Aim The study aim was to explore the issues and challenges facing undergraduate nursing education in one Canadian province from an institutional theory perspective. The research questions were: What is the institutional field of nursing education? What are the issues and challenges facing nursing education? How is the institutional field of nursing education contributing to the issues and challenges? How are the issues and challenges contributing to the institutional complexity? Background Nursing education is essential for the health care of society, yet face various issues and challenges at the system level. Institutional theory has been used in higher education to better understand how higher education institutions are structured and operate. Institutional theory has not been used in nursing education. The issues facing nursing education have been examined from a critical or descriptive perspective, but a system-level perspective is missing. Institutional theory could fill this gap and examine the institution of nursing and how its structure, behaviours, and rules influence those issues and challenges. Methods An exploratory single-case study with embedded units design was used. Theoretical propositions from institutional theory informed the sample, recruitment, data collection, and data analysis. In 2019, representatives from organizations comprising the institutional field of nursing education and senior-level administrators were interviewed and relevant documents were collected and reviewed. The data were analyzed using deductive and inductive thematic analysis, building a case description, and visual analysis techniques. Findings The findings from sixty documents and seven interviews suggested the institutional field of nursing education is composed of postsecondary institutions, health service organizations, the regulatory body, the ministry for health, and the ministry for postsecondary education. The issues and challenges facing nursing education included demands on curricula, teaching and learning values versus practice, the relationship between education and practice, limiting financial supports, clarity of the RN role, and need for faculty. The institutional field of nursing education is complex and includes dominant organizations, such as the regulatory body and health service organization, and the non-dominant organization, postsecondary institutions. Discussion / Conclusion The use of institutional theory was beneficial to explore the issues and challenges facing undergraduate nursing education from a system-level perspective and captured the complexity within the system. The institutional field including the influences of structure, dominance, and complexity impact the issues and challenges facing nursing education. The institutional perspective of the issues and challenges diverges from previous examinations. In addition, the use of institutional theory in higher education offers strategies for advocacy in nursing education. Recommendations for nursing education practice, policy, and research include: (a) awareness of the organizations comprising the institutional field of nursing education, (b) including the nursing education accreditation body and the professional association within the interorganizational structures, (c) acknowledgement of the sources of dominance within the field, and (d) developing strategies for academic nurse leaders to navigate the complexity of nursing education. The most urgent consideration arising from this research is the dominant forces from regulation and health service organizations and the subsequent non-existence of the professional voice of nursing for nursing education within the institutional field. / Graduate

Enrollment in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other open distance education is increasing and this requires large numbers of problems for students to learn from. Additionally, students learning programming benefit from practicing their skills on programming problems. Researchers have turned to automatically generating problems for this reason, although rarely within the domain of computer science. Those that are within that domain are limited in the variety of tasks they can generate. This means that students must come up with their own practice or rely on educators to create them manually, which is a demanding task. This research demonstrates a tool that can generate a suite of randomized programming problems to challenge students from instructor-defined templates. The tool will also come with an evaluation program to provide relevant statistics that instructors can use to evaluate the variety and complexity of problems in their suite.

