Intergration of Intentional Research Assignments into Select Nursing Courses

Undergraduate Applie

What helps or hinders practitioners, children and young people, and their families in implementing the Common Assessment Framework and Lead Professional working?

The Every Child Matters (DfES 2003) policy agenda has brought multi-agency working to the fore of children’s services in the UK. The implementation of the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) is a central part of the measures developed to improve outcomes for children and young people. The CAF is a standardized, shared assessment tool which is used across agencies to help practitioners develop a shared understanding of a child or young person’s needs. It has been designed to support practitioners in assessing needs at an earlier stage and to work with families, alongside other practitioners and agencies, to meet those needs, thus supporting integrated working practices. This study investigated the views of professionals and families who had been involved in a CAF. Five families were interviewed, as well as the Lead Professional and one or two other professionals who had been involved. These interviews explored experiences of the process and feelings about its future use. Perceived strengths included training and the support available for both families and professionals during the CAF process. Concerns were expressed from professionals regarding increased workload and difficulties completing the assessment. There was a lack of clarity regarding whether or not the CAF improved outcomes in itself, however professionals and families were positive about its benefits. Key findings for future practice included the need for the impact of CAF to be monitored from the perspectives of professionals, families and young people. There also needs to be an allowance made for the extra time and resources required by this new way of working if a wider range of professional groups are to be encouraged to become involved

Leveraging a Creative Commons Resource for Online Course Quality Management

MidAmerica Nazarene University has been building about fifty business and general education courses in support of three new online business programs. After evaluating available quality management systems, we chose the eCampusAlberta Quality eToolkit (http://quality.ecampusalberta.ca/). This system is licensed under free Creative Commons Attribution, and comprises a comprehensive rubric to assess course quality. We combined this quality management tool with intensive faculty training, plus assignment of instructional designers to team up with each faculty member to build the courses. We established a two-part cycle of quality management, with a minimum threshold of quality required before course launch, and then a second cycle of post-instruction improvements with a higher minimum threshold. This presentation is an interim report on this project, which is now almost 100% complete

Using the “Lesson” Activity Module in Moodle as a Primary Building Block for Online Courses

Before building out about 50 online courses at MidAmerica University, we surveyed the way existing courses (mostly on-ground, some online) had been constructed across the University’s Moodle platform. We discovered that Moodle was being used mainly as a file-delivery platform, with very little student engagement. Nearly all courses were constructed in a way where the “dreaded scroll of death” was manifested. For the development of the new online courses, we standardized on the Moodle Lesson activity module as a primary building block to accomplish the following: Provide meaningful organization to the learning materials, including guided learning pathways Encapsulate related learning materials into integrative learning modules Provide formative inline quizzing and learning checkpoints within the learning modules Eliminate the “scroll of death” This presentation covers the basics of why the Lesson activity module is a powerful learning tool and how it works, using examples from our recently-completed course development project. We’ll also touch on a little of the as-yet-untapped further potential of the toolset

Incentives for breastfeeding and for smoking cessation in pregnancy: An exploration of types and meanings

Financial or tangible incentives are a strategy for improving health behaviours. The mechanisms of action of incentives are complex and debated. Using a multidisciplinary integrated mixed methods study, with service-user collaboration throughout, we developed a typology of incentives and their meanings for initiating and sustaining smoking cessation in pregnancy and breastfeeding. The ultimate aim was to inform incentive intervention design by providing insights into incentive acceptability and mechanisms of action. Systematic evidence syntheses of incentive intervention studies for smoking cessation in pregnancy or breastfeeding identified incentive characteristics, which were developed into initial categories. Little published qualitative data on user perspectives and acceptability was available. Qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted in three UK regions with a diverse socio-demographic sample of 88 women and significant others from the target population, 53 service providers, 24 experts/decision makers, and conference attendees identified new potential incentives and providers, with and without experience of incentives. Identified incentives (published and emergent) were classified into eight categories: cash and shopping vouchers, maternal wellbeing, baby and pregnancy-related, behaviour-related, health-related, general utility, awards and certificates, and experiences. A typology was refined iteratively through concurrent data collection and thematic analysis to explore participants' understandings of ‘incentives’ and to compare and contrast meanings across types. Our typology can be understood in three dimensions: the degree of restriction, the extent to which each is hedonic and/or utilitarian, and whether each has solely monetary value versus monetary with added social value. The layers of autonomy, meanings and the social value of incentive types influence their acceptability and interact with structural, social, and personal factors. Dimensions of incentive meaning that go beyond the simple incentive description should inform incentive programme design and are likely to influence outcomes

Border crossings: investigating the comparability of case management in a service for older people in Berlin

