Clinical nursing research is required to develop an evidence base for practice in the rehabilitation unit. An analysis of the challenges and possible methods of overcoming these challenges is useful to both future investigators and nurses in practice to insure that studies can be carried out effectively.

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This paper discusses the development of Knowledge Maps for enhancing engineering learning. These maps are somewhat similar to concept maps, which have been widely used and developed in various areas of study. Knowledge Maps, however, extend concept maps in that they not only illustrate the underlying concepts of a discipline, but they actually embed the knowledge in each of those concepts through various multimedia attachments. Knowledge maps also allow reverse mapping so that students can be assessed based upon how many concepts they know and whether they have understood the proper relationships between the concepts. A reverse map can be used to evaluate students and act as a record of student learning. Aggregate course maps may be used to gain an average understanding of the gains of entire classes of students and may be used to evaluate faculty effectiveness and provide valuable insight into the gains and weaknesses of students matriculating from one course to the next. The work contained herein presents the strategies implemented to allow for the design of custom knowledge maps. Reverse mapping techniques are discussed to indicate the method for evaluation of students.

Hands-on learning has been utilized in engineering curriculums for several years in order to illustrate theory in a physical way. This paper presents the use of two hands-on learning activities in a first semester, freshman year engineering course designed to introduce basic concepts from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer engineering. In previous offerings of the course, several disjoint activities have been provided in order to introduce the fundamentals of these disciplines. This paper presents how several weeks worth of material are synthesized in a hands-on activity in order to allow deeper levels of student understanding and to showcase how engineering knowledge from a variety of disciplines can be synthesized in a meaningful way. Through these exercises students are able to understand how computer programs can be used to collect data from sensors, determine the appropriate response to this sensor data, and control circuits that are used to drive mechanical systems based on the sensor data. Through this activity, students are able to escalate through several levels of Bloom's taxonomy by drawing connections between theory and practice from a variety of fields.

He is primarily affiliated with the ECU Electrical Engineering concentration. His research work focuses on the use of wireless sensor networks, microcontrollers, and physiological data collection for a variety of applications. His primary interest is in the area of adaptive tutorial systems, but he has ongoing projects in the area of hospital patient health monitoring. He is actively engaged in K-12 outreach through several venues including Summer Ventures, high school STEM day, the N.C. Science Olympiad, a Math Science Partnership grant, volunteer work with a local literacy camp, Boy Scouts Robotics Merit Badge counseling, and teaching the science portion of VBS and children's Sunday School at his local church.