No description available.

Educators are faced with the rapid influx of online courses in the K-12 educational setting. The majority of research conducted to date has been in the area of higher education. Research and publications suggest that many factors control the success or failure of students enrolled in online courses. These factors include student characteristics, mentoring, and teacher/student interaction. Other factors affect the implementation of successful online courses and virtual schools. These factors include policies, funding, student support, technology, curriculum, access, equity, staff development, and administration. Currently, the absence of appropriate research suggest the need to identify the necessary components of a staff development program to prepare teachers to teach secondary online classes in a local school system. In the development of a staff development program, measures need to be undertaken to assess and address the individual needs of the teachers. This study was designed to identify the necessary components of a staff development program for the purpose of training teachers to teach secondary online courses in a local school system and collect recommendations for differentiating staff development to meet the individual needs of teachers. Using a three-round Delphi technique, panelists, representing successful secondary public and corporate online schools, developed a common consensus on the necessary components. The panelists identified the components needed for teacher training and ways in which a staff development program could be structured to address the individual needs of teachers. The panelists were provided an opportunity to scale the components as to their degree of importance. By working through the rounds and providing statistical feedback, a consensus was obtained. Each panelist was provided the frequency, mean, and standard deviation for each criterion. The components agreed upon by 80% of the panelists as either very important or important were used to develop an outline of a staff development program that can be used to train teachers to teach secondary online courses. / Ed. D.

The Virginia Board of Education is considering the adoption of technology standards for instructional personnel in Virginia's schools. All pre-service instructional personnel will have to demonstrate proficiency prior to obtaining a Virginia teaching certificate. Those currently in service may also have to demonstrate proficiency, as defined by the local school division.This study was designed to be a prototypic model for implementing the standards in Gloucester County Schools. Three hundred-ninety (390) instructional personnel were surveyed, according to selected strata, regarding their current level of competence. The discrepancy between the current level of proficiency and the level required by the standard defined the need for staff development. Differences among strata were provided for in planning for staff development activities.Staff Development activities were planned for all identified needs and implemented for a pilot group. The training sessions focused on raising the level of proficiency to that required to satisfy the standards. Participants in the pilot group were re-surveyed to verify the plan. An assessment procedure for measuring and reporting mastery on the standards was proposed by the pilot group. The process outlined in this study will be condensed into a brochure that will be provided to the Virginia Department of Education for possible distribution to other school divisions. / Ed. D.

Introduction: Knowledge and attributions are frequently cited as variables which may help to understand staff responses to challenging behaviour in people with a learning disability. Previous research has found only partial support for Weiner‟s (1980, 1986) model of helping behaviour within a learning disability context. The study developed a clinical definition of „helping behaviour‟, and examined knowledge of challenging behaviour and the combination of attributions from Weiner‟s (1980, 1986) model in predicting staff helping behaviour. In addition the emotion regulation strategies of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression were investigated in moderating the relationship between attributions and helping behaviour, developing an overarching framework between attributions, staff stress and positive staff approaches to challenging behaviour. Method: One hundred and seven support staff completed self-report measures of knowledge of the term and management of challenging behaviour, causal attributions, emotion regulation style and behavioural response to challenging behaviour. Results: Knowledge and helpful attributions were significantly correlated with helping behaviour, however, when regressed onto helping behaviour, only knowledge significantly contributed to the variance. No significant correlations were found between emotion regulation styles and attributions. No moderating or mediating effect was found for emotion regulation styles on the relationship between attributions and helping behaviour.

Electronic Information Resources (EIR) can be seen as invaluable teaching and research tools, which complement print-based resources and enhance the learning and research processes in any academic institution. The aims of this research were to investigate, analyse and discuss the use of and needs for EIR and existing training in promoting and enhancing the quality of teaching and research activities amongst academic staff at the University of Bahrain. Extensive quantitative, qualitative and theoretical methods were used to identify and analyse academic staff EIR skills, knowledge and awareness. The population of the study is made up of all the full-time faculty members working at the University of Bahrain. A total of 593 questionnaires were distributed and 466 completed ones were returned, giving an overall response rate of 78.5%, and these were used for the purpose of the study. The result of the study revealed that printed resources are the sources of information most used for teaching and research. The colleges of Law, Art and Education had the lowest percentages of usage of EIR compared with other colleges. Work overload, lack of awareness, low skill levels, slow servers, ineffective communication systems, language barriers and a preference for print resources were among the primary constraints that affected academic staff uptake and use of electronic resources in teaching and research. One-to-one training was the preferred training method for those academics wishing to enhance their EIR skills. It was recommended that there is a need for greater promotion from the upper level decision-makers at the university if they wish to see greater use of electronic resources in teaching and research. Strategic conceptual models designed to provide solutions to the current problems and to help in setting policies and decisions for the effective use of EIR in teaching and research are given.

The purpose of this study is to get a deeper understanding of staff who are exposed to threat and violence in the work with people with mental disabilities. Focus is aimed at the staff´s experience of that in their daily work can be exposed to threat and violence. The first question for the study is what definition the staff gives to threat and violence in the daily work with people with mental disabilities and the second one is what determines the decision in making/or not making a report in threat and violence in the daily work with people with mental disorders. To collect empirical data the study is based on seven individual semistructured interviews with staff working with people with mental disabilities. The theory used to analyse is the normalisationprocess. The analyse is based on the interview-participants views on how they define threat and violence, their view on the client and themselves and also reporting threat and violence. The result is that the staff is affected by different aspects and a conflict is made between context and individual. This conflict contributes to the decision in reporting and definition of threat and violence.

