Student Comments Research Articles

Anatomy Education Elective: A Model for Vertical Integration and Self‐Directed Learning in the Medical Curriculum

INTRODUCTIONWith decreased curricular time devoted to anatomy courses, it is imperative that medical students have opportunities to review anatomical content in the clinical years. Vertical integration of anatomy into the clinical curriculum facilitates the transfer of anatomical knowledge from the classroom to the clinic by providing concrete examples that illustrate the clinical relevance of anatomical content. The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) also requires that medical schools provide students with opportunities to engage in self‐directed learning to cultivate the habits of lifelong learning.OBJECTIVESTo discuss the effectiveness of a 4th year Anatomy Education elective for integrating anatomy into the clinical curriculum and engaging students in self‐directed learning.DESCRIPTIONIn 2016 an Anatomy Education elective was introduced at Indiana University School of Medicine to provide 4th year medical students with an opportunity to revisit an anatomical topic during the clinical years by developing an educational module that integrates anatomical knowledge with clinical applications. The anatomy education elective is also an opportunity for 4th year students to engage in self‐directed learning on an anatomical topic that aligns with their area of clinical interest. The elective entails students generating learning objectives that their module will address, creating module content in a format of their choosing, and developing an appropriate assessment for the module. Students are encouraged to approach an anatomical topic from a clinical perspective to illustrate the clinical relevance of the anatomical structures and relationships. Twenty‐six student have taken the Anatomy Education elective as of 2021. Some examples of module topics include a review of hepatic anatomy and histology using a clinical case of portal hypertension and placement of a trans‐jugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt; a review of abdominal anatomy through the lens of a the FAST (Focused Assessment with Sonography for Trauma) exam; and a review of facial anatomy in the context of a facial nerve injury and facial re‐animation procedure.OBSERVATIONSStudents’ experiences during the Anatomy Education elective have been overwhelmingly positive. Student feedback confirms that the elective engaged their self‐directed learning skills, and they appreciated the opportunity to explore a topic of interest. Some student comments include: “I really appreciated the flexibility that this elective allowed. I learned a great deal and was given autonomy when selecting my project topic and content. [The professor] provided excellent guidance and feedback while also allowing me, as the student, to take ownership of my project” and “I enjoyed getting to conduct independent learning about a topic of my choice. I was able to dedicate time to learning about the eye, a topic that I did not feel very confident about after first‐ and second‐year curriculum.”CONCLUSIONSThe Anatomy Education elective is an effective way to vertically integrate gross anatomy into the clinical curriculum. Student feedback confirms that the elective engaged their self‐directed learning skills and the autonomy to choose their own topic motivated students to take ownership of their project.

Using Google Tools to Increase Student Learning, Engagement, and Collaboration in Remote, Hybrid, and In‐person Courses

The COVID‐19 global pandemic turned the educational community upside‐down. As all in person coursework quickly transitioned to online delivery, faculty had to formulate new ways to not only disseminate course content but also assess student learning and engage students in the virtual classroom. As the pandemic state continues to affect higher education, the use of online collaborative tools has become essential to many college classrooms. This poster reviews the implementation of a selection of Google tools (e.g. Docs, Forms, Jamboard) in remote, hybrid, and in‐person courses.Initially, these online tools were added to engage students when strict COVID‐19 guidelines were in place in the hybrid and remote classroom setting as a way to promote student collaboration and group learning. In class activities, homework, and other group assignments were modified such that both in‐person and remote students could collaborate in real time during the synchronous class session and outside of scheduled class time. Student feedback on course evaluations indicate that the learning environment was positive, collaborative, and engaging. Student comments specifically pointed to the success of these activities. Students ranked the course greater than 4.0 (out of 5.0) across all evaluative questions.In the spring 2020 hybrid version of the course, summative assessments were modified to include open‐book take‐home case studies in addition to the timed objective exam. Required biweekly virtual small group sessions allowed students to collaborate on these challenging case‐based critical thinking problems. The case study exams were designed in Google Docs and a template file (copy function) was created for student use. Overall student perception of the case study exams was very high as indicated by the students' ranking of this activity on a survey and written feedback. Additionally, student performance improved on the case study exams (p < 0.001) as their critical thinking, analytical, and scientific writing skills improved, while their performance on the timed objective exams remained relatively consistent (p = 0.157).Examples of how these online tools can be set‐up for use as formative and summative assessments as well as interactive, collaborative activities will be presented and shared using QR codes at the poster session. As coursework has returned to in‐person learning, many of these tools are still used due to ease of use, positive feedback, and benefits to student learning.

