Role Development in the Managed Care Era: A Case of Hospital-Based Nursing

Managed care poses numerous opportunities and challenges for today's health care organizations and their employees. This article investigates the ways that hospital nurses develop and make sense of their professional roles and organizational environments in a changing and often uncertain managed care setting. The case study approach used in this research combined qualitative methodologies to gain a rich, detailed, and contextual understanding of nurses' work roles and organizational experiences. After an analysis of interviews with 24 nurses and observations of nurses' communicative activities on one inpatient unit, the complexity of sensemaking and role development in a managed care environment is considered. Conclusions are then drawn regarding the theoretical and pragmatic implications of nurses' communicative processes, as they attempted to develop and understand their roles in a changing organizational context.     

Early Literacy Skills in African-American Children: Research Considerations

The poor reading achievement of African-American children in urban schools is well established. African-American children from low-income homes may be at particular risk for reading difficulties, although middle-income children often fare poorly as well. Intervention efforts have focused on children in kindergarten through fifth grade. This article suggests that prevention efforts must begin prior to kindergarten entry. Several key variables that may influence young children's performance, including poverty, general oral language skills, dialectal variations, home literacy practices, standardized testing bias, and teacher expectations, are explored. Future directions for research addressing emergent literacy in African-American children are discussed throughout.     

Shared Reading within an Apprenticeship Approach to Reading

Williamson & Carrington argued, in a recent edition of Educational Studies, the need for a major investigation of the effectiveness of an apprenticeship approach to reading. This paper considers some of the problems associated with such investigations. It also seeks to clarify some of the terminology in the whole language repertoire before looking in detail at shared reading as an important part of such approaches. The article concludes by suggesting that ethnographic studies are the means by which issues in the teaching and learning of reading may best be clarified, and teachers and children assisted.     

Indianapolis I3: the third generation Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems.

In 2001, the Regenstrief Institute for Health Care and the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) began an IAIMS planning effort to create a vision and a tactical plan for the first Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS) implementation to cross a large area and include unaffiliated institutions. A number of elements made this planning effort unique. Among these elements were the existence of a network infrastructure that supported the Indianapolis Network for Patient Care, the existence of a mature medical informatics program at the Regenstrief Institute, and the existence of a wide-area knowledge network fostered by the IUSM libraries. However, the leadership for a strong information technology role in the IUSM that could promote collaboration in support of education and research across the diverse Indianapolis hospital systems had been lacking. By bringing together various groups, each with a commitment to improve health care quality and public health across the Indianapolis metropolitan area, regardless of individual institutional affiliation, the strategic directions for I3-Indianapolis IAIMS Initiative have been defined and the foundations for a third generation IAIMS construct have been laid in Indianapolis, Indiana.     

Strength,Weakness, Opportunity,Threat (SWOT) Analysis of the Adaptations to Anatomical Education in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland in Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has driven the fastest changes to higher education across the globe, necessitated by social distancing measures preventing face-to-face teaching. This has led to an almost immediate switch to distance learning by higher education institutions. Anatomy faces some unique challenges. Intrinsically, anatomy is a three-dimensional subject that requires a sound understanding of the relationships between structures, often achieved by the study of human cadaveric material, models, and virtual resources. This study sought to identify the approaches taken in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland to deliver anatomical education through online means. Data were collected from 14 different universities in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland and compared adopting a thematic analysis approach. Once themes were generated, they were collectively brought together using a strength, weakness, opportunity, threat (SWOT) analysis. Key themes included the opportunity to develop new online resources and the chance to engage in new academic collaborations. Academics frequently mentioned the challenge that time constrains could place on the quality and effectiveness of these resources; especially as in many cases the aim of these resources was to compensate for a lack of exposure to cadaveric exposure. Comparisons of the actions taken by multiple higher education institutions reveal the ways that academics have tried to balance this demand. Discussions will facilitate decisions being made by higher education institutions regarding adapting the curriculum and assessment methods in anatomy.     

Methodological Choices in the Content Analysis of Textbooks for Measuring Alignment With Standards

With the recent adoption of the Common Core standards in many states, there is a need for quality information about textbook alignment to standards. While there are many existing content analysis procedures, these generally have little, if any, validity or reliability evidence. One exception is the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC), which has been widely used to analyze the alignment among standards, assessments, and teachers’ instruction. However, the SEC can be time‐consuming and expensive when used for this purpose. This study extends the SEC to the analysis of entire mathematics textbooks and investigates whether the results of SEC alignment analyses are affected if the content analysis procedure is simplified. The results indicate that analyzing only every fifth item produces nearly identical alignment results with no effect on the reliability of content analyses.