Technical Assistance Systems Research Articles

Creating a virtual academic community for STEM students

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe synchronous, remote tutoring for the Deaf STEM Community Alliance's virtual academic community (VAC). The alliance addresses critical barriers for students who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) in postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Design/methodology/approach – A mixed-method approach (qualitative content analysis and descriptive statistics) documents project activities. Findings – Google+ Hangouts was used for remote tutoring. Participants completed 57 tutoring sessions. Participants found tutoring beneficial, especially for its convenience. Technical assistance and feedback systems were created to support participants. Grade point averages (GPA) and retention remained stable. Research limitations/implications – Research on this project continues. Small sample size is a limitation of the study. Ongoing research investigates how remote technology and social media impact learning for students who are D/HH. Practical implications – Scholarship on social media for educational purposes is minimal. While specifics of particular social media platforms vary, recruitment, technical assistance, and establishing feedback mechanisms are common issues for VACs. Outcomes from this study will be used to improve this VAC and create documentation for replication. Social implications – The Deaf STEM Community Alliance provides supportive resources to underrepresented students in STEM majors. Improved GPA and retention in STEM majors will generate more individuals qualified for STEM careers. Research on VACs creates opportunities to understand how technology and networked communities change knowledge and learning. Originality/value – The Deaf STEM Community Alliance is a unique project for postsecondary students in STEM fields who are D/HH. The information is valuable to educators interested in using social media for instruction.

Defining and assessing evidence for the effectiveness of technical assistance in furthering global health

In an era when health resources are increasingly constrained, international organisations are transitioning from directly managing health services to providing technical assistance (TA) to in-country owners of public health programmes. We define TA as: ‘A dynamic, capacity-building process for designing or improving the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of specific programmes, research, services, products, or systems’. TA can build sustainable capacities, strengthen health systems and support country ownership. However, our assessment of published evaluations found limited evidence for its effectiveness. We summarise socio-behavioural theories relevant to TA, review published evaluations and describe skills required for TA providers. We explore challenges to providing TA including cost effectiveness, knowledge management and sustaining TA systems. Lastly, we outline recommendations for structuring global TA systems. Considering its important role in global health, more rigorous evaluations of TA efforts should be given high priority.

Technical Assistance Systems Influence the Work Organisation to Challenge the Demographical Change

Article Technical Assistance Systems Influence the Work Organisation to Challenge the Demographical Change was published on September 6, 2012 in the journal Biomedical Engineering / Biomedizinische Technik (volume 57, issue SI-1-Track-N).

Getting What You Ask For

This article provides a greater understanding of the contract monitoring process by identifying barriers that prevent contracted providers from using service monitoring tools properly. To evaluate barriers to proper tool use, seven case studies were conducted on early childhood programs in three communities in upstate New York. The case studies specifically focused on the reporting forms that the early childhood programs completed. Data sources included (a) interviews with government agency and contracted provider employees, (b) content analysis of key documents relating to the service monitoring tools, and (c) attendance at meetings between government agencies and contracted providers on the service monitoring tools. This article identifies lack of contracted provider ability and misunderstandings between government and contracted providers as key barriers to proper tool use. This study also finds evidence suggesting a link between the overall strength of technical assistance systems and understanding problems.

HIV/AIDS financing: a case for improving the quality and quantity of aid

There is no doubt that increasing amounts of funding are needed to provide a full package of HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and mitigation interventions to Africa. However, even the existing funding flows are posing considerable challenges at a national level. In the quest for rapid results, donors have too often chosen to alleviate the lack of local capacity by bringing in foreign technical assistance or building parallel systems for delivering commodities such as drugs that may not be sustainable over the long term once external assistance stops. Even when such interventions may be relevant, they do not address the biggest challenge, namely how to build up the capacity and the systems needed for large-scale implementation of the AIDS response. This article argues that to attain the needed efficacy in HIV/AIDS mitigation programmes, further sustainable increase in external financing is certainly required (particularly for treatment programmes), but even more important is the need to implement them.

Family-strengthening approaches for the prevention of youth problem behaviors.