Sentiment Analysis of Stakeholder Satisfaction Measurement

Measuring the satisfaction of stakeholders is very impoirtant in order to get feedback and input for the purposes of developing and implementing the improvement strategies. ITB STIKOM Bali routinely measures student stakeholder satisfaction every semester. This study aims to analyze stakeholder comments to generate sentiment analysis on stakeholder satisfaction. The data used are comments on the results of the measurement of stakeholder satisfaction (students) for the Odd Semester of 2020/2021 which are filled out through questionnaire. The algorithm used in this research is the Naïve Bayes Classifier (NBC). The research method in this study consisted of several stages, namely problem identification and literature study, data collection on stakeholder satisfaction (students), data preprocessing, feature extraction in order to facilitate classification using the Naïve Bayes Classifier (NBC) algorithm. The training data used is 200 data while the training data is 2133 data. The results of this study can provide recommendations to ITB STIKOM Bali for the results of student comments as a whole where the percentage of sentiment generated is 58% positive sentiment and 42% negative sentiment.

Connecting Students’ Interests to a Learning Context: The Case of Ecosystem Services in STEM Education

Interest in a subject matter is a powerful motivation in education. Prior knowledge of students’ interests can be helpful in teaching the concept of ecosystem services (ES) and disservices (ED), which is increasingly being used in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, including soil science. Study objectives were to evaluate prior students’ soil science-related interests and use them to expand the learning context of a laboratory exercise on soil reaction (pH) with ES/ED in an online introductory soil science course (FNR 2040: Soil Information Systems) taught at Clemson University. Students from multiple fields of study (environmental and natural resources, forestry, and wildlife biology) completed the laboratory exercise in Fall 2021. This exercise on soil regulating and provisioning ES/ED included a sequence of reusable learning objects (RLOs), which are self-contained online modules frequently used for e-learning. Laboratory activities included calculating the liming replacement cost of soil inorganic carbon (SIC) and avoided social cost of carbon (SC-CO2) from soil inorganic carbon (SIC) stocks in the assigned soil. The laboratory exercise was effective in increasing the familiarity with the concept of ES/ED (+39.4 increase in “extremely familiar” category) and the concept of SIC (+44.7 increase in “moderately familiar” category). The graded online quiz consisted of 9 questions and was taken by 55 students with an average score of 7.0 (out of 9). A post-assessment survey found that the laboratory was an effective way to learn about soil pH, SIC, and their ES/ED. Detailed student comments showed learning enjoyment (e.g., calculations, good experience), the value of multimedia (e.g., video, PowerPoint), the learning flexibility (e.g., separate parts), content applicability (e.g., economic values of services), and constructive criticism (e.g., clearer instructions, lots of information). A word cloud based on comments by the students about their soil ES laboratory exercise experience indicated the most common words submitted by students to describe their experience, such as “soil”, “calculations”, “enjoyed”, “learning”, and “values”, among others. Applied recommendations are proposed to develop future exercises based on the alignment of students’ interests, STEM subject matter, and ES/ED applications.

Case study: Perspectives on the use of LEGO® bricks in the biochemistry classroom.

The use of LEGO® bricks in the higher education classroom has increased in the last two decades. This is no different in the STEM classroom and several disciplines, including physics, chemistry, and biology, have all made use of LEGO® bricks in some way to create models for active learning activities. Currently, the discipline to make the greatest use of LEGO® bricks is chemistry; only limited examples exist in biochemistry and the molecular life sciences. Here, we present the use of a LEGO® brick modelling activity in the introductory biochemistry classroom during the teaching of metabolism. We present student comments on the activity and the models that were generated by the students. Additionally, we focus on other instructor and project student-designed models for the teaching of ATP synthesis, gene regulation and restriction digestion. Interestingly, both the gene regulation and restriction digest activities were generated with the help of undergraduate students or recent graduates, by applying a backward design approach. This case study seeks to encourage more molecular life science educators to adopt the use of LEGO® bricks in their classrooms to engage in more active learning.

