Instruction Level Research Articles

Cloud based adaptive learning system: virtual reality and augmented reality assisted educational pedagogy development on clinical simulation

An adaptive learning system provides support for student’s academic progress by varying learning routes and pedagogical contents to satisfy various students’ unique academic needs. The primary goal of this research work is to enhance and expand occupational efficiency through the use of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) frameworks in nursing education. The authors developed an adaptive federated cloud computing learning system in order to better prepare students for the demands of real-world professional practice. The article examined the use of virtual reality(VR) and augmented (AR) technologies in nursing education and developed an instrument that skillfully combines knowledge from the reputable literature on clinical competencies with the peculiarities and ingenuousness particular to virtual simulations. Designated for the remote sharing and utilization of combined educational resources, cloud computing is a distributed information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure built on the Internet of Things (IoT) framework. To increase the occupational efficiency among the nurses and midwives, an educational simulation applied in a way that gamifies the curriculum component for interactive educational pedagogy will be necessary. As a completely integrated part of the curriculum, simulation has proven to be beneficial for nursing students at all levels of instruction. Nursing educators have a plethora of options at their disposal to introduce simulation-based learning approaches into their curricula in the modern era. A three-dimensional (3D) interactive environment that provides users with a sense of spatial presence is created through computer technology, which is an immersive digital ecosystem of VR and AR utilized to improve teaching and learning in nursing education. In this study, the authors offered a cost- effective clinical simulation laboratory for clinical students, nurses, midwives, and practicing healthcare professionals in a manner that ensures constant learning and occupational efficiency by adopting the TPCK model in its central discussion and implementation. The TPCK model has demonstrated how to recognize the boundaries between technological components and pedagogical structures as well as how they are connected when creating facts in nursing education.

Overcoming Reading Difficulties with Reading Fluency Strategies in the Turkish Language: Evidence from a Transparent Orthography

This study employed a single-case design with an AB structure to examine the effect of implementing a Response to Intervention (RTI) model on a fourth-grade elementary school student with reading difficulties. The participant in the study was Deniz, a fourth-grade elementary school student. The pretest measures revealed that Deniz was at the frustration level in both word recognition and reading comprehension skills. Consequently, an eight-week reading intervention program was designed to address and remediate Deniz’s reading difficulties. Through the intervention program, Deniz’s word recognition improved from the frustration level to the instructional level, and her reading comprehension progressed from the frustration level to the independent level, accompanied by a significant decrease in reading miscues.

Drawing a line in the sandbox: balancing exploration and instruction in AI playgrounds

Following the release of ChatGPT and similar generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, many universities have committed to helping their students become AI literate (see for example Russell Group, 2023). The means of providing this support vary, ranging from optional, asynchronous guides to taught instruction embedded within courses. One popular format is the ‘AI playground’: practical sessions encouraging students to experiment with different AI tools, often with minimal instruction given by the facilitator. Yet how much instruction is too much or too little? Some leading voices in AI pedagogy place an emphasis on exploration and self-discovery, encouraging students to set their own goals and play with AI tools rather than walking them through specific tasks (Mollick, 2023). Minimising instruction, however, may sometimes clash with students’ needs. Recent research indicates that many students feel overwhelmed and anxious about AI, and a lack of confidence may hold some back from simply diving in on their own terms (Tierney and Peasey, 2023). In order to find a balance between exploration and instruction, this paper presents different formats of AI playgrounds with varying levels of instruction, run by the Study Skills team at the University of Bristol during the 2023/2024 academic year. Using feedback from student attendees, we identify some specific areas of AI use in which students value facilitator instruction, and at what stages the facilitator should minimise their own intervention. With these findings, we present a potential model for introductory AI playgrounds for use and adaptation by other HE practitioners.

Millions of Students are (Still) Above Grade Level: Achievement and Achievement Variability in Mathematics and Reading Before and During COVID-19 in the United States

According to a 2017 article by Peters and colleagues, millions of students have already demonstrated they know the material slated to be taught that year. Consequently, grade-level standards are unlikely to be appropriately challenging for these students. In this paper, we conceptually replicated and extended this prior study. Using data from schools that administered the Renaissance Star assessment in Fall 2018 and Fall 2021, we quantified pre-COVID and mid-COVID average achievement and variance in achievement in mathematics and reading in fifth grade and estimated the grade level of instruction needed for students. Our results indicate that (a) achievement dropped during COVID-19 relative to pre-COVID, but the drop in mathematics was larger, and (b) achievement variability increased during COVID-19, but the variability in reading was slightly more pronounced. Further, our results replicated Peters et al.’s (2017) results showing that large numbers of students still performed above grade level, and substantial variability in achievement was present within schools.

