Volume 2, Issue 2, 2025

ABSTRACT: Mathematics plays a vital role in nursing practice, as it supports essential tasks such as medication administration, fluid management, and the accurate interpretation of patient data. However, nursing students often struggle to apply mathematical concepts in clinical settings where quick and accurate decisions are crucial. The study explores a heuristic way to help students become more confident and capable in using mathematics to ensure safe and effective patient care. A learning intervention was conducted among nursing students using specially designed packets incorporating heuristic strategies for understanding clinical mathematics. Data collected before and after the intervention were analyzed to identify meaningful improvements in their skills, with results handled under strict ethical and privacy guidelines. The results showed significant improvements in students’ performance in clinical mathematics after using heuristic-based learning materials. These gains were consistent across key areas such as unit conversion, dosage calculation, fluid balance, and data interpretation. The findings confirm that focused and contextual instruction can meaningfully support nursing students in developing the skills necessary for safe and effective patient care.

ABSTRACT: Despite growing student diversity in U.S. K–12 classrooms, Teachers of Color (TOC) remain severely underrepresented. One way to support TOC is through professional learning within critical affinity groups. Critical affinity groups are spaces where TOC engage in critical pedagogy that addresses systems of oppression in educational spaces through recognition of racial and cultural strengths. This study examines how Women of Color personnel in the Urban Public School district designed a critical affinity program to support the retention and development of the district’s experienced TOC. Using semi-structured interviews, participants’ illuminated how their own lived experiences as former TOC shaped their understanding of the necessity of critical affinity spaces and how these groups support TOC. The Women of Color personnel identified monthly meetings, mentorship, support, and networking, as well as participation in policy-change workshops as the best ways support TOC. The information gained from this study supports using racial affinity groups as professional learning for TOC to offer culturally responsive mentorship and leadership opportunities that provide professional and personal transformation.

ABSTRACT: Teachers are ubiquitously theorized as agents of change capable of both facilitating learning and serving as educational teacher-researchers. The negotiation of teacher-researcher identity has garnered substantial scholarly attention in international discourse. In Vietnam, the majority of existing inquiries have primarily concentrated on tertiary-level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) lecturers, leaving an empirical gap concerning how contextual variables affect this identity reconstruction among other teacher populations. This retrospective narrative inquiry, endeavoring to bridge this gap, explored contextual influences on a Vietnamese high school EFL female teacher’s identity negotiation through her Master’s thesis-conducting experiences. The study adapted Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Ecological Systems Theory of Human Development as its theoretical framework. Data source included a two-round semi-structured narrative-framed interview with the primary participant, triangulated by an outsider-nominated interview. The data analysis followed Clandinin and Connelly’s (1990, 2022) three-phase narrative analysis of broadening, burrowing, and storying/restorying. Findings unveiled how a four-layered ecological system, including individual, academic, institutional, and socio-cultural factors, aligning with micro-, meso-, exo-, and marco-sytem, respectively, affected such negotiation. The findings further showcased how thesis conducting acted as a catalyst for nurturing epistemological belief transformation, occupational enhancements, and multifaceted identity development as a language teacher. Implications and methodological recommendations were proposed to advise stakeholders to pedagogize their practices and inform future inquiries to expand this study’s findings.

ABSTRACT: For beginner creators, conceptualizing best-selling packaging designs can serve as efficient design training, yet the practical application remains challenging. To bridge this gap, we considered design education utilizing Kansei Engineering methods. This study aims to enhance beginner creators’ packaging design skills through exercises based on Kansei Engineering and to verify the effectiveness of design education. Participants engaged in exercises that involved visualizing Kansei responses to existing ice cream packages, creating original designs, visualizing Kansei responses to their packages, redesigning, and then reading the portfolios. This process showed positive trends in participants’ quantitative responses to items such as “I am interested in a job related to design (p = .017, d = –1.24),” “I am confident in designing packages (p = .004, d = –1.7),” and “I find designing something enjoyable (p = .004, d = –1.73).” Our findings suggest that integrating Kansei visualization into the design education process can empower beginners by enhancing their skills and engagement in packaging design.