Thesis advisor: Pamela J. Grace / Background: As established in professional codes of ethics, critical care nurses must be equipped to provide good (ethical) patient care. This requires ethical awareness, which involves recognizing the ethical implications of all nursing actions (ranging from the mundane to the dilemmatic). Ethical awareness is imperative in successfully addressing patient needs, however, evidence suggests that the ethical import of everyday issues may often go unnoticed by nurses in practice. Assessing nurses’ ethical awareness is a necessary first step in preparing nurses to identify and manage ethical issues in the highly dynamic critical care environment. Purpose: To use Rasch principles to develop a psychometrically sound instrument to assess the nature and extent of critical care nurses’ ethical awareness in the context of everyday nursing practice, and to assess the success of scale development using a Rasch model. Method: An item bank representing nursing actions was developed (33 items). Content validity testing with nursing ethics experts (n = 5) was performed (CVI-I = 1). Eighteen items were selected for face validity testing with graduate nursing students (n = 7). After revisions, two full-scale pilot administrations were performed to run item analyses. Sample: Critical care nurses (n = 116) at a large academic teaching hospital in New England. Results: Pilot test analyses suggest sufficient item invariance across samples and sufficient construct validity. Final analyses demonstrate a progression of items uniformly along a hierarchical continuum; items that match respondent ability levels; response categories that are sufficiently used; a Principle Components Analysis demonstrating randomness of residuals, and adequate internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.83). Mean ethical awareness scores were in the low/moderate range (M = 34.9/54; logit = -0.21). Conclusion: The results of this study suggest the Ethical Awareness Scale (EAS) is a psychometrically sound, reliable, and valid measure of ethical awareness in critical care nurses. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Connell School of Nursing. / Discipline: Nursing.

In response to test-based accountability (No Child Left Behind, 2001), schools and districts across the country are adopting a variety of supplemental assessments aimed at improving student performance. These interim assessments are administered more than once during the school year for the following purposes: 1) predicting student performance on summative accountability tests, 2) identifying student strengths and weaknesses, 3) tracking student progress toward "proficiency," or 4) identifying students for remedial instruction. Vendors claim these assessments can improve teaching and learning, although critics contend they do not possess a number of attributes theorized to facilitate formative use of results, including particular assessment features, instructional practices, and school-level supports. To date, empirical evidence on interim assessments is scarce. Thus, this study collected the first empirical evidence on the use of interim assessments in reading and math in Iowa elementary schools. Elementary school administrators completed a survey regarding their school or district's use of interim assessments. Respondents provided basic descriptive information and also indicated how teachers use assessment results to modify teaching and learning and the types of professional development opportunities available. A companion teacher survey designed to capture teachers' use of assessment information to improve teaching and learning was constructed. This draft teacher survey was pilot-tested with a small sample of teachers in order to improve its clarity by identifying areas of ambiguity. Feedback generated from these interviews was used to revise the teacher survey. Study results suggest widespread use of interim assessments among respondents, particularly for the improvement of reading skills and primarily for instructional and remediation purposes. These reading assessments appeared to exhibit many of the characteristics deemed essential for formative use of assessment results. However, both survey and interview results suggested teachers have little autonomy for deciding when assessments will be administered. Results also suggest there is much room for improvement in teachers' formative use of assessment results, as one of the most important aspects of formative use (responding to results by modifying instruction and identifying alternative pedagogies) may also be the least used by classroom teachers and the most neglected with respect to professional development.