This report presents an explorative examination of the scientific literature regarding current methods utilized in mixed-model assembly lines and the challenges that are faced. Empirical data from a real mixed-model assembly line was collected and analyzed to explore the application of the identified methods and the problems that are faced in a realistic situation.  The report consists of a theoretic framework on the topics of assembly systems and topics relevant to managing the challenges. In addition a case study is conducted where an assembly system is observed and real production data is collected. Product assembly lines make up one of the final steps in the manufacturing process of a product. By implementing proven methods for process improvements highly effective assembly lines are realized. If an assembly line is experiencing reliability issues the probability of the company’s end-customers being directly affected is considerably increased.  Ensuring reliability in a mixed-model assembly line (MMAL) is an important task with an increasing level of difficulty given the current evolution of advanced technology. The resulting increase in product variety and complexity made possible increases the demands on the entire manufacturing process and the assembly line in particular. Added product variety and complexity poses an increased challenge from an automation perspective as well due to the limitations in flexibility inherited by industrial robots in comparison to a human operator. Many challenges in manufacturing and assembly processes stem from product development, increased variation between product models, and changes in production systems, due to the resulting increase in the complexity of the production processes (ElMaraghy ​​& ElMaraghy, 2016). Historically, a vast number of manufacturing companies have seen significant improvements in their product quality and productivity, leading to improved financial results as well as customer satisfaction by implementing process development methods such as Lean production, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma.  Therefore, the purpose of this report is to explore assembly system reliability and complexity management. The scope of this report is restricted to focus on reliability in assembly systems from a quality perspective. Suggestions for improvements are biased towards Lean Six Sigma methods and complexity management as described in current literature with the consequence of potentially valid methods and solutions being excluded. The theoretical framework of this report is based on selected books and scientific articles on the topics of complexity, assembly systems, process development, and human performance in the context of assembly systems.  The case study project is executed following the DMAIC-process as per the L6S methodology. Lean six sigma methodologies are applied in accordance with the selected literature with the objective of identifying a potential strategy for mitigating the quality deficiencies observed in the company´s assembly processes. The research presented in this report follows the abductive reasoning concept (Säfsten & Gustavsson 2020). Abductive reasoning is initialized by a conclusion, which is followed up by constructing a theory based on literature, and finally analyzing empirical data to validate the constructed theory in the context given by the initial conclusion.  Additionally, a root cause analysis is conducted. The root cause analysis is initiated by constructing an Ishikawa diagram to categorize and identify possible causes of the identified errors. By systematically working through each of the categories the examined problem is look upon from different points of view, making for a comprehensive analysis. In this step the 5-why’s method is utilized to support the deductive reasoning process. The potential root causes are then utilized to construct a list of possible solutions and suggestions for improvement for the examined problem. The improvement suggestions are based on deductive reasoning as well as documented improvements from the literature.

Dynamic written corrective feedback is a strategy that raises student awareness of the patterned errors they make in their writing. Teacher feedback provides the location and type of error made in the form of error codes. Multiple studies have shown it to significantly improve the grammatical accuracy of student writing. This research examines the effects of the frequency of teacher feedback, on student written accuracy, fluency, and complexity whether daily or every-other-day. The total number of minutes students write for is also questioned since it is directly related to the amount of feedback students receive. This is done to make the process more manageable for teachers, as well as determine the optimum volume and feedback frequency that can be processed and benefit students. Findings suggest that 20 minutes of writing a week has the potential to significantly improve accuracy no matter how the time is divided. Fluency also has the potential to improve significantly if students are writing for 5 minutes and receiving feedback daily. As previous research on daily 10-minute writing has suggested that only accuracy will improve, this study is instrumental in highlighting specific modifications that can be made to the DWCF process that increase the potential for development of both accuracy and fluency.

Background: In a sustaining, durable project, an effective code review process is key to ensuring the long-term quality of the code base. As the size of the software continues to increase, although the code inspections have many benefits, the time it takes, the manpower makes it not a good method in some larger projects.  Nowadays more and more industry performs modern code reviews for their project in order to increase the quality of the program. Only a few papers have studied the relationship between code reviewers and code review quality. We need to explore the relationships among code review, code complexity, and reviewers. Finding out which part of the code the reviewers pay more attention to in the code review and how much effort it takes to review. This way we can conduct code reviews more effectively. Objectives: The objective of our study is to investigate if code complexity relates to how software developers to review code in terms of code review length, review frequency, review text quality, reviewer’s sentiment. What’s more, we want to research if the reviewer’s experience will have an impact on code review quality. In order to find a suitable way to conduct a code review for different complexity codes.  Methods: We conduct an exploratory case study. The case and unit of analysis is the open-source project, Cassandra. We extract data from Cassandra Jira (a proprietary issue tracking product), the data are the reviewer’s name, review content, review time, reviewer’s comments, reviewer’s sentiment, comment length, and the review file(java file). Then we use CodeMR to calculate the complexity of the file, it uses some coupling and code complexity metrics. The reviewer’s sentiment is analyzed by a text analysis API. After we collect all these data we use SPSS to do a statistic analysis, to find whether there are relationships between code complexity and these factors. What’s more, we have a workshop and send out questionnaires to collect more input from Cassandra developers. Results: The results show that code review frequency is related to code complexity, complex code requires more review. Reviewer’s sentiment is related to code complexity, reviewer’s sentiment towards complex code is more positive or negative rather than neutral. Code review text quality is related to the reviewer’s experience, experienced reviewers leave a comment with higher quality than novice reviewers. On the other hand, the code review length and review text quality are not related to code complexity. Conclusions: According to the results, the code with higher code complexity related to the more frequent review, and the reviewer's emotions are more clear when reviewing more complex code. Training experienced reviewers are also very necessary because the results show that experienced reviewers review the code with higher quality. From the questionnaire, we know developers believe that more complex code needs more iterations of code review and experienced reviewers do have a positive effect on code review, which gives us a guide on how to do code review based on a different level of code complexity.