Can we do real inquiry online? Influence of real-time data collection on students’ views of inquiry in an online, multi-site masters’ degree on environmental education

In a previous study we detected that a number of inquiry stages (data collection, analysis and conclusions) went unnoticed by the students of an in situ joint online/onsite master’s degree via online teaching. In this paper we analyse the effect of improved instruction, in which students fully experienced and became aware of all the stages that comprise the inquiry-based teaching approach. In the article we show the differences between the initial and improved instruction. The comparison of student comments as exhibited in the online class diary forum between the initial and improved instruction has allowed us to analyse the influence of this improvement in the level of depth of the students’ discourse. Two codings have been employed to analyse the forums: the first (deductive) detected which stages of inquiry appeared in the comments. The second (inductive) involved the recoding of each of the previously classified comments based on five levels of communicative quality that emerged. Our main finding was that as well as being more aware of the different stages of inquiry, the students of the improved investigation were able to explain and identify them with specific examples. In other words, the investment of time in developing each of the stages in question helped them to define, afford reality to, and increase the explicative quality of their comments.

Where's the harm? Screening student evaluations of teaching for offensive, threatening or distressing comments

Student evaluation surveys provide educational institutions with important feedback regarding the student experience of teaching and courses; however, qualitative comments can contain offensive, insulting or threatening content. Large educational institutions generate thousands of comments per academic term; therefore, manual screening processes to find potentially harmful comments are not generally feasible. We developed a methodology for semi-automated screening of student comments that incorporates a machine learning decision support system and a detailed psychological assessment protocol. In a case study at a large public Australian university, our system identified 4,258 out of 62,049 (6.9%) comments as potentially harmful and requiring further review. Feedback from stakeholders demonstrates that this methodology is useful in reducing staff workload and could be broadly applied to different settings. Implications for practice or policy: Educational institutions can adopt this methodology to dramatically decrease the number of working hours required to screen harmful free-text comments. Researchers can use the proposed psychology-based assessment as an example of how to develop a protocol to categorise comments. Educators and researchers can use this case study to follow best practices to develop their own decision support system that implements free-text comment classifiers.

The relationship between students’ evaluations of teaching and academics professional development

ABSTRACT There is much debate concerning students’ evaluation of teaching and several academics discredit the validity and reliability of student comments. Student feedback would be a good source of information for academics to improve their teaching, while earlier studies indicate that the academics do not always make use of student feedback in their teaching development. Their perception on the applicability of the student feedback can be related to teachers’ attitude towards student feedback and their teaching conceptions. Furthermore, it may influence their motivation and efforts to participate in pedagogical trainings and willingness to improve their teaching. The research question for the current study was: What are the relationships between the academics’ conceptions of teaching and participation in pedagogical courses and their willingness and ability to apply student evaluation of teaching feedback to enhance teaching practice? Forty two academics were interviewed and interviews were analysed using qualitative content analysis. As the result of the analysis three profiles of academics’ were formed: 1) academics with consistent attitude, 2) ambivalent attitude and 3) arrogant attitude towards student evaluation of teaching feedback. The study revealed how academics respond to such feedback and how they use it to develop their teaching depends on academics’ conceptions of teaching, attitude towards student feedback and participation in pedagogical courses.

An undergraduate laboratory to detect viruses in human DNA samples using qPCR

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the need to reliably detect the presence of viral genomes in human clinical samples. The most accurate viral tests involve the use of qPCR. Thus, it is important for students to understand the mechanism to detect viral genomes by qPCR including critical qPCR controls and how to properly interpret qPCR data. Herein, we describe a 2-week undergraduate laboratory to detect a viral genome in a human DNA sample. The strategy follows a SARS-CoV-2 qPCR test in numerous ways. Students are provided isolated DNA representing a mock human patient sample, and determine if a viral genome (bacteriophage lambda) is present using qPCR. A battery of control samples and patient pooling strategies are utilized. The laboratory exercise is successful based on high rates of student success in detecting viral genomes, pre-quiz and post-quiz assessments focusing on viral qPCR testing, and positive student comments.

