<p> Current political, social and professional trends have resulted in an increased enrollment of registered nurses (RNs) in Baccalaureate of Nursing (RN to BSN) completion programs (AACN, 2012; McEwen, White, Pullis &amp; Krawtz, 2012). Although recent studies have demonstrated the benefits of baccalaureate preparation on patient outcomes in the areas of safety and decreased mortality (Aiken, Clark, Cheung, Sloan &amp; Silber, 2003; Aiken, Clarke, Sloane, Lake &amp; Cheney, 2008; Blegen, Goode, Park, Vaughn &amp; Spetz, 2013; Kutney-Lee, Sloan &amp; Aiken, 2013; Aiken et.al, 2014), and on leadership, critical thinking and communication skills (AACN, 2010; Giger &amp; Davidhizar, 1990; McNeish, Rodriquez, Goyal &amp; Apen, 2013; Phillips, Palmer, Zimmerman &amp; Mayfield, 2002), there is limited literature on the <i> personal transformation</i> that is experienced by the registered nurse (RN) who has completed the Baccalaureate degree in nursing. Research from the disciplines of psychology, college student development and adult education describe the importance of personal transformation and the development of self-authorship in college students to meet the complex challenges of the 21^st century. The purpose of this study was to explore personal transformation, with specific attention to the development of self-authorship, in the RN who recently graduated from a baccalaureate completion program. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 RNs who graduated from an RN to BSN program within the past year. Transformation was described as meaningful change in self and practice. Meaningful change in this sample was evident in a lasting awareness, an increase in confidence and the application of new learning into practice. Themes that emerged from the category of Change in Self included having gained 1) a broader perspective, 2) confidence and 3) awareness and clarity. Narratives that described Change in Practice generated themes of 1) feeling more well-rounded as a nurse, 2) having more confidence in practice and 3) having acquired new skills. Knowledge in this area could influence the intentional design of RN to BSN curricula for transformation, as well as encourage further research on personal transformation related to professional practice and health care outcomes.</p>

<p> By integrating spiritual development theories with Sanford's theory of challenge and support and study findings, this mixed methods study examines how spiritual development may be occurring through service-learning. The relationship between service-learning participation and spiritual growth is analyzed by addressing the following research questions: 1) Does spiritual growth occur among undergraduates participating in service-learning? 2) Which aspects of the service-learning experience relate to the occurrence of spiritual growth? 3) What role do "challenge" and "support" play in the process of spiritual growth? </p><p> The 272 study participants are drawn from the Boston College PULSE Program, a service-learning program that requires 10-12 hours of weekly service for the full academic year while students simultaneously take an interdisciplinary philosophy and theology course entitled, Person and Social Responsibility. The quantitative strand of this study sought to objectively understand the components of the PULSE program that may relate to spiritual development among undergraduates through a pre-test/post-test survey adapted from the College Student Beliefs and Values instrument created by Astin, Astin, &amp; Lindholm (2011). The qualitative strand consisted of semi-structured, one-on-one interviews with eleven study participants whose quantitative survey results demonstrated particularly high or low levels of spiritual change. </p><p> Study findings indicate that nearly 80% of study participants grew spiritually during the service-learning experience. Consistent with Sanford's (1962, 1966,1967) theory of college student development and the spiritual development theories of Fowler (1981) and Daloz Parks (2000), spiritual growth was most likely to occur when students experienced significant challenge balanced with support. Qualitative and quantitative results found that challenge was related to the eye opening experience of witnessing injustice at service sites while simultaneously being exposed to diverse perspectives through course assignments and discussions. This eye opening experience led students to struggle spiritually as they questioned prior assumptions and beliefs. Support was found in relationships and effective integration of course content with the service experience.</p>

