Search Results (16)

This paper presents the methodological approach adopted by a team of researchers from the Politehnica Bucharest National University of Science and Technology (UNSTPB) to revise and reconstruct the Feedback Form used in the university’s teaching staff evaluation process. (1) Background: Because of the imperative need to involve students, as active actors in the academic community, in this process, a Questionnaire on the identification of the students’ perception regarding the Feedback Form used by the institution was prepared and distributed online to 559 students enrolled in bachelor’s/master’s/doctoral programs in our higher education institution; (2) Methods: Taking into account the legal provisions in force, the scientific guidelines in the literature, and the recommendations/suggestions and observations made by our students, two instruments were developed for the evaluation of the teaching staff, i.e., the Feedback Questionnaire for students enrolled in bachelor’s/master’s degree programs and the Feedback Questionnaire for students enrolled in doctoral programs. By creating this tool to assess the university’s social reality, we aimed to identify the strengths/weaknesses of the Feedback Form used until this study was conducted; (3) Results: Centralizing and interpreting the data collected allowed us to gather complex and detailed insights on the way in which the beneficiaries of the educational services provided by the university want the feedback they provide to be formulated, collected, and interpreted, as well as a set of explicit student recommendations in this regard; (4) Conclusions: the need to start an ample revision process on the feedback questionnaire used to conduct the university’s teaching staff performance evaluation, based on the students’ unequivocal involvement, was justified by these fundamental premises. Full article

As doctoral education evolves globally, the focus intensifies on doctoral candidates’ academic performance and psychological well-being. Previous research has studied the effects of individual, societal, and environmental factors on students’ academic achievements. However, there is still a lack of investigation into how these factors interact, especially in the domains of arts. This study surveyed 213 Chinese musicology doctoral students and adopted Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to evaluate how various factors affect academic and mental health outcomes. The analysis shows that factors including teacher support, student engagement, and well-being positively influence academic performance, while academic anxiety negatively impacts academic performance. Moreover, variables help diminish academic anxiety, encompassing self-efficacy, parental support, time management skills, and student engagement. Meanwhile, enhanced doctoral students’ well-being is related to robust teacher support, facilitating conditions, and active student engagement. Notably, students who experience academic anxiety about their studies generally have lower well-being. These findings indicate that alleviating academic anxiety, refining academic resources, and reinforcing mental health supports can foster academic and psychological outcomes for doctoral students. Our study contributes vital empirical data to developing higher education policies, benefiting doctoral students’ mental health and academic success. Full article

For people from communities experiencing poverty and oppression, education, particularly higher education, is a means to ensure upward socioeconomic mobility. The access to and attainment of education are issues of social and economic justice, built upon foundational experiences in primary and secondary settings, and impacted by students’ cultural and socio-political environments. 6. The 2020 murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, ongoing discourse around immigration, and COVID-19-related hate targeting people of Asian American descent prompted national calls to dismantle social and systemic racism, spurring diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives, particularly in education. However, these efforts have faced opposition from teachers who have told students that all lives matter, and racism does not exist in many American classrooms Loza. These comments negate students’ experiences, suppress cultural and identity affirmation, and negatively impact student wellness and academic performance. Forged in this polarized environment, two longtime community organizers and educators, an indigenous person living away from her ancestral lands and a multiracial descendant of Japanese Americans interned during WWII, whose identities, experiences, and personal narratives shape the course of their work in and outside of the physical classroom, call on fellow educators to exercise y (2018) component of the archeology of self, a “profound love, a deep, ethical commitment to caring for the communities where one works”, by adopting a framework to encourage this profound love in students, acting not just as a teacher, but as a sensei. The word sensei is commonly understood in reference to a teacher of Japanese martial arts. The honorific sensei, however, in kanji means one who comes before, implying intergenerational connection. Sensei is an umbrella expression used for elders who have attained a level of mastery within their respective crafts—doctors, teachers, politicians, and spiritual leaders may all earn the title of sensei. The sensei preserves funds of knowledge across generations, passing down and building upon knowledge from those who came before. The Student Empowerment through Narrative, Storytelling, Engagement, and Identity (SENSEI) framework provides an asset-based, culturally affirming approach to working with students in and beyond the classroom. The framework builds on tools and perspectives, including Asset-based Community Development (ABCD), the Narrative Theory, Yosso’s cultural community wealth, cultural continuity, thrivance, community organizing tenets, and storytelling SENSEI provides a pedagogy that encourages students to explore, define, and own their identities and experiences and grow funds of knowledge, empowering them to transform their own communities from within. The SENSEI framework begins by redefining a teacher as not simply one who teaches in a classroom but rather one who teaches valuable life lessons that transcend colonial conceptualizations of the teacher. In colonized contexts, teachers function to maintain hegemony and assert dominance over marginalized populations. In the SENSEI framework, teachers are those who disrupt colonial patterns and function to reclaim the strengths and voices of the communities they serve. In the SENSEI framework, students are not relegated to those enrolled in classrooms. As with a sensei, a student exists to counter hegemony by embracing and enacting their cultural wealth Educators must help counter harmful narratives and encourage students to identify the strengths that lie within themselves and their communities. Collective forms of narrative that value identity can ensure the continuity of a community or a people. The stories of students’ histories, traditional practices, and resilience can help disrupt harms, many that have lasted for generations, so they may not just survive, but thrive. Full article