Students' Attitude Towards Translanguaging Practice in Indonesian EFL Classes

The multilingual world demands educational stakeholders to adjust by embracing multilingual pedagogies. Translanguaging is deemed a prominent language practice to be implemented in educational settings, especially in the EFL class. However, the practice still obtains criticisms. Many scholars point out challenges in implementing classroom translanguaging. Therefore, studying attitudes, specifically students' attitudes, becomes significant at this point because it helps to reveal how students' feelings and thoughts of translanguaging practice are based on their learning experience. Further, their attitudes can be considered in the classroom decision making whether to translanguage or not to translanguage. The present study will generally continue what previous scholars have done but in a new context and methodology. This study investigated students' attitudes towards student- and teacher-directed translanguaging in Indonesian EFL classrooms. The participants were 40 grade VIII students from two EFL classes of a private boarding school located in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. The data was collected using online questionnaires consisting of close-ended and mainly open-ended questions. The result showed that most students expressed negative feelings toward students-directed translanguaging. Meanwhile, teacher-directed translanguaging was more acceptable indicated by most students who had positive feelings towards their teachers' translanguaging. Students' arguments and comments were also interesting to be noticed. These findings shed light on a multilingual pedagogical practice and further research, which we would like to discuss further within this article.

Characteristics of good clinical teachers in anesthesiology from medical students' perspective: a qualitative descriptive study.

Learning needs are influenced by the stage of learning and medical specialty. We sought to investigate the characteristics of a good clinical teacher in anesthesiology from the medical students' perspective. We conducted a qualitative descriptive study toanalyzewritten comments of medical students about their clinical teachers' performances. Our analysis strategy wasthe inductive content analysis method.The results are reported as a descriptive summary with major themes as the final product. Our study identified four themes. The first theme, teachers' individual characteristics, includes characteristics that are usually more related to students' subjective experiences and feelings. The second theme, teachers' characteristics that advance student learning, seems to be one of the most important contributions to learning because it increases the practice of procedural skills. The third theme, teachers' characteristics that prepare students for success, shows characteristics that facilitate students' learning by promoting a healthy and safe environment. Lastly, the fourth theme, characteristics related to teaching approaches, includes characteristics that can guide clinical teachers more objectively. Our analysis of the written comments of medical students identified many characteristics of a good clinical teacher that were organized in four different themes. These themes contribute to expand on existing understandings of clinical teaching in the anesthesiology clerkship environment, and add new interpretations that can be reflected upon and explored by other clinical educators.

Learning organizational behaviors and leadership through reflective journal writing

This study offers an in-depth exploration of the elements of an effective journal writing assignment in an organizational behavior class within the framework of a structural model. The connections between the following variables were assessed: assignment purpose, learning achievement, instructor feedback, self-reflection and student satisfaction. To that end, a survey was given to students over a three-semester time frame. Students' answers to the questions were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The analysis validates the structural model and supports the research finding that the hypothesized relationships were all statistically significant. Sentiment analysis was used for the student comments. All findings support the conclusion that journal writing offers an opportunity for students to actively engage in learning. The results also suggest that self-reflection, perceived learning achievement and instructor involvement positively affect students' experience and satisfaction with a writing project of this type. A clear purpose and explicitly articulated expectations from the instructor drive student engagement in the active learning process.

Abusive comments in student evaluations of courses and teaching: the attacks women and marginalised academics endure

This paper examines the volume and type of anonymous comments academics receive in student evaluations of courses and teaching (SETs) at the 16,000 higher education institutions that collect this data at the end of each teaching period. Existing research has increasingly pointed to the negative issues of student surveys, but very little research has focused on the volume, type, and impact of anonymous student comments on academics. This paper analyses the survey results of 674 academics to inform higher education leaders and the sector more widely of the amount and type of abusive comments academics are receiving. The work also demonstrates that the highest volume, most derogatory, and most threatening abuse is directed towards women academics and those academics from marginalised groups. The paper finds that previous estimates of the rate and severity of abusive comments that academics receive, and the impact to academics’ wellbeing, mental health, and career progression, have underestimated what is taking place. The paper argues that many universities are failing to protect their staff from this abuse, and the prejudice nature of SET results, which will continue to have a negative impact on the career progression of marginalised academics - a major flaw in a sector that prides itself on diversity and inclusion.