<p> This doctoral research is an ethnographic study that describes the lived culture of Alice Lloyd College, a work college located in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, and its efficacy in engaging Appalachian students in sustainability education in a college setting. Campus culture was found to be consistent with that of the broader Appalachian region, with three blue collar values emerging as core cultural indicators within the campus community. The three core values are work ethic, service, and self-reliance. Student participants reported low levels of cultural dissonance in transitioning from their family lives to life in college, with most claiming that their immediate families were supportive of their decision to attend college. This is uncommon in the higher education landscape as many Appalachian students on more traditional campuses are first-generation, struggle to persist to graduation, and experience clashing between their home culture and that which they experience at school. The institution was found to be a model of sustainability education in the areas of social and economic justice. Social justice is promoted through the enactment of the institution&rsquo;s mission of cultivating leaders to serve and improve the Appalachian region. Economic justice is fostered through the College&rsquo;s work program which makes higher education possible without debt for low-income Appalachian students by providing tuition waivers to those who work a minimum of 10 hours per week carrying out critical campus operations. While environmental justice was not found to be a current outcome, the institution&rsquo;s practices have valuable implications for re-envisioning higher education as a tool for promoting&mdash;rather than impeding&mdash;holistic sustainability efforts by reinforcing and promulgating sustainable blue collar values through teaching subsistence skills and systems thinking in a work college setting. Data collection for this study was conducted via responsive qualitative interviews with multiple campus constituent groups, including students, faculty, and staff. Data analysis consisted of attributes coding, magnitude coding, and values coding, followed by code landscaping to identify patterns across each coding phase.</p>

<p> This dissertation seeks to explain why large segments of the Jewish community, after working with blacks for decades, often quite radically towards expanding the boundaries of citizenship at City College, rejected the legitimacy of the 1970 Open Admissions policy? While succeeding in radically transforming the structure of City College and CUNY more broadly, the Black and Puerto Rican Student Community's late 1960&rsquo;s political mobilization failed as an act of citizenship because its claims went broadly unrecognized. Rather than being remembered as political action that expanded the structure and content of citizenship, the Open Admissions crisis and policy are remembered as having destroyed a once great college. The black and Puerto Rican students who claimed an equal right to higher education were seen as unworthy of the forms of inclusion they demanded, and the radical democracy of Open Admissions was short lived, being decisively reformed in the mid 70&rsquo;s in spite of what subsequent research has shown to be remarkable success in educating thousands who previously had no hope of pursuing a college degree. This dissertation places this question in historical context in three ways. </p><p> First, it historicizes the political culture at City College showing it to be an important incubator and index of the changing political imaginaries of the long civil rights movement by analyzing the shifting and evolving publics on the college&rsquo;s campus, tracing the rise and fall of different political imaginaries. Significantly, the shifting political imaginaries across time at City College sustained different kinds of ethical claims. For instance, in the period from the 1930 to 1950, Jewish and black City College students tended to recognize each other as suffering from parallel forms of systemic racism within U.S. society. Understanding each other to be similarly excluded from a social system that benefitted a largely white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant elite, enabled Jewish and black City College students to position themselves and each other as the normative subjects of American democracy. However, in the 1960&rsquo;s, political imaginaries at City College had come to be anchored in more individualistic idioms, and ethical claims tended to be made within individualistic terms. Within such a context, when the BPRSC revived radically democratic idioms of political claims making, they tended to be understood by many whites as pathologically illiberal. </p><p> Second, it historicizes the ways in which City College constructed &ldquo;the meritorious student&rdquo; by analyzing the social, political and institutional forces that drove the college to continuously reformulate its admissions practices across its entire history. It shows that while many actors during the Open Admissions crisis invested City College&rsquo;s definitions of merit with sacred academic legitimacy, they were in fact rarely crafted for academic reasons or according to a purely academic logic. Regardless, many ignored the fact the admissions standards were arbitrarily based, instead believing such standards were the legitimate marker of academic ability and worthiness. By examining the institutional construction of the &ldquo;meritorious&rdquo; student the dissertation shows the production of educational citizenship from above while also revealing how different actors and their standpoints were simultaneously constructed by how they were positioned by this institutional process. </p><p> Finally, the dissertation examines two significant historical events of student protest, the Knickerbocker-Davis Affair of the late 1940's and the Open Admissions Crisis of the late 1960's. In these events, City College students challenged the content of &ldquo;educational citizenship.&rdquo; These events were embedded in the shifting political culture at City College and were affected by the historically changing ways different groups, especially Jews and blacks, were positioned by the structure of educational citizenship. </p><p> While Jews had passed into whiteness by the late 1960&rsquo;s in the U.S, there was no objective reason for many to claim the privileges of whiteness by rejecting a universal policy such as Open Admissions. Yet, many Jews interpreted Open Admissions as against their personal and group interests, and rejected the ethical claim to equality made by the BPRSC. By placing the Open Admissions crisis in deep historical and institutional context, and comparing the 1969 student mobilization to earlier student actions, the dissertation shows how actors sorted different political, institutional and symbolic currents to interpret their interests and construct their identities and lines of action. </p>

