First Day Of Class Research Articles

Increasing attitudes and interest in caring for older adults in first year nursing students using innovative teaching and learning strategies

Objective : The purpose of this study was to determine if the course Healthy Aging had any impact on nursing students’ attitudes towards older adults and/or interest in their caring for older adults after the completion of nursing school. Methods : A pretest-posttest design was used. A convenient sample of 54 first year baccalaureate nursing students enrolled in the course Healthy Aging at Memorial University School of Nursing, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada was recruited for in the study. On the first day of class 51 students consented to participate in the study. During the second and last classes of the course the Kogan’s (1961) Attitudes Towards Old People Scale (KOP) was administered to compare student attitudes towards older adults before and after completion of the course. Students were also asked pre and post course whether they would consider working with older adults after the completion of nursing school. Students’ perceptions of the innovative teaching strategies used in course delivery and how they contribute to knowledge, attitudes, and interest regarding older adults were also evaluated. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize demographic information and obtain means and standard deviations on the KOP. Results : Thirty-three students completed both the pre and post-tests. KOP scores were fairly high at both the beginning and at the end of the course. The students in the first year of nursing studies entered the course with a fairly positive attitude toward older adults. Of the 33 students, 19 students (57.5%) stated they would definitely consider working with older adults and 8 students (24.2%) stated that they might consider working with older adults, at the completion of nursing school. Only 2 students stated they would definitely not consider working with older adults after completion of nursing school. This was somewhat surprising in light of previous research in this area. Although there was no significant increase in KOP scores at the completion of the course, 27 (81.5%) students said that they would definitely work with older adults at the completion of nursing school. Qualitative data revealed that students had a greater interest in working with older adults at the end of the course than they did prior to taking the course. Results revealed that educational strategies were highly influential in this positive change of interest and provided evidence of the importance of making the content contextually relevant and interesting. Furthermore, a positive attitude by faculty and enthusiasm toward the older adult and toward gerontological nursing is equally important in providing a positive influence on students’ perceptions. Conclusions : Participating in the Healthy Aging course increased students’ attitudes and interest in caring for older adults.

Helpful Tips for New Users of Active Learning

Helpful Tips for New Users of Active Learning

Making the Most of Your First Day of Class

Instructors of physics courses face the demanding challenge of creating a safe, nurturing community in their classroom while maintaining sufficient rigor. First-day activities are especially important, because they need to both motivate their students and prepare them for the course. Experienced instructors happily share their successful first-day activities,1,2 but what works for one instructor or class might not be as successful for another. We postulate that to be successful, an activity will set expectations, attend to the face needs of the students, and build the instructor's credibility. By modeling the course activities and fostering a supportive learning community, well-suited activities can both orient and motivate students.