Background and Objectives: Medical students represent the ideal target group for promoting mental health and mental wellbeing, being exposed to specific risk factors, such as the content of medical training, the exposure to sickness and death, and a stressful academic routine. Medical students report high levels of cynicism and emotional exhaustion, which represent two of the essential features of burnout syndrome. In this systematic review, studies assessing the levels of burnout among medical students through validated tools worldwide were analyzed. Materials and Methods: A systematic review has been performed in order to identify studies: (1) focusing on samples of medical students; (2) evaluating burnout syndrome using validated tools; (3) providing prevalence data on burnout; and (4) written in English. Results: Out of the 5547 papers initially obtained, 64 were finally included in the analysis. The sample sizes ranged from 51 to 2682 participants. Almost all studies had a cross-sectional design; the Maslach Burnout Inventory and its related versions were the most frequently used assessment tools. The prevalence of burnout, which was stratified based on gender and academic stage, ranged from 5.6 to 88%. Burnout was mostly predicted by thoughts of stopping medical education, negative life events, lack of support, dissatisfaction, and poor motivation. Conclusions: The prevalence of burnout syndrome in medical students is quite heterogeneous, reaching a peak of 88% in some countries. However, several predictors have been identified, including negative life events or poor motivation. These findings highlight the need to develop preventive interventions targeting the future generation of medical doctors, in order to improve their coping strategies and resilience styles. Full article

“Publish or perish” is a term used for the culture adopted in universities, whereby academic members of staff, typically although not exclusively on research and teaching contracts, are required to publish research. Minimum levels of quantity and quality may apply and these may be included in key performance indicators and annual staff reviews to ensure compliance. Whilst this culture has been reported in universities for nearly a century, most recently it has cascaded down to doctoral students who are increasingly expected to publish and otherwise disseminate research during their studies (i.e., research outside of that which is to be submitted in their thesis). This entry relates primarily to doctoral students in a UK setting and studying a monograph route (rather than a published papers submission) in the humanities. It further explores the role played by supervisors to help doctoral students to publish, and in turn the help and guidance supervisors need to offer as support. Many of the findings explored in this entry apply equally beyond the parameters noted above, and, as demonstrated in the literature, international students and institutions are facing similar issues. Full article

Effective mentoring is an integral component of the doctoral dissertation process. This study aimed to determine the psychometric properties of two questionnaires developed to assess research self-efficacy and the mentoring/supervision process. The sample comprised 1265 doctorate students (mean age = 32.36 years; standard deviation = 8.20). Items in both questionnaires had adequate discrimination indexes and principal component analysis supported the unifactorial structure of each questionnaire, with adequate percentages of explained variance (47.5% and 60%, respectively). Reliability was good or excellent: α = 0.71 and α = 0.94. In the research self-efficacy questionnaire, there was a significant interaction between gender and year of doctoral studies. Men had higher scores in the first, second and third years of their doctoral studies than women, but this ranking was reversed for the fourth and fifth years. In the mentoring/supervision questionnaire, PhD students in their first year had a higher score than those in the third, fourth and fifth years, and students in the second year had a higher score than those in the fifth year. Understanding students’ perception of their research self-efficacy and the mentoring process is of great importance given the relationship between the mentoring process and students’ academic performance and personal well-being. Full article

