Search Results (29)

Four previous and two new experiments from our laboratory are reported, in which college students learned associations between French and English words in a learning phase and then took an immediate retention test. One week later, a delayed test was followed by relearning. Four difficulty manipulations were used during learning: blocking versus mixing semantic categories, translation direction, prelearning, and set size. The first new experiment examined the effect of set size on retention, and the second new experiment examined blocking and mixing semantic categories, as well as translation direction, on learning new vocabulary (transfer). Generally, across the six experiments, difficult conditions provided a disadvantage during learning and immediate testing, but made no difference or provided an advantage during relearning and delayed testing. These results suggest that making the initial learning more difficult does not always lead to superior retention. Full article

Educational chatbots (ECs) can offer instructional feedback to enhance learning. However, the effect of metacognitive feedback on science education has not been fully explored. This study focuses on the effect of the EC with metacognitive feedback on students’ knowledge retention, transfer, and intrinsic motivation in the field of biology science. A between-group experimental design with 62 college students was conducted. Students in the experiment group received metacognitive feedback, whereas students in the control group received no feedback. The results of the ANCOVA test showed that students in the experiment group demonstrated better knowledge retention and transfer than those in the control group (F = 13.11, p = 0.001; F = 14.39, p < 0.001). Further, students in the experiment group reported more learning interest and higher perceived competence and value than those in the control group (F = 3.72, p = 0.001; F = 1.91, p = 0.009; F = 2.70, p = 0.004). In addition, correlation analysis revealed that perceived competence in the metacognitive feedback group was positively related to knowledge transfer (r = 0.39, p = 0.032). However, there was no significant difference in perceived pressure between both groups (p = 0.203). This study highlights the potential of the EC with metacognitive feedback for science learning. Full article

While the vertical transfer process and culturally responsive approaches to education have been studied extensively, few scholars have addressed these two areas of concern simultaneously, particularly within higher education contexts. This study explores what cultural responsiveness means and how it matters for low-income community college (CC) students aspiring toward STEM careers and transferring to STEM majors at a local university. As part of a bridge program, students received two STEM faculty mentors, one faculty mentor from the community college and the other from the local university, beginning in their last year of enrollment at the community college. Each STEM mentor was trained in culturally responsive mentoring, and their mentorship extended post-transfer. Students participated in focus groups to share their experiences. The findings reveal that specific aspects of the community college students’ identities, primarily their race and language, were relevant as aspects of culture that mattered for their STEM aspirations. The findings also show that cultural responsiveness in mentoring and support outside the classroom are important steps toward humanizing STEM spaces, but they are wholly insufficient when not paired with extensive culturally responsive efforts in STEM teaching and within the curriculum to improve the internal classroom climate for those with racialized identities. Full article

Peer-led Team Learning (PLTL) is a model of instruction and learning that has been used to address low success rates in various science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses and other fields in higher education. (1) While research conveying the efficacy of this model of instruction remains mixed, this project sought to add to the body of knowledge communicating the benefits of PLTL for STEM achievement. This study examined the experiences of STEM community college transfer students’ engagement in PLTL within their major course of study when a suite of supports was provided. (2) Specifically, study participants were enrolled in degree programs at a four-year rural, regional university in the engineering, computer science, and mathematics (ECSM) fields and were provided social, financial, and academic assistance. Qualitative analysis of the data revealed that with a PLTL component, community college transfer students were more likely to participate, engage, and perform better in coursework given the additional supports. (3) Study participants indicated the community of learners created through PLTL was a primary motivator for continued engagement and progress towards ECSM degree attainment. (4) Implications for practice extend to engagement and retention efforts of STEM students from the community college population Full article

Economic mobility and career success for undergraduate students is enhanced by understanding students’ experiences and supports and addressing the barriers they face. This study explores how U.S. undergraduate transfer students described their career journeys and how they perceived contextual barriers and supports for their career-oriented experiences. This longitudinal narrative case study was conducted with undergraduate students who were transferring from a community college to a four-year college. They participated in a professional development program, which funded science/engineering internships within bioproducts and bioenergy sectors. The study drew from social cognitive career theory and analyzed data collected over two years, including student interviews, biographical mapping, and reflective writings. Students most frequently described supports they received from their professors and program staff (institutional), family (social), and their internship hosts. The barriers they identified were more variable, such as inadequate advising and communication issues, and were often resolved by program staff (institutional) and financial supports from the program and internship sites. Internship participation led to all of the participating students feeling a sense of job readiness. Programmatic supports, such as clear communication between the internship host and the academic program, funding the internships, and addressing barriers by providing adequate mentoring and logistical supports, were found to enhance the experiences of science and engineering transfer students. Full article

