Introduction to General Psychology (Georgia Highlands College)

This Grants Collection for Introduction to General Psychology was created under a Round Three ALG Textbook Transformation Grant. Affordable Learning Georgia Grants Collections are intended to provide faculty with the frameworks to quickly implement or revise the same materials as a Textbook Transformation Grants team, along with the aims and lessons learned from project teams during the implementation process. Documents are in .pdf format, with a separate .docx (Word) version available for download. Each collection contains the following materials: Linked Syllabus Initial Proposal Final Reporthttps://oer.galileo.usg.edu/psychology-collections/1000/thumbnail.jp

Evidence Based Change to Improve Outcomes in Cardiac Patients

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States” (CDC, 2022). Modern healthcare has made numerous advances in changing the prevalence of heart disease and has shifted resources to promoting prevention. When a patient requires admission to an acute care facility for heart disease exacerbation, the focus is more of treating the acute process and how to manage the condition moving forward. Although there have been a substantial number of resources that have been allocated to prevention in the primary care and outpatient setting, there is a need for additional resources in the acute care setting for prevention and management of a newly acquired heart condition. In October of 2012, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) created the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) which reduces payment to those facilities that have “excess readmissions” within a 30-day period for common health conditions that include acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CMS, 2023). There is a unique opportunity for nursing interventions to make significant changes in the outcomes for this patient population at the acute care level and beyond. The focus of this project is to have a nurse navigator in an acute care facility that primary focus is patients with coronary artery disease and a newly placed coronary stent during a recent hospital admission. In effort to reduce readmissions and improve outcomes for these patients. Therefore, it is recommended for acute care facilities to allocate resources for a nurse navigator to monitor, track, and lead an interdisciplinary committee to promote early intervention for those patients discharged with a newly acquired diagnosis of coronary artery diseas

Supporting Gifted Education in Rural Schools

In this “promising practices” piece, we draw from lessons learned from a larger research study exploring how alternative identification processes and curricular interventions might influence gifted education programming for students in rural school districts. In the larger study we sought to (a) increase the number of rural students identified for gifted education services and (b) provide support for those programs in the form of a place-based language arts curriculum. As we implemented an innovative identification and curricular option for historically underrepresented students from low-income rural areas, we encountered hurdles stemming from four sources: conceptions of giftedness, teacher time and expertise, expectations for students, and fidelity of implementation. This article illuminates those challenges and discusses efforts to mitigate them and negotiate a path through to success—seeing the possible rather than limitations set forth by imposed systems affecting rural schools and communities

The Party’s Over: Sustaining Support Programs When the Funding is Done

In the lifecycle of an engineering education grant, the phase where best practices are sustained and disseminated is perhaps the most crucial stage for maximizing impact. Yet this transition phase often receives the least attention as project team enthusiasm can wane, while funding tapers off, and faculty priorities are pulled in other directions. There are numerous obstacles associated with sustaining program changes, even those perceived as very valuable. Typical challenges are: What happens when the funding runs out? What grant-developed programs should be sustained by the university? Does the institution need to internally allocate resources in an annual budget large enough to replace the grant? Ultimately, sustaining successful programmatic improvements is about “change management” in an institution. In this paper, we will review the literature relating to institutional change in engineering education. We will build on current curriculum change models, in the context of a major engineering education grant at Boise State University that included a variety of curricular enhancements, academic support, and outreach efforts. Over the past two years, the project team focused considerable effort on institutionalizing the most successful programs, and met with mixed results. While many programs will continue and benefit students long-term, other programs, even ones with stellar success and solid assessment, have not been entirely adopted for a number of reasons that we will examine. We will review the role assessment played in the process of program transfer (from the grant to the university) and lessons learned about building alliances with other campus partners to achieve university-level buy-in, well before the last stage of the grant. Finally, we will discuss two factors that are not identified in institutional change literature, but that contributed significantly to the successful transition of our programs—the importance of taking a research based approach, and flexibility in time and resource allocation

