Anne's Arts & Activities Blog

Faculty from the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford spent the fall semester not only teaching, but also conducting and presenting research. Dr. Wayne Brinda, assistant professor of education, presented a session titled “Teasing Your Students to Read: Create Teasers to Engage and Motivate Students to Read” at the 2012 Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English in Las Vegas. The presentation discussed the use of a “teaser” like those given on the nightly news to present students with a context for a story and get them interested before they began reading. Brinda also had a paper, “Engaging Students in Inquiry through Field Trips in Your Classroom,” accepted for publication by the Middle School Journal. Dr. Donna Dombek, associate professor of education, participated in a panel discussion titled “Building Bridges between Theory and Practice: Strategies to Forge Connections between Foundations Courses and Clinical ...

Dr. Jean Truman, assistant professor of nursing at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, presented a paper at a teaching conference held at Penn State Shenango on the success of first-generation nursing students. Truman presented her paper “First Generation Student Preparedness for NCLEX-RN Success” at the “Meeting the Challenges of the 21st-Century Classroom” conference. The NCLEX is the state board nursing licensure exam. Truman’s study was a furthering of the research she did for her doctoral dissertation, which focused on predictors of student success on the NCLEX. This time, Truman chose to focus on first-generation college students and whether, as a group, their NCLEX scores differed from other students. Truman found that first-generation students (who make up about one-third of college students nationwide, but two-thirds of Pitt-Bradford nursing students) do not score much differently on the NCLEX then non-first-generation students. ...