Assessing the Long-Term Effects of a Cultural Immersion Experience on Nursing Practice

Cultural immersion has been identified as a preferred method of teaching cultural competence in undergraduate nursing education. Multiple qualitative and quantitative studies have shown that baccalaureate nursing students enjoy international learning experiences and, based on self-efficacy evaluations, feel they have increased cultural competency following immersion experiences. However, there is little evidence to indicate concepts learned during undergraduate cultural competency course work is retained or integrated into nursing practice after leaving the milieu of academia. To inform future cultural competency educational efforts, I conducted a qualitative phenomenological study to provide a baseline of evidence regarding the impact of a cultural immersion experience to the Navajo Nation during baccalaureate nursing education. Following Institutional Review Board approval, information was gathered from 13 semi-structured interviews of registered nurses who have been in practice for one to three years. The interviews were transcribed and data analysis completed using both inductive and deductive coding and content analysis processes to interpret findings and develop a narrative of participants’ experiences. The five themes that emerged from the interviews indicate that participants had gained cultural competency skills which they attributed to learning during their cultural immersion experience to the Navajo Nation as an undergraduate nursing student. Further, they were able to give evidence of specific ways in which they implement those skills in their current practice as a registered nurse. The results of this study provide direction for additional research and inform nursing educators’ efforts to produce a culturally competent workforce to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population in the United States

A Comparative Study of Principals\u27 Perceptions of Bilingual Education in School Districts in South Texas

At a time when school leaders are held accountable for academic achievement and student growth, this study served to inform school leaders, who implement bilingual education programs, on the influence their perceptions have in their students’ academic success. This study examined and described elementary principals’ perceptions about bilingual education in a district implementing an early-exit bilingual program and in a district implementing a dual language bilingual program and its effectiveness to help ELLs achieve academic success. The study focused in determining if elementary principals’ perceptions were a function of their bilingual proficiency or language discourse, level of academic knowledge of bilingual education, and years of experience in bilingual education. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011) was selected for the study. The quantitative and qualitative data collected during the study provided insight into factors that influence elementary principals’ perceptions of bilingual education programs, specifically early-exit and dual language. The data provided a look at the similarities and differences that exist amongst elementary principals about their perceptions of bilingual education in an area where stakeholders are predominantly English and Spanish speakers. Through survey instrumentation and focus interviews, the researcher developed a picture of principals’ experiences with two different models of bilingual education. This study found that the perception held by principals regarding bilingual education can be influenced by their bilingual proficiency and academic knowledge of bilingual education

STiC -- A multi-atom non-LTE PRD inversion code for full-Stokes solar observations

The inference of the underlying state of the plasma in the solar chromosphere remains extremely challenging because of the nonlocal character of the observed radiation and plasma conditions in this layer. Inversion methods allow us to derive a model atmosphere that can reproduce the observed spectra by undertaking several physical assumptions. The most advanced approaches involve a depth-stratified model atmosphere described by temperature, line-of-sight velocity, turbulent velocity, the three components of the magnetic field vector, and gas and electron pressure. The parameters of the radiative transfer equation are computed from a solid ground of physical principles. To apply these techniques to spectral lines that sample the chromosphere, NLTE effects must be included in the calculations. We developed a new inversion code STiC to study spectral lines that sample the upper chromosphere. The code is based the RH synthetis code, which we modified to make the inversions faster and more stable. For the first time, STiC facilitates the processing of lines from multiple atoms in non-LTE, also including partial redistribution effects. Furthermore, we include a regularization strategy that allows for model atmospheres with a complex stratification, without introducing artifacts in the reconstructed physical parameters, which are usually manifested in the form of oscillatory behavior. This approach takes steps toward a node-less inversion, in which the value of the physical parameters at each grid point can be considered a free parameter. In this paper we discuss the implementation of the aforementioned techniques, the description of the model atmosphere, and the optimizations that we applied to the code. We carry out some numerical experiments to show the performance of the code and the regularization techniques that we implemented. We made STiC publicly available to the community.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic