Data-wary, Value-driven: Teacher Attitudes, Efficacy, and Online Access for Data-Based Decision Making

How do teachers use online student assessment data? School districts invest increasing resources in online systems for reporting and analyzing student assessment data, yet few studies describe the direct use of such applications or explore how these systems relate to teachers’ professional roles, data use attitudes, or data use efficacies. This dissertation applies learning analytics methods for log file analysis and visual data analytics to explore the extensive variation in teachers’ online data use behaviors and attitudes over six months in one urban secondary school. Descriptive statistics and visualizations of online usage over time demonstrate strong connections between teachers’ online behavior and common organizational factors, such as school level (middle vs. high school), content area, and required training. Correlational evidence suggests that data use self-efficacies have stronger relationships to online use than general data use attitudes. Hierarchical cluster analysis heatmaps are used to identify novel subgroups of teacher online data use behaviors and attitudes. These exploratory findings are used to generate data use dashboards for school-based leadership and an expanded determinant framework for the adoption of online assessment systems. Combining data-intensive methods with theoretical frameworks for self-efficacy, technology acceptance, and use diffusion, this dissertation aims to describe the rich variation in teachers’ online data use and attitudes, as well as productively inform the practice and study of data-based decision making in schools

Substance Abuse in Older Adults: An Exploratory Study

The increasing number of older adults in the United States, due in part to the Baby Boomer generation, means that there is also an increase in the number of older adults dealing with substance abuse problems. The compounded effects of multiple legal medications with alcohol, illicit drugs, or abused prescription drugs on the withdrawal process are likely to make delineating between legitimate medication side effects and withdrawal symptoms incredibly difficult for medical professionals working with older adults. With the average older adult legally using 17 medications from nine different medical professionals, the physical effects of substance abuse might easily go unnoticed. To determine medical professionals\u27 knowledge of substance abuse in older adults and how they assess it, this study focused on nursing students in central Illinois as well as other health care and social science professionals regarding substance abuse in the older adult population. The study sought to determine how nursing students\u27 knowledge of substance abuse in older adults varies according to the type of nursing degree being pursued and their nursing focus, determine how nursing students\u27 knowledge of substance abuse in older adults varies according to their progress in their degree program, and determine how nursing students\u27 knowledge of substance abuse in older adults varies as a result of their previous experience working/spending time with older adults or person with substance abuse issues. The study found that nurses and nursing students had less knowledge about older adults with substance abuse issues than any other profession. This is an alarming finding considering that nurses are often on the frontline in identification of substance abuse issues in older adults. The study also found that more time spent in both personal and professional interactions with older adults had no significant relation to overall knowledge of older adults with substance abuse issues. There is a necessity of acknowledgement that substance abuse in older adults is a growing issue, that there is a need for addiction treatment programs tailored to older adults, and that proper diagnostic measures of substance abuse symptoms in older adults are created as soon as possible. Future research should focus on the knowledge of physicians and other direct health care professionals working with older adults and sample from a more diverse population of medical and social science professionals. More research also needs to be done on the effectiveness of substance abuse diagnosis for older adults, and which, if any, methods of treatment are the most effective for this specific population

The Patriarchy Gives Way to Irish Mothers

Overview: In Ireland, both the patriarchy and the strong mothers seem to be timeless, but they exist in a delicate balance to one another. The Irish mothers who presented as a strong constant have always been capable of overtaking the patriarchy, yet the patriarchy has been a burden on Irish mothers for much of the nation’s history. The beautiful irony is that this patriarchy, a society where men are granted an inequitable amount of control, is slowly falling victim to the persistent Irish mothers, as fathers continue to fail their children and leave mothers with no choice but to take the lead. Irish mothers are slowly dominating the patriarchy that has treated them as second class citizens for centuries. Though Ireland is historically a patriarchy, uninvolved fathers, as seen in The Guard and The Snapper are forcing Irish mothers to take back control; this control is the foundation of a matriarchal society. Author\u27s reflection: My name is Cora Hawn, and I am an Inclusive Childhood Education major with a concentration in Psychology at St. John Fisher. I am also involved in the honors program here at Fisher. While I admittedly had very little knowledge of Irish society going into my 1299, Watching Ireland, I have always had a passions for psychology and sociology. The role that gender plays in societal standards and the blind adherence to societal norms fascinates me, so seeing the strong Irish women that were portrayed in the films of this course was refreshing and exciting. Ireland is known to be a Catholic, and therefore patriarchal, society, but these films painted a different picture of Irish gender roles than I was expecting. I saw families run by the mothers and a notable lack of paternal involvement in their children\u27s lives. I saw the mothers of Ireland taking the power that the fathers of their children were unknowingly relinquishing both in and out of the home. In writing this paper I found it difficult to hold back the naive idealism that I was tempted to insert throughout. As a woman myself in a universally patriarchal world I needed to draw the line between evidence of a power shift and my own wishful thinking. The first several attempts to write seemed to be infested with opinion and lack the proper evidence to support it. No matter how often I tried, I could not remove my own feminism from my writing, so I decided to lean into it while finding and inserting research based evidence. When I did this I wrote the whole paper in a few hours because it was natural and seemed like writing in a journal more than anything else. I had always been taught that opinions had no place in research based writing like this, that it was meant to be a clinical, dry presentation of findings, but in writing this I discovered how untrue that is. My opinion was my voice, and writing is not meant to be a presentation of facts, but an expression of the author’s voice. It is a form of communication and one’s unique thoughts must be conveyed in their writing as well as the facts that have been gathered

The Lenoir City Company, An Attempt In Community Development

This thesis is an outgrowth of a number of factors. In the first place, the writer has been employed in the Lenior City Schools for a period of five years. During this period, in order to make the educational program more funtional, the writer has had to delve into many community problems, enlist community participation and explore community resources and potentialities

The effect of middle school athletic participation on California common assessment tests

The purpose of this study is to examine the correlation between participation in middle school athletics and academic achievement and how this relationship may be impacted by gender and ethnicity. Scores from the cumulative California Standards Tests of 6th thru 8th graders were gathered and evaluated. The data used were from past years\u27 scores that the school district provided for the researcher. The hypotheses formed were that a positive relationship could be found between middle school athletics participation and academic success. The participants in the study were students in 1 California middle schools located in Southern California. A literature review was completed on the history of athletics, those who support participation of students in school athletic programs, and others who have found a negative correlation between the two. An analysis of variance of a specified sample was completed using SPSS. A positive relationship between test scores and participation in school athletics would allow for schools and parents to take these results into account when considering scheduling, finances, and curriculum development

The importance of a double standard : inter sexual differences and cooperative breeding in the green Woodhoopoe

Includes bibliographical references.The findings of this study support several ideas relevant to the interpretation of evolutionary patterns among cooperative species. First, the reproductive costs of delaying reproduction may not be as high as previously assumed in some cooperative species if, as in females of this species, birds delaying breeding tend to live longer than birds reproducing at maturity. Second, as demonstrated by inter-sexual difli:rences in the reaction of birds to varied levels of breeder saturation, behavioral responses to ecological constraints may depend on life-history pattem