The advantages of having a strong professional identity include ethical performances, promoted wellness, and increased awareness of roles and functions among individual counselors (Brott & Myers, 1999; Grimmit & Paisley, 2008; Ponton & Duba, 2009). Scholars in the counseling field have underscored the importance of unified professional identity of counseling, but have yet to create or comprehensively measure the construct. The purpose of this study was to construct a reliable and valid instrument the Professional Identity Scale in Counseling (PISC). The PISC is a 62-item instrument designed to measure professional identity in counseling professionals across all counseling sub-specialties and sub-populations. The PISC's development was based on a comprehensive definition of professional identity derived from the counseling literature. To investigate the factor structure of the PISC, an exploratory factor analysis with the Principle Component Analysis extraction and the varimax rotation method was conducted. The factor analysis produced a meaningful six-factor solution with a total of 54 items. These six factors were Engagement Behaviors, Knowledge of the Profession, Professional Roles and Expertise, Attitude, Philosophy of the Profession, and Professional Values. They approximately accounted for 43.54% of the total variance in a sample of 371 participants. Reliability was supported by internal consistency values as reflected in high Cronbach's coefficient alpha for four factors and acceptable Cronbach's alpha for one factor. Regarding validity, support for convergent validity of the PISC was illustrated as all six subscales significantly correlated with one subscale of the PIVS, Professional Orientation and Values, and five subscales significantly correlated with the other subscale of the PIVS, Professional Development. Social desirability that was measured using the M-C (20) did not appear to impact participants' responses to the instrument items, providing evidence of discriminant validity of the PISC. Additional analysis was conducted to investigate differences among participant groups on the PISC total scores. Results showed significant group differences between master's-level and doctoral-level counseling professionals. Implications for counselors and counselor educators are also discussed related to the findings.

Teacher shortages are a critical issue for education, and agricultural education has not been exempt from this trend. Many factors possibly contribute to this lack of qualified teachers. Researchers suggest that retention practices, stress factors associated with agricultural education, and job satisfaction may be areas for improvement within the profession. A deeper understanding of the problems beginning teachers experience is a critical first step in raising the retention rate for new teachers. An original researcher-designed instrument based on Moir was composed of 66 items intended to measure induction-year teachers’ attitude toward teaching and was administered at six different points in time to induction-year agriculture teachers in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico during the 2011–2012 school year. Data collection occurred via a mixed mode design following the Tailored Design Method. The overall response rate was 52.5% with 197 responses to the instrument. All 66 scale items from the original questionnaire were included in the principal component analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation; coefficients with an absolute value less than 0.45 were suppressed. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) of sampling adequacy was 0.787 and Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant (p < 0.001). Factor analysis yielded a nine factor solution using varimax rotation. Forty-five items composed the Agricultural Education Induction-Year Teacher Attitudinal Scale. Descriptive names for the constructs were the product of 20 experts in the field of agricultural education: “Professional Efficacy,” “Balanced Reflection,” “Professional Commitment,” “Professional Confidence,” “Anticipated Change,” “Work-Life Balance,” “Strategic Renewal,” “Problem Solving,” and “Professional Resolve.” Overall reliability coefficient for the proposed new instrument was 0.88. Overall attitude toward teaching was not statistically significantly different across measures. No significant predictors of attitude toward teaching based on selected demographic variables were generated as a result of forced entry regression. Grand mean scores per round did not statistically differ from one round to another. A model of induction-year agricultural education teacher’s attitudes was proposed along with a scale adjusted model of agricultural education teacher attitude toward teaching. A model of all attitude constructs was presented to illustrate the effect of time on the attitude of the induction-year agricultural education teachers.

In the past decade, there has been an enormous growth of distance education courses and programs in higher education. However, the potential of distance education is tempered by one overriding question: How do you ensure that distance education coursework and degrees are of high quality? The purpose of this study is threefold: (1) to identify quality indicators of distance education; (2) to provide implications of the identified quality indicators for health education researchers and practitioners; and, (3) to develop an instrument to assess student opinions of the quality of distance education. Dillman's (2000) steps of pretesting and the instrument development framework in the Standards (1999) were used, and data were collected from students enrolled in four health education on-line courses during the Spring 2006 semester at Texas A&M University. MPlus (Muthen & Muthen, 2002) was used to conduct reliability and validity analyses of the instrument. The results of the study revealed common benchmarks and quality indicators that all parties deem important in designing, implementing and evaluating distance education courses and programs. Additionally, an instrument was produced that resulted in both valid and reliable scores.