Effective parenting is the most powerful way to reduce adolescent problem behaviors. Dissemination of research-based family interventions has been slow, with most practitioners still implementing ineffective programs. This article reviews 2 federal studies that involved national searches for effective family interventions targeting pre-birth to adolescence: Preventing Substance Abuse Among Children and Adolescents: Family-Centered Approaches (Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, 1998) and Strengthening America's Families (R. Alvarado, K. L. Kumpfer, K. Kendall, S. Beesley, & C. Lee-Cavaness, 2000). Results identified 3 effective prevention approaches, 13 principles of effectiveness, and 35 programs. Recommendations include increased dissemination research on training and technical assistance systems, adoption with fidelity and quality, and gender-, age-, and culturally sensitive adaptations.

Community interventions and effective prevention.

The prevalence of pregnancy, substance abuse, violence, and delinquency among young people is unacceptably high. Interventions for preventing problems in large numbers of youth require more than individual psychological interventions. Successful interventions include the involvement of prevention practitioners and community residents in community-level interventions. The potential of community-level interventions is illustrated by a number of successful studies. However, more inclusive reviews and multisite comparisons show that although there have been successes, many interventions did not demonstrate results. The road to greater success includes prevention science and newer community-centered models of accountability and technical assistance systems for prevention.

Supporting community-based prevention and health promotion initiatives: developing effective technical assistance systems.

As research evidence for the effectiveness of community-based prevention has mounted, so has recognition of the gap between research and community practice. As a result, state and local governments are taking a more active role in building the capacity of community-based organizations to deliver evidence-based prevention interventions. Innovations are taking place in the establishment of technical assistance or support systems to influence the prevention and health education activities of community-based organizations. Several challenges for technical assistance systems are described: (1) setting prevention priorities and allocating limited technical assistance resources, (2) balancing capacity-building versus program dissemination efforts, (3) collaborating across categorical problem areas, (4) designing technical assistance initiatives with enough "dose strength" to have an effect, (5) balancing fidelity versus adaptation in program implementation, (6) building organizational cultures that support innovation, and (7) building local evaluative capacity versus generalizable evaluation findings.

Maintaining Inter-Vehicle Spacing -Using Synergetic Effects between Rail and Road Traffic!

Now as ever, transportation services are a decisive criterion of an economy. This constitutes the background for dealing with the various routing and protection principles for the two important land-based traffic systems: namely, road and rail transport. The objective is to determine how the two systems could benefit from the respectively chosen approaches to a solution and which future operating concepts this makes possible. Whether in rail or road traffic, inter-vehicle spacing directly effects several quality criteria of the transport process, and vehicle throughput. The various theoretically possible and practically applied principles for maintaining inter-vehicle spacing will be described and assessed with regard to occupied time, safety, and throughput. Today, various principles are used in both system which is attributable in part to the historical development of the system but also to the possibility of supporting the system through technical assistance systems. For both systems the possible maximum traffic throughput is considered depending on maintaining inter-vehicle spacing. Synergy potential can be used through an interdisciplinary approach to detection and classification of traffic scenarios. In the future, vehicle electronics will be developed with the same objectives and similar outline conditions. Rail traffic then can profit from the series effect of road traffic and thus reinforce its market position through affordable solutions. Identical concepts in the field of vehicle-based route information (digital map) will permit joint solutions. In the field of convoy formation and automatic, driverless operation, joint studies make sense when it comes to longitudinal guidance and vehicle protection.

Models for the Delivery of Technical Assistance for Rural Special Education of Preschool Handicapped Children

Increased attention has recently been given to the special educational needs of preschool handicapped children, especially when services are to be delivered in ' 'mainstream (i.e., nonsegregated) settings [ 1-5] . However, the specific problems encountered in providing services to children in rural areas have not been satisfactorily addressed [ 6] . We shall therefore focus here on two technical assistance systems VirginiaTs Technical Assistance Centers (TACs), and California^ Special Education Resource Network (SERN) that illustrate important issues in attempts to provide comprehensive special education services to preschool children residing in rural