Generally, tax systems are perceived to be complex. This study takes a qualitative empirical approach to examine individual taxpayers’ perceptions of tax complexity. This was achieved by obtaining individual taxpayers perceptions on the complexity of the tax system. The study also investigates whether taxpayers perceive that their tax burden is influenced by the complexity of the tax system and also analyses suggestions by respondents on how the South African tax system can be simplified. The findings are that not all taxpayers perceive that the tax system is complex. These respondents mainly acknowledge the various means available, such as e-filing, to counter the effects of tax complexity. They also point out that taxpayers should be responsible for educating themselves on how the tax system works. However, there are more people who believe that the tax system is complex. The complexity is mainly attributed to the challenges taxpayers face in attempting to comply with tax legislation. These challenges include difficulties in keeping up to date with constant changes to legislation, the fear of filing an inaccurate tax return and the general lack of adequate knowledge to confidently handle one’s tax affairs. An interesting theme emerged on how respondents make the presumption that the tax system might be complex for other taxpayers due to a lack of education or knowledge of the tax system. The study concludes that perceptions of tax complexity seem to be influenced by complexities in tax legislation, user needs as well as user abilities. Recommendations are made for further studies to assess taxpayers’ tax literacy levels. These studies may also investigate taxpayers’ awareness of their rights and obligations under tax laws / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2014 / gm2015 / Taxation / MCom / Unrestricted

Medication errors make up a staggering portion of medical error in the United States. These medication errors are most likely to occur at transitions in care. Children with medical complexity (CMC) often rely on multiple medications to maintain their health, making accurate medication ordering of utmost importance to avoid exacerbating chronic conditions or unnecessary harm. Because of their increased medication usage, CMC have an increased risk of medication ordering error (MOE). To better inform the medication reconciliation process for CMC, we examine the prevalence, category, and risk factors of MOE at hospital admissions for this patient population. A retrospective cohort analysis of 1,237 hospitalized CMC from two tertiary pediatric teaching hospitals with clinical care services for CMC was performed on data from November 1, 2015 to October 31, 2016. Pharmacists and advance nurse practitioners identified MOEs at admissions through medical record review, patient history at interview, and inpatient team discussions. Identified MOEs were classified as one of seventeen different categories, some of which include duplications, omissions, or incorrect frequency, dose, or route. Statistical analysis was performed using Fisher’s exact test, chi-squares, and generalized linear mix models to examine the relationships between MOEs at admission and patient characteristics, such as ethnicity, number of chronic conditions, or number of medications taken at admission. A total of 115 admission MOEs were identified in 73 hospitalized CMC. The two most common MOE types were wrong dose (41.7%) and omitted medication (33.9%). The median number of medications ordered at admission was 10 (IQR 6-14). Medications most commonly associated with an MOE were cholecalciferol (n=9) and baclofen (n=9). As for patient characteristics, the median age at admission was 5 years ([Interquartile Range [IQR] 1-12). Of the total sample, 96.8% had a complex chronic condition and 72.8% were technology dependent. Children who are Black, require medical technology, or take more than 15 medications during hospitalization were found to have higher MOE rates. Multivariable analysis revealed the highest odds of MOE in children taking baclofen (Odds Ratio [OR] 2.6 [95% Confidence Interval {CI} 1.4-4.7]). MOEs at admission are prevalent among hospitalized CMC. Further study on medication safety in CMC is needed to inform medication reconciliation processes and better prevent patient harm. / 2019-07-03T00:00:00Z

