For decades, district level administrators and policy makers have been searching for ways to combat the ever growing issue of teacher attrition. Each year teachers leave the profession prior to retirement age. This problem is even more prevalent in schools who serve low-income, high-minority students.
The purpose of this qualitative transcendental phenomenological study was to determine the lived experiences that keep elementary school teachers teaching in low-income, high-minority schools, when so many of their peers choose to leave. For this study, six elementary level teachers, who have taught in the same low-income, high-minority school for five years or more, participated in one hour long semi-structured interviews. These interviews helped see through the lens of the participants, providing rich, real world experiences they used to sustain their positions when so many of their peers leave.
The results revealed that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators played a role in the teacher’s decision to remain in low-income, high-minority schools. These motivators ranged from their professional work environments to past experiences as teachers and students. The information discovered during this study may help administrators and policy makers find ways to increase teacher attrition especially in low-income, high-minority schools
With the introduction of job embeddedness theory, turnover research shifted away from the precursors of why people leave and focused on why people stay. Distinct from similar constructs, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, job embeddedness includes community-related issues in addition to job-related issues. While existing literature has evaluated alternate ways to measure the job embeddedness construct, variable-centered approaches continue to be utilized. This approach implicitly assumes that being high or low on job embeddedness perceptions in the form of an overall composite indicates that individuals perceive each aspect and their attachment ties similarly. Thus, this study advances the job embeddedness theoretical framework by engaging in a person-centered approach. This study found that the presumed underlying factors used to measure job embeddedness were best represented by a six-factor model through confirmatory factor analysis. In addition, this study conducted a latent profile analysis to examine patterns in response indicators within the sample data and found that distinct job embeddedness profiles emerged. These profiles showed unique patterns of job-based and non-job-based experiences that relate to staying on the job. Lastly, this study examined each job embeddedness profile and compared them with respect to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions.
Childhood obesity has been on the rise for decades with negative impact on health, psychology of the people and with significant economic cost to the society. Some risk factors attributed to obesity are quality and quantity of food, sugary drinks, and sedentary lifestyle. This project evaluates the effect of an educational intervention to improve parents’ nutrition label literacy as parents make healthy food choices for their children.
The literature review discussed the causes and consequences of childhood obesity, and importance of nutrition label literacy in prevention of childhood obesity. This quantitative descriptive study was conducted at an outpatient pediatric clinic among parents. One of the aims of the project was to identify the participants’ nutrition label illiteracy by administering a Food Label Literacy for Applied Nutrition Knowledge (FLLANK) pretest. Thirty participants completed the pre and post intervention questionnaire. 73.3% of the participants had a least a 2-year college degree and 60% made more than $45,000/ year. The results showed that irrespective of socioeconomic status, the participants improved in their nutrition label literacy after the educational intervention. It is important for healthcare providers to initiate early intervention in nutrition literacy in prevention of childhood obesity.
Childhood obesity has been on the rise for decades with negative impact on health, psychology of the people and with significant economic cost to the society. Some risk factors attributed to obesity are quality and quantity of food, sugary drinks, and sedentary lifestyle. This project evaluates the effect of an educational intervention to improve parents’ nutrition label literacy as parents make healthy food choices for their children.
The literature review discussed the causes and consequences of childhood obesity, and importance of nutrition label literacy in prevention of childhood obesity. This quantitative descriptive study was conducted at an outpatient pediatric clinic among parents. One of the aims of the project was to identify the participants’ nutrition label illiteracy by administering a Food Label Literacy for Applied Nutrition Knowledge (FLLANK) pretest. Thirty participants completed the pre and post intervention questionnaire. 73.3% of the participants had a least a 2-year college degree and 60% made more than $45,000/ year. The results showed that irrespective of socioeconomic status, the participants improved in their nutrition label literacy after the educational intervention. It is important for healthcare providers to initiate early intervention in nutrition literacy in prevention of childhood obesity.
Many people are affected by chronic pain. The use of opioids for pain has resulted in an increase in the number of opioid-related overdose deaths. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) created opioid prescribing guidelines to help providers safely prescribe opioids for chronic pain. The purpose of this project was to create an electronic medical record (EMR) template and urine drug test (UDT) alert to increase the providers’ adherence to the CDC opioid guidelines in a small, hospital-owned, family practice clinic. A pre/post implementation chart review tool was used to evaluate the medical records of 60 patients prescribed chronic opioids. The tool was used to determine if providers were adhering to the guidelines. Measures included the number of patients who completed an annual UDT, signed control substance agreement (CSA), documented pain diagnosis, quarterly office visits, and if providers reviewed the prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) every 3 months. Adherence improved in the post-implementation data compared to pre-implementation. There were statistically significant increases in CSA (p=.000), PDMP reviewed (p=.000), annual UDT (p=.005), and quarterly appointments (p=.006). Although not statistically significant, there was an increase in documented pain diagnosis (p=.492). Implementation of an EMR template and UDT alert led to an increase in provider adherence to opioid prescribing guidelines.