<p> <b>Purpose:</b> The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of notecards, a study aid, on students&rsquo; learning in three sections of a non-majors undergraduate Human Biology course. Moreover, the effectiveness of illustrations as study aids was compared with the effectiveness of descriptions as study aids. Presently, there is not much research on this particular topic, but notecards are a quite common method of studying. </p><p> <b>Hypothesis:</b> It was expected that the use of notecards would be more beneficial to student learning than no use at all. Furthermore, it was expected that drawing illustrations would be more effective than writing definitions or descriptions. </p><p> <b>Method:</b> Three Human Biology courses taught by the same instructor took part in the study. One class acted as the control in which they did not complete notecards, while the other two courses completed three notecards per unit. Of the two classes, one class completed notecards by drawing illustrations while the other course completed notecards in which students were to write definitions or descriptions. Pre-tests and post-tests were given at the beginning of the semester and the end of the semester, respectively, to identify students&rsquo; overall knowledge retention and learning during the semester. </p><p> <b>Results:</b> The Paired t-test and Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test showed that there was a statistically significant difference of change scores between the pre-tests and post-tests within each group meaning all sections of the course learned. The Shapiro-Wilk&rsquo;s test showed that data was normally distributed to continue the One-Way ANOVA tests. The results of the One-Way ANOVA showed that there was a statistically significant difference between all groups, and the Tukey post-hoc test pinpointed the statistical significance of the One-Way ANOVA between the illustration group and the control group. There was neither a statistically significant difference between the illustration group and the description group nor between the description group and the control group. The Effect Size was small-to-medium, &omega; = 0.044. The Kruskal-Wallis H test performed on the weekly assignment scores showed there was a statistically significant difference between groups. Dunn&rsquo;s (1964) procedure with a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons showed that, generally, there was a statistically significant difference from the control group to the illustration group as well as from the control group to the description group, meaning students in the illustration group and the description group performed better on weekly assignments than the control group. The illustration group performed as well as the description group on weekly assignments. The weekly assignment and exam analysis compared average exam percentages and final exam percentages of each group to average assignment percentages to assess whether there were any certain notecard assignments, descriptive or illustrative, that led to different exam percentages between groups. Exam scores between all groups were similar and there was no specific trend between certain assignments and respective exam scores. Largely, in all groups, there was a positive correlation amongst exam scores and their respective assignments as well as a general positive correlation amongst the assignments and the final exam according to the results of Spearman&rsquo;s Correlation test. The Kruskal-Wallis H test performed on all five exam scores of each group showed there was not a statistically significant difference between exam scores of each group. By assessing the change in number of correct answers per question between pre-tests and post-tests, it was determined that learning in some specific content areas may have been improved by utilizing notecards (descriptive in some cases and illustrative in other cases) as a study aid whereas learning in other content areas were nearly equivalent across all groups. Student reflection on course evaluations showed a mixed reaction to the notecard assignments with some students regarding them as their least favorite part of the course and still others commenting on how helpful they were to their study. </p><p> <b>Conclusions:</b> All groups learned throughout the semester, and learning gains for the illustration group and the description group doubled compared to the control group. Short-term learning based on weekly assignments was increased for both the illustration and description groups, but exam scores were not really affected by the different learning interventions. Exam scores were similar among the three groups, so notecards were neither superior nor inferior to the standard curriculum when it came to academic performance. The student divide concerning using notecards illuminated the idea that all students have different learning styles, and in the case of the present study, some students in one group may have preferred to complete the type of assignment of another group. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) </p>