The overarching goal of this dissertation research was to develop and measure the psychometric properties of an instrument to assess preservice teachers’ content knowledge of the function concept embedded in contextual problems. This goal was accomplished through two research projects described in two central chapters. Chapter II reports on the collective case study that was used to pilot test the instrument and Chapter III details the rationale used in item selection and the psychometric properties of the new instrument. Unlike existing research studies that examine a broad range of function related topics using various forms of symbolic, tabular, and graphical representations as the basis for questions and problems, this study focused solely on function problems immersed in various real world contexts. Since this is not a common approach to measuring content knowledge of the function concept, the existing instruments in published studies were not found to be suitable for this specialized purpose. The psychometric measurements of the instrument did not suggest that the instrument was valid or reliable so more research will be required to validate the instrument. However, based on the preliminary results from testing, several potential suggestions can be made to teacher educations programs. Inferences drawn from the mathematical problem-solving cognition will aid in the development and validation of future instruments to assess preservice mathematics teachers’ knowledge of how to connect their knowledge mathematical concept of function to a contextual setting.

This study concerned the development of measures for youth civic development in Malaysia with four major goals in mind, namely conceptual, measurement, baseline/pragmatic, and predictive goals. It was a preliminary study of its kind in Malaysia as Malaysia did not participate in any international or regional study such as the IEA Civic Study. The central intention of the study was to establish a conceptually valid assessment framework and psychometrically sound instruments for the measurement of youth civic development in Malaysia. This would, in turn, provide some baseline information upon which future research on youth civic development in Malaysia could build. Civics as a subject was removed from the Malaysian school curriculum in the early 1980s and Civic and Citizenship Education as a specific subject, with an explicit structure and curriculum framework, was reintroduced only in 2005. It was not feasible at the time when this study was conducted to conduct a specific assessment on the outcomes for school-aged students as explicated and expected in the curriculum framework. Therefore, the post-school-aged group of young undergraduates in public universities within the age range of 17-28 was selected as the target population. Firstly, a conceptualisation of youth civic development was synthesized by identifying current views on citizenship, as set out in the international literature and, specifically, in Malaysia in two major documents – the Rukenagara and Vision2020. Civic development consists of three variables of Civic Knowledge (CK) (knowledge about the legal status and associated rights and responsibilities of citizens); Civic Disposition (CD) (views on identity and attitudes as a citizen); and Civic Engagement (CE) (participation as a citizen). The relationship between civic development variables was explicated through a Neo-Vygotskian cultural-historical theory of human development. In addition, Bronfenbrenner’s Socio-Ecological Theory of human development was adopted for the selection of contextual and individual factors (the independent variables) for the conceptual model. To help ensure cross-cultural validity for use within the Malaysian socio-cultural context, the three dependent variables of CK, CD and CE, and the independent variables were appraised for their suitability for use within the Malaysian socio-cultural context before they were operationalized into observable indicators. Secondly, the Rasch measurement paradigm, framework and model were adopted as the foundation for instrument development and validation. The procedures for instrument development followed Wilson’s model of four building blocks of instrument development (Wilson, 2005). Three instruments were developed for this study, namely The Malaysian Civic Knowledge Inventory (MCKI), The Malaysian Civic Disposition Inventory (MCDI), and the Malaysian Civic Engagement Inventory (MCEI). Items from existing instruments in international literature were adopted or adapted for the three instruments, especially the MCEI, if there was construct equivalence in Rukunegara and Vision 2020. This was to ensure a cumulative tradition in research on youth civic development. Most of the items in the MCKI and the MCDI however were developed specifically for this study to capture the specificity of the civic culture of Malaysia. The target population for the study was undergraduate students enrolled in Malaysian public universities. Students at one public university were chosen as the accessible population. Data were collected in February 2006 (pilot study) and from July to August 2006 (main study). The sample for this study (N=1391) was drawn through multistage cluster sampling by study concentration, level of study, and clusters based on lecture/tutorial group. The sample also, by default, included major inherent characteristics of the target population, particularly gender (Male and Female) and ethnicity (Malay, Chinese, Indian and other ethnic groups). Rasch analyses confirmed the three-dimensional structure of youth civic development. Three measurement scales with acceptable psychometric properties were established to provide measures for the three dependent variables of CK, CD and CE. The hypotheses about civic development (in terms of CK, CD and CE) as a ‘tool and result’ activity were tested through path analyses of mediational relationships based on Baron and Kenny’s criteria (1986) using the Rasch-derived linearized scores from the main study. Analyses provided statistical support for a bidirectional association between each pair of CK, CD and CE, despite the low inter-correlations between them. This study revealed that, on average, youth in this study demonstrated a moderately high level of CK (Mean =1.11, SD = 0.77), a positive CD (Mean = 1.25; SD = 0.63) but a moderately low CE (Mean = -0.44; SD = 0.92). The Malay sub-sample scored, on average, higher on all three dimensions of civic development. The results of hierarchical multiple regressions however showed the effect of ethnicity (Malay or Non-Malay) was statistically non-significant when other contextual (home, curricular and co-curricular) variables were entered into the regression equation. This indicates it is not ethnicity that predicts levels of civic development, but rather it is the differences in other socio-political entitlements and status associated with ethnic status. Three selected collective social-contextual factors of home, curriculum and co-curriculum explained only a fairly modest but statistically significant amount of variance (10 to 20%) in the dependent variables. Finally, the findings were discussed in relation to the theoretical perspectives undergirding this study. Pragmatic implications for policy planning as well as other relevant stakeholders involved in youth civic development are also discussed.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, 2009. / Title from screen (viewed on August 28, 2009). School of Nursing, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Pamela Jeffries, Daniel Pesut, Judith Halstead, Tamilyn Bakas. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-179).