Background: Studies have shown that symmetry plays an aesthetic role and has a positive effect on the perception of human faces. Our work hypothesizes that facial symmetry positively correlates with physical attractiveness and, thus, with higher visual evaluations of future doctors. Materials and methods: Observational study of 46 students (26 women and 20 men), comparing subjective indicators, symmetry of their facial features, and students’ academic performance. Results: We found no correlation between these subjective results and an objective factor of symmetry facial recognition. User evaluators’ subjective assessments of students’ physical appearance showed significant gender differences for almost all the domains assessed. Moreover, these variables were correlated to each other: women were perceived more positively than men. There were also correlations in the variables related to academic performance but no gender differences. We did not observe any relationship between subjective variables related to physical appearance and objective ones related to academic performance. Conclusion: Facial symmetry was not correlated with positive physical appearance and, therefore, with a better evaluation of future doctors by patients. Users perceive women physicians more positively, despite there being no difference at an academic level. Full article

Student academic performance is an important indicator of doctoral education quality, but limited research has focused on how multiple influential factors of doctoral students’ academic performance work together. This study aims to explore the factors significantly affecting the academic performance of mathematics education doctoral students in Indonesia. Several factors were recognized from prior studies, such as the fear of delay, student engagement, parental support, teacher support, facilitating conditions, stress level, and well-being. An online questionnaire was designed and answered by a total of 147 mathematics education doctoral students. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was adopted to analyze the questionnaire data. The results suggested that teacher support had the strongest positive effects on mathematics education doctoral students’ academic performance in Indonesia. Student engagement was the most significant positive factor in improving doctoral students’ well-being, while parental support could most significantly reduce their stress levels. Practically, these results are expected to provide implications to universities and supervisors regarding the improvement of doctoral students’ well-being to promote their academic success and further the quality of doctoral programs in education. Theoretically, these results can also contribute to building an empirical model that can be used to explore and explain how multiple factors could affect doctoral students’ academic performance in other contexts. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted European universities’ educational process. With the vaccination rollout, in-class instruction broadly resumed beginning in September 2021. In order to mitigate the risks of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, European universities apply COVID-19 containment protocols. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the COVID-19 containment protocol that Greek universities implemented in order to fully reopen in the fall of 2021 and for the entire academic year 2021–2022. A case study was conducted at the Department of Industrial Management and Technology, University of Piraeus (Athens’ port), Greece. Data were collected from November 2021 to July 2022 and a quantitative statistical analysis (descriptive and inferential) was performed. A total of 330 unique (and 43 reinfections) COVID-19 cases were confirmed, including 241 undergraduate students, 73 postgraduate, and 2 doctoral students, 10 faculty, and 4 administrative personnel. Contact tracing reported four confirmed and eight potential cases of in-classroom transmission. The person in charge of implementing the COVID-19 containment protocol in the department ordered more than 6000 rapid tests during this period. The Department of Industrial Management and Technology at the University of Piraeus used a rigorously monitored and coordinated strategy of vaccine promotion, screening/testing, contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine in order to control COVID-19 transmission. The results show, on one hand, that the protocol’s implementation is effective and leads to in-classroom transmission minimization and, on the other hand, verify the hypothesis that the department’s confirmed COVID-19 cases are less (with a mean percentage difference of 50%) than the community’s respective 18–39 age group. Full article

In recent years, there has been an increased implementation of massive open online courses (MOOCs). This teaching model plays a pivotal role in online education because it can provide high-quality learning resources to numerous students with great feasibility, shaping training courses according to their different learning requirements. Although the widespread adoption of MOOCs in medical education has led to numerous benefits for undergraduate and graduate doctors, their role remains unclear, suggesting the need to analyze the key factors of such a learning method in this field. To achieve this aim, a scoping review, in line with the PRISMA method for qualitative synthesis, was performed by considering studies published from 2016 to 2021, written in English, and including the physician population. Through this literature analysis, the following main areas of interest came to light: (1) pedagogical approaches, (2) MOOC structure-related variables, (3) participant-related variables, and (4) MOOCs vs. traditional courses. The review provides valuable evidence on factors underlying MOOCs effectiveness, which might be helpful for academic and healthcare organizations in designing effective training courses for physicians. Full article

Background: Personality traits are the basic components of an individual’s personality. Although there are many published articles about the impact of personality traits on medical students, there is a lack of integrative reviews of existing articles. To close this gap, this review aims to summarize the impact of personality traits on medical students from two perspectives: life and work. Methods: The search was performed using the following databases: PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and EMBASE. All publications that assessed the impact of personality traits on life and work until February 2022 were selected. Results: Ninety-seven studies were included. The results suggest that personality traits could affect life performance, health outcomes, life satisfaction, the formation of doctor–patient relationships, mastery of knowledge, academic performance, and career planning. Different personality traits can have positive or negative impacts on these aspects. Conclusions: The results of this review suggest that personality traits can affect medical students’ lives and work. Therefore, based on the evaluation of the personality traits of medical students, it is necessary to design targeted courses and training for students to improve their personality traits, to bring about better results in their lives and work. Full article