Background: As a result of the changes in support for adults with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) and the increasing emphasis on independent living within the community, individuals commonly live in their own homes with support provided by voluntary or private services. As a result, support staff play a huge role in the lives of adults with ID and are often the mediators of interventions aimed at reducing distress or the occurrence of challenging behaviour. Issues relating to the well-being of support staff and how they manage behaviours that challenge services are central to the quality of the lives of adults with ID. Method: A systematic review was carried out regarding interventions aimed at reducing stress felt by staff supporting adults with ID, with the aim of informing the clinical practice of psychologists that work with such staff groups. An empirical study employing the qualitative methodology of grounded theory was also conducted to explore the experiences of staff working with clinical psychologists outside of their organisation in the development of support guidelines aimed at reducing challenging behaviour. Results: Findings from the Systematic Review highlighted the lack of high quality intervention studies aimed at reducing stress in staff. Some tentative support was found for interventions based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and those taking a more practical problem-solving approach. The empirical study resulted in a tentative model within which the role of expectations was highlighted as key to staff’s experiences of working with professionals. Conclusion: Further research is required in order to identify the most effective ways to reduce stress experienced by staff working with adults with ID. The constructed theoretical model suggests ways in which psychologists can understand the experience of staff and has implications for their practice.

Introduction: The evidence-base for the effectiveness of music on people with dementia is unclear, yet music is frequently used in the care of people with dementia. Little is known about formal dementia caregivers’ views on the use of music in their ward. The aim of this study was to investigate the attitudes of formal dementia caregivers towards the use of music in people with dementia through the development of a new attitudes scale, and to investigate if these attitudes may be related to staff attitudes to people with dementia and burnout. Method: 101 formal caregivers from NHS wards which accommodate people with dementia completed a survey consisting of the Staff Attitudes to Music questionnaire–Dementia version (SAM-D), translated and validated for the purposes of this study, the Approaches to Dementia Questionnaire and the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Data were analysed using exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis and a series of correlational and multiple regression analyses. Results: The SAM-D is a useful measure of formal caregiver attitudes to the use of music for their patients, with three subscales, ‘Positive effects’, ‘Organisational facilitation’ and ‘Negative effects’. Most participants had positive attitudes to the use of music as a non-pharmacological intervention. Attitudes to dementia is a significant predictor of attitudes to the use of music, whereas burnout is not related to attitudes to music. Discussion: Alongside the evidence-base for music, staff attitudes should also be investigated, although development of an attitudes scale can be challenging. There are furthermore clinical implications for the use of music in people with dementia and caregiver attitudes. Future research may help assess the SAM-D’s psychometric properties further and investigate differences in attitudes of different professionals in various settings.

In this thesis we address capacity planning problems with different demand and service characteristics, motivated by healthcare applications. In the first application, we develop, implement, and assess the impact of analytical models, accompanied by a decision-support tool, for operating room (OR) staff planning decisions with different service lines. First, we propose a methodology to forecast the staff demand by service line. We use these results in a two-phase mathematical model that defines the staffing budget for each service line, and then decides how many staff to assign to each potential shift and day pair while considering staff overtime and pooling policies and other staff planning constraints. We also propose a heuristic to solve the model's second phase. We implement these models using historical data from a community hospital and analyze the effect of different model parameters and settings. Compared with the current practice, we reduce delays and staff pooling at no additional cost. We validate these conclusions through a simulation model. In the second application, we consider the problem of staff planning and scheduling when there is an accepted time window between each order's arrival and fulfillment, with the goal of obtaining a balanced schedule that focuses on on-time demand fulfillment but also considers staff characteristics and operational practices. Hence, solving this problem requires simultaneously scheduling the staff and the forecasted demand. We propose, implement, and analyze the results of a model for staff and demand scheduling under this setting, accompanied by a decision-support tool. We implement this model in a company that offers document processing and other back-office services to healthcare providers. We provide details on the model validation, implementation, and results, including a 25\% increase in the company's staff productivity. Finally, we provide insights on the effects of some of the model's parameters and settings, and assess the performance of a proposed heuristic to solve this problem. In the third application, we consider a non-consumable resource planning problem. Demand consists of a set of jobs, each job has a scheduled start time and duration, and belongs to a particular demand class that requires a subset of resources. Jobs can be `accepted' or `rejected,' and the service level is measured by the (weighted) percentage of accepted jobs. The goal is to find the capacity level that minimizes the total cost of the resources, subject to global and demand-class-based service level constraints. We first analyze the complexity of this problem and several of its special cases, and then we propose a model to find the optimal inventory for each type of resource. We show the convergence of the sample average approximation method to solve a stochastic extension of the model. This problem is motivated by the inventory planning decisions for surgical instruments for ORs. We study the effects of different model parameters and settings on the cost and service levels, based on surgical data from a community hospital.

No description available.