The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the RN to BSN student's perceptions about what they need from curricula and the faculty to meet their educational goals. In addition, the study looked at the relationship between student identified needs and those identified by the faculty in regard to the RN to BSN curriculum.Evidence was collected using three focus group interviews with RN to BSN students and three focus group interviews with faculty who teach in RN to BSN programs. The number of participants in faculty focus group totaled 13 while participants in student focus groups totaled 16 participants. Individual follow-up interviews were conducted with participants from five of the six focus groups.A total of 50 concepts and a total of 20 subcategories were identified as significant as a result of the student data analysis. Seven themes emerged from the data analysis: 1) reasons for seeking BSN degrees (personal reasons, job advancement or maintenance, bridge to graduate school); 2) curricular content (nursing research, nursing leadership/management, health assessment, politics, computer technology, and general education); 3) curricular outcomes (professionalism, professional self-esteem, critical thinking); 4) institutional factors (advising and admissions processes, separation from traditional BSN students); 5) teaching methodologies (discussion, sharing, student presentations); 6) adult learning principles (self-direction, choices, peer learning, respect for experience); and 7) accommodations (acknowledgement for multiple roles, convenience, flexibility, credit for previous work, choices, physical environment). / Department of Educational Studies

The critical shortage of nurses has resulted in the recruitment of an increased number of nontraditional students who frequently fill multiple roles in addition to their student role. Minimal research has been conducted with this population enrolled in a college environment designed for traditional students.The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experience and margin-in-life of re-entry women enrolled in two traditional baccalaureate nursing programs in central Indiana. The theoretical framework for the study was McClusky's Power Load Margin Theory and the population consisted of ten re-entry nursing students who volunteered for participation. Demographic data was collected using a researcher designed tool and semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant. Participants completed Stevenson's Margin-in-Life Scale and demonstrated an average margin of 0.60492.All interviews were audio taped, transcribed, and subjected to systematic phenomenological analysis inspired by the work of Max van Marten resulting in the identification of five main themes entitled success, support, transitions, challenges, and relationships. Success was comprised of three sub-themes including motivation for returning to school, persistence or determination to complete the nursing program, and time management strategies. Support included two sub-themes of support from family and friends of the participants and support from self-care strategies.The transitions theme included feelings of anxiety upon returning to college and academic difficulties encountered. The challenges theme was comprised of financial challenges and challenges encountered balancing multiple responsibilities. The fifth theme, relationships, included relationships with university faculty and staff and relationships with fellow students.Simultaneous triangulation was employed applying quantitative and qualitative methods at the same time in order to enhance the understanding of the lived experience of the participants. In an attempt to present a visual image of the interaction between the five themes and the margin-in-life, the researcher conceptualized a model entitled the Margin-in-Life Model.The five themes identified and margin-in-life scores provided rich information about the lived experience of this group of re-entry women. Further research is needed to gain a more complete understanding of this population and implications for nursing education. / Department of Educational Studies

The study implied that a basic writer's overall abilities, shown through a type of "emotional intelligence quotient" [EQ], could help in determining that individual's inherent abilities in the writing classroom. Using prompted and timed writings plus two EQ surveys, developed by the investigator, the study analyzed students' emotional cognition in their writing environments. EQ qualities displayed while interacting with their instructor and peers or self-disclosed EQ qualities displayed in surveys or metacognitive writings were interpreted and compared to portfolio assessments by outside readers.During the spring semester of 1996, 409 students enrolled in 27 Ball State University English 102 basic writing classes. From 7 classes, 108 sample subjects accomplished surveys and prompts. Fifty randomly-selected subjects of the 108 were scrutinized. Comparisons of the two samples were detailed. Providing a close look at the 50 random-sampled group, 13 students occupying opposing levels at particular scoring-range margins were further detailed. Portfolio results, course grades, and how classroom teachers viewed their classroom students' emotional intelligence skills were the quantitative data compared with two EQ surveys' results.The study's governing gaze revealed self-disclosed, emotional dynamics of basic writers. It surrounded those disclosures with particulars on the biology of emotions. It extended the views on students' personality types as determined by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The study combined the conceptual knowledge of the biology of our emotions and the specific knowledge of personality traits to explain certain dimensions of the composing process. With the beginnings of a comprehensive synthesis, we may better understand how basic writers begin to evolve as effective writers and thinkers.Whether two surveys and portfolio assessments can determine a relationship between basic writers' emotional intelligence and how appropriately they write is still undecided. The statistical results are not as convincing as would be desired for any clear breakthrough. However, the descriptive information, written by the students themselves, coupled with information about preferred and inferior traits, displayed a nucleus of support for the hypothesis: a predisposition toward the four categories of emotional intelligence relates to basic writing skills and composing processes. / Department of English

