ABSTRACT Prioritizing Diseases, Disorders and Disabilities and the Relative Importance of Skin Cancer: A Public Health Faculty Survey By James Thomas Sandwich, MD April 21, 2016 INTRODUCTION: Academic faculty in public health have diverse career interests and occupy positions of considerable influence. They play an important role in setting curriculum and training the future public health workforce. However, there is little published scholarly information regarding which public health diseases, disorders, and disabilities are most important to them. Skin cancer is a major public health problem that has been declared an epidemic. AIM: The Aim of this study is to discover which public health disorders are of highest concern and to determine the relative priority of skin cancer to public health faculty. METHODS: The primary design of the study was that of a non-experimental opinion based survey. Subjects were faculty members of national academic, public health programs. To obtain the broadest distribution, primary and secondary faculty as defined by the ASPPH were included. A 19 question survey document was administered electronically through Qualtrics. There were 15 questions on the importance of specific disorders and five questions on skin cancer. Responses were categorized ranked and compared. RESULTS: Obesity ranked the highest among all concerns with cardiovascular disease and cancer also receiving high priority. Cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease led in secondary outcomes. Tertiary outcomes were nearly evenly split between cardiovascular disease, cancer, and mental health. Priorities varied by regions, age, gender and race. The majority placed skin cancer in the second quartile of importance and believed it to be appropriately ranked. CONCLUSION: Public health faculty prioritize disorders similarly in spite of diverse interests with minor differences across regions and demographics. National Funding as a proxy for importance does not cleanly align with faculty priorities. Public health faculty express familiarity with skin cancer, however, do not generally considered it of highest priority compared to other disorders. Increased faculty emphasis on interventions that prevent skin cancer may improve awareness and reduce negative sequela.

The intention of this report is to communicate to University Library administration, and interested library employees, the results of a survey of all U of S faculty carried out in November 2012. The report mainly consists of edited raw data; I have removed comments that may have identified respondents and comments that were inappropriate or off-topic. It is my hope that the library may benefit from the rich data collected on faculty behaviours and awareness surrounding scholarly communications (SC) topics such as open access (OA) publishing and archiving, and their evident and expressed needs for support in this area. / Internal report and edited raw data from faculty survey.

Objectives – This exploratory research seeks to broadly understand the publishing behaviours and attitudes of faculty, across all disciplines, at the University of Saskatchewan in response to the growing significance of open access publishing and archiving. The objective for seeking this understanding is to discover the current and emerging needs of researchers in order to determine if scholarly communications services are in demand here and, if so, to provide an evidence-based foundation for the potential future development of such a program of services at the University Library, University of Saskatchewan. Methods – All faculty members at the University of Saskatchewan were sent personalized email invitations to participate in a short online survey during the month of November 2012. The survey was composed of four parts: Current Research and Publishing Activities/Behaviours; Open Access Behaviours, Awareness, and Attitudes; Needs Assessment; and Demographics. Descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated. Results – The survey elicited 291 complete responses – a 21.9% response rate. Results suggest that faculty already have a high level of support for the open access movement, and considerable awareness of it. However, there remains a lack of knowledge regarding their rights as authors, a low familiarity with tools available to support them in their scholarly communications activities, and substantial resistance to paying the article processing charges of some open access journals. Survey respondents also provided a considerable number of comments – perhaps an indication of their engagement with these issues and desire for a forum in which to discuss them. It is reasonable to speculate that those who chose not to respond to this survey likely have less interest in, and support of, open access. Hence, the scholarly communications needs of this larger group of non-respondents are conceivably even greater. Conclusion – Faculty at the University of Saskatchewan are in considerable need of scholarly communications services. Areas of most need include: advice and guidance on authors’ rights issues such as retention of copyright; more education and support with resources such as subject repositories; and additional assistance with article processing charges. The University Library could play a valuable role in increasing the research productivity and impact of faculty by aiding them in these areas.

Objective. To use cognitive interviewing techniques to determine faculty and student interpretation of a subset of items from the AACP faculty and graduating student surveys. Methods. Students and faculty were interviewed individually in a private room. The interviewer asked each respondent for his/her interpretation of 15 randomly selected items from the graduating student survey or 20 items from the faculty survey. Results. While many items were interpreted consistently by respondents, the researchers identified several items that were either difficult to interpret or produced differing interpretations. Conclusion. Several interpretational inconsistencies and ambiguities were discovered that could compromise the usefulness of certain survey items.

No description available.

No description available.

Several active learning strategies have been used when increasing the structure of a course as increasing course structure has been known to improve student learning in introductory STEM courses. Much has been studied on the value of frequent formative assessment; however, few studies have evaluated the effective modes of delivering summative assessment. This study examines the use of summative assessment as an inclusive teaching practice to improve first generation college student success in introductory biology and also uses faculty surveys to find out how instructors structure their introductory biology course and why they are structured that way. Final exams were evaluated by Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning. Survey results showed that many instructors used online activities most of the time to supplement face-to-face courses. However, student and faculty viewpoints on assessments offer many interesting insights into how instructors may modify teaching strategies to increase the success of diverse student populations.

No description available.