Introduction

Introduction Nancy J. Parezo (bio) Much has been written about collaboration as a desired form of united labor where individuals or groups work together with equality, shared authority, and respectful discourse. Indeed, this journal is a testament to how much anthropology as a scholarly endeavor has been, is, and can continue to be a form of intellectual and social work not undertaken by a lone maverick thinking great thoughts. As important as personal insight or intuition is to the world of ideas, a profession is a social world involving changing suites of individuals and institutions who work in societies that support their esoteric endeavors by providing specialized information deemed important. Anthropology as a form of labor is a profession based on the accumulation of knowledge about peoples of the world over time, critiqued through peer review by other scholars and the peoples with whom we work and about whom we write. The continuously active status of our evidence and information about our subject matter makes anthropology a distinctive scholarly undertaking. Indeed, as Catherine Nichols demonstrates in the first paper in this special section of Collaborative Anthropologies, museum anthropology has always been collaborative in its basic practices. It had to be if it was to be a distinctive, encyclopedic discipline where practitioners from different places could “speak the same language” through the collaborative sharing of distinctive artifacts and evidentially based classifications. Through social networks of individuals and institutions, anthropologists collaborated with local educational institutions to disseminate anthropology’s methods and demonstrate that it had professional [End Page 25] value for the general society as well. This was often through the distribution of evidence in the form of “duplicate” artifacts, an under-studied topic in the history of anthropology, which solidified shared values and goals. Like the other authors who look at past practices, Nichols offers models for future collaborative endeavors demonstrating that these need not be solely based on a postcolonialism agenda. They can be based on extensive past disciplinary practices, which need to be recognized and reconsidered. We just need to remember what were the best practices and adapt them in light of historic events and contemporary contexts. The collaborative and cumulative nature of anthropological knowledge and evidence means that anthropology as a form of social work carries ethical responsibilities one could argue are not present in sciences like physics, optics, or chemistry, or humanistic fields like philosophy, music, and creative writing. I have taught graduate-level research design, grant writing, ethics, and qualitative methodology courses at the University of Arizona for twenty-four years. Every semester on the first day of class I tell my students that when we are conducting a research project, we are guests of a community. Before we start the research project we are about to become guests. After finishing the data collection phase we are guests who say thank-you as we return to our homes. Too many people think “collaboration” ends as their daily lives take over and they are no longer involved in face-to-face interactions with the people from whom they collected information. But collaboration continues, as Sam Cook and Jeffrey Anderson demonstrate so eloquently in their papers. As conscientious, if now distant, visitants we must periodically reengage our guest status during analysis, write-up, and dissemination as well as make sure that copies (or the originals) of data-bearing materials are returned to the community for their use in the future. We hold the histories of research communities in our field notes (Silverman and Parezo 1995); we must not hoard this information. I tell my students that when I work on a project with a community I always assume I will return in the future and either continue new projects or adopt a revised role as a helper and friend in some manner. I will become what the Native Americans in my department call “allies.” Every research project should involve a tacit commitment to “good guest” status for longer than the life of a specific research project. But this is not always possible or easy when people are shifting into and out [End Page 26] of projects, into roles as active or inactive researchers, or when—as fellow anthropologists...

On Becoming a Teacher: Reflections on Teaching and Learning in Psychiatry Residency and Beyond.

Although over a decade has passed since my postgraduate year (PGY) 2 in psychiatry residency, it was a formative year for me as a psychiatrist and teacher. It felt, in many ways, like another PGY-1 year in terms of the transitions I faced. Although I was relieved and excited to (finally) be a full-fledged psychiatry resident rather than the “psych” resident passing through various rotations—internal medicine, emergency, and palliative care—I also felt the weight of expectation on my shoulders. This is the true test now—core inpatient and outpatient psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology—the heart of psychiatric practice. What if I didn’t like it? What if I wasn’t any good at it? And now they’re asking me to teach clinical clerks? Wasn’t I one just recently? Fast-forward 6 years from my PGY-2 year. I am sitting in a class of 14 other “scholars” in the Education Scholars Program (ESP) as a newly minted attending physician. I’ve been supported to attend by the chief of my department and I feel as nervous as I did inmy PGY-1 and 2 years of residency. Do you ever shake this feeling? Didn’t I just pass the requisite licensing exams and complete a fellowship? Haven’t I “arrived”? We were asked on the first day of class in the ESP to communicate our metaphors for teachers and teaching. The answers are both expected and unexpected—a chameleon, constantly adjusting to learners and the context, a guide on a journey, and an orchestra conductor. One answer from a thoughtful surgeon resonates with me. He speaks of his experience in Japanese martial arts and the term senseiwhich means “teacher” in Japanese. The surgeon says sensei’s literal translation is something like “the one who came before.” This term honors the perspective that teachers have in terms of imparting wisdom and perspective and I realize, in reflecting on this, that this is what I lacked as a PGY-2: bright eyed and bushy tailed; I had no idea how formative and meaningful teaching and being taught by talented and dedicated teachers would be inmy career development. I also had no sense of how impactful my contribution to teaching medical students could be. As doctors, I think we implicitly value teaching and learning. We are, after all, supposed to be “lifelong learners” and we’ve invested a lot in becoming doctors, but that’s just it, isn’t it, the essence of being a lifelong learner: Each of us is always in the process of becoming, learning, and growing. It’s never done. However, in those first months in PGY-2 and the years that followed it was the wisdom and guidance from the “ones who came before,”my/our teachers who provided time, guidance, safety, wisdom, knowledge, a sympathetic ear, perspective, inspiration...and so much more that helped to provide the “secure base,” to borrow a term from Bowlby [3], from which I could explore and become the clinician and educator I am today. Another flash forward and backwards. It’s 3 years into my being an attending physician and I am sitting in a faculty development program called “Train the Trainer” that is meant to teach faculty how to deliver a teaching skills program. I’m Acad Psychiatry (2016) 40:380–381 DOI 10.1007/s40596-014-0260-2

