Patient satisfaction dimensions have a wide ranging and significant impact on organizational performance in the healthcare industry. In addition, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Hospital Value Based Purchasing (HVBP) Program links patient satisfaction to Medicare reimbursement, putting millions of dollars at risk for health systems. A gap in the literature exists in the exploration of how a patient's experience in the emergency department affects their satisfaction with inpatient services. In a multiple regression analysis, the relationship between HVBP Patient Experience of Care and hospital level factors including emergency department wait times are explored. Results indicate a statistically significant relationship between hospital level factors and standardized measure of patient satisfaction with a moderate adjusted effect size (p= <.0001, R2 adjusted= 0.184). Emergency department wait times post physician admit orders were most salient in predicting patient satisfaction scores (rs2= 0.434, β= -0.334, p= <.001). Recommendations to improve emergency department wait times include focusing on key decision points and implementation of electronic systems to support the movement of admitted patients out of the emergency department as quickly as possible.

The purpose of this non-experimental, quantitative study is to investigate the relationship between the use of project-based learning (PBL) by secondary business teachers and time spent in professional development of secondary business teachers for the teaching of 21st century skills. The four identified 21st century skills that will be researched include: (1) critical thinking, (2) collaboration, (3) communication, (4) creativity and innovation. A sample of 316 secondary business teachers were surveyed about their classroom practice and reflection of teaching 21st century skills. This study used a modified version of the 21st Century Teaching and Learning Survey. Survey results were analyzed for relationships using correlational and regression analysis. Business teachers reported a statistically strong relationship between the use of PBL and the teaching of 21st century skills. A statistically significant relationship between time spent in professional development and the teaching of 21st century skills was not found. Regression results indicated that the use of PBL had an impact on the teaching of 21st century skills. This research guides teachers, school administrators, and CTE directors at the state and district level towards the creation of professional development and implementation strategies when applying PBL methods in career and technical education settings.

Undergraduate nursing students face tremendous stress in regards to academic and clinical demands while emotional intelligence (EI) is a topic of interest in the nursing field. This study examined whether problem-focused coping methods for stress are related to ability and personality. In this study, EI represented ability and locus of control (LOC) represented personality. Confrontive coping, seeking social support, and planful problem-solving represented the problem-focused coping variables. A survey instrument which represented a combination of the Assessing Emotions Scale, Perceived Stress Scale, Ways of Coping Scale (Revised), and the Rotter Locus of Control Scale was administered to 11 undergraduate nursing schools during the spring semester of 2019. The results indicated that EI had strong and statistically significant correlations with each of the other variables in the study which were LOC, stress, confrontive coping, seeking social support, and planful problem-solving. The results further supported that EI was a statistically significant predictor for each of the three problem-focused coping variables. It was concluded that level of stress did not mediate the relationship between EI and any of the three problem-focused coping methods. In addition, LOC moderated the relationship between EI and stress. The limitations and possibilities for future research are addressed in …

To improve online learning pedagogy within the field of paralegal education, this study investigated how paralegal students and paralegal instructors perceived the effectiveness of synchronous and asynchronous online paralegal courses. Survey results were analyzed using independent samples t-test and correlational analysis, and indicated that overall, paralegal students and paralegal instructors positively perceived synchronous and asynchronous online paralegal courses. Paralegal instructors reported statistically significant higher perceptions than paralegal students: (1) of instructional design and course content in synchronous online paralegal courses; and (2) of technical assistance, communication, and course content in asynchronous online paralegal courses. Instructors also reported higher perceptions of the effectiveness of universal design, online instructional design, and course content in synchronous online paralegal courses than in asynchronous online paralegal courses. Paralegal students reported higher perceptions of asynchronous online paralegal course effectiveness regarding universal design than paralegal instructors. No statistically significant differences existed between paralegal students' perceptions of the effectiveness of synchronous and asynchronous online paralegal courses. A strong, negative relationship existed between paralegal students' age and their perceptions of effective synchronous paralegal courses, which were statistically and practically significant. Statistically significant relationships existed between paralegal instructors' perceptions of effective synchronous online paralegal course and the number of courses …

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationships between job satisfaction, work engagement, and turnover intention of health science teachers in the state of Texas. The healthcare profession is one of the largest growing occupations in the U.S. nationwide. The job growth outlook for healthcare professionals is projected to be on average 34% between 2014 and 2024. Despite the growing healthcare job categories, there is a shortage of healthcare professionals in the U.S. This study addressed the shortage of health science teachers in secondary education. Considering the importance of healthcare, especially with an aging U.S. population, it is critical to study the impact of work engagement and job satisfaction on teacher intent to leave the health science teaching profession. Through a correlational survey research design it was found that job satisfaction and work engagement are negatively related to turnover intention. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that job satisfaction accounted for 39.6% of the variation in turnover intention. Findings also showed that work engagement did not moderate the relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intention. Implications for research and practice are discussed and conclusions are provided.

