Teaching Therapeutic Yoga to Medical Outpatients: Practice Descriptions, Process Reflections, and Preliminary Outcomes

This article describes therapeutic Yoga practices designed for a medical population with mixed diagnoses and a wide range of health challenges. We present preliminary data from 54 adults who participated in Yoga classes at a community medical center serving seventeen counties in Northeast Georgia. Findings suggest that attending therapeutic group Yoga classes can improve health perceptions and mindfulness. These findings are discussed in terms of implications for clinical practice and future research. The Yoga practices are described in detail, for the benefit of teachers and researchers who wish to replicate the practices

Experiential Learning Enhances Physical Therapist Student Confidence in Management of Neurologically-Involved Adults and Children

Purpose/ Hypothesis: As physical therapy (PT) students advance through an entry-level professional program, clinical decision making skills improve, though self-confidence in treating individuals with neurological impairments does not. One technique to improve PT student self-confidence with this population is the addition of experiential learning opportunities, which uses direct student interaction with community volunteers to simulate clinical application of didactic material. The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of experiential learning using community participants who were neurologically-involved, on PT students’ perceived self-confidence. It was hypothesized that PT students would report greater levels of self-confidence in their neurological patient management skills following the 4 week experience. Number of subjects: 129 Materials/ Methods: As part of their curriculum, PT students at the University of St. Augustine are required to participate in Patient Oriented Integrated Neurological Treatment (POINT) labs in both their final neuromuscular and pediatric classes. The POINT labs are divided into an adult and pediatric section, requiring the students to evaluate and treat a volunteer from both sections once weekly for 4 weeks. A survey study was conducted over 3 semesters to assess students\u27 perception in how confident they felt with evaluation and treatment of neurologically involved people across the lifespan. PT students (N = 129) were given the survey immediately prior to the start of the first POINT lab. The survey contained 10 questions and took 5 minutes to complete. The same survey was given to the PT students immediately after the final POINT lab. Results: Paired samples t-test was performed on each student\u27s summed pretest and posttest scores. On average, students reported more self- confidence in the posttest survey, -7.91, BCa 95% CI [-8.98, -6.75], which was significant t(128) = -13.841, p\u3c.001, and represented a large effect size, d = 1.70, indicating increased self-confidence after the POINT labs. Principal access factor analysis was conducted on the 10-item questionnaire. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure varied the sampling adequacy for the analysis, KMO = .876. Eigenvalues were obtained for each factor in the data. Two factors had eigenvalues over Kaiser’s criterion of 1, and in combination explained 35.72% of the variance. We retained two factors based on the scree plot and Kaiser’s criterion. All items in the first factor had high reliabilities, Cronbach’s a = .848 and the items in the second factor had a good reliability, Cronbach’s a = .743. Conclusions: These findings are consistent with our hypothesis that PT students perceive greater levels of confidence in their neurological patient management following the POINT lab experience. Clinical Relevance: Experiential learning with neurologically involved community participants is an effective strategy to prepare students for their clinical internships. This study supports the use of a 4 week POINT lab in entry-level professional PT curriculum

Diffusion of Policy Innovation: The Case of Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) as an Asset-Building Policy

Diffusion of a policy innovation from one state to another is an important component of social change. Several theories and models have been developed to explain how and under what circumstances policy innovation and diffusion occurs. This paper examines the policy diffusion process through the case of Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), a policy innovation designed to provide matched saving opportunities for low-income people to accumulate assets. While our examination supports several of the prominent theories of policy diffusion, we suggest that a fusion of policy theories may better guide policy makers in more adequately predicting and executing the diffusion of policy innovation. Furthermore, these theories appear to hold most relevance at distinct stages of the process

Contributions of the Earned Income Tax Credit to Community Development in Indian Country

