What is Instructional Design

Constructivist Learning Environments: Case Studies in Instructional Design

The Code of Ethics for Nurses.

Contract cheating, where students use a third party to complete their assignments, is frequently reported to be increasing, presenting a threat to academic standards and quality. Many incidents involve payment of the third party, giving contract cheating a commercial aspect. This study synthesised findings from prior research to try and understand how common self-report of contract cheating is in Higher Education, and test whether it is increasing. It also sought to evaluate the quality of the research evidence which addresses those questions. 71 samples were identified from 65 studies, going back to 1978. These included 54514 participants. Contract cheating was self-reported by a historic average of 3.52 % of students, with evidence that this has increased in recent years; a positive relationship was found between time and the percentage of students admitting to contract cheating, and in samples from 2014 to present the figure is 15.7%, representing approximately 31 million students around the world. This increase may be due to an overall increase in self-reported cheating, rather than contract cheating specifically. Most samples were collected using designs which makes it likely that contract cheating is under-reported, for example using convenience sampling, with a very low response rate and without guarantees of anonymity for participants. Recommendations are made for future studies on academic integrity and contract cheating specifically.

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How Common Is Commercial Contract Cheating in Higher Education and Is It Increasing? A Systematic Review

I had been hired to teach a course in English Grammar at one of the local community colleges in my neighborhood. This course was the prerequisite for entry into the multi-streamed Office Administration program. And it was this Program that held the promise of paid employment in a more pleasing environment than that of working in a factory or in sales. Despite the isolation of the secretary responsible for everything that goes wrong and meriting no credit for those things that go well, the opportunity for moving forward and experiencing success was appealing to women entering or re-entering the workforce. The English Grammar course was always over-subscribed. The women enrolling in the course did not always have the prerequisite of a High School Diploma, but were accepted on the strength of being "mature students"--someone over the age of nineteen. Some were single moms on social assistance who had to coordinate babysitting services with public transportation with funding for the course from their case workers, while some were women for whom English was not their mother tongue; all were seeking paid employment. And they all shared one common denominator -- fear of the unknown. Twenty-seven women sat before me, two or three to a table, accompanied by their adolescent traumas about the formal learning environment of a school. Tension ran high that first night. I hid my new teacher/new subject anxieties in the housekeeping activities that signify the first session of a class. I busied myself with handing out college schedules, course outlines, and taking attendance. However, the small talk I attempted seemed forced and contrived to my inner ear. Although I had undergone the interview/hire procedure in late spring, I had not signed the teacher contract until the college had been assured of sufficient enrollment for the other instructors who had been on staff previously as well as opening up a third class for me. After I signed the contract, I began the teaching preparation in earnest, working and reworking my lesson plans ad infinitum, ad nauseam. I spent literally hours on my introductory remarks about the nature of English Grammar, sentences and their constituent elements. I compiled a list of many, many examples illustrating the tried and true explanations of nouns as naming words and verbs as doing words. After introductions in the class, I began to teach the lesson that I had worked on for so long. I filled up three blackboards with information about sentences, examples of each kind of sentence as well as the parts of speech in each sentence. My fingers were numb from gripping the chalk tightly in my hand, my arms were tired from writing neatly and legibly in a straight line on the blackboard, and I was parched in the throat and blue in the face from talking, writing, explaining, smiling, clarifying, extrapolating and elucidating. …

The Making of an Adult Educator: Moving Beyond Empathy:

Academic cheating among nursing students

The study reviewed 20 currently-available structured ethical decision-making models and developed an integrated model consisting of six steps with useful questions and tools that help better performance each step: (1) the identification of an ethical problem; (2) the collection of additional information to identify the problem and develop solutions; (3) the development of alternatives for analysis and comparison; (4) the selection of the best alternatives and justification; (5) the development of diverse, practical ways to implement ethical decisions and actions; and (6) the evaluation of effects and development of strategies to prevent a similar occurrence. From a pilot-test of the model, nursing students reported positive experiences, including being satisfied with having access to a comprehensive review process of the ethical aspects of decision making and becoming more confident in their decisions. There is a need for the model to be further tested and refined in both the educational and practical environments.

An integrated ethical decision-making model for nurses

To effectively train ethical decision-making of nursing students, a case-based computer program was developed using Flash animation. Seven ethical cases collected from practicing registered nurses' actual clinical experiences and a six-step Integrated Ethical Decision-Making Model developed by the author were employed in the program. In total, 251 undergraduate students from three nursing schools used the program in their nursing ethics course. The usability of the program and its usefulness in improving 11 abilities needed in ethical decision-making were measured; it scored higher than 4 on a 5-point scale. Of the students, 82% recommended the program as a valuable complementary tool in the teaching of a nursing ethics course. A variety of encouraging and positive experiences were reported by the students. The computer program is likely to be usefully practical in the training of abstract skills to nursing students, though certain challenges remain, such as the precise understanding of cognitive or affective responses to ethical issues.

The development and implications of a case-based computer program to train ethical decision-making

Purpose This study aimed to identify and compare hospice care research topics between Korean and international nursing studies using text network analysis. Methods The study was conducted in four steps: 1) collecting abstracts of relevant journal articles, 2) extracting and cleaning keywords (semantic morphemes) from the abstracts, 3) developing co-occurrence matrices and text-networks of keywords, and 4) analyzing network-related measures including degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, and clustering using the NetMiner program. Abstracts from 347 Korean and 1,926 international studies for the period of 1998-2016 were analyzed. Results Between Korean and international studies, six of the most important core keywords-"hospice," "patient," "death," "RNs," "care," and "family"-were common, whereas "cancer" from Korean studies and "palliative care" from international studies ranked more highly. Keywords such as "attitude," "spirituality," "life," "effect," and "meaning" for Korean studies and "communication," "treatment," "USA," and "doctor" for international studies uniquely emerged as core keywords in recent studies (2011~2016). Five subtopic groups each were identified from Korean and international studies. Two common subtopics were "hospice palliative care and volunteers" and "cancer patients." Conclusion For a better quality of hospice care in Korea, it is recommended that nursing researchers focus on study topics of patients with non-cancer disease, children and family, communication, and pain and symptom management.

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A Comparison of Hospice Care Research Topics between Korea and Other Countries Using Text Network Analysis

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare characteristics of the case management (CM) workforce in the US by age, years of experience, and original profession.



Design: This study was an exploratory, descriptive secondary analysis of demographic and job characteristics of 24,085 certified case managers (CCMs).



Methods: Descriptive statistics, Chi-square tests, and correlation coefficients were calculated.



Findings: The majority of the case-management workforce is made up of RNs (93.3%). The CCMs were older, with a mean age of 55.0 years, than were those in their original profession and started to work as CCMs late in their careers. The educational level of RN-CCMs was lower than that of CCMs from other professions. Also, job titles and work settings of CCMs were diverse, with different focus areas depending on clients' needs. The distribution of CCMs was associated with the number of managed-care enrollees.



Conclusions: Profiles of CCMs in this study are valuable for clinical practice and can assist with deployment of the CM workforce.



Clinical Relevance: To develop and deploy CCMs better matched to societal healthcare needs, characteristics of CCMs should be precisely understood. Managing the CM workforce is expected to be critical because of a shortage of RN workers and aging-of-the-workforce issues in the US.

Eun-Jun Park

Papers

Academic cheating among nursing students

An integrated ethical decision-making model for nurses

The development and implications of a case-based computer program to train ethical decision-making

A Comparison of Hospice Care Research Topics between Korea and Other Countries Using Text Network Analysis

Case Management Workforce in the United States