Faculty and Staff

Objectives: While PhD dissertations are typically accessible as part of a university library’s general collection, or as content within a proprietary database, many other terminal degree projects remain invisible and inaccessible to a greater audience. This poster will describe the development and creation of a digital repository collection containing doctor of nursing practice (DNP) student’s final projects.

Methods: The “Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Final Projects Collection” was created over the course of one semester and included initial discussions with program faculty and administrators, the creation of a student consent form, the development of a process for adding student work to the repository collection, and a presentation to graduating students. This poster will describe the process in more detail, discuss benefits and challenges, as well as highlight the considerations to keep in mind when developing and creating a digital collection of student work. Additionally, best practices and lessons learned will also be described to provide valuable information to others considering creating this type of collection at their own institution.

Results: At the end of the first semester of implementation, twenty student projects existed in our public collection. On the whole, both faculty and students were pleased to have a collection highlighting the work being done in their program. Valuable lessons were learned that can be applied in the next semester of implementation. Specifically, metadata consistency was an issue during the initial uploading process. Gaining select faculty and student buy-in by allaying concerns related to some student’s wanting to publish in a peer-reviewed journal on the topic of their final project remains vital.

Conclusion: Creating open access collections of student applied final projects or capstone projects allows for greater visibility of this type of often overlooked student scholarship. Specifically, the final projects showcased can now be found and accessed by potential employers, researchers, other schools, and other DNP students. In many cases these final projects have applied real-world impact related to answering clinical questions or patient care that should be shared with the world.

Communicating climate risks is crucial when engaging the public to support climate action planning and addressing climate justice. How does evidence-based communication influence local residents’ risk perception and potential behavior change in support of climate planning? Built upon our previous study of Climate Justice maps illustrating high scores of both social and ecological vulnerability in Michigan’s Huron River watershed, USA, a quasi-experiment was conducted to examine the effects of Climate Justice mapping intervention on residents’ perceptions and preparedness for climate change associated hazards in Michigan. Two groups were compared: residents in Climate Justice areas with high social and ecological vulnerability scores in the watershed (n=76) and residents in comparison areas in Michigan (n=69). Measurements for risk perception include perceived exposure, sensitivity, and adaptability to hazards. Results indicate that risk information has a significant effect on perceived sensitivity and level of preparedness for future climate extremes among participants living in Climate Justice areas. Findings highlight the value of integrating scientific risk assessment information in risk communication to align calculated and perceived risks. This study suggests effective risk communication can influence local support of climate action plans and implementation of strategies that address climate justice and achieve social sustainability in local communities.

Accessibility is increasingly used as a metric when evaluating changes to public transport systems. Transit travel times contain variation depending on when one departs relative to when a transit vehicle arrives, and how well transfers are coordinated given a particular timetable. In addition, there is necessarily uncertainty in the value of the accessibility metric during sketch planning processes, due to scenarios which are underspecified because detailed schedule information is not yet available. This article presents a method to extend the concept of "reliable" accessibility to transit to address the first issue, and create confidence intervals and hypothesis tests to address the second.