Notas sobre o acolhimento

Esse artigo é fruto das primeiras análises de uma pesquisa em um município da Baixada Fluminense que estuda as transições às quais estão submetidas as crianças nos espaços educativos. A questão das transições nas instituições educativas assume relevância diante das naturezas orgânica, sequencial e articulada, a partir das quais devem se estruturar as etapas e as modalidades do processo de escolarização. A partir da observação da primeira semana de aulas de crianças de 2 anos, questionamos: Como se dá o primeiro ingresso da criança na Educação Infantil? Há estratégias específicas para a sua "adaptação"? As primeiras aulas visam prioritariamente ao bem-estar das crianças ou dos adultos? Ou se pautam nos aspectos administrativos das instituições? Tomamos como referência o ciclo de políticas educacionais brasileiras, na tentativa de considerar os processos micro e macropolíticos, articulando os contextos que cercam a sua produção e os resultados das políticas refletidos nas práticas.

An Analysis of the Effectiveness of the Multicultural Program Model on Pre-school Teachers' Multiculture-related Abilites: Multicultural Attitudes, Perceptions toward Multicultural Education, and Multicultural Teaching Efficacy

This study aims to examine how pre-school teachers can improve their multiculture-related abilities by taking multicultural education courses and to explore how to develop multicultural education courses for pre-school teachers. For this purpose, 64 pre-school teachers were selected among those who took the course “Understanding Multicultural Families” as participants in the study. Participants were all sophomore female students who enrolled in the Early Childhood Education program at a Junior College. The study was conducted from March 2013 to June 2013 for a total of 14 weeks. On the first day of class, a test was taken to examine the participants’multicultural aptitutde including their attitudes and perceptions toward multicultural education, and multicultural teaching efficacy. After taking a total of 14 classes, their multiculture-related abilities were re-examined on the 15th week. findings from this study are as follow: 1) There is a difference in the pre-school teachers" attitudes toward multicultural education after they took the course. 2) There is a difference in the pre-school teachers" perceptions toward multicultural education after they took the course. 3) There is no difference in the pre-school teachers" multicultural teaching efficacy after they took the course.

Employability: The Main Axis for Duoc UC

A year ago our institution considered necessary a change in the way we understand how employability and how it was measured. The new concept meant to assume that the task of Duoc UC not end with the degree, and that our students employable would work from the first day of school, at which time we would begin to transfer to them the necessary skills and, moreover, would accompany for all life with systematic teaching continuing education activities.The concept of employability was reached which has a direct and vital relationship with our competency training model. Employability is institutionally assumed as a set of specific, generic and basic skills Duoc UC promises to transfer their students from the first day of class, enabling its graduates to be effective to get a job, stay in it and if you lose, it could recover as soon as possible; or they can start having personal business ventures training and basic information for it.The paper attempts to show how it came to the definition of institutional employability and academic activities that were designed and implemented to achieve this indicator turn as the backbone of the academic training of Duoc UC.

Using Data to Assess Staffing and Services: University of Iowa Main Library

The Main Library Service Desk is a one-stop academic help center located between a newly renovated student-focused space called the Learning Commons and the library collections. Services began with the first day of classes, August 26, 2013, and assessment has been ongoing, in part due to the availability of data. Staffing levels, staffing hours, and roving services were all analyzed and changed to better meet the needs of our users.

A Brief Instructional Intervention to Increase Students’ Motivation on the First Day of Class

What an instructor does on the first day of a course can impact students’ motivation in the course. To build upon these prior research findings, we implemented a first-day intervention to influence students’ motivation by increasing their perceptions of course interest, course usefulness, and instructor caring. The participants were undergraduate students ( n = 111) enrolled in either an introductory or an upper-level psychology class. The instructor implemented an experimental intervention to some sections but not to others. The intervention allowed students to discuss the usefulness of and their interest in the course with one another and to interact with a caring instructor. As hypothesized, students’ perceptions of course interest and instructor caring increased significantly; although perceptions of course usefulness did not.

