Browsing by Subject "Instrument Development"
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Item An Analysis of Induction-Year Agricultural Education Teachers' Attitude toward Teaching during the 2011-2012 School Year in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico(2012-10-26) Lawrence, Shannon 1980-Teacher shortages are a critical issue for education, and agricultural education has not been exempt from this trend. Many factors possibly contribute to this lack of qualified teachers. Researchers suggest that retention practices, stress factors associated with agricultural education, and job satisfaction may be areas for improvement within the profession. A deeper understanding of the problems beginning teachers experience is a critical first step in raising the retention rate for new teachers. An original researcher-designed instrument based on Moir was composed of 66 items intended to measure induction-year teachers? attitude toward teaching and was administered at six different points in time to induction-year agriculture teachers in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico during the 2011?2012 school year. Data collection occurred via a mixed mode design following the Tailored Design Method. The overall response rate was 52.5% with 197 responses to the instrument. All 66 scale items from the original questionnaire were included in the principal component analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation; coefficients with an absolute value less than 0.45 were suppressed. The Kaiser?Meyer?Olkin (KMO) of sampling adequacy was 0.787 and Bartlett?s test of sphericity was significant (p < 0.001). Factor analysis yielded a nine factor solution using varimax rotation. Forty-five items composed the Agricultural Education Induction-Year Teacher Attitudinal Scale. Descriptive names for the constructs were the product of 20 experts in the field of agricultural education: ?Professional Efficacy,? ?Balanced Reflection,? ?Professional Commitment,? ?Professional Confidence,? ?Anticipated Change,? ?Work-Life Balance,? ?Strategic Renewal,? ?Problem Solving,? and ?Professional Resolve.? Overall reliability coefficient for the proposed new instrument was 0.88. Overall attitude toward teaching was not statistically significantly different across measures. No significant predictors of attitude toward teaching based on selected demographic variables were generated as a result of forced entry regression. Grand mean scores per round did not statistically differ from one round to another. A model of induction-year agricultural education teacher?s attitudes was proposed along with a scale adjusted model of agricultural education teacher attitude toward teaching. A model of all attitude constructs was presented to illustrate the effect of time on the attitude of the induction-year agricultural education teachers.Item The Development and Utilization of the Periodic Focusing Ion Funnel(2014-12-09) Fort, Kyle LoganIon mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) provides gas phase, size-based separation, on an ultrafast timescale (?s-ms). With the incorporation of electrospray ionization, IM-MS is a valuable tool to investigate conformations of biological molecule ions that can be representative of their solution-phase structure. In some cases, evaporative cooling during ESI can kinetically trap these solution-phase structures in local minima along the potential energy surface. However, if the internal energy of the ion is increased via collisional activation, these solution-phase structures can be readily converted to an energetically preferred, gas-phase structure. Radio frequency (RF) confining devices, such as the RF ion funnel, are typically used to increase ion transmission in IM-MS measurements; however, these devices can lead to collisional activation and structural rearrangement due to high voltage oscillation amplitudes (Vp-p). Recently, periodic focusing ion mobility spectrometry (PF IMS) has been shown to provide comparable radial confinement, while utilizing reduced radial electric fields Vp-p as compared to the RF ion funnel. Work presented herein describes the development and characterization of a periodic focusing ion funnel (PF IF) that is capable of increasing ion transmission while being able to preserve nascent conformer distributions and subsequently inducing structural rearrangement. The utility of the PF IF is demonstrated with the neuropeptide Substance P (SP), as it provides a model for studying the structural effects of collisional activation due to the presence of both a kinetically trapped and gas-phase conformer, denoted ASP and BSP, respectively. By increasing the internal energy of [SP + 3H]^3+ ions, ASP is quantitatively converted to BSP, which is consistent with ASP being a kinetically trapped conformer and BSP being a gas-phase conformer. The collision cross section and mobility resolution of the ASP suggests that it is comprised of a broad distribution of compact globular conformations. Intramolecular solvation appears to stabilize the compacted structure of ASP in the gas-phase; however, as the ion?s internal energy increases, these noncovalent interactions are disrupted and the peptide converts into the gas-phase conformation. Mutations of various amino acid residues of SP provide a means of identifying these interactions and their effect on the stability of the kinetically trapped conformers.