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Background Acute chest syndrome (ACS) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality among children with sickle cell disease (SCD). Preventing hypoxemia by optimizing lung aeration during sleep remains a challenge. Objectives To explore safety, feasibility, and tolerability of noninvasive, bi-level positive airway pressure ventilation (BiPAP) as preventative, supportive care for hospitalized, medically stable children with SCD on a general pediatric inpatient unit. Methods Retrospective chart review of patients ≤22 years of age with SCD admitted to the general pediatric inpatient unit from February 1, 2017 to March 1, 2020 for whom BiPAP was recommended as supportive care. Hospitalizations were excluded if patients were admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), required BiPAP for respiratory failure, or used BiPAP at home for obstructive sleep apnea. Results Twenty-three patients had 53 hospitalizations in which BiPAP was recommended. Fifty-two (98%) hospitalizations included acute SCD pain. Indications for BiPAP included prior ACS (94%), chest or back pain (79%), and/or oxygen desaturation (66%). On 17 occasions, patients already had mild to moderate ACS but were stable when BiPAP was recommended. BiPAP was used successfully during 75% of hospitalizations for a median of two nights. There were no adverse effects associated with BiPAP. PICU transfer for respiratory support occurred during three hospitalizations. In 26 hospitalizations of children at risk for ACS who tolerated BiPAP, 23 (88%) did not develop ACS. Conclusions BiPAP is safe, feasible, and well tolerated as supportive care for hospitalized children with SCD. Next steps include an intervention trial to further assess the efficacy of BiPAP on ACS prevention.

Micro-credentials are becoming an efficient and financially sound method of delivering skills and content knowledge to adult learners. This chapter will define micro-credentials, explore how higher education and business organizations view and utilize them, and discuss the challenges of creating and implementing them. This chapter will conclude with a description of how a small private non-profit university created several micro-credentials by adapting components of their Online Teaching and Instructional Design Master's program. It will also outline the reasons behind the implementation, the research conducted to validate the change, and the process of creating the micro-credentials through template design.

This multiple case study explored classified staff interactions with students as a strategy for increasing success. Interviews, observations, and focus groups examined interactions from the staff perspective. Findings indicate staff members enhance the educational process by providing a human connection, offering practical strategies for success, and giving support to special populations. Front-line staff interactions appear to positively impact the student experience. Future research should focus on work place considerations, policy development, and the student perspective. The authors urge community college leaders to more fully utilize the contributions of these front-line educators.

Community colleges often are catalysts for economic and workforce development in localities with high unemployment or large numbers of dislocated workers. Increasingly, dislocated workers—individuals who have experienced job loss due to occupational closings, reduced workforces, or severe local economic downturns—are enrolling in educational and retraining opportunities, career counseling, and other supports offered by their local community college in partnership with federal and state assistance programs. Although benchmarks for two-year college success include providing institutional supports to address students’ academic, social, and personal adjustment needs, little research exists to help guide effective practices aimed at supporting dislocated workers’ two-year college adjustment, retention, and success. To help fill this gap, this study collected data describing 117 dislocated-worker students’ academic, social, personal-emotional, and institutional adjustment. Next we compared dislocated worker adj...

This multiple case study explored classified staff interactions with students as a possible strategy for increasing student success. Individual interviews, observations, and a focus group with support staff were used to investigate their interactions with students, their view of these interactions, and their expectations of students. Findings showed classified staff members enhance the educational process by empowering students with information, offering individual support, and holding students accountable. Interactions with classified staff appear to have a positive impact on the student experience. The authors recommend increasing institutional support of classified staff in order to enhance student success. Future research focusing on how students perceive the impact of classified staff interactions is also suggested.

This study explores student success courses from the student perspective to answer three questions: What topics do students find the most useful? What teaching methods do the students find most helpful? How can these courses be customized to better serve the students? The purpose of this study is to interview students from a number of community colleges, exploring these topics from the student perspective with the goal of orientation course enhancement. Although students reported the skills and information provided in these orientations classes to be useful, the usefulness of specific topics varied according to the precollege preparation of each student. The authors offer suggestions for creating specialized orientation programs and courses to fit the needs of the diverse community college population.

This descriptive study surveyed current, lapsed, and major gift donors to explore the impact of college communications on donors' decisions to contribute to the college, the likelihood of donor financial support for various college projects, and the philanthropic motivation profiles of the donors of a midsized, multicampus community college in Virginia. Findings suggest both the impact of college communications and financial support of various fundraising projects differ significantly by donor profile.

The research presented in this paper shows the continued evaluation of a web‐based interview simulation designed for human services and counseling students. The system allows students to practice empathetic helping skills in their own time. As a possible means to reinforce acquisition and transfer of these skills, interactive learning modules (ILMs) were developed and implemented. The ILMs act as supplemental instruction presenting scenarios and demonstrating best practices responses to client behaviors. Data were collected to assess the impact of these modules on empathetic helping skill acquisition and to assess the efficacy of repeated interactions with the system. Survey items and comments from users were also collected. Findings show some positive trends in empathetic helping skill acquisition through repeated interactions but no significant effects of the ILMs. Attitudinal survey results and comments from users were collected to assess user perceptions of the system as a whole and of the ILMs.

