Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "Nursing Study and teaching Australia Evaluation"

The Australian Catholic University (ACU National at www.acu.edu.au) is a public university funded by the Australian Government. There are six campuses across the country, located in Brisbane, Queensland; North Sydney, New South Wales; Strathfield, New South Wales; Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (ACT); Ballarat, Victoria; and Melbourne, Victoria. The university serves a total of approximately 27,000 students, including both full- and part-time students, and those enrolled in undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Through fostering and advancing knowledge in education, health, commerce, the humanities, science and technology, and the creative arts, ACU National seeks to make specific and targeted contributions to its local, national, and international communities. The university explicitly engages the social, ethical, and religious dimensions of the questions it faces in teaching, research, and service. In its endeavors, it is guided by a fundamental concern for social justice, equity, and inclusivity. The university is open to all, irrespective of religious belief or background. ACU National opened its doors in 1991 following the amalgamation of four Catholic tertiary institutions in eastern Australia. The institutions that merged to form the university had their origins in the mid-17th century when religious orders and institutes became involved in the preparation of teachers for Catholic schools and, later, nurses for Catholic hospitals. As a result of a series of amalgamations, relocations, transfers of responsibilities, and diocesan initiatives, more than twenty historical entities have contributed to the creation of ACU National. Today, ACU National operates within a rapidly changing educational and industrial context. Student numbers are increasing, areas of teaching and learning have changed and expanded, e-learning plays an important role, and there is greater emphasis on research. In its 2005–2009 Strategic Plan, the university commits to the adoption of quality teaching, an internationalized curriculum, as well as the cultivation of generic skills in students, to meet the challenges of the dynamic university and information environment (ACU National, 2008). The Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary) Program at ACU Canberra Situated in Australia’s capital city, the Canberra campus is one of the smallest campuses of ACU National, where there are approximately 800 undergraduate and 200 postgraduate students studying to be primary or secondary school teachers through the School of Education (ACT). Other programs offered at this campus include nursing, theology, social work, arts, and religious education. A new model of pre-service secondary teacher education commenced with the introduction of the Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary) program at this campus in 2005. It marked an innovative collaboration between the university and a cohort of experienced secondary school teachers in the ACT and its surrounding region. This partnership was forged to allow student teachers undertaking the program to be inducted into the teaching profession with the cooperation of leading practitioners from schools in and around the ACT. In the preparation of novices for the teaching profession, an enduring challenge is to create learning experiences capable of transforming practice, and to instill in the novices an array of professional skills, attributes, and competencies (Putnam & Borko, 2000). Another dimension of the beginning teacher experience is the need to bridge theory and practice, and to apply pedagogical content knowledge in real-life classroom practice. During the one-year Graduate Diploma program, the student teachers undertake two four-week block practicum placements, during which they have the opportunity to observe exemplary lessons, as well as to commence teaching. The goals of the practicum include improving participants’ access to innovative pedagogy and educational theory, helping them situate their own prior knowledge regarding pedagogy, and assisting them in reflecting on and evaluating their own practice. Each student teacher is paired with a more experienced teacher based at the school where he/she is placed, who serves as a supervisor and mentor. In 2007, a new dimension to the teaching practicum was added to facilitate online peer mentoring among the pre-service teachers at the Canberra campus of ACU National, and provide them with opportunities to reflect on teaching prior to entering full-time employment at a school. The creation of an online community to facilitate this mentorship and professional development process forms the context for the present case study. While on their practicum, students used social software in the form of collaborative web logging (blogging) and threaded voice discussion tools that were integrated into the university’s course management system (CMS), to share and reflect on their experiences, identify critical incidents, and invite comment on their responses and reactions from peers.