146 Virtual role-play: A useful tool for undergraduate obstetrics and gynaecology teaching during a pandemic

Background and Aims: The Obstetrics and Gynaecology undergraduate programme at our hospital transitioned to a blended learning programme in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students attended for clinical assignments at the hospital two days per week and availed of online learning from home three days per week. The challenge we faced was to create opportunities for students to practice history taking and consultation skills and to create opportunities for social interaction. Methods: In order to address these concerns, weekly virtual role-play tutorials based on two clinical cases were facilitated by the clinical tutor for ten students learning from home. The cases involved role-playing a patient (played by the tutor) doctor (played by a student) interaction to obtain a history, followed by feedback, discussing investigations, interpretation of results, further management, and another role-play to counsel a patient for the indicated gynaecological procedure. After one of these tutorials, given to two groups of ten students, student feedback was obtained using a ‘one-minute paper’. Students completed the questionnaire anonymously via a Google Form. Students were asked three questions; 1) What was the most useful thing you learned? 2) What remains unclear to you? 3) Other comments/ideas for improvements? Results: The response rate was 95% (19 of 20 students). Students described the tutorials as “well-structured” and “really interactive”. The opportunity to role-play counselling a patient for a procedure was of particular value to students, with 73% of students specifying this as the most useful thing they learned. Student comments also suggest they appreciated the opportunity to receive feedback. Conclusions: Student feedback was valuable. Our findings suggest virtual role-play is a useful learning tool to support teaching in Obstetrics and Gynaecology during the COVID-19 pandemic and perhaps beyond.

Assessment of learning outcomes of first year dental students using an interactive Nearpod educational platform.

The impact of COVID-19 required revisions in curricula, especially among professional programs that have traditionally required hands-on learning of content. This study endeavored to assess the level of effectiveness of the online presentation of material both qualitatively and quantitatively in a 5-week module on cariology for first-year dental students. Quantitative analysis of the assessment data was required to determine if an interactive engagement platform increased student outcomes. Quantitative survey and qualitative student comments were analyzed to determine the students' preferences for supplemental learning opportunities and utilization trends. The purpose of this study was to measure the learning outcomes of online course delivery with the use of an interactive education platform. The dental class of 2023 received the cariology material in a live, in-person lecture format. The class of 2024 received the same material in a combination of synchronous Zoom lectures and asynchronous interactive presentations utilizing the interactive education platform (Nearpod). The identical midterm examination on cariology was administered to both cohorts at the completion of the 5-week module. Quantitatively, the class of 2024 had a significantly higher mean score than the class of 2023 on the midterm examination, collectively and in both female and male cohorts. Qualitatively, the dental students overwhelmingly expressed support for the ease of use and educational value of the Nearpod platform. This study found that student performance on the identical exam was improved through the use of synchronous Zoom lectures and asynchronous Nearpod review sessions. The application of technology to enhance remote learning can be effective in supporting student mastery of core concepts in dental education.

Deep Learning Model for Sentiment Analysis on Short Informal Texts

This paper proposes a classification model to classify short informal texts. Those short informal texts were texts that were noisy, typos, irregular, and could consist of a very small number of words or even only a single word. The proposed model was trained using a dataset collected from student comments from an application called Evaluasi Dosen Oleh Mahasiswa (EDOM). This application assesses the lecturers using questionnaires filled out by students. It also records the student's comments but is not part of the evaluation calculation, therefore this work makes the data possible to be part of the assessment through sentiment analysis. This work focuses on building suitable preprocessing algorithm and building a simple deep learning network. The preprocessing algorithm was based on multiple word n-gram and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) vectorization, and the network was built with a relatively shallow network. To evaluate the model in real usage, an application was built. The results were very convincing, reaching 0.979 in accuracy and 0.63 in F1-Score. Nonetheless, the imbalanced dataset was the only factor that needed to be investigated further for better overall performance.

Do We Have a Trust Problem? Exploring Undergraduate Student Views on the Tentativeness and Trustworthiness of Science.