The earned income tax credit (EITC) has become a central element in a suite of programs and polices that promote “asset building” for the poor. Increasingly, it has become a way not only for individuals but also communities to turn their economic circumstances around. The Center for Social Development in collaboration with Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies engaged ten Native community organizations currently providing free tax preparation services in a study that examined uptake and potential uses of Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) income by Native people. Through community surveys we learned that a majority of survey respondents (88.26%) have bank accounts. Respondents indicated that they would use their tax refunds to cover personal expenses such as emergencies and catching up on bills. 24.13% indicated that they plan to put their tax return in a savings account while others plan to use the refund to obtain necessary household items such as vehicles and furniture. Community members expressed strong interest in getting information about matched savings accounts, homeownership and financial management education, as well as starting their own business. These findings provide insight into the kinds of community infrastructure and programs that help dollars stay in a community and help citizens leverage their assets

VITA Sites: Linking Tax Returns and Asset Building Strategies in Indian Country

On an individual and family basis, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has important poverty alleviation characteristics. Few populations or places in the United States are as needful of the dollars provided by EITC receipt as Indian Country. The receipt of EITC will not alleviate poverty in Indian Country alone, but can be a viable start by providing thousands of dollars to families in Native communities. During the two years this project has been underway, more than 9,000 tax returns have been filed at 14 Voluntary Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites serving Indian Country. The study examined the number of Native community members who are eligible for EITC, the amount of money flowing to Native community members through EITC, potential uses of EITC income, and opportunities to build community infrastructure and programs that could help EITC and other tax dollars remain in Native communities and serve as leverage for further asset building

Dialogues on Assets in Native Communities: Recording a Native Perspective on the Definition and Benefits of Retaining and Building Assets

Dialogues on Assets in Native Communities: Recording a Native Perspective on the Definition and Benefits of Retaining and Building Asset

Online Learning During the Covid Crisis: Student Views

In the spring of 2020, students at all levels of education were suddenly thrown into online learning situations. Higher education institutions reacted without regard or exposure to known best practices for online learning. As a result, student satisfaction levels dropped dramatically. Before Covid, those participating in online courses chose that option. Occasionally, an individual course would only be offered online, but for the majority, students who did not like online courses could avoid them. With the Covid crisis, all students were thrust into an online educational environment with no alternatives and little notice. To examine the learning during this crisis, we developed a 22-item scale on student perspectives of online learning and administered the survey to a large regional university in the southwest US during the Covid crisis (n=1160). We found online students prefer non-quantitative courses, are motivated by many scheduling issues, believe they learn less online and feel online students must be self-motivated and more disciplined, among other findings

Multi-Name Credit Derivatives

The problem addressed in this report is that of pricing multi-name credit derivatives. These are default guarantee contracts on a basket of “names” whose default rates are correlated

ADVISE: AI-accelerated Design of Evidence Synthesis for Global Development

When designing evidence-based policies and programs, decision-makers must distill key information from a vast and rapidly growing literature base. Identifying relevant literature from raw search results is time and resource intensive, and is often done by manual screening. In this study, we develop an AI agent based on a bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model and incorporate it into a human team designing an evidence synthesis product for global development. We explore the effectiveness of the human-AI hybrid team in accelerating the evidence synthesis process. To further improve team efficiency, we enhance the human-AI hybrid team through active learning (AL). Specifically, we explore different sampling strategies, including random sampling, least confidence (LC) sampling, and highest priority (HP) sampling, to study their influence on the collaborative screening process. Results show that incorporating the BERT-based AI agent into the human team can reduce the human screening effort by 68.5% compared to the case of no AI assistance and by 16.8% compared to the case of using a support vector machine (SVM)-based AI agent for identifying 80% of all relevant documents. When we apply the HP sampling strategy for AL, the human screening effort can be reduced even more: by 78.3% for identifying 80% of all relevant documents compared to no AI assistance. We apply the AL-enhanced human-AI hybrid teaming workflow in the design process of three evidence gap maps (EGMs) for USAID and find it to be highly effective. These findings demonstrate how AI can accelerate the development of evidence synthesis products and promote timely evidence-based decision making in global development in a human-AI hybrid teaming context.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, to be published in the proceedings of IDETC-CIE 202