The broad purpose of this dissertation is to stimulate the conversation around both the purpose and conceptions of learning in higher education. In the current environment where knowledge is complex, uncertain, and changing there is a need to prepare students to be life-long learners capable of evaluating multiple knowledge claims and solving ill-structured problems. I offer the term meta-learner to articulate how in an environment where knowledge has no boundaries there is a need to understand, take ownership of, and control one’s own ways of knowing and personal learning such that learning allows for opening oneself up to the possibilities associated with knowledge uncertainty and complexity. Personal epistemology is the essence of how the learner knows and so I consider the beliefs about knowledge and knowing associated with the meta-learner as a preamble to discussing three broad views of knowledge. The opportunity for the learning and the development of the belief system associated with meta-learners is explored within the three learning theories: individual, social constructivist and activity theory. I propose an alternate conceptualization of learning for the development of students as meta-learners. The nature of this study is conceptual and as such it represents just one conception, my conception, of what is required from learning within academia if the meta-learner is to take control and ownership over the process and outcomes of the learning experience and participate in the knowledge creation process. When problems are ill-structured and complex, learning must be anchored in a personal belief that there is value in knowing oneself, others, and the world. I maintain this belief is associated with the ability of the learner to conceive of the possibilities learning holds, creates, and inspires. Learning must be about creating possibilities that strengthen the learner’s will to venture forward in an environment where knowledge is uncertain, complex, and changing.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

This study examined the relationship between college students' level of "developing purpose" as a psychosocial task and their tendency to seek help from a professional counselor at a university counseling center for a variety of personal and vocational concerns. Chickering's (1969) theory of college student development provided the theoretical basis for this study. The association between students' sex, educational status and type of problem, and their tendency to seek help was also investigated. Finally, this project explored students' likelihood of seeking help from persons other than professional counselors. Students' level of "developing purpose" was measured by the Student Developmental Task and Lifestyle Inventory (Winston, Miller, & Prince, 1987), while their tendency to seek help was assessed by the Tendency to Seek Help scale (Tinsley, de St. Aubin, & Brown, 1982).Preliminary analyses revealed a connection between previous counseling experience and students' tendency to seek help; therefore, data from 180 respondents reporting no previous counseling experience were used to test the hypotheses. The main analyses involved a 2 x 2 x 2 fully crossed fixed effects MANOVA design where the variables were sex, educational status, and level of "developing purpose." The dependent variables were respondents' rankings for seeking assistance from a professional counselor for personal and career concerns. Each effect was tested having first controlled for all other effects at or below the effect level. Friedman's analysis of variance were also employed to examine respondents' rankings of their perceived tendency to seek help for personal and career problems. Results indicated that there was no significant relationship between students' level of "developing purpose," sex, or educational status and their tendency to seek help. Based on a t-test, however, results suggested that students perceived themselves as more likely to seek help from a professional counselor for personal as compared to vocational concerns.Supplementary analyses revealed that, in general, participants were more likely to seek help from close friends and relatives than any other potential helpers for all personal problems. In contrast, assistance with career problems would most likely be sought from academic advisors,instructors, close friends and relatives. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research, including a more comprehensive study of Chickering's (1969) theory of student development are offered. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

The main purpose of this study was to explore, analyze and reflect on the meaning, nature, causes and associated dynamics of change in higher education within a Pakistani cultural context. Resistance was a major component of understanding this change. I focused on multiple factors that induced individual/group tendencies to resist or avoid making changes and to devalue change generally. This study employed a multiple case study approach. Semi-structured interviews with designated stakeholders of the planned change initiative were the primary data-collection method. Document analysis, members check and observations were used to triangulate the interview data. The data were analyzed on an ongoing basis. The findings revealed the complex dimensions of participants’ compliance and/or resistance with respect to change at the beginning of the twenty-first century when the Pakistani higher education system was shifting dramatically from a local to global perspective. Despite serious issues and weaknesses, change was gradual over time and the most strongly contested reforms were those that did not align with existing practices. In sum, the findings support the notion that change is complicated, and that the reasons for this complexity stem from factors that are structural, emotional, political and personal. The results of this study will be of interest to administrators and educators as they prepare for future challenges within the Pakistani context. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and directions for future research are identified.

No description available.