On Being Bolstered by Small Moments between Perpetual Crises

When I taught high school English in California another lifetime ago, I began the new year with my juniors in American Literature by having them read and discuss Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Gift”: A day so happy. Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I knew no one worth my envying him. Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me. In my body I felt no pain. When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails. After our discussion, I would ask students to create their own model poems, using Milosz’s first line exactly, but then crafting a series of simple declarative observations about fond memories from their summer vacations just ended. This simple activity eased students into another nine months of school, and the study of literature specifically, by allowing them to reflect upon, bring into the classroom, and share with others those moments that mattered to them from their summertime, non-academic lives. Students would share their poems with excitement. Everyone had something to write about, and now everyone was amazed to learn (my subversive pedagogical plan) that they could actually write poetry—on the first day of class!

Editor's Note

“Should I require, not just encourage, my students to engage questions about racial injustice?” Karen Teel asks in the first article in this issue. She answers in the affirmative by carefully staking out her pedagogical commitments. But she finds a dearth of theoretically informed practical teaching strategies in the pedagogical literature to help her with the specific challenge of constructing antiracist pedagogies across her introductory theology survey course (which is a far more subtle challenge then simply designing a unit or a course in which racial injustice is the explicit topic). For this, the second article in this issue may offer some help. Anna Floerke Scheid and Elisabeth T. Vasko describe and analyze several pedagogical strategies that emerge from their multiyear study examining college students' resistance, dissonance, and other emotional responses in classrooms in which injustice and white privilege are the topic of learning. These two essays were unsolicited and submitted separately. It was simple coincidence that they emerged at the end of our editorial review process at the same time. But the happenstance struck us as fortuitous and we decided to solicit brief responses from each of the authors to the other's essay. The four-manuscript set comprises the entire Article section of this journal issue. Stanley Fish, in his polemical book Save The World On Your Own Time (Oxford, 2008), famously answered “No!” to Karen Teel's question about engaging questions about racial injustice. Our training, he argues, is in our academic disciplines – not in politics or social justice movements. We ought to be arrested for malpractice if we seek to transform our students' character or their ethical and stances. The issue gets more complicated if you consider that this topic is indeed the academic discipline for these authors, teaching the liberal arts – in a Catholic University context. The opposition crudely posed between confessional and academic approaches in our field takes on a somewhat different cast when packaged alongside of the question of whether there are normative academic positions on racial and social justice issues that liberal art students might rightfully be required to learn. Both of the manuscripts in the Article section clearly answer this question in the affirmative. But it is worth noting that the subject was not even broached during the nearly four-hour interview we conducted with Jonathan Z. Smith, and publish in this issue. Our first question in that interview – whether there are any defining characteristics to religious studies pedagogy – quickly raised the specter of students' religious commitments in the classroom. But none of us ventured into Stanley Fish's broader Gen Ed version of this question about the role of normative ethical and political stances in the university. Jonathan Smith has not been known for political advocacy, but he is among the few most important theoreticians in our field who has also written compellingly about teaching – chiefly about the place of the introductory religion course (and the religious studies curriculum more generally) within the liberal arts. In the interview published here we draw him out on specific strategies he has used in the classroom, and he opens up a broad critique of the devaluing of teaching as reflected in the preparation of doctoral students in the field. Thus, considerable attention is given to specific classroom teaching techniques in this issue of the journal. This attention is augmented by three Teaching Tactics: Mara Brecht describes how she teaches her students to engage in discussion; David B. Howell explains the advantages of having students disclose their prior learning on the topic of the course during the first day of class; and Mark S. M. Scott analyzes how to teach students to read difficult texts carefully. These are three perennial and vexing challenges facing teachers of religion and theology in higher education. Sherry Jordan's “Note” in the Classroom section culminates this triumvirate of classroom practices with an extended description and analysis of how she uses short, frequent, low stakes “writing to learn” assignments in her Reformation class. She explains the theory behind assignments such as these, using writing as a process for critical thinking and learning the content of the course. This continuum demonstrates how abstract ethical questions about normative stances in the classroom eventually become manifest in concrete teaching practices focused on reading, writing, and critical thinking – and this constitutes an abiding concern and mission of this journal. As always, we have included a dozen or so book reviews. In this case there are reviews of important books on student spirituality, teaching biblical literature in undergraduate contexts, an extended meditation on the mentors and disciples depicted in Rabbinic tales and what they can tell us about our teaching vocation, and several books about teaching online, a subject which continues to concern our generation.