Level of Gamification Instruction in Language, Literacy, and Communication Domains for Kindergarten

This study aimed to assess the level of gamification instruction in language, literacy, and communication domains for kindergarten, in private schools, in a highly urbanized city in Central Philippines during the school year 2023-2024. Data for this descriptive study was collected from 34 kindergarten teachers using a self-made data-gathering instrument that underwent a stringent validity and reliability test with scores of 4.51 and 0.848, respectively. The results reveal that teachers’ level of gamification instruction was generally very high. Subsequent analysis indicated no significant difference in the level of gamification instruction in auditory perception and discrimination, oral language, alphabet knowledge, and study skills when grouped by age, area of concentration, length of service, and number of trainings attended. Meanwhile, a significant difference was observed in auditory perception and discrimination, visual perception discrimination, alphabet knowledge, and study skills when grouped by highest educational attainment. Likewise, there was a significant difference in visual perception and discrimination when grouped by highest educational attainment and length of service. Hence, this study recommends professional development for younger teachers, tailored gamified activities pieces of training, and the creation of a climate conducive to learning in the research environment. Keywords: Gamification Instruction, Language, Literacy, Communication, Kindergarten

Reading Comprehension of Key Stage 2 Learners

Reading comprehension is a critical learning skill for all students, as it is the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language. There are many reasons why children may have difficulty understanding what they read, including a lack of vocabulary, fluency, and word recognition. In this premise, this study aimed to determine the reading comprehension levels of key stage 2 learners in terms of vocabulary, fluency, and word recognition. The study was tested on 83 key stage 2 learners using a self-made questionnaire that passed stringent tests of validity and reliability. The data were statistically analyzed using the mean, t-test, and analysis of variance. Overall, the reading comprehension level of key stage 2 learners was at an instructional level. When grouped according to four variables, the reading comprehension level of key stage 2 learners in all three areas is at the instructional level. Further, no difference was found in the reading comprehension level of key stage 2 learners in all three areas when compared by their profile variables. Learners’ instructional rating in the three areas stems from poor vocabulary knowledge and less mastery in reading basic sight words that impede them from comprehending the given reading material. These calls for DepEd authorities, reading implementers, and school stakeholders to consider the reading profile of key stage 2 learners in proposing reading programs and in the development of localized instructional materials. Keywords: Reading comprehension, Key Stage 2, learners

The effects of special educational needs and socioeconomic status on teachers' and parents' judgements of pupils' cognitive abilities.

Teachers' and parents' judgements of pupils' cognitive abilities influence pupils' daily learning opportunities and experiences, as these judgements affect the difficulty level of materials and instruction that teachers and parents provide. Over time, these judgements thus significantly shape educational success. However, pupils' characteristics, such as special educational needs (SEN), giftedness and socioeconomic status (SES) can influence and bias judgement accuracy. The present study aimed to investigate the relation between pupils' cognitive abilities and their teachers' and parents' judgements of these abilities, and potential bias in these judgements related to SEN, giftedness, and SES. The sample consisted of 1073 primary school pupils from grades 4-6 from 77 classes in 16 schools, and their teachers and parents. Teachers and parents rated their pupils' cognitive abilities. Pupils completed the COVAT-3, a cognitive ability test. Multilevel analyses revealed that parent judgements were significantly higher than teacher judgements, but both informants' judgements were equally strong related to the cognitive ability scores. When controlling for pupils' assessed cognitive abilities, the results revealed small judgement biases: negative for SEN, positive for giftedness, and finally positive for high SES, but only in teachers. Overall, the results indicated that teachers and parents can judge their pupils abilities to a moderate degree, but they also hold judgement biases related to SEN, giftedness and SES. As these biases can affect pupils' opportunities, it is important to increase teachers' and parents' awareness.

