Adult and Continuing Education Commons^™

Factors Associated With Attitudes Toward Learning In An Online Environment: Transactional Distance, Technical Efficacy, And Physical Surroundings, Jodi Elizabeth Pettazzoni

Dissertations

This study examines the relationship between a student's environment in an online course and their academic achievement. This study surveyed students who completed world literature classes in an online format that were part of their universities' general education curricula. Students responded to items assessing several constructs and personal demographic variables that together defined their learning environments: content, delivery, assessment and feedback, technical support, learner experience with technology, learner experience with distance learning, interaction, physical space, support network, characteristics of adult learners, and major. Academic achievement was the dependent variable and was defined as anticipated grade in the course. Using Spearman …

Knowledge Of Pain Management In Older Adults As A Content Area For Continuing Professional Education For Licensed Nurses, Wanda Cleveland Dubuisson

Dissertations

The research of the last 30 years has revealed the inadequacy of pain management in the older adult. Although evidenced-based clinical practice guidelines exist to direct the management of pain in the older adult, health care providers are either unaware or lack the proper understanding of the guidelines. This study investigated the differences in knowledge of pain management in older adults when examining licensed acute care nurses and extended care nurses. It sampled 118 acute care nurses working in two hospitals in Mississippi and 78 extended care nurses working in six extended care facilities (ECF) in Mississippi.

Based upon the …

The Influence Of Career-Technical Student Organizations On Non-Traditional And Traditional Community College Students, Suzanne Lee Johnson

Dissertations

Student organizations have been contributing to adult education for years. The need to recruit non-traditional students and retain them is very important to the financial support of the career and technical program. If a career-technical student organization (CTSO) can encourage retention and completion of traditional and non-traditional students in a field of study, the state might realize the need to increase the funding provided to the advisers/instructors of the CTSO and the financial support of the CTSO. This study investigated what motivates a student to become an active member in a CTSO and to what extent the CTSO contributed to …

Differences In Learning Motivations Of Professionals And Nonprofessionals Participating In Two South Mississippi Institutes For Learning In Retirement, Constance Marie Farmer

Dissertations

This study investigated the differences in learning motivations of (a) professional and nonprofessional, and (b) urban and rural members of two south Mississippi Institutes for Learning in Retirement (ILR) programs in an attempt to expand C. O. Houle's conceptual model of continuing professional education into the retirement years and to determine if the life transitions of the older adult unite the learning orientations of these subpopulations into self-actualizing (growth) motives as part of the maturation process identified y Abraham Maslow.

Ninety urban ILR and 60 rural ILR members were recruited. Professional was defined as having completed a bachelor's degree or …

Keeping The Faith: The Public Library's Commitment To Adult Education, 1950-2006, Brenda Weeks Coleman

Dissertations

This study examines the extent to which the conception and implementation of the public library's educational commitment to adults changed between 1950 and 2006 within the context of the institutional development of the public library and the influences exerted by internal and external forces such as philanthropic organizations, the federal government, the American Library Association, research, the public library planning process, the nontraditional education movement, and changes in public library ideology. Philanthropic organizations such as the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation's Fund for Adult Education played pivotal roles in the development of the library's liberal adult education programming in …