Answering Student Questions During Examinations: A Descriptive Study of Faculty Beliefs

Outcomes of examinations have serious implications for students. Thus, implementing evidence-based testing administration practices is critical. Conversations with faculty peers revealed a variety of beliefs and practices, including whether or not students may ask questions while taking an exam; some faculty answer questions on a case-by-case basis and others do not permit students to ask questions. A review of the literature offered little empirical evidence on testing administration practices and, specifically, no evidence on how to respond to students who ask questions during an exam. This study describes nurse educator beliefs about answering individual student questions while administering an examination. According to Twigg (2012), examinations are used to measure learning outcomes and provide faculty with information to make grading decisions. Exam scores may also be used to compare aggregate student performance against standardized norm-referenced exams to evaluate curricular effectiveness (Waugh & Gronlund, 2013). In some cases, exams are used to determine the effectiveness of teaching strategies (Bain, 2004). Because examination outcomes have serious implications for both students and the program of study, it is essential to enforce testing administration practices that produce valid assessments of individual student knowledge. An exhaustive literature review was conducted using ERIC, CINAHL, EBSCOhost, MEDLINEplus, GoogleScholar, Communicatio

Answering Student Questions during Examinations: A Descriptive Study of Faculty Beliefs

Examinations are used to evaluate individual student learning. Therefore, fair and consistent administration practices are essential. One issue associated with testing practices includes answering individual student questions, i.e. how should faculty respond to individual questions and should faculty permit students to ask questions? Findings from this descriptive study revealed faculty believe answering questions disrupts the test environment, inhibits effective monitoring of the test environment, and could provide unfair hints to students who ask questions. Yet, faculty permit question asking to clarify questions, to provide definitions, and to appear receptive to student needs. Recommendations for nursing education and research are provided

Interventions to Reduce Perceived Stress Among Graduate Students: A Systematic Review With Implications for Evidence‐Based Practice

Background: Stress is a part of daily life for graduate students, including graduate nursing students. Contemporary graduate nursing students are facing unprecedented challenges to meet rigorous academic standards as they prepare for their advanced professional role to meet the demands of the nation’s complex and ever-changing healthcare system. Empowering graduate nursing students to ease their perceived stress and minimize undesirable health effects may benefit their capacity to adapt and successfully manage perceived stress in their future healthcare role. Aims: To conduct a systematic review to evaluate the existing evidence with the aim of identifying evidence-based self-care interventions for coping with perceived stress. Methods: We conducted a systematic review, searching CINAHL Plus with Full Text, PsycINFO, and MEDLINE. Inclusion criteria included self-care, graduate students, perceived stress as measured by Perceived Stress Scale, quantitative analysis, conducted within the United States, English language, and peer reviewed. Two authors completed an asynchronous review of the articles, and one expert evidence-based practice mentor and one wellness expert conducted rigorous appraisal of the eight identified studies. Evidence was evaluated and synthesized, and recommendations for practice were determined. Results: Eight studies meeting the criteria for this systematic review were critically appraised. The interventions varied from a stress management course to mind-body-stress-reduction (MBSR) techniques, such as yoga, breath work, meditation, and mindfulness. All studies measured the outcome of stress with the Perceived Stress Scale. Each study demonstrated a reduction in perceived stress post intervention. Linking Evidence to Action: Most effective self-care MBSR interventions include (a) a didactic component, (b) a guided MBSR practice session, and (c) homework. Consideration should be given to a trained or certified MBSR instructor to teach the intervention

Drawing bobbin lace graphs, or, Fundamental cycles for a subclass of periodic graphs

In this paper, we study a class of graph drawings that arise from bobbin lace patterns. The drawings are periodic and require a combinatorial embedding with specific properties which we outline and demonstrate can be verified in linear time. In addition, a lace graph drawing has a topological requirement: it contains a set of non-contractible directed cycles which must be homotopic to $(1,0)$, that is, when drawn on a torus, each cycle wraps once around the minor meridian axis and zero times around the major longitude axis. We provide an algorithm for finding the two fundamental cycles of a canonical rectangular schema in a supergraph that enforces this topological constraint. The polygonal schema is then used to produce a straight-line drawing of the lace graph inside a rectangular frame. We argue that such a polygonal schema always exists for combinatorial embeddings satisfying the conditions of bobbin lace patterns, and that we can therefore create a pattern, given a graph with a fixed combinatorial embedding of genus one.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017

A decade into Facebook: where is psychiatry in the digital age?

Social networking sites are a part of everyday life for over a billion people worldwide. They show no sign of declining popularity, with social media use increasing at 3 times the rate of other Internet use. Despite this proliferation, mental healthcare has yet to embrace this unprecedented resource. We argue that social networking site data should become a high priority for psychiatry research and mental healthcare delivery. We illustrate our views using the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, which currently has over 1 billion daily users (1 in 7 people worldwide). Facebook users can create personal profiles, socialize, express feelings, and share content, which Facebook stores as time-stamped digital records dating back to when the user first joined. Evidence suggests that 92% of adolescents go online daily and disclose considerably more about themselves online than offline. Thus, working with Facebook data could further our understanding of the onset and early years of mental illness, a crucial period of interpersonal development. Furthermore, a diminishing ‘digital divide’ has allowed for a broader sociodemographic to access Facebook, including homeless youth, young veterans, immigrants, patients with mental health problems, and seniors, enabling greater contact with traditionally harder-to-reach populations

Dryland salinity: a multi-disciplinary conceptual model designed for on-farm salinity control

Non-Peer Reviewe

In your eyes only? Discrepancies and agreement between self- and other-reports of personality from age 14 to 29

Do others perceive the personality changes that take place between the ages of 14 and 29 in a similar fashion as the aging person him- or herself? This cross-sectional study analyzed age trajectories in self- versus other-reported Big Five personality traits and in self-other agreement in a sample of more than 10,000 individuals from the myPersonality Project. Results for self-reported personality showed maturation effects (increases in extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability), and this pattern was generally also reflected in other-reports, albeit with discrepancies regarding timing and magnitude. Age differences found for extraversion were similar between the self- and other-reports, but the increase found in self-reported conscientiousness was delayed in other-reports, and the curvilinear increase found in self-reported openness was slightly steeper in other-reports. Only emotional stability showed a distinct mismatch with an increase in self-reports, but no significant age effect in other-reports. Both the self- and other-reports of agreeableness showed no significant age trends. The trait correlations between the self- and other-reports increased with age for emotional stability, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness; by contrast, agreement regarding extraversion remained stable. The profile correlations confirmed increases in self-other agreement with age. We suggest that these gains in agreement are a further manifestation of maturation. Taken together, our analyses generally show commonalities but also some divergences in age-associated mean level changes between self- and other-reports of the Big Five, as well as an age trend towards increasing self-other agreement