This paper describes an assessment of a web-based interview simulation designed to teach empathetic helping skills. The system includes an animated character acting as a client and responses designed to recreate a simulated role-play, a common assessment method used for teaching these skills. The purpose of this study was to determine whether learning gains found in previous evaluations would transfer to students needing similar skill sets but in different areas of study. Findings indicate a positive trend in learning gains across both areas of study (human services and counselling) with no significant differences in skill acquisition. Developers of the system conclude that the system is effective in the general training of empathetic helping skills regardless of the students' area of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this descriptive cross-sectional pilot study was to increase researcher knowledge of precollege preparation in three populations of traditional students attending a community college in a mid-Atlantic state: public-school students, home-schooled students, and private-schooled students. By its exploration of precollege experiences and their perceived impact among these three populations, this research extends the conversation on traditional student college preparation to include students from home-schooled and private-schooled backgrounds, two groups attending the community college in increasing numbers. Findings suggest that precollege preparation differs amongst the groups. Home-schooled students were more likely to credit their current abilities, skills, and knowledge to their previous educational experiences than were either of the remaining groups. Private-schooled student responses tended to be the next highest, followed by public-schooled student responses. In general, more home-schooled...

The current climate of accountability demands that institutions engage in data-driven program evaluation. In order to promote quality dual enrollment (DE) programs, institutions must support the adjunct faculty teaching college courses in high schools. This study uses Patton's utilization-focused model (1997) to conduct a formative evaluation of a pilot Dual Enrollment Faculty Orientation Program (DEFOP) at a community college. Data from surveys, interviews, observations, and analysis of syllabi indicated faculty appreciated establishing relationships with the college and gained an understanding of DE expectations. While participants did not make changes to syllabi or pedagogy, they employed effective teaching strategies to deliver successful, college-level DE courses. Implications for future DE orientation programs include focusing on the cultivation of institutional relationships and establishing expectations while deemphasizing information related to specific instructional strategies.

With the popularity of home schooling strengthening at the secondary level, the prevalence of home schoolers now attempting to enter higher education is escalating. Community colleges, however, may be inadvertently closing our doors to home-schooled applicants. This content analysis study uses the Home School Legal Defense Association's recommended college admissions policies as an indicator of home-school friendly cultures in an inductive analysis of admissions information appearing on 105 community college Web sites in an 11-state accreditation region. Findings suggest that community college Web sites frequently do not provide information for home-schooled applicants, and home-school admissions policies often differ from college to college. Suggestions for improvement include customizing information to better meet the needs of the individual audiences visiting the site, adding a “doorway” or “landing page,” posting YouTube-type videos, and providing interactive functions—such as instant messaging and li...

UNLABELLED Previously, the researchers proposed and tested a diagnostic framework for women with eating-related concerns who seek college health and mental health treatment. The framework emphasized moderate problems characterized by frequent binging, occasional purging, and frequent exercise; rumination; body image and self-esteem concerns; ambivalence about help seeking; and developmental themes. Several questions remained about the framework's generalizability beyond women in treatment. OBJECTIVE In the current study, the authors provide new support for the framework's generalizability to college women with clinically significant eating concerns who do not seek treatment. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS Female students (N = 112) completed a screening instrument providing descriptive and comparative data about primary symptoms, associated features, and help seeking. RESULTS Results suggested that the framework is specific to women with eating problems and does not suffer the pitfalls of applying over-generally to all college women or all female patients and clients. CONCLUSIONS Implications for practice, research limitations, and remaining questions are discussed.

The Transition to College Inventory (TCI) designed to identify patterns of noncognitive factors related to academic performance and persistence was adapted and validated for use with first-year transfer students in a university setting. In this study, 369 entering transfer students were surveyed during Transfer Preview, an orientation program for transfer students. This study confirmed that noncognitive factors can be used to predict academic success and persistence for first-year transfer students. A major finding was that the barriers differed between freshman, sophomore, and upper division (junior/senior) transfer students. The results of this study show promise in giving four-year institutions the ability to identify at-risk transfer students, pin-pointing areas of needs for intervention.

This study examined the differential predictors of institutional persistence between adult and traditional-aged degree-seeking, first-time enrollees at a public, multicampus 2-year community college in southeast Virginia. Differential predictors of institutional persistence were found between the traditional-aged and adult students. For traditional-aged students, encouragement and support, academic integration, fall grade-point average, and an expressed intent to leave were most predictive of institutional persistence. Chief among the predictors of persistence for adult students were social integration, institutional commitment, degree utility, encouragement and support, finances, an expressed intent to leave, and academic integration.

This chapter presents findings from a study of noninstructional community college staff, focusing on staff perception of organizational climate, the impact of gender on staff interactions with faculty and students, and perceptions of workplace satisfaction.