This study explores the learning effects of color cues in video lectures and their underlying mechanisms. With the rapid growth of online education, lifelong learning, and blended learning, video lectures have become integral to teaching and learning. Color, a crucial element in visual design, directs attention, organizes content, and integrates information. Evaluating 78 college students, we assessed learning performance by comparing video content with no-color, single-color, and multi-color cues using eye-tracking technology and cognitive load scales. Results indicate that students viewing videos with color cues demonstrated better retention and transfer test performance, while absence or excess of color cues increased cognitive load. These findings have practical implications for video producers and provide a theoretical foundation for enhancing learners’ viewing experience and overall effectiveness. This study not only offers an in-depth analysis of color cue utilization in video lectures, highlighting their positive impact on learning outcomes but also introduces fresh perspectives for educational technology and cognitive psychology research. Future investigations should consider color cue effects in diverse cultural contexts and subject areas, exploring varied strategies to optimize the learning experience. Full article

The transfer of learning is arguably the most enduring goal of education. The history of science reveals that although numerous theories have been transferred from the natural sciences to the socio-political realm, educational practitioners have often deemed such transfers romantic and rhetorical. We conducted an experiment that randomly assigned a sample of 292 college freshmen in China to two groups to learn different thermodynamic theories: entropy or self-organization theory. We examined whether the two groups may arrive at different implications about social (and government) control without explicit instructions. We found that participants who learned the theory of entropy were more likely to believe the social system would become chaotic over time without external control; thus, they preferred tightened social control. Whereas participants who learned self-organisation theory were more likely to believe that order may form from within a social system; therefore, they downplay external control and prefer stronger individual agency. Follow-up interviews showed that the participants’ narratives about social control were largely consistent with the thermodynamic concepts they had learned. Our findings have critical implications for the recent trend in STEM education that promotes the teaching of cross-cutting concepts—seeking patterns from interdisciplinary ideas—that may implicitly prime students to borrow physical science theories to formulate personal social hypotheses and engage in moral–civic–political discourse. Full article

With the development of urban road traffic, road noise pollution is becoming a public concern. Controlling and reducing the harm caused by traffic noise pollution have been the hot spots of traffic noise management research. The subjective annoyance level of traffic noise has become one of the most important measurements for evaluating road traffic pollution. There are subjective experimental methods and objective prediction methods to assess the annoyance level of traffic noise: the subjective experimental method usually uses social surveys or listening experiments in laboratories to directly assess the subjective annoyance level, which is highly reliable, but often requires a lot of time and effort. The objective method extracts acoustic features and predicts the annoyance level through model mapping. Combining the above two methods, this paper proposes a deep learning model-based objective annoyance evaluation method, which directly constructs the mapping between the noise and annoyance level based on the listening experimental results and realizes the rapid evaluation of the noise annoyance level. The experimental results show that this method has reduced the mean absolute error by 30% more than the regression algorithm and neural network, while its performance is insufficient in the annoyance interval where samples are lacking. To solve this problem, the algorithm adopts transfer learning to further improve the robustness with a 30% mean absolute error reduction and a 5% improvement in the correlation coefficient between the true results and predicted results. Although the model trained on college students’ data has some limitations, it is still a useful attempt to apply deep learning to noise assessment. Full article

Purpose: Mental health assessments that combine patients’ facial expressions and behaviors have been proven effective, but screening large-scale student populations for mental health problems is time-consuming and labor-intensive. This study aims to provide an efficient and accurate intelligent method for further psychological diagnosis and treatment, which combines artificial intelligence technologies to assist in evaluating the mental health problems of college students. Materials and Methods: We propose a mixed-method study of mental health assessment that combines psychological questionnaires with facial emotion analysis to comprehensively evaluate the mental health of students on a large scale. The Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale-21(DASS-21) is used for the psychological questionnaire. The facial emotion recognition model is implemented by transfer learning based on neural networks, and the model is pre-trained using FER2013 and CFEE datasets. Among them, the FER2013 dataset consists of 48 × 48-pixel face gray images, a total of 35,887 face images. The CFEE dataset contains 950,000 facial images with annotated action units (au). Using a random sampling strategy, we sent online questionnaires to 400 college students and received 374 responses, and the response rate was 93.5%. After pre-processing, 350 results were available, including 187 male and 153 female students. First, the facial emotion data of students were collected in an online questionnaire test. Then, a pre-trained model was used for emotion recognition. Finally, the online psychological questionnaire scores and the facial emotion recognition model scores were collated to give a comprehensive psychological evaluation score. Results: The experimental results of the facial emotion recognition model proposed to show that its classification results are broadly consistent with the mental health survey results. This model can be used to improve efficiency. In particular, the accuracy of the facial emotion recognition model proposed in this paper is higher than that of the general mental health model, which only uses the traditional single questionnaire. Furthermore, the absolute errors of this study in the three symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress are lower than other mental health survey results and are only 0.8%, 8.1%, 3.5%, and 1.8%, respectively. Conclusion: The mixed method combining intelligent methods and scales for mental health assessment has high recognition accuracy. Therefore, it can support efficient large-scale screening of students’ psychological problems. Full article