This empirical exploratory study quantitatively analyzed content similarity indices (potential plagiarism) from a corpus consisting of 360 dissertations and 360 published articles. The population was defined using the filtering search criteria human resource development, training and development, organizational development, career development, or HRD. This study described in detail the process of collecting content similarity analysis (CSA) metadata using Turnitin software (www.turnitin.com). This researcher conducted robust descriptive statistics, a Wilcoxon signed-rank statistic between the similarity indices before and after false positives were excluded, and a multinomial logistic regression analysis to predict levels of plagiarism for the dissertations and the published articles. The corpus of dissertations had an adjusted rate of document similarity (potential plagiarism) of M = 9%, (SD = 6%) with 88.1% of the dissertations in the low level of plagiarism, 9.7% in the high and 2.2% in the excessive group. The corpus of published articles had an adjusted rate of document similarity (potential plagiarism) of M = 11%, (SD = 10%) with 79.2% of the published articles in the low level of plagiarism, 12.8% in the high and 8.1% in the excessive group. Most of the difference between the dissertations and published articles were attributed to plagiarism-of-self issues which …

The purpose of this study was to identify the status and challenges of online distance education programs in post-secondary institutions in Ghana. This study was a replication of a similar study conducted in Kenya in 2009, at the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University. This present study was conducted with an online survey using Google survey assessment. The survey requested responses from six post-secondary institutions in Ghana. Out of a total of 450 projected student responses, 309 responses were received with a 69% participation rate. A total of 14 responses were received for instructors out of a projected 30 resulting in 47% participation rate. And for administrators, 8 responses were received out of a projected 12 resulting in a 67% participation rate. Overall the study revealed that Ghana post-secondary institutions have established and incorporated online distance education into their programs, offering both online and blended courses. Some of these institutions established regional centers across the country and incorporated foreign instructors into their programs. The survey also revealed that students were satisfied with the overall online distance education program in their institutions which included the level of instruction, feedback and evaluation. However, there were still challenges revealed from the study that …

This exploratory and descriptive study examines research articles published in ten of the top journals in the broad area of educational technology during the last 20 years: 1) Educational Technology Research and Development (ETR&D); 2) Instructional Science; 3) Journal of the Learning Sciences; 4) TechTrends; 5) Educational Technology: The Magazine for Managers of Change in Education; 6) Journal of Educational Technology & Society; 7) Computers and Education; 8) British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET); 9) Journal of Educational Computing Research; and 10) Journal of Research on Technology in Education. To discover research trends in the articles published from 1995-2014, abstracts from all contributing articles published in those ten prominent journals were analyzed to extract a latent semantic space of broad research areas, top authors, and top-cited publications. Concepts that have emerged, grown, or diminished in the field were noted in order to identify the most dominant in the last two decades; and the most frequent contributors to each journal as well as those who contributed to more than one of the journals studied were identified.

The purpose of this Bailey study was to identify perceived barriers of faculty participation in distance education courses in a four-year university and identify the differences in perceived barriers between the Hebert 2003 study and this Bailey study. The literature review covers numerous studies and articles written within the last 10 years that are related to a variety of barriers perceived by faculty and administrators. There were no statistically significant relationships found between faculty demographics including gender, age, position at the university, tenure status, and number of years faculty have taught in post-secondary education. There were no statistically significant relationships found between the top administrator-ranked motivators and corresponding faculty-ranked motivators, nor between the top administrator-ranked inhibitors and the corresponding faculty-ranked inhibitors. Out of the top four non-participating, faculty-ranked barriers, three were found to have statistically significant relationships with the corresponding administrator-ranked barriers. Statistically significant relationships were found between the faculty-ranked motivators and corresponding administrator identified motivators and between the top ranked barriers identified by non-participating faculty and administrators in Hebert’s study compared to non-participating faculty-ranked and administrator-ranked barriers identified in this study.

