Susan Lowes

Teaching Communication Skills to Hospice Teams Comparing the Effectiveness of a Communication Skills Laboratory With In-Person, Second Life, and Phone Role-Playing

Introduction: Communication skills are critical in hospice care but challenging to teach. Therefore, a hospice agency developed a communication skills laboratory for nurses and social workers. Methods: Learners role-played 3 common hospice scenarios. The role-play modalities were in-person, Second Life, and telephone. Learners were scored on 4 communication aspects. Results: Learners in all modalities rated the laboratory as very effective. However, learners in the Second Life and phone modality showed greater improvements from scene 1 to 3 than those in the in-person modality. There were no significant differences in improvement between the Second Life and phone modalities. Conclusion: Results support the effectiveness of this communication skills laboratory while using different teaching modalities and show phone and Second Life role-plays were more effective than an in-person role-play.

SENSE IT - student created water quality sensors

This paper describes the structure and impact of an NSF-funded ITEST project designed to enrich science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education using educational modules that teach students to construct, program, and test a series of sensors used to monitor water quality. During the three years of the SENSE IT project, over 60 teachers across New York, New Jersey and Washington were provided with equipment and professional development, and then implemented the modules in their classrooms with over 2,000 middle and high school students. Project evaluation results indicate that the curriculum was well received by teachers and students, could be integrated into several different subject areas and types of courses, and was effective for a wide range of students.

Student enabled water quality sensors

This paper describes efforts to enrich STEM education by providing classroom projects in which high school students build and deploy sensors for environmental monitoring. Through a series of educational modules, students learn about engineering and science through the design, construction, programming and testing of a student-implemented water monitoring network in the Hudson and St. Lawrence River regions in New York State. This paper provides an overview of the educational modules. A variety of sensors are described, which are suitably simple for design and construction from first principles by high school students while being accurate enough for students to make meaningful environmental measurements. The paper also describes how the sensor building activities can be tied to core curricula, enabling the modules to be utilized in standard classes by mathematics, science and computing teachers without disrupting the semester teaching goals. Furthermore, the paper presents the results of the first two years of the NSF SENSE IT project, during which 37 teachers have been equipped, trained on these materials, and have implement the modules with approximately 500 high school students.