Food insecurity (FI) has negative health effects throughout the lifespan, yet there is a disconnect between national recognition of FI as a health issue and FI screening in the clinical setting. The purpose of this project was to determine if an educational intervention increased knowledge of FI’s role on health, the screening and referral process, and using ICD-10 coding to document FI. A pretest-posttest design was used, sampling clinicians across five clinical sites. Participants received virtual education and completed a pre-, post-, and 3-month follow-up survey to measure knowledge, attitudes, and willingness to address FI issues. A retrospective ICD-10 coding report for FI was obtained to measure frequency of use per clinic site. Thirty-one clinicians completed the pre- and post-survey, and twelve clinicians completed all three time points. Participants’ knowledge of FI and knowledge of referral resources was significantly improved from the pre- to post-survey (p <0.001, p < 0.000 respectively). Clinicians showed a significant change in their intent to ask patients about FI (p < 0.000) and to refer patients to community food resources (p < 0.000); this remained at the 3-month follow-up (p < 0.001). There was not a significant change in the use of the ICD-10 code for FI throughout the measurement period. The results of this project support findings in the literature that a point-in-time educational training on FI could improvement clinicians’ knowledge, as well as their willingness to screen patients for FI and connect them to food resources.
Bacteria play a major role in our health and wellbeing. The microbe-host interaction is often mediated by sugar polymers at the cell surface. An incredibly diverse amount of glycan variation exists throughout these structures, which makes identification of surface components difficult. The composition of the surface is unique to bacteria and acts as molecular fingerprint which can distinguish even subspecies apart. Better methods to decipher what those glycan identities are or how to reproduce them may help develop future advancements towards exploiting them as therapeutic targets. The major challenge addressed herein is to simplify the tools used to track the formation of these natural materials. To do this, we expand on the chemoenzymatic preparation of a tagged lipid substrate central to early stages of biosynthesis for many surface polysaccharides. Further, we identify conditions in which these unnatural substrates can be used in vitro. Lastly, we develop methodologies to detect BP and polysaccharide intermediates in live cells. These tools have facilitated robust detection and reconstruction of glycan assembly building blocks. This research may lay the ground work for future applications technologies towards novel therapeutics, such as glycoconjugates vaccines.
The purpose of this action research project was to explore the perceptions, practices, and roles that a team of six (6) preservice teachers developed regarding make-based learning and teaching students with emotional and behavioral disabilities. During the course of the study, participants enrolled in a seminar course that involved weekly clinical visits to the makerspace inside a separate public school for students with exceptional emotional and behavioral needs. They also spent one afternoon per month designing and carrying out projects in a university makerspace. Data collection included observation forms that participants completed after the clinical school visits, written assignments, and individual interviews. Narrative analysis and structural coding were used to analyze data. Three beliefs emerged across participants: (1) making can benefit students with emotional and behavioral disabilities, (2) evidence-based practices have limited value in a classroom, (3) instructional time in a makerspace should be used for making.
As employers leverage recruitment activities to compete for active job seekers, they may also seize opportunities to recruit those who are not actively searching for jobs (i.e., passive job seekers). The literature currently focuses on active job seekers and has created a false dichotomy between active and passive job seekers. This study aims to change the conversation on passive job seekers and emphasize that all individuals fall on a continuum of job seeking behavior frequency. There is currently a lack of theoretical insight into the cognitive processes involved in the recruitment of active and passive job seekers, and misalignment between theoretically and practically relevant constructs and the measures currently being used. This study aims to identify the factors and mechanisms that attract talent across the job seeking behavior frequency continuum and establish a more thorough understanding of the factors that influence candidates’ actual job choices. The first contribution of this study to the field of recruitment is the reconceptualization of active and passive job seeking as different levels of job seeking behavior frequency on a continuum. The second is the extension of expectancy theory to the recruitment of job seekers across the continuum. The third contribution of this research is that it moves the needle to more closely approximate a measure of actual job choice decisions and provides a better understanding of how candidates make job choice decisions. This research may also inform the tailoring of organizational policies and practices to best attract job seekers on the passive end of the continuum, which could lead to advantageous recruitment outcomes.
The rapid development of IoT devices and distributed computing brings convenience and high efficiency to modern society. To enhance the security of hardware devices, quite a few cryptographic algorithms were proposed and applied. These encryption algorithms show good resilience to brute-force attacks, but are still vulnerable to side-channel attacks.
Side-channel attacks are non-invasive and passive attack that shows high efficiency on secret data extraction and brings a lot of difficulties for detection and defense. Unlike the brute-force attack and the cryptanalysis attack, that targets the weakness in the encryption algorithm, side-channel attacks utilize weaknesses of implementation and use statistical models such as differential analysis and correlation analysis to steal secret information.
In this work, we explore different side-channel attacks and propose feasible countermeasures for mitigation, including power-based analysis, electromagnetic-based analysis and Direct Memory Access(DMA) attack.
For power/EM based side channel attacks, we first demonstrate multiple attacks on both software-based implementation and hardware-based implementation, including template attack, power-based correlation analysis, and EM-based correlation analysis. To mitigate the risk, we propose a key update scheme to provide resilience to correlation-based side-channel attacks for encryption engine and prove the efficiency by experiments. To protect the process of key generation and key storage from the tampering attack, we use a secure coprocessor to generate and store secret keys.
For DMA attack, we propose a lightweight scheme to provide resilience without any physical and protocol-level modification. The proposed scheme constructs a unique identifier for each DMA-supported PCIe device based on profiling time and builds a trusted database for authentication. The efficiency is also tested and proved by experiments.
