Background: The Program Evaluation Standards (PES) can be considered established criteria for hig... more Background: The Program Evaluation Standards (PES) can be considered established criteria for high quality evaluations. We emphasize PES Utility Standards and evaluation capacity building as we strive for meaningful application of our work in the real world. Purpose: We focused our methodology on understanding how stakeholders discussed utility and how their perceptions related to our evaluation work aligned with PES Utility Standards. Setting: The West Virginia Clinical Translational Science Institute (WVCTSI) is a statewide multi-institutional entity for which we conduct tracking and evaluation since 2012. Intervention: Sustained collaborative engagement of evaluation stakeholders with the goal of increasing their utilization of evaluation products and evaluative thinking. Research Design: Case study. Data Collection and Analysis: We interviewed five key stakeholders. Themes developed from analysis of PES Utility standard coding of interview data informed document analysis. Interv...
This paper reports the findings of a case study in which audio feedback replaced text-based feedb... more This paper reports the findings of a case study in which audio feedback replaced text-based feedback in asynchronous courses. Previous research has demonstrated that participants in online courses can build effective learning communities through text-based communication alone. Similarly, it has been demonstrated that instructors for online courses can adequately project immediacy behaviors using text-based communication. However, we believed that the inclusion of an auditory element might strengthen both the sense of community and the instructor’s ability to affect more personalized communication with students. Over the course of one semester, students in this study received a mixture of asynchronous audio and text-based feedback. Our findings revealed extremely high student satisfaction with embedded asynchronous audio feedback as compared to asynchronous text only feedback. Four themes, which accounted for this preference, were culled out in an iterative, inductive analysis of int...
Journal of behavioral and social sciences (Cedarville, Ohio)
The Health Sciences and Technology Academy (HSTA) strives to increase college-going and completio... more The Health Sciences and Technology Academy (HSTA) strives to increase college-going and completion rates for students in West Virginia (USA), a state with low educational attainment and the second most rural state in the country. The positive impact of HSTA on student academic trajectories has been documented, but student voices have not been represented. This qualitative study using Bronfenbrenner's ecological perspective explores student experiences through HSTA, with an eye toward how similar programs serving rural populations might improve while understanding student participant perspectives. Participants were 706 incoming 9th -12th graders from rural West Virginia who provided survey responses across two years. We address the organizational and individual considerations that were instrumental in creating a supportive learning environment for rural youth.
Background: The Program Evaluation Standards (PES) can be considered established criteria for hig... more Background: The Program Evaluation Standards (PES) can be considered established criteria for high quality evaluations. We emphasize PES Utility Standards and evaluation capacity building as we strive for meaningful application of our work in the real world. Purpose: We focused our methodology on understanding how stakeholders discussed utility and how their perceptions related to our evaluation work aligned with PES Utility Standards. Setting: The West Virginia Clinical Translational Science Institute (WVCTSI) is a statewide multi-institutional entity for which we conduct tracking and evaluation since 2012. Intervention: Sustained collaborative engagement of evaluation stakeholders with the goal of increasing their utilization of evaluation products and evaluative thinking. Research Design: Case study. Data Collection and Analysis: We interviewed five key stakeholders. Themes developed from analysis of PES Utility standard coding of interview data informed document analysis. Interv...
This paper reports the findings of a case study in which audio feedback replaced text-based feedb... more This paper reports the findings of a case study in which audio feedback replaced text-based feedback in asynchronous courses. Previous research has demonstrated that participants in online courses can build effective learning communities through text-based communication alone. Similarly, it has been demonstrated that instructors for online courses can adequately project immediacy behaviors using text-based communication. However, we believed that the inclusion of an auditory element might strengthen both the sense of community and the instructor’s ability to affect more personalized communication with students. Over the course of one semester, students in this study received a mixture of asynchronous audio and text-based feedback. Our findings revealed extremely high student satisfaction with embedded asynchronous audio feedback as compared to asynchronous text only feedback. Four themes, which accounted for this preference, were culled out in an iterative, inductive analysis of int...
Journal of behavioral and social sciences (Cedarville, Ohio)
The Health Sciences and Technology Academy (HSTA) strives to increase college-going and completio... more The Health Sciences and Technology Academy (HSTA) strives to increase college-going and completion rates for students in West Virginia (USA), a state with low educational attainment and the second most rural state in the country. The positive impact of HSTA on student academic trajectories has been documented, but student voices have not been represented. This qualitative study using Bronfenbrenner's ecological perspective explores student experiences through HSTA, with an eye toward how similar programs serving rural populations might improve while understanding student participant perspectives. Participants were 706 incoming 9th -12th graders from rural West Virginia who provided survey responses across two years. We address the organizational and individual considerations that were instrumental in creating a supportive learning environment for rural youth.
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Papers by Reagan Curtis