As the term wraps up, we students often get caught up in our coursework. We stay up late cramming for finals, attend lectures during the day, meet with professors to discuss assignments and exam grades – and sometime in the midst of it all, we forget how distinguished and awesome these people who give us lectures and review our work actually are.
Some professors are publishing work that is playing a role in major political and social issues of today.
This month, Judith Hibbard, a professor of health policy in the University department of planning, public policy and management, had a study she authored published in Health Affairs, a journal of health policy and research. Hibbard coauthored the study with four other researchers, including Jessica Greene, a University associate professor.@@http://pages.uoregon.edu/jhibbard/, http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=staff&d=person&b=name&s=Jessica+Greene@@
Hibbard explained that as more information about doctor and hospital care — including both quantitative facts about the costs and resources as well as qualitative specifics such as the quality of a given practice — become available to consumers, the challenge arises of how to best present a complicated set of data.@@http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/31/3/560.abstract@@
“We were really interested in this because more and more organizations are putting out information for consumers about cost; we wanted to know how consumers interpreted and used this information,” Hibbard said. “We looked at different ways of presenting the information. People were randomly assigned to different groups — the same information but presented a little differently and we looked at how it affected their choices.”
After completing the study, which examined the way in which 1,421 employees choose health care options when presented with various choices, Hibbard found that people generally correlate a more expensive option with higher quality care. The challenge, she explained, was giving consumers an easy method to judge the quality of a program in order to identify value.
“We did find that people do tend to equate higher cost with a better quality doctor or hospital,” she said. “When you make the information about the quality of a doctor or hospital very easy to understand, you use cost less as a proxy for quality.”
The College of Education has its own celebrities too.
Hill Walker, a professor in the College of Education and a codirector at the University’s Institute on Violence and Destructive behavior, recently won the Kauffman-Hallahan Distinguished Researcher Award. The award honors groups or individuals who have been involved in research and scholarly efforts over a period of time. Walker is the first recipient of the new award.@@http://education.uoregon.edu/faculty.htm?id=51, http://education.uoregon.edu/feature.htm?id=2926@@
Over the course of more than 40 years of research, Walker developed various programs that aim to help children overcome outside-of-class risk factors and succeed in school. Walker explained that many children’s educations are put at risk due to events or experiences that happen prior to their first years in school. Trauma caused by these events can make success in school – both socially and academically – a major challenge for youth.
“Many of these children, due to their preschool experiences, do not get off to a good start in school,” Walker said. “Often, their teacher and peer relationships are disrupted. Often, their school success is not what it could be. What we try to do is to find them early, just at or before their school career and work with the three most important social agents in their lives — who are parents, teachers and their peers or classmates — and try to involve all three groups to sort of develop a support system among those three groups that will help the child succeed.”
Over the course of his career, Walker said there have been dramatic changes in the general public’s attitude toward children who disrupt class or experience behavior disorders. Twenty years ago, he recalled, the norm was to take disruptive kids out of class and away from school. Now, things are different.
“We find that one of the very best things that you can do for children who experience these problems is to try to do everything you can to make them successful in school,” he said. “It’s not like a vaccination, but it is absolutely a very strong protective influence. If you can be successful in school it can prevent a very large number of problems in your life.”
Although Walker has already been selected as the recipient of the award by The Council for Exceptional Children, he will formally receive the award during the organization’s annual convention in April.@@http://www.cec.sped.org/Content/NavigationMenu/ProfessionalDevelopment/ConventionExpo/@@
“I have to say, this is an award that I share with my colleagues in the department of education,” he said. “I’m just one individual in all of the people who have made a difference in the lives of these students.  It’s a privilege to associate with them and be a part of the department.”