Support Model for Transfer Students Utilizing the STEM Scholarship Program

This paper describes how the College of Engineering at Boise State University utilized a National Science Foundation S-STEM award from 2011 to 2016 to support transfer students in their path toward graduation. The need for this support was a result of both Boise State University College of Engineering’s transition from a 2-year pre-engineering program to the establishment of Bachelors of Science in Engineering Degree programs in 1997 as well as the establishment of the College of Western Idaho as a regional community college in 2007. Both of these factors led to an increase in the numbers of incoming engineering students transferring from other institutions of higher education to complete their degree. These students were generally ineligible for most Boise State University scholarship programs which are mainly aimed toward students entering college directly from high school. In this paper we describe how our program connected transfer students with university staff, faculty and resources. To date, this program has a 100% retention rate, with the exception of one student on an official leave of absence, and a projected 100% graduation rate with 91% of the students already graduated. In addition, approximately 22% of scholarship graduates are pursuing graduate degrees

The Impact of Volunteering at a Girls Outreach Activity on Community Formation

This paper is focused on exploring the motivation for volunteering at an engineering outreach activity. The outreach activity itself involved a two day, overnight experience for 9th and 10th grade girls that started in 2005, and which has been held annually since that time. The outreach event takes place in Boise, Idaho, and at the time of its onset was the only outreach or camp activity in the state focused on girls or young women. Across ten years, 510 total girls have participated, with approximately 85% of them coming from the immediate metropolitan area. The program was developed with a mind toward marketing engineering as an exciting, creative activity; including activities developed specifically from that perspective.1 The specific topic of this paper is an investigation into the motivation for volunteers and students to support this program. Our hypothesis is that, in particular, the women found this an experience that helped to create community among like-minded STEM focused professionals and students. An anonymous survey was used to collect information from the 188 individuals who helped support the program across the past ten years. This includes people from local industry, and faculty, students and staff from the university (some of the student staff were paid and some of the university staff participated as part of their work duties; all others were volunteers). Survey participants were asked to identify themselves as primarily being a student, faculty or staff at the associated university, professional employed in the region, or other. In total, 67 people responded to the survey. Across all respondents, 55% were students, 12% were faculty and 5% were staff at the university; and 25% were from outside the university. The results from the survey include their motivation for participation, and reasons for participating during more than one year if applicable. Survey results also include information reported concerning formal and informal interactions between volunteers, and information concerning opportunities for interactions with other professional women that are available. Finally, respondents’ reported on how they may have benefited from their participation in the engineering outreach activity together with advice they have to help improve the volunteer experience are presented. This paper will report on the results of this survey and will discuss the implications of these results

Responding to the Challenges of Gifted Education in Rural Communities

There are both achievement and opportunity gaps for low-income students when compared to their economically advantaged peers; and, for rural students, these gaps may be even more pronounced. In this manuscript we draw from our ongoing work in a five-year federally-funded, Jacob K. Javits grant focusing on promoting gifted education in rural schools. To address issues of under-identification of gifted students in these settings, and to investigate ways to maximize achievement, we established an alternative process for identifying gifted students in rural schools; and we created units integrating place-based pedagogy within an evidence-based curriculum model as an intervention. Finally, we discuss preliminary findings from the pilot year and first half of the second year of the study documenting success in augmenting the pool of identified students and engaging teachers in implementing the curriculum. Perhaps more importantly, we document lessons learned and more global takeaways for the field. Specifically, we discuss the influence of deficit thinking with regard to rural schooling (and subsequent recognition of gifts and talents), the risk of generalizing rural to all rural places, and the nuances of rural poverty not captured in commonly used metrics, such as Free and Reduced Lunch

Successes of an Engineering Residential College Program within an Emerging Residential Culture

Boise State University is in the process of transforming from a historically commuter campus into a metropolitan research university which includes a growing residential culture (currently 8% of students live in residence halls). First time, full time freshmen age 18 or younger have increased from 61% of the incoming class in 2000 to 72% of the incoming class in 2008. To support our growing residential culture, University Housing, in cooperation with six academic colleges, began the Residential College (RC) program in 2004. Key among the five current RC communities is the College of Engineering. The Engineering Residential College (ERC) admits first and second year students with declared majors in one of our six undergraduate programs (civil engineering, computer science, construction management, electrical engineering, materials science and engineering, and mechanical engineering) and undeclared engineering. The 2007- 2008 academic year was the first during which an engineering faculty member lived in residence, the Faculty-in-Residence (FiR), with the 26 members of the ERC. The physical structure of the ERC supported collaborative work and study with student community members. Daily interaction of student ERC community members with the FiR and structured activities outside the classroom facilitated learning that enhanced engineering academics. In this paper, we discuss the qualitative life skills and quantitative academic successes of this living-learning community facilitated by a live-in engineering faculty member during the past three semesters and make recommendations for improving the overall ERC experience