Case management, a coordinating process designed to align service provision more closely to the identified needs of people requiring assistance in the context of complex care systems, is an example of those policies and practices that cross the borders of different national welfare systems, ostensibly to resolve the same or similar problems in the adopting country. Developed in the USA, case management was re-named 'care management' upon adoption in the UK as part of the community care reforms of the early 1990s, reforms which have framed my professional life in English local authority adult social care services ever since. In 2007, a temporary research fellowship (TH Marshall Fellowship, London School of Economics) enabled me to spend four months in Berlin studying a citywide case management service for older people in the context of German long-term care policy and legislation. This experience sits at the core of this thesis which addresses the extent to which the study of a specific case management service for older people in Berlin can illuminate how case management translates across differing national welfare contexts, taking into account the particular methodological challenges of cross-national research. Drawing on both cross-national social policy and translation studies literatures and adopting a multi-method case study approach, the central problems of determining similarity and difference, equivalence and translation form the core of the thesis. Informed by a realist understanding of the social world, the study took a naturalistic turn in situ that fore-grounded the more ethnographic elements in the mix of documentary research, semi-participant observation and meetings with key informants that formed my data sources and were recorded in extensive field notes. The data were analysed to trace how case management was constructed locally in relation to both state and federal level policy and legislation, and then comparatively re-examined in the context of the key methodological problems identified above in relation to understandings of care management in England as reported in the literature, in order to further explore the question of comparability of case management across different welfare contexts. The research clearly demonstrates how institutional context both shaped and constrained the adoption of case management in Berlin, and highlights a need in comparative research for close contextual examination of the apparently similar, with a focus on functionally equivalent mechanisms, to determine the extent to which case management can be said to be similar or different in different contexts, particularly where English words and expressions are directly absorbed into the local language. Relating the case study to findings from earlier studies of care management in England highlights the extent to which care management in England is itself a locally shaped and contextualised variant of case management as developed in the USA that matches poorly to the variant in Berlin. Indeed problems discovered in the research site constructing definitional boundaries for case management in practice mirror issues in the wider literature and raise questions about the specificity of the original concept itself. Nonetheless, the study shows that, despite the multiple asymmetries of equivalence and difficulties of translation, there are sufficient points of similarity for cautious potential lessons to be drawn from Berlin, particularly with regards to policy changes on the horizon in England, but also in the other direction with regards to how case management in Berlin may also be re-shaped following recent reforms to German long-term care legislation

Efficacy Beliefs and the Learning Experiences of Children with Cancer in the Hospital Setting

The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of self-efficacy beliefs on the learning experiences of children with cancer while in the hospital setting. Analysis of five students' cases revealed that the efficacy-regulated processes of motivation, cognition, affect, and selection have a mediational role on the children's learning experiences and that, bidirectionally, through the development of strong academic efficacy beliefs, children with cancer may experience psychosocial adjustment and an improved sense of overall well-being. Findings support Bandura's (1995) assertion that the issue of control is central in human lives and is particularly important for those who have constraints imposed on them.Le but de cette recherche était d'étudier l'influence qu'ont les croyances d'auto efficacité sur les expériences d'apprentissage d'enfants atteints d'un cancer et séjournant dans un milieu hospitalier. L'analyse du cas de cinq étudiants a révélé que des processus réglementés par l'efficacité, notamment la motivation, la cognition, l'affect et la sélection, jouent un rôle médiationnel sur les expériences d'apprentissage des enfants et que, de façon bidirectionnelle et par le développement de fermes croyances soutenant l'efficacité académique, les enfants atteints d'un cancer peuvent connaître un ajustement psychosocial et un meilleur sens global de bien-être. Les résultats appuient l'assertion de Bandura (1995) selon laquelle la question de contrôle est centrale dans la vie humaine et revêt d'une importance toute particulière dans l'existence de ceux vivant avec des contraintes

Hydrodynamic Control of a Submarine Close to the Sea Surface

To understand the behaviour of a submarine under the influence of surface waves at the early stages of design, the impact on whole boat design, from the perspective of the hydrodynamic shape of the hull, internal arrangements, performance requirements of ballast tanks and pumps and the requirements of control surfaces, a suitable design tool and analysis process is required. The thesis includes outcomes from different engineering disciplines; principally, naval architecture (particularly the specialised areas of submarine hydrodynamics and ocean engineering) and control engineering. The thesis particularly draws upon research from the area of ocean engineering, specifically in the methods of quantifying second order effects, to bring insights into control system design for the problem of submarine control under waves. This is achieved by providing a potential approach for developing control system specifications in reflection of the available assessment methods

How business intelligence is adding business value

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-72).Business Intelligence (BI) continues to top the list of CIO priorities, investment in BI technologies continues to grow and organizations are becoming increasingly reliant on BI to help reduce costs and grow revenues. However, structured measurement and monitoring of the business value that can be attributed to BI investment remain elusive. This study used a multiple case study approach to examine how BI is adding value to organizations, what processes and methods are being followed for the evaluation of the business value that BI delivers as well as what approaches are being used to maximize the potential value that the organization's investment on BI could deliver