The Intersection of Disability Studies and Health Science

The Intersection of Disability Studies and Health Science Sharon Cuff (bio), Kathleen McGoldrick (bio), Stephanie Patterson (bio), and Elizabeth Peterson (bio) On the first day of class I always ask my health science students, “Why disability studies?” Inevitably more than half the class answers, “Because I want to help people.” I groan and think, here we go again. I sit in my wheelchair facing a room full of future doctors, nurses, PAs, PTs, OTs, and human service providers, who have decided to forge their careers in healthcare services. To many disability activists, our students represent the medical model of disability—the enemy. They are those who see us as our disability. Who only see our deficits, and strive with their paternalistic knowledge to fix us and help us fit better into the construct of the normal they are accustomed to. Although I know they mean well, the task of changing over twenty years of societal indoctrination seems quite overwhelming and maybe a bit futile. I have to ask myself, “Why do I choose to attempt to educate future healthcare providers about what it means to live well with a disability? “Because if I don’t, who will?” — Kathleen McGoldrick Theoretical debates over which academic department disability studies (ds) is most aligned with can go on for days with no compromise, but the one thing most disability studies scholars usually agree on is that disability studies does not fit best within health science. After many decades of active struggle to establish a social model of disability and disengage from all things medical, why would anyone even consider such collaboration? Minds have been made up for some time and the resounding reaction to this suggestion has consistently been, “No.” Simi Linton, in her 1998 article suggesting an “interdisciplinary field of inquiry…called Disability Studies” states the importance of there being “two separate domains” isolating disability studies from what it is “Not”(Linton “Disability Studies” 528). She insists that it is important to situate disability studies within fields that treat it as a social phenomenon. Many activists and scholars do not see synergy between the study of medicine and disability studies. “One of Disability Studies’ major hang-ups is its default position with respect to the field of medicine….”(Souza). Traditionally, ds scholars have taken an adversarial stance against the medical profession and most would consider a collaboration to be treasonous. During the founding of disability studies and [End Page 37] while it was becoming established, such a conclusion and practice was logical and maybe necessary, but at this time, we respectfully disagree. Paul Longmore disagrees as well. He believes that, “Students interested in health care…need to have the opportunity to study this [disability] in the same way that they have the opportunity to study women’s history or African American history or Asian history”(Stanford University News Service). Ironically, the study of disability, as a social phenomenon is not new. Steven J. Taylor discusses the social theories of stigma, deviance, and labeling that took root in the 1960s (xiv), and addresses the implications that labeling of people with various disabilities has had on them. Within the health and rehabilitative sciences, disabled status was exclusively addressed as the consequence of impairment with which an individual had to live. It was not until the early 1980s that the minority group model of disability, fashioned after other civil rights causes, grew out of an effort by activists to address 1) the cultural, vocational, and political prejudices faced by those living with disability and 2) the absence of these issues in discussions about disability that solely focused on correcting impairment (Longmore 2). In 1982, the Section for the Study of Chronic Illness, Impairment, and Disability (ssciid) was founded by a cohort of sociologists and medical anthropologists and by 1986 the group was renamed the Society for Disability Studies (sds). sds is the most widely known “scholarly organization dedicated to promoting disability studies” (Society for Disability Studies About sds: Mission and History). Presented as a part of human existence, research and teaching about disability focused on the unique, individual experience of disability, “without examining the ignorance, fear, and prejudice that deeply influenced...