The sustainability of English development plays a crucial role in higher education. However, the language needs of community college transfer students have not been well studied. This paper examined the language needs and support measures for vertical transfer (VT) English as a Second Language (ESL) students after admission to the university. A qualitative approach was adopted. Thirty-nine focus groups and seven individual interviews were conducted with 124 VT ESL students. The results found that, while community college studies might have prepared VT students for basic written assignments in universities, these students needed support with advanced academic writing skills, and general speaking and listening skills. It is only if the needs and challenges of VT ESL students are clear to higher education administrators that effective strategies can be developed. For instance, the participants were not content with the current measures provided to them and required short, fun, and purpose-driven interventions. This is the first of its kind to explore the English needs and support measures among VT ESL to sustain their English development should be strengthened. Full article

Every year, students around the globe embark upon their higher education journey, making the onboarding of these students a critical task for colleges and universities. Combined with the growth in distance learning and the rapid development in technologies, the onboarding process occurs increasingly in the digital setting. For this reason, the objective of this scoping review was to report and map interventions, which are used in digital onboarding of first-year students in higher education institutions and explore the digital settings that characterized these interventions. The PRISMA-ScR Guidelines and the JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis guided this investigation, which included researching four databases and screening the resulting titles and abstracts to identify the 17 sources of evidence included in the final analysis. According to our results, digital and virtual onboarding interventions were categorized into four onboarding dimensions: information interventions, socialization interventions, counseling interventions, and self-study interventions. Examples of the purposes and outcomes of these onboarding interventions included the transfer of information and the socialization of incoming students. Of the five onboarding settings that were also identified in the categorization, telecommunication software and virtual environments predominated. An independently developed onboarding tool could combine the identified onboarding settings and dimensions in the future. Full article

(1) Background: The transition of children with chronic kidney disease to adult care has become a well-handled issue. However, other patients with normal or mildly decreased renal function also requiring further management and transition are neglected. (2) Methods: A questionnaire was sent to patients with kidney pathology, aged 17 years and older.(3) Results: The patients were mostly high-school (55%) or college students (39%), living with their parents (94%). One third did not know how their disease affected their choice of profession and reproductive health. Furthermore, 46% of the respondents did not know who would continue with their care, and 44% still had a primary pediatrician. (4) Conclusions: A review of the literature on the topic was performed and summarized here. Regular education is the key for successful transfer, not only in chronic kidney and transplant patients, but also in others in whom a decline in renal function can be expected in the future. Full article

Transfer students (TSs) transitioning from community college (CC) to university have been found to experience adjustment challenges different from those experienced by direct entrants (DEs) admitted straight from high school, which in turn influences their approaches to learning. Learning can enhance the transition towards sustainability, and it is influenced by various factors. However, there have been limited studies examining the factors associated with TSs’ and DEs’ learning approaches. To fill this research gap, this current study used a cross-sectional survey with both TSs (n = 841) and DEs (n = 978) to identify the factors. Our results indicated that the TSs had a higher rate of adoption of surface approaches (SA) to learning than DEs, while TSs and DEs shared some similar predictors of their learning approaches. The results suggest that the commitment of education stakeholders is essential for sustainable learning. They should improve the transfer system by providing adequate support and reduce disparities in the allocation of resources to TSs and DEs, as these affect learning approaches. Full article

This research addressed a research gap in scrutinizing the language problems of English as a second language (ESL) transfer students (TSs) with regard to the aspects of “transfer deficit” and “transfer capital”, instead of simply labelling the use of English as a “transfer deficit”. One hundred and twenty-four TSs participated in this qualitative study. From qualitative content analysis, three main categories were identified: (a) English competence as transfer capital; (b) English competence as transfer deficit; and (c) transition from deficit to capital. Based on the results, educational practitioners are advised to pay attention to the specific implications of proficiency-based courses, with support measures not limited to essay-writing or referencing skills, but including advanced research writing genres such as the Capstone Project. Full article

An innovative wireless device for bioimpedance analysis was developed for post-dual-site free vascularized lymph node transfer (VLNT) evaluation. Seven patients received dual-site free VLNT for unilateral upper or lower limb lymphedema. A total of 10 healthy college students were enrolled in the healthy control group. The device was applied to the affected and unaffected limbs to assess segmental alterations in bioimpedance. The affected proximal limb showed a significant increase in bioimpedance at postoperative sixth month (3.3 [2.8, 3.6], p = 0.001) with 10 kHz currents for better penetration, although the difference was not significant (3.3 [3.3, 3.8]) at 1 kHz. The bioimpedance of the affected distal limb significantly increased after dual-site free VLNT surgery, whether passing with the 1 kHz (1.6 [0.7, 3.4], p = 0.030, postoperative first month; 2.8 [1.0, 4.2], p = 0.027, postoperative third month; and 1.3 [1.3, 3.4], p = 0.009, postoperative sixth month) or 10 kHz current ((1.4 [0.5, 2.7], p = 0.049, postoperative first month; 3.2 [0.9, 6.3], p = 0.003, postoperative third month; and 3.6 [2.5, 4.1], p < 0.001, postoperative sixth month). Bioimpedance alterations on the affected distal limb were significantly correlated with follow-up time (rho = 0.456, p = 0.029 detected at 10 kHz). This bioimpedance wireless device could quantitatively monitor the interstitial fluid alterations, which is suitable for postoperative real-time surveillance. Full article