Technostress Effects on Technology Acceptance by Nurse Faculty

Technology is an essential tool used in nursing academia. The rapid changes in technology and required adaptations can result in technostress, but little research exists about technostress among nurse educators. Gaps in this area of research generated several questions regarding the adaption to technology among nurse faculty and the impact technology has on stress, system use, job satisfaction, and intent to stay in the profession. This dissertation explored technostress and its influence on technology use, acceptance, job satisfaction, and intention to stay within the profession. Included are two manuscripts. The first is a concept analysis of technostress. The second manuscript is a research study report on the effects of technology acceptance on 1,017 nursing faculty using hierarchical regression. Three regression analyses involved up to seven predictors and their potential influence on technology use, job satisfaction, and intent to stay. Results yielded multiple factors that influence nursing faculty use of electronic learning technology

Interprofessional Learning Readiness: Health Policy Summit

Purpose: Interprofessional Education (IPE) and Health Policy are important components in health professional curricula. Students from business, communication sciences and disorders, dietetics, occupational therapy, nursing, and social work participated in an innovative IPE event working in an IPE group to apply discipline specific knowledge and propose solutions to the Medicaid Expansion gap in Virginia. Students presented their final proposals to legislators while advocating for issues important to their discipline. Methodology/Results: This study used the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) to examine student Teamwork and Collaboration, Professional Identity, and Roles and Responsibilities following participation in a Health Policy Summit. The results revealed a difference at baseline between health professions students and business students (N= 260) in their perception of teamwork and collaboration between groups. The themes of the question items found to be significant within the scale pre- and posttest were student perception of learning with other health-care/professional students, shared learning to help students understand their limitations, and welcoming opportunities to work with IPE students. Conclusion: This data indicates that there remains an opportunity to promote student perceptions of their abilities to participate in teamwork, collaborate significantly, and to understand the scope of their discipline specific knowledge and contributions to a team

Recurrent Modification of a Conserved Cis-Regulatory Element Underlies Fruit Fly Pigmentation Diversity

The development of morphological traits occurs through the collective action of networks of genes connected at the level of gene expression. As any node in a network may be a target of evolutionary change, the recurrent targeting of the same node would indicate that the path of evolution is biased for the relevant trait and network. Although examples of parallel evolution have implicated recurrent modification of the same gene and cis-regulatory element (CRE), little is known about the mutational and molecular paths of parallel CRE evolution. In Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies, the Bric-à-brac (Bab) transcription factors control the development of a suite of sexually dimorphic traits on the posterior abdomen. Female-specific Bab expression is regulated by the dimorphic element, a CRE that possesses direct inputs from body plan (ABD-B) and sex-determination (DSX) transcription factors. Here, we find that the recurrent evolutionary modification of this CRE underlies both intraspecific and interspecific variation in female pigmentation in the melanogaster species group. By reconstructing the sequence and regulatory activity of the ancestral Drosophila melanogaster dimorphic element, we demonstrate that a handful of mutations were sufficient to create independent CRE alleles with differing activities. Moreover, intraspecific and interspecific dimorphic element evolution proceeded with little to no alterations to the known body plan and sex-determination regulatory linkages. Collectively, our findings represent an example where the paths of evolution appear biased to a specific CRE, and drastic changes in function were accompanied by deep conservation of key regulatory linkages. © 2013 Rogers et al