Cross-modal recipe retrieval based on unified text encoder with fine-grained contrastive learning

Cross-modal recipe retrieval is vital for transforming visual food cues into actionable cooking guidance, making culinary creativity more accessible. Existing methods separately encode the recipe Title, Ingredient, and Instruction using different text encoders, then aggregate them to obtain recipe feature, and finally match it with encoded image feature in a joint embedding space. These methods perform well but require significant computational cost. In addition, they only consider matching the entire recipe and the image but ignore the fine-grained correspondence between recipe components and the image, resulting in insufficient cross-modal interaction. To this end, we propose Unified Text Encoder with Fine-grained Contrastive Learning (UTE-FCL) to achieve a simple but efficient model. Specifically, in each recipe, UTE-FCL first concatenates each of the Ingredient and Instruction texts composed of multiple sentences as a single text. Then, it connects these two concatenated texts with the original single-phrase Title to obtain the concatenated recipe. Finally, it encodes these three concatenated texts and the original Title by a Transformer-based Unified Text Encoder (UTE). This proposed structure greatly reduces the memory usage and improves the feature encoding efficiency. Further, we propose fine-grained contrastive learning objectives to capture the correspondence between recipe components and the image at Title, Ingredient, and Instruction levels by measuring the mutual information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of UTE-FCL compared to existing methods.

PLRTE: Progressive learning for biomedical relation triplet extraction using large language models

Document-level relation triplet extraction is crucial in biomedical text mining, aiding in drug discovery and the construction of biomedical knowledge graphs. Current language models face challenges in generalizing to unseen datasets and relation types in biomedical relation triplet extraction, which limits their effectiveness in these crucial tasks. To address this challenge, our study optimizes models from two critical dimensions: data-task relevance and granularity of relations, aiming to enhance their generalization capabilities significantly. We introduce a novel progressive learning strategy to obtain the PLRTE model. This strategy not only enhances the model’s capability to comprehend diverse relation types in the biomedical domain but also implements a structured four-level progressive learning process through semantic relation augmentation, compositional instruction and dual-axis level learning. Our experiments on the DDI and BC5CDR document-level biomedical relation triplet datasets demonstrate a significant performance improvement of 5% to 20% over the current state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, our model exhibits exceptional generalization capabilities on the unseen Chemprot and GDA datasets, further validating the effectiveness of optimizing data-task association and relation granularity for enhancing model generalizability.

Cyberbullying issues on a transgender Instagram account

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Fairclough was employed to analyze discourse regarding cyberbullying on Millen Cyrus's Instagram account, which has claimed herself as transgender. Most of the comments show negative responses. Some linguistic features are analyzed, such as 'bro,' 'laki,' 'tulen,' 'banci,' and many more, which refer to cyberbullying. With the sophisticated features of Instagram, it is no wonder that news could get about quickly. In the context of the situation, Millen could not avoid any attention from the media and the public as she is a part of Ashanty's family, an Indonesian singer and socialite. At the instructional level, it is easy to get more exposure from others since her account has been verified by Instagram, including Millen's followers and non-followers, as people quickly found her posts on the explore feature. The act of some people who put comments on a transgender account, like what they have done to Millen Cyrus, has also evidenced that their discourse is influenced by the existence of their culture, religion, family background, and so on.

Real-time fMRI neurofeedback of the anterior insula using arterial spin labelling.

Arterial spin labelling (ASL) is the only non-invasive technique that allows absolute quantification of perfusion and is increasingly used in brain activation studies. Contrary to the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) effect ASL measures the cerebral blood flow (CBF) directly. However, the ASL signal has a lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), than the BOLD signal, which constrains its utilization in neurofeedback studies. If successful, ASL neurofeedback can be used to aid in the rehabilitation of health conditions with impaired blood flow, for example, stroke. We provide the first ASL-based neurofeedback study incorporating a double-blind, sham-controlled design. A pseudo-continuous ASL (pCASL) approach with background suppression and 3D GRASE readout was combined with a real-time post-processing pipeline. The real-time pipeline allows to monitor the ASL signal and provides real-time feedback on the neural activity to the subject. In total 41 healthy adults (19-56 years) divided into three groups underwent a neurofeedback-based emotion imagery training of the left anterior insula. Two groups differing only in the explicitness level of instruction received real training and a third group received sham feedback. Only those participants receiving real feedback with explicit instruction showed significantly higher absolute CBF values in the trained region during neurofeedback than participants receiving sham feedback. However, responder analyses of percent signal change values show no differences in activation between the three groups. Persisting limitations, such as the lower SNR, confounding effects of arterial transit time and partial volume effects still impact negatively the implementation of ASL neurofeedback.

Aligning extracurricular school activities with physical literacy: pilot evaluation through self-study of practice.

