Professional caring is the essence of nursing practice. Reflection on personal assumptions and beliefs challenge stereotypic views that influence professional caring and nursing care. An innovative educational pedagogy known as service learning creates an opportunity for students to reflect on self in the context of service to others; it is through this pedagogy that personal assumptions and beliefs are challenged as students become registered nurses. A qualitative descriptive study engaged undergraduate first and second year nursing students through interviews and reflections. The purposes of this study were to describe students' perception of self and caring in service learning, any changes in the perceptions of self over time, and the connection of self to others. Results identified three major themes: understanding self, becoming a nurse and learning to care with increasing depth over the two years. Implications for nursing curriculum and further research are discussed.

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Both human and animal research indicate that rapid eye movement sleep (REM) plays an important role in the processing of emotional information. REM is altered after fear conditioning in rats, but this alteration can be mitigated by exposure to a naïve conspecific. In addition, both the housing condition (isolated vs paired) and the experiences of rats' cagemates can influence the response to aversive events. Based on this prior work, the present study sought to determine the effects of social housing on the previously demonstrated impairment in the extinction of conditioned fear responses produced by REM deprivation. Rats were assigned to one of three housing conditions: housed with a naïve rat, housed with another fear-conditioned rat, or housed alone. The results demonstrated that rats housed with either a naïve or a fear-conditioned conspecific exhibited an impairment in the acquisition of extinction as a consequence of REM deprivation, as observed in previous studies. However, rats in the isolated condition demonstrated a trend toward an impairment only after continued extinction training. These results indicate that the effects of social housing on REM deprivation-induced impairments in learning and memory are subtle, but may explain some conflicting findings in the literature.

Adolescence is a critical developmental period. An important change that occurs in adolescence is the neurological maturation for adult-type cognitive abilities. Research has linked adequate sleep quantity to successful learning and memory capabilities. However, due to a shift in sleep timing drive in adolescence, in combination with early awakening for school, the adolescent population is experiencing chronic sleep restriction (CSR). What repercussions to long-term memory capabilities could CSR in adolescence have immediately and are the consequences longlasting? The present study modeled human adolescent CSR in rats through four hours of sleep deprivation for five days, followed by two days of unrestricted sleep, and five more days of four hours of sleep deprivation; thus the rats were exposed to CSR throughout the two-week rat adolescent period. Long-term hippocampal dependent and non-hippocampal dependent memory were tested through the object location task and the object recognition task, respectively. Testing occurred in adolescence and after a four-week delay during which the rats slept freely and matured to adulthood. The results showed that, given the appropriate conditions for successful long-term memory, the rats exposed to CSR in adolescence showed impaired hippocampal dependent memory in adolescence and this impairment was also evident in adulthood. These findings were not the case for non-hippocampal dependent memory, for which a significant effect of sleep was not found. Given the findings of the hippocampal dependent task, these results suggest that CSR in adolescence may influence less than optimal memory performance among adolescents. Further, the pattern in adulthood suggests that even after undisturbed sleep in the period from adolescence to adult maturation, the consequences of adolescent CSR are relentless. The findings in this study inform the research as the first rodent model of adolescent CSR and indicate practical implications for the health of adolescents.

There is a wealth of research on self-report and intervention based student study habits. There is also a well-established behavior checklist for master professors (Keeley, Smith, & Buskist, 2006). However, there is little work detailing the techniques used by faculty in assisting their students with exam preparation (Morehead, Rhodes, & DeLozier, 2016). We present results from a survey of 160 nonpsychology faculty at a medium sized liberal arts institution regarding faculty delivered instructions on how to study for exams. The data suggest that although the majority of faculty respondents discuss study skills, 54% provide only passive strategies (e.g., rereading), while 46% provided at least one active strategy (e.g., self-testing). Suggestions and implications for improving the dissemination of more effective study techniques to faculty across disciplines are discussed.

Graduating psychology majors completed a survey with open-ended questions assessing their degree of satisfaction, reasons for choosing the major, valuable experiences, and suggestions for improvement. Qualitative analysis of the results revealed that students were overwhelmingly satisfied, most frequently chose the major as a result of personal interests or personality characteristics, reported experiential learning as the most valuable component of their experience, and most commonly stated curricular issues (e.g., lack of course variety, strong emphasis on experimental aspects of the field) as needing improvement. There were no differences in satisfaction between first-generation students and their continuing-generation peers. However, firstgeneration students were more likely than continuing-generation students to value extracurricular experiences and believed that more such experiences, as well as additional assistance with developing their plans for the future, would have improved their experience. These results suggest that high levels of satisfaction are seen when students believe that their interests and characteristics are a good fit with the content of the discipline and have opportunities to obtain hands-on experience in the field. Satisfaction may be improved by increasing experiential learning opportunities and expanding course offerings, particularly those related to applied areas of the field, as well as educating students about the experimental nature of the discipline early in their academic career.

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