This study focuses on the nature of scaffolding used by the Chinese student and teacher in a Chinese university English classroom located in Mainland China. Using the Vygotskian theory to analyze scaffolding events which occur during three transcripted lessons, it expands the present research on scaffolding. Previous research has predominantly utilized Wood, Bruner and Ross' (1976) six criteria to characterize the building and deconstructing of the scaffold by a tutor: 1) recruitment; 2) reduction in degrees of freedom; 3) direction maintenance; 4) marking critical features; 5) frustration control; and 6) demonstration. Many of these six criteria are utilized by the teacher within a lesson for scaffolding the students. This study, however, has shown that the teacher's scaffold is not the only scaffold that is built. Indeed, this study has shown that at any given moment in a lesson, many different layers of scaffolding are being built, which intertwine and overlap each other.Within the Chinese English classroom, it is more productive to discuss scaffolding in terms of layers, rather than only analyze Wood et al.'s (1976) strategies for building a scaffold. Four separate layers of scaffolding were discovered in the Chinese context. The layer one scaffold is where the teacher sets the backdrop for the lesson. She/He has planned the lesson, aware of what the students already know and lays down the foundation for it within the students' ZPD. Carrying out the work at this level involves creating intersubjectivity with the students and using prolepsis. The layer two scaffold occurs when students attend to the teacher's layer one scaffold and become mentally involved in the teacher's scaffold. Layer three involves two or more learners building and deconstructing scaffolds for each other. Finally, layer four shows the student actually building and deconstructing a scaffold for him/herself.This study discusses the strategies utilized by both the teacher and students in building a scaffold for other students and shows how these scaffolds are inter-related. In the conclusion, suggestions are made for native-English speaking teachers who are teaching in China concerning how to incorporate the findings of this study into their own teaching strategies. / Department of English

The problem of the study was to determine the status of patient education courses offered by undergraduate and graduate health education programs in the United States, and what was being taught in these courses.Two original data collection instruments were created. The first was a demographic tool used to collect data from colleges and universities (n = 120) during May/June 2004, and the second was a 59-item checklist used to conduct the content analysis of patient education course syllabi. It was found that only 9.2% of institutions that responded offered patient education courses, none of the syllabi included all 59 checklist items, there does not appear to be a statistically significant relationship between program accreditation/approval and the offering of a patient education course, and there does not appear to be a statistically significant relationship between programs that prepare students for the CHES examination and the offering of a patient education course. / Department of Physiology and Health Science

People with vision impairments are under-represented in the workforce, largely due to discrimination. Also, in order to be qualified for most types of employment, people will need to be computer-literate in the future. Therefore, teaching computer literacy is an important part of postsecondary education. Particularly the availability of adaptive computer equipment and improvements in legislation prepare the ground for a computer-literate visually impaired person to achieve equality and become an integral part of the workforce.This thesis addresses the issues involved in teaching computer literacy for visually impaired students. It introduces several examples of computer literacy courses at institutions of post-secondary education, as well as discusses the CS 104 course designed and taught by Dr. Roy L. McCormick for visually impaired students at Ball State University. / Department of Computer Science

This study examines NewsLink Indiana, an innovative convergence news organization at Ball State University. The first chapter briefly introduces the organization and the study. The second chapter reviews relevant literature and poses the research question: How do the stakeholders in NewsLink Indiana construct their memberships in the group in light of their memberships in other groups? Methods of data collection and analysis are described in the third chapter. Transcribed interviews from fourteen members of the NewsLink Indiana organization were examined. The fourth chapter describes the four themes that emerged as results of this study. The final chapter provides conclusions, contributions, limitations, and suggestions for future research in this area. / Department of Communication Studies