CLEAR SYLLABI? A SIMPLE ANSWER TO COMPLEX LEARNING REALITIES AT TWO-YEAR COLLEGES

ABSTRACT Learning styles are defined as the pedagogical customization that is required for students to engage and to improve their performance in the learning process. Traditionally, pedagogical strategies have emphasized learning styles, such as some students can learn better by listening, reading, verbalizing, or watching visual images; but one important component has been ignored, and this is responsibility (Blasco, 2009; Hunsaker, Pavett, & Hunsaker, 2011; Lincoln & Frontczak, 2008; Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, & Bjork, 2009). The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how important responsibility is for students, professors, and the competitiveness of the United States. The questions I will address are: First, how can we engage students attending two-year colleges in learning theoretical concepts? Second, how can we connect responsibility, learning outcomes, and research projects? The purpose of this paper is to share the methodology I follow for a writing intensive business organization and management class. On the first day of class with the active participation of the students, we review the syllabus. The specific tasks during the semester are as follows: to visit the Writing Center and the Library and to write one page about each of these experiences, to research five topics related to the student learning outcomes of the course, and to create questions to interview a manager. After interviewing the manager, students present a final research paper and deliver a PowerPoint presentation. It is important to mention all homework, research papers, and presentations must be submitted on the day they are due. Finally, for the evidence: for fall 2012 the expected average for the two classes was a score of 8.5 out of 10. The result for one section was 9.3, and for the other section it was 9.6. Keywords Syllabi, responsibility, and learning outcomes

Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity

A host of simple teaching strategies—referred to as “equitable teaching strategies” and rooted in research on learning—can support biology instructors in striving for classroom equity and in teachi...

Beyond the Syllabus: Using the First Day of Class in Physical Chemistry as an Introduction to the Development of Macroscopic, Molecular-Level, and Mathematical Models

The initial interaction among student, instructor, and content on the first day of class is critical in setting the stage for the remainder of the semester. While many students would like to ease into the semester, experienced faculty realize that the first day of class provides a one-time opportunity to shape the students’ first impression of a subject area. In this paper, a process is outlined for introducing the physical chemistry course in such a way that students expect that much of the course will be about developing models to describe physical and chemical processes and that those models may be macroscopic, molecular-level, or mathematical in nature.

Thermometry as a Teaching Tool for Graphing: A First-Day Introductory Chemistry Laboratory Experiment

Preparing a meaningful laboratory exercise for introductory or general chemistry students to perform, especially on the first day of class, is challenging. Introductory or general chemistry students range from being skilled in laboratory techniques and equipment usage to never having been in a laboratory setting. Subject content can be taught in the laboratory in advance of an associated lecture, but this too is not always popular or practicable. A laboratory exercise is presented that can be taught at the very beginning of the semester. The primary focus is on graphing to investigate the thermal expansion of a liquid, but students can be instructed on recording data precisely from a measuring device, be introduced to the basic physical properties of liquids, practice using a spreadsheet software program for data analysis, and learn good laboratory note-taking. The experiment is appropriate for a first-semester general chemistry course, physical science, or high-school chemistry.

“Recombinant protein of the day”: Using daily student presentations to add real‐world aspects to a biotechnology course

“Recombinant protein of the day”: Using daily student presentations to add real‐world aspects to a biotechnology course

Healing power of honey

Say the word “insect” and what comes to mind? I asked that question to nonentomology, first-year undergraduate students on the first day of class. The typical response: “Insects suck.”

Cadaver Presentations: An Integrative, Clinical Approach to Anatomy

The current standard for medical human anatomy courses includes a didactic and laboratory component where medical students learn about the human body through traditional lectures and laboratory dissection or prosection. At the Quillen College of Medicine, the Medical Human Gross Anatomy and Embryology course includes the traditional elements of lecture and laboratory dissection, but recently incorporated a longitudinal element that starts with the cadaver dissection during the traditional course. From the first day of class, students are encouraged to look at the cadaver as their first patient, keeping a chart of abnormal findings and determining likely health problems present—one of which will become their presentation topic. The first year of study is marked by an end of the year “mini‐grand rounds” where students present not only the anatomy, but also the biochemistry, physiology, histology and genetics involved in the cause of death or pathology findings related to their first patient. This project fuses classroom learning with clinical medicine, challenging students to look at their cadaver less as a tool for academics and more as their patient. This project is planned to be projected into the second year, where an additional presentation encompassing elements of pathology, pharmacology, microbiology, immunology, neuroscience and lifespan and development (introduction to psychiatry) can also be presented, as appropriate.