Globalization in the past few decades has been marked by increased mobility of highly skilled workers from one country to another. Even though self-initiated expatriation is a widespread phenomenon, it is a relatively under-researched phenomenon in the academic literature, especially in an organizational context. Existing literature shows that not all individuals are equally suited to embark on a new life in another country, and self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) could be particularly susceptible to failure since they have no support from a home organization. This study was designed to investigate the experiences of self-initiated professional expatriates and the effect it had on their work performance. The purpose was to understand how their organizational and social experience affected their cross-cultural adjustment process and in turn affected their individual work performance. The researcher used a qualitative method using semi-structured interviews, observations, and documents with ten self-initiated expatriates. This study contributed to the expanding literature on the experiences of self-initiated expatriates, specifically how different support systems affected cross-cultural adjustment and individual work performance.

The purpose of this study was to provide a snapshot of current Human Resources (HR) and Management curricula of four-year public universities in Texas in 2016 and evaluate their alignment with the competencies of the SHRM Competency Model®. This study used a mixed methods approach and analyzed course syllabi for a purposeful sample of 21 public universities in Texas. The course objectives referenced explicitly and/or implicitly all nine competencies. Three courses encompassed all nine competencies, and 84% of all programs demonstrated alignment with the competencies. “Business Acumen”, “Critical Evaluation”, “Communication” and “Relationship Management” were the most frequently referenced competencies in course syllabi. “Consultation” appeared the least frequently. This comprehensive analysis revealed that there is alignment between course curricula of public universities in Texas and competency expectations of graduates wishing to pursue a career in Human Resources. Recommendations applied to four areas including scholarship, university administration, professional associations, and practitioners.

Bombarded by constant and rapid change, healthcare organizations feel a sense of urgency to meet their needs for leaders. They rely on physicians to lead at all levels in their healthcare organizations. For them to successfully navigate today's healthcare environment, they require more than a medical education. To address this need, healthcare organizations are developing in-house leadership development programs.In this paper, I conduct a case study of physicians transitioning into leadership and their self-efficacy facilitated through an in-house leadership development program. Documentation, semi-structured interviews, and observations are examined to explore how physicians think about their leadership experiences following their participation in a six-month leadership development program.The study also explores at a high-level how these experiences influenced physician's self-efficacy as a first step in developing a theory of physician leadership and self-efficacy.

Responding to globalization and its effects on education and research development, the Thai government decided to push all public universities to become autonomous and establish a system of quality assurances. The establishment of quality assurances has had a large impact on many Thai instructors, especially in new public universities. Thai instructors are now forced to more focus on conducting research because the number of research publications is regarded as one of the main criteria for quality universities. The purpose of this study is to investigate the key factors, at the individual and university levels, which impact on the instructors' behavior in conducting research of the full-time instructors in the faculty of Management Science from the Rajabhat Universities in Thailand. The current study will help explain how and why the instructors accept or refuse to conduct research and provide insight into the salient factors motivating the instructors to produce more research by conducting HLM. Data were collected from 694 participants at 37 institutions via a questionnaire survey. The findings revealed that there was no difference among these 37 universities on behavior in conducting research. The key factors statistically influencing behavior in conducting research of the instructors were facilitating conditions, academic degree, …

The ability for an organization to innovate has become one of the most important capabilities needed in the new knowledge economy. The research has demonstrated that an organization’s culture of innovation in particular predicts organizational innovativeness across multiple industries. To provide support to these organizations in their abilities to understand the culture of innovation, researchers have developed instruments to measure culture of innovation, and while many of these instruments have been widely used to inform organizational opportunities for improvement, few of these instruments have been validated or replicated beyond their initial use. The current study employs multiple factor analytic methods to validate the factor structure of the Innovation Quotient instrument developed by Rao and Weintraub and assess the extent to which the instrument is reliable for multiple organizational groups. The results of this study, as well as implications for researchers interested in culture of innovation, are presented.