Abstract This study seeks to explore mental representations of caregiving, an area of attachment that has been the subject of relatively little research. The Caregiving Styles Questionnaire (CSQ) was developed as a cost effective and efficient alternative to lengthier caregiving interviews, and this study examines its internal and external validity. An initial item critique was used to examine underlying constructs of the measure. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a three factor structure, which was replicated in a subsequent EFA using a data set that differed primarily in the age of the target child. The three factors included (1) Relationship uncertainty, (2) Needy uncertainty, and (3) Rejecting representations of caregiving. Each of these scales had high reliability, and the results reflected existing caregiving representations that have been theorized in previous studies. These findings, particularly the generalizability of the measure across age groups, indicate that it would be worthwhile to continue refining the CSQ items in order to provide a valid measure of an understudied behavioral system.

Background: Previous research has identified four distinct developmental stages associated with organizational learning in high-performing hospital units: identity and ownership, team and respect, accountability and support, and reliability and sustainability. We designed a research instrument to measure these constructs. The purpose of this thesis was to establish the content and predictive validity of this instrument.Methods: The Organizational Learning Development Instrument (OLDI) consists of a total of 35 items in Likert-scale format. Item-level and instrument-level content validity were assessed using three cycles of cognitive interviewing with 28 nurses, and eight expert ratings. The OLDI was administered to nurses in Magnet® hospitals via a web-based survey. National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI) and Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) reports were used for comparison of hospital performance. Predictive validity was tested using multiple linear regression. Based on a power analysis for multiple linear regression, reaching 80% power, with a medium effect size of 0.15, an alpha of 0.05, and five predictor variables, the target sample size was 92 hospital units.Results: Results from 63 inpatient units in 11 Magnet® hospitals were used. The scale- level content validity for this instrument was 0.95 and item-level content validity index scores ranged from 0.86 to 1.0, suggesting excellent content validity. No significant relationships were found between OLDI results and NDNQI measures. Significant correlations (P<.05) were found between several OLDI constructs and HCAHPS composites.Discussion: Correlations with HCAHPS scores help validate the OLDI, as well as the theory underlying the instrument. The OLDI may not have predicted NDNQI measures due to a lack of instrument sensitivity or because NDNQI results are strongly influenced by other factors. Nurse managers can use the OLDI to predict unit performance related to patient satisfaction and to determine actions that may improve unit performance. Replicating this study with a larger sample size and more diverse hospital performance and more uniform unit type could further validate this instrument.