Education Commons^™

The Debt Burden Of Entry-Level Physical Therapists In Florida, Steven Benton Ambler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the education, autonomy, and high demand for physical therapists both nationally and in Florida, recent graduates have seen steadily rising education costs with disproportionate changes in income once they have graduated and entered the workforce. The growing debt burden of physical therapists entering the workforce, coupled with the growth in projected need and stagnant wages, raises concern about where and how entry-level physical therapists will practice and if these choices will be affected by their debt burden. The purpose of this quantitative, cross-sectional survey study was to identify the debt profile of entry-level physical therapists and explore the relationship …

Adaptive Styles And Coping Strategies Of Youth Diagnosed With Cancer: Relationship To Well-Being, Psychosocial And Educational Adjustment, And Parents’ Adaptive Styles, Renee Corbett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although almost 16,000 children and adolescents are diagnosed with cancer each year, the incident rates have remained stable over recent years, and mortality has decreased consistently since 1975 (American Cancer Society, 2016). With increased survivorship, research and practice in pediatric oncology has focused more on the psychosocial well-being of patients during and after treatment. With research repeatedly indicating that patients and families appear to exhibit great resilience and adjustment, and low incidences of psychosocial difficulties (e.g., Kazak, 1994, Eiser et al. 2000), some researchers have examined adaptive style as a possible construct that may help explain the predominantly positive outcomes …

Examining Content Validity Of The Nurse Competence Scale In The United States, Jessica B. Shearer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nursing competence is a necessity as it affects public health, safety and welfare; however there are very few reliable and valid tools that measure nursing competence. The Nurse Competence Scale has been used in many different countries outside of the United States and is based on Benner’s Novice to Expert theory. The purpose of this study was to examine the content validity of the Nurse Competence Scale using a mixed methods approach. Descriptive statistics were used to report results of the frequency of use scale and the critical to practice scale. Nursing faculty indicate Prioritizing My Activities Flexibility According to …

Racial And Ethnic Differences In Low-Risk Cesarean Deliveries In Florida, Yuri Combo Vanda Sebastiao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Background and Significance: Cesarean delivery rates increased by more than 50% between 1996 and 2011 in the United States. The large increase in rates for the procedure was generally not associated with significant improvements in obstetric outcomes, raising concern about quality and prompting recommendations for prevention. Primary cesareans provide the best opportunity to reduce overall cesarean rates, and the group of first-time mothers considered low-risk for cesarean (known as nulliparous, term, singleton, vertex, NTSV) constitutes the focus of prevention efforts. Studies increasingly report racial and ethnic differences in NTSV cesareans, which remain after controlling for health factors. However, the reasons …

Teacher Child Interaction Therapy: An Ecological Approach To Intervening With Young Children Who Display Disruptive Behaviors, Sara Marie Hinojosa

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A model of Teacher Child Interaction Therapy (TCIT) was implemented in two kindergarten classrooms of students (n = 2) who successfully completed Parent Child Interaction Therapy, but continued to demonstrate disruptive behaviors in the classroom. The current study first indicated that TCIT was implemented with integrity by both the therapists and teacher participants. Next, the effects of this intervention on the teacher’s skills, students’ disruptive behaviors, teacher’s stress, and teacher-child relationships were investigated. The treatment acceptability was also examined. Both visual and statistical analyses found a treatment effect in both cases was seen for both teachers’ increased use of positive …

Analyzing Spelling Errors By Linguistic Features Among Children With Learning Disabilities, Christine Johnson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In order to spell fluently and accurately, phonology, orthography, and morphology must be integrated and stored into long term memory (Berninger & Richards, in press; Berninger, Nagy, Tanimoto, Thompson, Abbott, 2015). Children with dysgraphia, dyslexia, and OWL-LD have specific deficits in linguistic processing that impede the cross-mapping of these linguistic elements. This study analyzes the frequency and nature of spelling errors produced by children with dysgraphia, dyslexia, and OWL-LD during an academic writing task in order to determine if known deficits in linguistic processing affect the type and severity of spelling errors made by these children.

The present study analyzed …

Relationship Between Teacher Characteristics And Accuracy In Identifying Middle School Students With Symptoms Of Anxiety And Depression, Elizabeth Storey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As a universal screening method, teacher nominations have been found to both miss and misidentify a substantial proportion of students with internalizing disorders such as anxiety and depression (Cunningham & Suldo, 2014; Gelley, 2014; Moor et al., 2007). Although some research has explored the accuracy of teacher nominations when used to identify students with anxiety and depression, no research examined the teacher characteristics that are potentially related to accuracy. The current study conducted a secondary analysis of an archival dataset (Gelley, 2014) to determine which characteristics of teachers (N= 19) are more closely related to accuracy in identifying …

Analysis Of Patterns In Handwritten Spelling Errors Among Students With Various Specific Learning Disabilities, Laura Ann Winkler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Students diagnosed with specific learning disabilities struggle with spelling accuracy, but they do so for different reasons. For instance, students with dysgraphia, dyslexia, and oral-written language learning disability (OWL-LD) have distinct areas of weakness in cognitive processing and unique difficulties with the linguistic features necessary for accurate spelling (Silliman & Berninger, 2011). This project considered the spelling errors made by such students to determine if their unique learning profiles lead to distinct misspelling patterns.

Academic summaries handwritten by 33 students diagnosed with dysgraphia (n=13), dyslexia (n=15), and OWL-LD (n=5) were analyzed for type/complexity and …

Development And Validation Of A Remote Sensing Model To Identify Anthropogenic Boreholes That Provide Dry Season, Refuge Habitat For Anopheles Vector Mosquitoes In Sub-Saharan Africa, James Pkemoi Kukat

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A lack of surveillance systems is an impediment to public health intervention for perennial vector-borne disease transmission in northern tropical savanna region of Kenya. The population in this area are mostly poor nomadic pastoralists with little acquired functional immunity to Plasmodium falciparum, due to infrequent challenges with the parasite. A common characteristic in tropical savanna climatic zone is the availability of riverbeds that have anthropogenic boreholes that provide malaria vector mosquitoes, such as Anopheles gambiae s.l and Anopheles funestus, with aquatic refuge habitats for proliferation and endemic transmission to proximity human households during the dry-season. Unfortunately, currently there …

Exploring The Relationship Between Severity Of Illness And Human Milk Volume In Very Low Birth Weight And Extremely Low Birth Weight Infants Over Six Weeks, Shannon Leigh Morse

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Very low birth weight and extremely low birth weight neonates have tremendous risk of mortality. This is a grave concern; however, survival alone is not the goal of neonatal intensive care. Survival, along with a reduction or elimination of life long morbidity is the aim of neonatal intensive care.

Human milk is known as the best nutrition for babies and a growing body of evidence supports that human milk is critical in helping these fragile neonates mitigate the overwhelming risks they face. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between neonatal severity of illness and human …