The changing landscape of demographics, technology, and diversity in the learning environment is challenging schools around the world to rethink their approaches to the implementation of high-quality teaching practices. Classroom practices are becoming more complex because educators have to ensure that their students are well-equipped with 21st century skills (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2010; Dede, 2010; Griffin, McGaw, & Care, 2012). Educators, curriculum developers, and school administrators need to be more than experts in pedagogy. They are now required to keep up with current ideas, innovative instructional practices, and the results of a variety of educational reform efforts. Believing that teachers’ beliefs are the most important psychological construct with regard to instructional practices (Pajares, 1992) and that teachers’ beliefs are related to their choice of classroom practices and, ultimately, the students’ performance (Bybee, Taylor, Gardner, Van Scotter, Powell, Westbrook, & Landes, 2006; Staub & Stern, 2002), the author of this study utilizes the international data set of the Teaching and Learning International Study (TALIS) 2013 to examine the associations between teachers’ constructivist beliefs, their self-efficacy beliefs, professional activities, and the school principals’ instructional leadership as related to lower secondary school teachers and principals in South Korea, Finland, and Mexico. These three countries …

During team decision-making practices information is often shared among team members as part of the decision making process. Knowledge sharing involves one team member sharing information so that other team members can encode the knowledge to make their own mental representation of the new information (Huan & Jiang, 2012). Unfortunately, the literature has shown that new information is not always shared between team members during decision making processes (Stasser & Titus, 1985). When teams make decisions without considering all the information available poor decisions can result. This research study tests a team conceptual model derived by Turner (2013) addressing attitudes toward knowledge sharing. Structural equation modeling was conducted to test a portion of Turner’s (2013) team conceptual model. The tested model included the independent variables of psychological safety, team conflict, team cohesion, and transactive memory systems. The dependent variable for the dissertation was knowledge sharing.

The Online Student Connectedness Survey (OSCS) was introduced to the academic community in 2012 as an instrument designed to measure feelings of connectedness between students participating in online degree and certification programs. The purpose of this study was to examine data from the instrument for initial evidence of validity and reliability and to establish a nomological network between the OSCS and similar instruments utilized in the field. The study utilized sequential exploratory factor analysis- confirmatory factor analysis (EFA-CFA) and correlational analysis to assess results of the data. Students enrolled in online courses at higher education institutions located in the United States served as the sample for this study. Three instruments were used during the study. The OSCS was administered first so that the factor structure could be examined for factor validity. Once confirmed, the Classroom Community Scale (CCS) and the Community of Inquiry Scale (COI) served as the instruments to examine nomological validity through correlational analysis of data.This study provided evidence of factor validity and reliability for data from the OSCS. After the initial EFA-CFA, the four-factor structure held, and 16 of the 25 original items remained for nomological testing. Statistically significant correlations were demonstrated between factors contained in the …

As work environments become more complex and demanding, organizations are becoming more interested in measuring the impact of their human resource development programs and initiatives. With this increased attention on data and measurement, human resource professionals have been encouraged to utilize data collection and data analysis techniques to make more objective and rationale human capital decisions and to verify business impact. As a result, the human resource profession has seen a significant increase in the use of surveys to measure anything from training effectiveness to the efficacy of recruitment procedures. The increase in the use of survey instruments requires that more focused attention is placed on the reliability and validity of data from any instrument used to make important human resource and business decisions. One instrument that is currently being used to measure career plateaus and job fit is the Work Perceptions Profile. The purpose of this research study was to conduct a construct validity analysis of the Work Perceptions Profile data and to determine the factor structure of data from its items. The data in this analysis supported a two-factor model structure with the first factor measuring Work Characteristics and a second factor measuring Performance. The results of this …

In recent years, considerable concern has arisen over cross-national student’s math achievement. A number of studies focusing on eighth grade student’s math achievement have been published. However, the most important role we should consider is not only students, but also teachers. A good teaching training program could help teachers improve their teaching expertise and student’s math achievement. Moreover, most studies only focused on explained predictions of the effect between potential factors. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to implement a hierarchical linear model and cluster analysis techniques to re-examine the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2011 among eighth grade students in the United States (U.S.), South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. These techniques were applied to provide a teacher characteristics and student math achievement model and identify a new institutional typology based on the pattern of teacher characteristic types and countries. Based on these patterns and model, this study presented the findings, as well as suggestions for improving educational policies and teaching training program in, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and the U.S.