The MHEC-RAP project involves the innovative application of video conferencing to mental health assessment in rural NSW. The preliminary evaluation findings of the project are presented. Mental health emergencies in rural and remote settings cause particular problems and are not amenable to conventional health service solutions. Patients and local health care staff may be isolated from specialist mental health staff and from acute inpatient services. Decisions to transport patients for specialist assessments or treatment may be required at night or at weekends and may involve families, police, ambulance services and local health staff. Such decisions need to be made promptly but carefully and the ability to obtain a specialist assessment may assist in making a decision about how best to care for the patient bearing in mind the need to provide a responsive, high quality and safe service to patients and local clinicians. In this chapter we examine a novel approach which uses audio-visual technology to conduct remote emergency mental health patient assessment interviews and provide consultations to local clinicians in rural communities in western NSW. The Mental Health Emergency Care – Rural Access Project or ‘MHEC-RAP’ was developed in 2007 following a series of consultations held in rural towns and implemented in 2008 within the Greater Western Area Health Service (GWAHS), New South Wales, Australia. GWAHS is a primary example of a rural and remote health service. It serves 287,481 people (8.3% of whom are Indigenous Australians) in an area that is 445,197sq km or 55% of the state of New South Wales (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001; Greater Western Area Health Service, 2007, 2009). The communities within GWAHS are mostly small, the towns are widely dispersed and local services are “limited by distance, expense, transport, and the difficulty of recruiting health professionals to these areas” (Dunbar, 2007 page 587). The chapter focuses on the design of the service, its implementation and its performance in the first year. We conclude with a discussion about the service, its broader relevance, transferability and its sustainability.

By the end of this chapter, you should understand… ● The range of possible sources of information about medicines ● Their positive and negative characteristics ● Some trustworthy sources of evidence ● The role of medicines information departments ● Some basic principles of critical analysis of evidence ● How the British National Formulary (BNF) is structured ● How to read a BNF monograph ● A selection of terms used in the literature about medicines…. While nurses will not usually be selecting medicines, they still need information to make the best use of the medicines prescribed for their patients. Information of all kinds is much more readily available today than it was a generation ago when the authors were students, but much of it is of low quality and today’s student must learn to test the quality of the evidence offered to see if it can be relied upon. In all fields of healthcare it has become usual to insist that practice must be evidence based. This is very desirable, but it begs the question—what is evidence? This chapter will examine some of the sources of evidence about medicines that are available and give some guidance on their reliability. Later, there will be an introduction to critical analysis of sources, and a description of some of the key terms used in evaluating clinical evidence about medicines. Sources of information may be conveniently divided into two main types—people and publications. It is natural that many healthcare professionals should rely upon their mentors and instructors to supplement the knowledge they gain in formal teaching. Indeed, for many years much of the practical information about medicines that junior doctors received came from participation in ward rounds under the tutelage of a consultant. In medical school they learned some general pharmacology, but the actions of many drugs were learned following graduation (Maxwell and Walley, 2009 ) The same will be true for nurses, and it will continue to be true throughout their careers. New medicines will come into use, and nurses will have to learn about them. It is therefore important to realize that pharmacology will be a lifelong study and does not end with registration as a nurse.

Critical Thinking (CT) in the nurse graduate continues to be a topic of concern in the academic and acute care settings. Few studies focus on early evaluation of Critical Thinking Skills (CTS). The purpose of this chapter is to show how the non-experimental, explanatory, quantitative study, the Kaplan CTIT, was employed to determine if a transformation in the level of CTS occurs within the first semester of associate degree nursing students. Participants completed the pretest in the first three weeks of classes. Posttests were given after course finals. A significant transformation in the level of CT occurred. The estimated change in CT test scores was 2.04, with 95% confidence. Implications for early measurement of CTS in nursing programs reveals if teaching methodology is providing the necessary input for developing CTS or if evaluation and changes are needed.

This chapter reports on the use of Facebook as the host site for a collaborative international animation forum between student cohorts from the University of South Australia in Australia, Penn State University in the United States of America, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. From July to December in 2012, 69 animation students from the three institutions took part in the forum. Students were required to submit work-in-progress imagery related to major assignments, and provide feedback and critiques to their global peers. Locally, resulting discussions were often transferred into the physical classroom, be it a lecture or studio, for further dissemination between peers. Internationally, students took on new roles, with more experienced students mentoring their peers. The evaluation process of the international online learning environment included informal discussions between associated teaching staff, and a post semester survey providing participating students with the opportunity to critically reflect on the experience. The findings of the study are discussed in light of the growing use of social media to support mentoring, learning and teaching in tertiary education, particularly in the fields of design and digital media.