Medical students generally express a low interest in Occupational Medicine. We aimed to assess the attitudes and changes in attitudes of students towards this area after completing a course on Occupational Medicine in two Medical Universities in Spain (Zaragoza and Castilla-La Mancha). The teaching method included blended learning as a model that used online virtual patient platforms (CASUS) and/or EMUTOM, as well as traditional methods such as face-to-face teaching. A total of 526 students (98 of whom attended the University of Castilla-La Mancha) participated during three academic years (2015–2016, 2016–2017 and 2017–2018). The validation of the questionnaire was carried out using reliability, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. For the analysis of internal consistency and discrimination, Cronbach’s alpha was used. The adequacy of the factor analysis was measured by means of KMO, and a correlation matrix was examined by means of Bartlett’s test of sphericity. To identify differences between students before and after completing the course, the Mann–Whitney U-test for independent samples was used. Our results show that despite a negative or neutral attitude towards Occupational Medicine, the acquisition of competences and skills in this area and their training were recognized as fundamental for their future professional performance as doctors in any specialty. Full article

The purpose of this research is to: (1) clarify the scope and connotation of the OPOP (One Product/Project/Performance, One Paper) model comprehensively; (2) show its application in design and creative teaching; (3) introduce this model to more people. First, the author reviews the design doctoral education system and its shortcomings and analyzes the similarities and differences between “Ph.D. of Design” and “Master of Design”; second, the researcher discusses the DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) pyramid, cognition and communication theory separately. The author also interviewed the two teachers who created the OPOP model to clarify its core meaning and goals. Finally, the author invited students who participated in an OPOP forum to fill out a questionnaire in order to analyze and understand their responses and suggestions. The OPOP model allows participants to realize that “creativity” and “interpretation” are equally important and to gradually learn to use academic papers to transform personal “tips” and “experience” into “knowledge” that can be imparted. The author hopes that the OPOP model and the general frameworks mentioned in this study can inspire all readers, enabling them to continuously explore the connotation and further possibilities of OPOP in light of the actual situation. Full article

Graduate programs should be operated based on professionalism. The purpose of this study was to investigate the professionalism of thirteen doctoral dance programs in Korea. The study included thirteen doctoral programs from 10 universities in Korea. Data on the dance programs were collected using school bulletins, websites, and booklets. Educational goals, doctoral program requirements, and syllabi were analyzed based on the documents of each graduate school. Although most graduate school dance programs offered similar characteristics of courses, programs majorly comprised theory, performance, and workshops. Dance performance appeared to be an important aspect of dance programs in Korea. Interestingly, three different genres of dance (Korean folk dance, modern dance, and ballet) were overwhelmingly present in doctoral programs. This study recommended that more research- and scholastic-oriented programs should be provided in doctoral programs to enhance the fundamentals of the dance academic environment. Overall, more specialized programs are required to meet the various needs and choices of the doctoral students. It is certain that students’ interests and academic excellence are the greatest assets for doctoral dance major students. The concepts of diversity, culture, and interdisciplinary cooperation should be applied more to the description and research of graduate courses. Operationalizing these efforts through rigorous assessments of students’ mastery of key competencies in the curriculum is another evolving task for sustainable education leaders. Full article

Menstrual problems affect many young women worldwide, conditioning both their academic performance and quality of life. This study sought to analyse the prevalence of menstrual problems and their possible relationship with lifestyle among Spanish university women, as part of a research project (UniHcos Project) involving a cohort of 11 Spanish universities with 7208 university students. A descriptive analysis was performed using the bivariate chi-square test and the Student’s t-test together with a binary logistic regression, in which the dependent variable was ‘suffering from menstrual problems’. Menstrual problems were identified in 23.8% of the students, representing women who paid more visits to the doctor and to emergency rooms, and who consumed more painkillers and contraceptives. In relation to dietary preferences, menstrual problems were 1.39 (CI 95% 1.22–1.61; p = 0.000) times more likely among women classified as high-risk alcohol users according to the AUDIT questionnaire, and 1.187 (CI 95% 1.029–1.370; p = 0.019) times greater among those who consumed sweets daily, 1.592 (CI 95% 1.113–2.276; p = 0.011) times more frequent among those who eat fish daily, and 1.199 (CI 95% 1.004–1.432; p = 0.045) times greater among those who were dieting. Menstrual problems affect many college students and potentially modifiable lifestyle variables exist which may influence their prevalence. It would be interesting to develop programmes to promote women’s health in the university context. Full article