Chicago Board of Education

This article describes the response of the Illinois Board of Nursing to an escalating number of prelicensure nursing programs with low National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX) pass rates. The response aligns with stipulations of the Illinois Nurse Practice Act and best practices. NCLEX success is crucial to launching the careers of nursing graduates and to maintaining approval status of prelicensure programs by state regulatory bodies. Boards strive to guide programs with low pass rates fairly and consistently. The Illinois Board of Nursing created a tool and process addressing curriculum and resources, faculty, students, and administrative support in a programmatic approach to improving pass rates. Initial outcomes were positive. Anecdotal evidence of programs in good standing also confirmed the tool's value as a resource to promoting graduate success. A programmatic approach can provide guidance for boards of nursing to address low NCLEX pass rates in a consistent evidence-based manner.

This paper describes a haptic simulator that has been developed as an aid for the sensorimotor skill acquisition in dentistry. An important feature of the simulator is the ability to generate templates of position and force trajectories for the students to follow. Furthermore, the simulator has a mechanism, haptic playback, to help the students follow and learn these templates. Using this feature, the teacher can perform a procedure in the haptic simulator and record her actions. The trainee is then able to observe the recorded procedure and follow the correct trajectory in the position and force. Several haptic playback techniques are reviewed and the procedure implemented in the simulator is described in detail. We also describe hardware and software components of the simulator and their functionality.We conclude by describing the results of a preliminary classroom evaluation of the simulator.

Background and Purpose. A central issue surrounding the use of a visual analog scale (VAS) of the Physical Therapist Clinical Performance Instrument (CPI) is the level of measurement represented by the method. An often-made assumption is that the VAS is an interval-level measure of the construct of interest. In order for the scale to be valid and for this assumption to be supported, raters must demonstrate the ability to discriminate among 100 levels of student performance. The purpose of this study was to use a measurement model to investigate the validity of the VAS of the CPI when used by clinical instructors to evaluate student performance. Subjects. Final CPI raw scores were collected from 182 subjects from 3 different physical therapist education programs across 4 full-time clinical experiences. Methods. Visual analog scale raw scores for each item were measured (in millimeters) along with rater use of the With Distinction Box. An analysis using the Rasch Measurement Model was performed on the collected data. Step calibration values and average measure values provided by the model were used to analyze rater use of the VAS. Results. A valid rating scale was achieved when the VAS was considered to be a 6-level ordinal scale. Following the collapse of response categories, the 6 groupings of VAS raw scores were as follows: 0-30 mm=l, 31-50 mm=2, 51-70 mm=3, 71-90 mm=4, 91-100 mm=5, and 100 mm + With Distinction Box=6. Discussion and Conclusion. The inability of clinical instructors to discriminate among 100 levels of student performance is most likely contributing to the invalid scale.

Contrary to assumptions about the aversive effects of competition on achievement motivation, in this study young people saw academic contests as fair. When 136 children and adolescents (ages 6-14) completed structured interviews on fair ways to organize science contests and on the differentiation of skill and luck, age-related trends in their conceptions of procedural justice were parallel to their ability to differentiate skill and luck tasks. Differences in the use of contest-specific attributions such as credit allocation, odds of winning, and incentives were central to developing conceptions of procedural justice. Everyone made similar intrapersonal attributions to effort, mood, talent, and interest. Individual competition was judged to be more fair than team competition. Effectiveness was seen as necessary but not sufficient for establishing fairness. Personal harm was not central to developing conceptions of fair contests.

Osteopathic graduate medical education is still in transition. The AOA Department of Education will continue to monitor and report on the impact of these changes.

This report summarizes important changes in osteopathic graduate medical education. The report also discusses the administration of graduate medical education by the AOA and presents current statistics regarding internships,

Abstract The health‐awareness program conducted by school nurses was an in‐service program for elementary school teachers. Effects of the program on the teachers' referrals, school nurses' management of referrals, and pupils' absence patterns were studied. Four pairs of schools participated; one pair each for schools with predominantly white and Hispanic students and two pairs for mostly black students. The schools in each pair were matched by predominant enrollment of pupils' race or ethnicity and randomly assigned to the experimental or control group. Referrals for pupil health services form and Pupil's daily class attendance record were used as instruments. Results showed that (1) the program significantly increased referral rates, (2) in seven of the eight schools at least 50 percent of reported health problems remained unsolved by the end of the 1982–1983 school year, and (3) the program had little impact on absence patterns. Collaboration between teachers and nurses played a key role in the success of the health‐awareness program.