In 2013, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers System (HCAHPS), a national, independent metric of patient satisfaction, revealed room for improvement at a teaching hospital in the southeastern section of the United States. This project reports the development and validation of a Bedside Shift Report (BSR) policy, practice guidelines, and associated documentation. Several initiatives, models, and theories informed thinking about this project. The work of Kurt Lewin and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's joint initiative, Transforming Care at the Bedside, both guided the project in terms of the process of institutional change. SBAR (Situation Background Assessment and Recommendation Technique) was the primary model upon which communication strategies were developed. PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) served as a continuous quality improvement model to inform development of the implementation and evaluation plans. Using these concepts, models, and theories, a project team led by the DNP student reviewed relevant literature and considered institutional contexts and goals in order to develop a new institutional bedside-report (BSR) policy along with practice guidelines to inform operationalization of the BSR policy. Five scholars reviewed these products with expertise in relevant content areas in order to validate essential content; both policy and practice guidelines were revised in accordance with feedback. All related documentation needed to implement the products, along with both an implementation and an evaluation plan, were also developed by the project team. Improved nurse-patient communication holds significant potential to improve patient satisfaction and to promote positive social change across the institutional service population.

Students are reaching middle school 2 or more years behind in reading ability. As a result, they are unable to meet state testing standards. In 2007, the READ 180 program was implemented at an urban middle school in Virginia to address the reading gaps of these middle school students. The purpose of this sequential mixed-method program evaluation was to analyze the reading success of 30 READ 180 students and the perceptions of 4 teachers who taught the READ 180 curriculum. The theoretical framework that served as a basis for this study was Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which holds that independent thinking is facilitated by developmentally-appropriate instruction. Research questions examined the strengths and weaknesses of the program and its effectiveness on helping the students improve their reading ability. Student scores from the program assessments were examined using a paired samples t test and by comparing central tendencies. An analysis showed a 15% increase in students' SRI pre- and posttest scores, noting that 6.67% of students passed the reading SOL. Themes from the teacher interviews indicated that the teachers perceived the training to be sufficient and that the materials and technology were authentic; however, updated curricula materials were needed. The quantitative and qualitative research data were used to generate an evaluation report to share explicit research findings with the school division and parents about the programs' successes and needs for improvement. Social change was supported by evaluating a reading intervention program designed to increase middle school students' reading ability.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rhode Island, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 52-57).

A key collaborative hub for many software development projects is the issue tracking system, or bug repository. The use of a bug repository can improve the software development process in a number of ways including allowing developers who are geographically distributed to communicate about project development. However, reports added to the repository need to be triaged by a human, called the triager, to determine if reports are meaningful. If a report is meaningful, the triager decides how to organize the report for integration into the project's development process. We call triager decisions with the goal of determining if a report is meaningful, repository-oriented decisions, and triager decisions that organize reports for the development process, development-oriented decisions. Triagers can become overwhelmed by the number of reports added to the repository. Time spent triaging also typically diverts valuable resources away from the improvement of the product to the managing of the development process. To assist triagers, this dissertation presents a machine learning approach to create recommenders that assist with a variety of development-oriented decisions. In this way, we strive to reduce human involvement in triage by moving the triager's role from having to gather information to make a decision to that of confirming a suggestion. This dissertation introduces a triage-assisting recommender creation process that can create a variety of different development-oriented decision recommenders for a range of projects. The recommenders created with this approach are accurate: recommenders for which developer to assign a report have a precision of 70% to 98% over five open source projects, recommenders for which product component the report is for have a recall of 72% to 92%, and recommenders for who to add to the cc: list of a report that have a recall of 46% to 72%. We have evaluated recommenders created with our triage-assisting recommender creation process using both an analytic evaluation and a field study. In addition, we present in this dissertation an approach to assist project members to specify the project-specific values for the triage-assisting recommender creation process, and show that such recommenders can be created with a subset of the repository data.

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