In this creative project, I propose that comics can be used fruitfully to introduce undergraduates to the image-word dynamic, helping them become betters critics, more thoughtful consumers, and more effective creators of images. In addition, I argue that such a course of study be housed in an undergraduate rhetoric and composition major. Therefore, this project accomplishes three goals: it explores the rhetorical function of comics; second, it justifies the inclusion of comics in an undergraduate rhetoric-composition program; and, third, it provides a master syllabus for four classes that would provide the experience necessary to students wishing to study visual, verbal, and visual-verbal rhetorics. / Department of English

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of specific textual and contextual materials to bridge the gap between the student's present level o proficiency in a target language and the level of proficiency required to perform a listening comprehension task in that language. This study also tested for interaction between the use of the textual and contextual materials and the learning modality of the students. In addition, confounding effects by either learning modality and foreign language classroom anxiety were controlled.Listening comprehension was assessed by a fourteen-item multiple-choice test in Spanish developed by the researcher. Learning modality was established by the Edmonds Learning Style Identification Exercise developed by H. Reinert. Foreign language class anxiety was measured by the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale developed by Elaine Horwitz, Michael Horwitz, and Joann Cope.A group of 198 college students enrolled in nine second-semester Spanish classes at Anderson University, Anderson, Indiana participated in the study. Three classes were randomly assigned to each of the three treatments: the contextual cue, the textual cue, and neither one.A three factor 3 x 3 x 2 fixed effects factorial design was used to analyze the data gathered in the study. Four null hypotheses were tested. The .05 level of significance was established as the critical probability level for the non-acceptance of the hypotheses.Findings1. There are significant effects attributable to a textual cue on recall measures of listening comprehension.2. There are no significant effects attributable to a contextual cue on recall measures of listening comprehension.3. There are no significant interactions between the use of the textual cue and the learning modality of the students.4. There are no significant interactions between the use of the contextual cue and the learning modality of the students.5. There are no significant effects attributable to learning modality on recall measures of listening comprehension.6. There are significant effects attributable to foreign language classroom anxiety on recall measures of listening comprehension.Conclusions1. Textual cues support listening comprehension tasks but contextual cues do not.2. The effect of a semantic cue can not be affected by the learning modality of the student.3. Learning modality by itself does not affect student comprehension of a listening task.4. Foreign language class anxiety inhibits student performance during a listening comprehension task. / Department of Secondary, Higher, and Foundations of Education

The problem investigated was whether the human genetics content taught in higher education institutions throughout the United States correlates with the needs of the lay population, general studies students, and with the content offered in the human genetics courses at Ball State University. Questionnaires were sent nationwide to faculty who teach human genetics to determine the content currently being taught. Another form of the questionnaire was sent to a population of genetic counselors to determine the needs of the lay population concerning human genetics content. Additional data were collected from faculty of human genetics courses at Ball State University.Results and ConclusionsThe content of a typical human genetics course was determined from data obtained from the faculty questionnaire. The content needed in a human genetics course to produce a genetically literate lay population was determined from the data obtained from genetic counselors. The data obtained from the two populations were analyzed. Significant differences between the populations in recommended content for a human genetics course were found. These differences included variationsin: time allotments devoted to specific topics, inclusions of specific human genetics diseases/defects, and the teaching approach (i.e., faculty use various human genetics diseases/defects to emphasize the mode of transmission whereas genetic counselors stress the clinical aspects).Using the combined data obtained from both populations, the content of a model human genetics course was profiled. Topics included in the course, time allotments (mean of means), genetic diseases/ defects, and the teaching approach were determined.RecommendationsFaculty developing a human genetics course could use the model human genetics profile as a guide. However, the content in a human genetics course should be adapted to the students' needs.An additional study to determine the factors which genetic counselors consider when determining the importance of a genetic disease/defect, would be helpful.Since the knowledge base in human genetics is rapidly increasing, this study should be repeated every two or three years to maintain validity of the model profile.