Recently, insecure work in universities in many countries has grown exponentially, alongside the rapid marketization of higher education. Reflecting the neoliberal ideal of a flexible workforce, research and teaching at universities is routinely carried out by precariously-employed academics. In Australia, for instance, the bulk of university teaching is now carried out by hourly-paid employees. This structural dependence on precarious academics poses a reputational problem for universities, and universities respond by obfuscating the statistical evidence. We present a case study of tracking down the level of this phenomenon in Australian higher education. The academics’ trade union and allies have used the university-level figures to challenge the advance of academic job insecurity, and are now highlighting the incidence of precarious academic employment nationally. Our own work has highlighted the multiple and conflicting figures being reported by universities, and the systematic underestimation of the actual rate of insecure jobs reported by government departments. We question these unreliable estimates, examples of neoliberalism’s ‘funny numbers’, and develop alternative data and arguments Thereby, we aim to reveal the impact of casualisation and enable critical evaluation of trends in the higher education sector, so as to restore industrial justice.

Over the past several decades, dramatic improvements in outcome have occurred for children treated for cancer. Many of these advances can be attributed to the benefits of multicenter research conducted within the context of a cooperative group clinical trials infrastructure (D’Angio & Vietti, 2001; Pediatric Oncology Group, 1992). Historically, the cooperative groups sponsored by the National Cancer Institute provided pooled expertise, centralized high-quality medical informatics resources, and access to large patient populations. This infrastructure enabled investigators to ask more focused research questions with greater statistical power as well as generalize research findings to the broader population. Although childhood cancer is by no means a rare disease, its incidence in the general population is sufficiently low that few single pediatric oncology treatment centers are likely to treat enough patients, representing an adequately homogeneous sample, to provide a robust evaluation of clinical outcomes. In many respects, multisite research has been necessary to acquire adequate sample sizes to allow appropriate statistical evaluations of treatment outcomes and generalization of these outcomes to the larger pediatric oncology population. Awareness of this fact led first to the development of small consortia of pediatric oncology centers and later to the formation of large multiinstitutional cooperative study groups to conduct controlled clinical therapeutic trials for pediatric cancer patients. Ultimately, the four major childhood cancer study groups (the Children’s Cancer Group, CCG; the Pediatric Oncology Group, POG; the National Wilms Tumor Study Group; and the Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study Group) merged in 2000 to form a single collaborative group: the Children’s Oncology Group (COG). At present, the 238 institutions that comprise the COG provide the research infrastructure for the majority of pediatric oncology clinical trials conducted in North America, Australia, and parts of Europe. Moreover, because the COG member institutions include all major university and teaching hospitals throughout the United States and Canada, the majority of children diagnosed with cancer in North America will be treated at a COG member institution with the opportunity to be enrolled on a COG protocol. An early evaluation of referral patterns to the two largest cooperative groups enumerated the observed cancer cases from the CCG and POG cancer incidence registries.

[This Proceedings paper was revised and published in the 2019 issue of the journal Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology, Volume 16] Aim/purpose The purpose of this article is to discuss the psychosocial and emotional outcomes of an introductory health science workshop designed to support and assist incoming health science students before starting their university study. Background For the past two decades, a South Australian university offered an on-campus face to face workshop titled ‘Preparation for Health Sciences’ to incoming first-year students from eleven allied health

Aim/Purpose: Project Management (PM) capability is one of the skill sets that employers across a broad range of industries are seeking with a projected current talent deficit of 1.5 million jobs. Background A course syllabus is both a tool and a resource used by the learners, the faculty, and the school to articulate what to learn, how to learn, and how and when to access and evaluate the learning outcomes. A learner-centred course syllabus can enhance the teaching, the learning, and the assessment and evaluation processes. A learner-centred pedagogy seeks to create a community of learners by

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is an international comparative study of student achievement directed by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). TIMSS was first conducted in 1995 and the assessment conducted in 2019 formed the seventh cycle, providing 24 years of trends in mathematics and science achievement at Year 4 and Year 8. In Australia, TIMSS is managed by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and is jointly funded by the Australian Government and the state and territory governments. The goal o