension’s Response to the Change in Public Value: Considerations for Ensuring Financial Security for the Cooperative Extension System

Cooperative Extension is a partnership of county, state, and federal governments to fund the translation and community education of applied research from the land-grant university system. Cooperative Extension’s funding since the 1980s has experienced a few key trends such as federal budget stagnation as well as state and county cyclic funding cycles based on the states’ economic health. Accompanying the state-level budget cuts have been calls for Cooperative Extension to reinvent and improve communication about what it does. As budget stability has become a greater concern, ideas around value and return on investment have become more integrated into the messaging about why Cooperative Extension should be funded. These economic terms reflect the integration of neoliberalism’s frame. In a larger qualitative research study about how Cooperative Extension administrators recognize the need for change, funding emerged as a fundamental influence of organization adaptation. The public contract between citizen, legislature, and public-serving organizations has changed to, “What is the return on investment?” To respond to the shifting narrative, it was necessary to assess, measure, and communicate value. However, administrators also recognized relationships mattered to how the message was received by legislators and other funders

A Case of Shifting Focus Friction: Extension Directors and State 4-H Program Leaders’ Perspectives on 4-H LGBTQ+ Inclusion

Contemporary Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ+) youth are identifying and communicating their identities earlier in childhood than generations before as a result of more awareness and more acceptance of gender identity and sexual minorities by society. A qualitative study of U.S. 4-H program leaders and Extension directors generated an emergent theme around the importance of serving LGBT youth and the resulting implementation challenges. The administrators of 4-H, the largest youth serving organization in the country, recognize the presence of LGBTQ+ youth in 4-H and believe the organization must be inclusive. But challenges remain in ensuring youth experience inclusion at all levels of the organization and to manage political and societal pressures resulting from shifting focus friction

Methodological Framework for Analysis of Buildings-Related Programs with BEAMS, 2008

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) develops official “benefits estimates” for each of its major programs using its Planning, Analysis, and Evaluation (PAE) Team. PAE conducts an annual integrated modeling and analysis effort to produce estimates of the energy, environmental, and financial benefits expected from EERE’s budget request. These estimates are part of EERE’s budget request and are also used in the formulation of EERE’s performance measures. Two of EERE’s major programs are the Building Technologies Program (BT) and the Weatherization and Intergovernmental Program (WIP). Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) supports PAE by developing the program characterizations and other market information necessary to provide input to the EERE integrated modeling analysis as part of PAE’s Portfolio Decision Support (PDS) effort. Additionally, PNNL also supports BT by providing line-item estimates for the Program’s internal use. PNNL uses three modeling approaches to perform these analyses. This report documents the approach and methodology used to estimate future energy, environmental, and financial benefits using one of those methods: the Building Energy Analysis and Modeling System (BEAMS). BEAMS is a PC-based accounting model that was built in Visual Basic by PNNL specifically for estimating the benefits of buildings-related projects. It allows various types of projects to be characterized including whole-building, envelope, lighting, and equipment projects. This document contains an overview section that describes the estimation process and the models used to estimate energy savings. The body of the document describes the algorithms used within the BEAMS software. This document serves both as stand-alone documentation for BEAMS, and also as a supplemental update of a previous document, Methodological Framework for Analysis of Buildings-Related Programs: The GPRA Metrics Effort, (Elliott et al. 2004b). The areas most changed since the publication of that previous document are those discussing the calculation of lighting and HVAC interactive effects (for both lighting and envelope/whole-building projects). This report does not attempt to convey inputs to BEAMS or the methodology of their derivation

Listening to teachers: a qualitative exploration of teaching practices in higher and further education, and the implications for digital

To bring about lasting changes around the use of technology to support teaching and learning in colleges and universities, we need to understand the practices that teaching staff undertake and the challenges they face. Effective, sustained change comes from a place of working in service to pedagogies. This report captures the findings of our recent work to develop a thorough understanding of the practices of teaching in colleges and universities. Our starting point A Jisc co-design project in 2016 was the starting point for a consultation to gain a richer understanding of what next generation digital learning environments might look like. In a wide-ranging and in-depth consultation we asked questions that focused on the potential of technology, the range of activities that staff currently undertake and what activities they would like in the future. The resulting report, next generation [digital] learning environments: present and future focused on many of these areas, providing a baseline of current and emerging technology-based practices. During that consultation many contributors raised questions about how behaviours of staff working in learning and teaching have changed since the first widespread deployment of virtual learning environments (VLEs) and other educational technologies in the 1990s. As it’s our mission to continue to provide solutions, advice and guidance on the use of technology to support learning and teaching we must remain focused on what the sector needs and wants from digital learning environments. This imperative is the driver for the current report. We wanted to develop deeper understanding about practice around learning and teaching with the aim of gaining insights beyond the technology-led. We’ve captured the voices and experiences of teachers in higher and further education, drawing on senior and junior teaching scholars across a broad range of academic disciplines. From more than 22 hours of interviews and several workshops we’ve distilled a series of themes and ideas for future development. The authors have provided indicative quotes from interviewees in the text rather than a comprehensive catalogue. We used a contextual inquiry approach. This is a process whereby individuals are interviewed about their practices in an open-ended format and within a particular frame designed to find out what they do, what their motivations are, what personal history contributes to these practices and how they are impacted by current macro- and micro-contexts. This is standard practice in user experience research, especially at the beginning of design processes, and it is valued in particular for being distinct from ‘lab’ investigations of behaviour that are distanced from the context in which people habitually do their work. In what follows, we describe the motivations for the contextual inquiry project and the themes that have emerged, and then explore the implications of some of those themes for Jisc’s next generation digital

Mimesis stories: composing new nature music for the shakuhachi

Nature is a widespread theme in much new music for the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute). This article explores the significance of such music within the contemporary shakuhachi scene, as the instrument travels internationally and so becomes rooted in landscapes outside Japan, taking on the voices of new creatures and natural phenomena. The article tells the stories of five compositions and one arrangement by non-Japanese composers, first to credit composers’ varied and personal responses to this common concern and, second, to discern broad, culturally syncretic traditions of nature mimesis and other, more abstract, ideas about the naturalness of sounds and creative processes (which I call musical naturalism). Setting these personal stories and longer histories side by side reveals that composition creates composers (as much as the other way around). Thus it hints at much broader terrain: the refashioning of human nature at the confluence between cosmopolitan cultural circulations and contemporary encounters with the more-than-human world