With the increasing use of social media by students, researchers, administrative staff, and faculty in post-secondary education (PSE), a number of institutions have developed guideline and policy documents to set standards for social media use. Social media platforms and applications have the potential to increase communication channels, support learning, enhance research, and encourage community engagement at PSE institutions. As social media implementation and administration has developed in PSE, there has been minimal assessment of the substance of social media guideline and policy documents. The first objective of this research study was to examine an accessible, online database (corpus) comprised of 24, 243 atomic social media guideline and policy text documents from 250 PSE institutions representing 10 countries to identify central attributes. To determine text meaning from topic extraction, a rotated latent semantic analysis (rLSA) method was applied. The second objective of this investigation was to determine if the distribution of topics analyze in the corpus differ by PSE institution geographic location. To analyze the diverging topics, the researcher utilized an iterative consensus-building algorithm.Through the maximum term frequencies, LSA determined a rotated 36-factor solution that identified common attributes and topics shared among the 24,243 social media guideline and policy atomic documents. …

Diversity impacts organizations, both internally and externally. Responses to changes in demographics come from legal and moral imperatives. As a reflection of the changes in the population demographics in the United States, universities have seen and sought increased diversity in their student enrollment. Many institutions have purposeful plans to increase representation of under-represented groups as well as those students from low-income families. Some schools also recognize the importance of having diversity represented within their staff and faculty positions as a way of creating a supportive environment that also promotes diversity of thought. As schools increase the diversity of their student population, at what level are they increasing diversity among their tenured and tenure-track faculty? The purpose of this study is to examine the impact on full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty diversity compared to enrolled student diversity at institutions that promote, require, or provide access to training for faculty search committees, including diversity/cultural awareness, legal compliance, and process training, and those institutions that do not appear to have any training requirement as documented on their websites. Only tenured/tenure-track faculty were considered as they are the permanent teaching/research positions and generally represent the core faculty of every department at a university.

Organizations rely on their training departments to deliver adequate training for effective use of knowledge on the job to new and tenured employees. The transfer of learned knowledge and skills yields many positive outcomes for the employees, the trainers, and the organization as a whole. Such outcomes include improved productivity and efficiency, increased morale, work enjoyment, improved customer service, and improved shareholder satisfaction. In order to achieve these outcomes, training departments must employ skilled training personnel knowledgeable about curriculum design and creative with training delivery and learning environments. These requirements implementation will depends heavily on the experience level of training professionals. Training professionals need to understand their own learning styles and how to appropriately utilize strategies to target the various learning styles that exist in the classroom. Instructors must constantly monitor the learning environment and be able to make immediate changes to meet the needs of the participants when necessary. Participants themselves play an integral role in the effective transfer of learning from the classroom to the job. Learners’ backgrounds, life experiences, and motivation to learn are important considerations for designing a positive learning experience. When training programs cater to learners’ preferred learning styles with an appropriate learning environment in …

To impact student learning, educators’ implementation, or transfer, of new knowledge, skills, dispositions, and practices to daily work is the primary purpose of professional learning. The purpose of this study was to assess the multivariate relationship between individual and work environment characteristics as measured by the Collective Efficacy Scale and Dimensions of Learning Organization Questionnaire, respectively, and learning transfer factors as measured by the Learning Transfer System Inventory. The sample consisted of 249 PK-12 grade school- based instructional staff members of an education association. Canonical correlation and commonality analyses required using the two individual and work environment characteristics of learning culture and collective efficacy as predictor variables of the five learning transfer factors of performance self-efficacy, transfer-effort performance expectations, performance outcome expectations, performance coaching, and resistance to change to evaluate the multivariate between the two variable sets. Learning culture and collective efficacy demonstrated a relationship to resistance to change and performance outcome expectations. Learning culture and collective efficacy were insufficient to transfer-effort performance expectations, attend to performance self-efficacy beliefs, and increase support for transfer (i.e., performance coaching) factors. These findings might guide the decisions and practice of individuals with responsibility to plan, implement, and evaluate professional learning, and provide the …

This work focuses on how to improve medical services for veterans in a manner that will result in high levels of satisfaction and attainment of needed services. This research assess how veterans access healthcare and receive service. The problem to be addressed relates to reports by veteran healthcare organizations regarding the presence of gaps in coverage and customer service disparities in healthcare. Common concerns involve the gaps between veterans’ expectations for services and the provided services. This study created a survey instrument that contextualized components of established scales along with demographics and constructs specific to the current study. This study assessed the relationships among a variety of constructs and dimensions with healthcare expectations and service quality using a series of simple regressions. The results showed a statistically significant relationship between quality and the use or intention to use technology. The study supports the contention that respondents are willing to use self-service technologies. Technology that incorporates digital devices into healthcare services offers an opportunity to bridge service gaps and holds a promise for giving veterans faster access to service and care in a beneficial manner.