Science includes the fundamental attributes of durability and uncertainty; hence, we teach about the “tentative yet durable” nature of science. Public discourse can be different, where one hears both confidence about “settled science” and doubts about “just theories.” The latter observation gives rise to the possibility that emphasis on learning the tentative nature of science offers some people the actionable option of declining to accept canonical science. Our paper reports the findings from initial and replication exploratory studies involving about 500 preservice, elementary/middle school teacher education students at a large Midwestern public university. Using a survey method that included opportunities for student comments, the study tested hypotheses about confidence in the veracity, durability, tentativeness, and trustworthiness of science. We found that most students embrace noncontroversial science as correct, and that almost all embraced the tentative nature of science regardless of what they thought about controversial topics. However, when asked about the trustworthiness of science, many students were not willing to say that they trust scientific knowledge. Even students strongly supportive of science, including controversial science, responded similarly. And why did they say that science is not trustworthy? The explanation echoed by many students was that scientific knowledge is tentative. Our paper concludes with implications for instruction and research. Our findings suggest that it would be prudent for science educators to increase instructional focus on the relationship between data and evidence that leads to the durability of scientific knowledge. Future research needs to thoroughly investigate the public interpretation of what we teach about the nature and characteristics of science, and for the implications it might have on how scientific knowledge is or is not incorporated in the development and implementation of public policy.

Learner comments-based Recommendation system

Traditional techniques of recommender systems presented low accuracy performance because it suffer from sparsity problem hence. In this work we build a recommender model based on free-text reviews written online by user. The model built on two method recommendation and sentiment analysis. Our recommendation model first predicts new rating from user reviews then detect user requirements and interest by differences analysis between a new rating prediction and original rating. Presented model take in account both explicit original rating and implicit user sentiments, hence that will be roll key to address data sparsity problem. In this model we try to extract feature and opinion by sentiment analysis of text user comments and reviews to get more accurate rating calculation from student reviews and comments written in English. This model tested and trained on online learner comments and reviews on video learning of three courses on coursera learning platform to produce a video learning recommendation system and to validate the accuracy and efficiency of proposed model.

Student Perspectives of Online Teaching: Lessons Learned for the Post-Covid Classroom

As instructors return to in-person teaching and learning following online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, we can build from the experiences gained and incorporate various online resources into our campus-based classes. Drawing from student evaluations of teaching, a post-course student survey and learning management system (LMS) analytics, we documented students’ perspectives of online teaching and learning in a large introductory science course offered as a flipped classroom, and reflect on student and instructor perspectives as we return to campus-based teaching and learning. Results suggest that what students liked and what they perceived as effective often did not align, and that instructors need to consider good pedagogical practice when evaluating student comments. We identified strategies that we can carry forward to enhance our large introductory science course including a weekly course structure, synchronous classes and laboratories supported by asynchronous content, and taking advantage of recent advancements in online teaching and learning tools for discussion forums, practice exams and assessment.

Distance Learning with Virtual Case-Based Collaborative Learning: Adaptation and Acceptability of Clinical Cases from an American Academic Medical Center for Education at an African Medical School

We aimed to determine whether a Case-Based Collaborative Learning (CBCL) curriculum, developed from the clinical experience of U.S.-based clinicians in collaboration with Rwandan medical faculty, is acceptable, feasible to implement, and effective as a virtual educational tool for medical students in a resource-limited, global health setting. In this CBCL distance learning education, students were actively engaged and understood the case material and asked probing and insightful questions. Course evaluations showed that 106 of the 120 total student responses (88.3%) said that the difficulty level was “about right”, while only 11/120 (9.2%) said it was “too easy” and 3/120 (2.5%) said it was “too hard” providing evidence that even though the cases were largely based on clinical encounters at an American academic medical center, they are understandable, and at the appropriate level of difficulty for Rwanda-based medical students. Qualitative analysis from student comments found the CBCL method most helpful for students to develop diagnostic frameworks, and the practice of clinical reasoning using CBCL was engaging and interactive. This method of a virtual, international CBCL approach, was feasible, effective, and acceptable for students. A large majority of students found the sessions to be of appropriate difficulty and engaging. From the global health and inter-cultural exchange perspective, this collaboration demonstrates feasibility and acceptability of international partnerships. Using virtual, video conferencing technology, similar future collaborations can improve capacity building in lower-resource settings.