The majority of clinical impairments following a concussion resolve within 7-10 days. However, there is limited clarity as to long-term impact of this injury on neurocognitive function, motor control, and particularly integration of these domains. While repetitive head trauma is associated with numerous neurological disorders, the link is not well described. Visual-motor tracking tasks have been used to identify differences in visual processing, error detection, and fine motor control in aging and numerous pathologies. Examining the complexity of motor output from visual-motor tracking provides insight into multiple cognitive and motor function domains, and into fine motor control used for daily living, work, and sport. The purpose of this dissertation was, therefore, to: (1) use multiple regression to determine the extent to which concussion history and symptoms (loss of consciousness and amnesia) influence visual-motor task performance multiscale complexity, and (2) determine whether task performance complexity can distinguish, through logistic regression and prediction, between individuals with and without a history of concussion. In study 1, individuals with (n = 35) and without (n = 15) a history of concussion performed a visual-motor tracking task. Men and women exhibited linear decreases in task performance complexity, as well as midand high-frequency task performance components, with increasing numbers of concussions. However, men and women exhibited differing patterns, as did those with and without a history of concussion-related loss of consciousness. Finally, trial-to-trial complexity variability increased with increasing numbers of concussions. Findings indicate (1) a cumulative reduction in the way in which previously concussed individuals process and integrate visual information to guide behavior and (2) gender is an important consideration in concussion-related visual-motor outcomes. In Study 2, individuals with (n = 85) and without (n = 42) a history of concussion performed a visualmotor tracking task. Linear and nonlinear measures of task performance were used to build gender-specific logistic classification models using 10-fold cross-validation. When ensuring 80% sensitivity, the best models were 75-80% accurate in predicting a history of concussion. Such discrimination has clinical value in identifying individuals who merit further evaluation and observation over time for conditions related to repetitive head traumas.

Cette thèse aborde deux sujets de recherche dans le cadre du même projet. La première voie de recherche, expliquée en détail au chapitre 3, est une approche de modélisation relative à la dynamique de confiance dans une société en réseau. La seconde voie de recherche, décrite au chapitre 4, est une approche expérimentale visant w étudier les décisions humaines lors de l’échange d’un actif avec une croissance moyenne positive par période dans un environnement de laboratoire contrôlé. Un des liens communs entre ces deux thèmes est l’action collective, qui joue un rôle déterminant dans de nombreux phénomènes, par exemple la dynamique de la panique, les faillites et par conséquent le risque systémique. C’est pourquoi, j’espère que ce travail contribuera à l’étude des phénomènes d’actions collectives, en particulier dans la finance quantitative, où les conclusions spécifiques du modèle de confiance et l’expérience de trading en laboratoire mentionnés ci-dessus pourront être utilisées dans leur état actuel. / This thesis reports on two different research topics belonging to the same project. The first research avenue, which is thoroughly explained in chapter 3, is a modelling approach to the dynamics of trust in a networked society. The second, whose description can be found in chapter 4, is an experimental approach to study human decisions when people trade an asset with a positive average growth per period in a controlled laboratory environment. One of the common links between these two topics is collective action, which is a key player in a number of phenomena, for example in the dynamics of panic, bankruptcies and, consequently, systemic risk. Therefore, the author hopes that this work will contribute to the study of collective action phenomena, especially in the field of quantitative finance, in which it is more likely that the specific findings from the above mentioned trust model and trading experiment can be used in their present form.

Acropora cervicornis, commonly known as the staghorn coral has historically been a major contributor to reef structural complexity, providing habitat for many functionally important fish species throughout Florida and the Caribbean. Unfortunately, due to disease, bleaching, and local anthropogenic stressors, A. cervicornis populations have suffered drastic declines that have negatively impacted associated reef fish populations. In order to promote recovery, A. cervicornis fragments can be cultivated in nurseries and outplanted back onto reefs. This practice can effectively increase A. cervicornis abundance, but the long-term effects on local fish assemblages, and specifically functionally important grazing fishes, has not been assessed. Fish assemblages at natural (control) sites were compared to outplanted A. cervicornis sites in Southeast Florida. Fish surveys were conducted each summer at four locations from 2012 to 2017. Each location contained three outplanted A. cervicornis and one or two control sites. Outplant sites were defined by 50 A. cervicornis colonies in a 36 m2 area. Control sites occupied the same area but did not contain outplanted colonies. The fish assemblage structure was assessed in terms of composition, demography, and functional temporal trends as well as with the increasing structural complexity of the outplanted corals, defined as total linear extension (TLE). Significant temporal trends were recorded for total fish abundance, grazer abundance, and diversity. Structural complexity (outplanted A. cervicornis measured in TLE m-2) was found to be a significant predictor of total fish abundance, grazer abundance and diversity. Fishes 2-5 cm total length were most numerous indicating that the outplant sites may be providing habitat for juvenile reef fishes, particularly algae consumers. These findings suggest that A. cervicornis restoration may be creating a positive feedback loop in which outplanted corals create habitat for grazing fishes that in turn reduce algae competition, potentially providing new habitat for coral settlement.