Although several important documents of education and health promotion on the international level favor practices geared toward physical literacy (PL), not all countries have yet gained experience with this holistic concept. Therefore, numerous stakeholders and practitioners who intend to align their interventional activities with PL will soon face the situation that there are no recommendations for their specific culture and language for how to design such programs. Given that such recommendations are also lacking for Germany, the goal of the present study within the uncontrolled pilot cycles of the PLACE study was (a) to describe the process of a female pedagogue (27 years old, previously unexperienced with PL) initially familiarizing herself with the PL concept and its implementation opportunities for the school setting, and (b) to retrace the process of developing and refining a PL-driven intervention for extracurricular physical education (60-90 min) of children in grades three and four at primary schools in Bremen. Adopting a self-study design, this endeavor emphasized continuous reflexivity involving: (a) session protocols; (b) biweekly discussions with another coach; (c) weekly discussions between scientists and stakeholders of youth development ("multi-perspective panel"); (d) weekly observations and impressions during field work; and (e) summative group interviews with children (n = 17, age range: 8-9 years, 17.6% boys). Written documents underwent qualitative content analysis with inductively generated categories. Despite explicit links between the theoretical PL domains and the intervention content, the character of how PL informed the intervention level was dominated by the stance and atmosphere implemented by the deliverer (e.g., participatory attitude, open mindset). Accordingly, the team revised the intervention primarily on the levels of organization (temporal schedule and sequences), instruction, and materials. After initial stages of didactically "surviving" within classes, the deliverer could increasingly integrate tasks of cognitive engagement and provide choice for students enabling individual autonomy for nurturing a person-centered approach. This study encourages teachers and stakeholders of physical education to seek exchange with scholars or other practitioners while simultaneously demonstrating patience in comprehensively internalizing PL and efficiently translating the concept into routines in line with individual's quality standards.

The long‐run educational benefits of high‐achieving classrooms

AbstractThis paper examines how placement in high‐achieving classrooms within high school impacts students’ short‐ and longer‐term academic outcomes. Our setting is a large and selective Chinese high school, where first‐year students are separated into high‐achieving and regular classrooms based on their performance on a standardized exam. Classrooms differ in terms of peer ability, teacher quality, and class size, as well as level and pace of instruction. Using newly collected administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we show that high‐achieving classrooms improve math test scores by 23% of a standard deviation, with effects persisting throughout the 3 years of high school. Impacts on performance in Chinese and English language subjects are more muted. Importantly, we find that high‐achieving classrooms raise enrollment in elite universities by 17 percentage points, as they substantially increase scores on the national college entrance exam—the sole determinant of university admission in China. We provide suggestive evidence that the most likely mechanism driving our results is exposure to higher‐quality teachers.

Evaluation Method of Intelligent Teaching in Physical Training Classrooms Based on Multimedia Information Retrieval Technology

In different historical periods, people have different demands for Physical Education (PE), and the educational goal of school PE will also change, and the teaching mode and requirements of school PE will also be different. Multimedia information retrieval (IR) technology refers to searching in a large-scale multimedia database according to the content and context of media and media objects. In this paper, the Back Propagation instructional level of physical training class, and model is established. The BPNN is used to analyze the Multimedia IR data, and the simulation and experiment show the effectiveness of the assessment model, which provides a new method for comprehensively, fairly and scientifically evaluating the teaching work. This method is improved by 11.85% compared with the comparative assessment algorithms. The method of using BPNN to evaluate instructional level is easy to operate, which can overcome the shortcomings of traditional assessment methods, and avoid the complicated process of traditional assessment of instructional level.

Patient education in the digital age: An analysis of quality and readability of online information on rhinoplasty.

This study aimed to investigate quality and readability of online rhinoplasty information provided on Turkish websites. We searched for the terms "rhinoplasty" (rinoplasti) and "nose job" (burun estetiği) in Turkish using the Google search engine in May 2023. The first 30 sites for each term were included in the evaluation. We used the DISCERN tool to evaluate quality and the Atesman and Cetinkaya-Uzun formulas to assess readability. According to the Atesman formula, the readability scores of all the websites were moderately difficult. According to the Cetinkaya-Uzun formula, the readability scores of websites were at the instructional reading level. The mean total DISCERN score was 2.33 ± 0.60, indicating poor quality. No statistically significant correlations were found between the Atesman or Cetinkaya-Uzun readability scores and the DISCERN scores across all websites (P > .05). Our analysis revealed key areas in which Turkish websites can improve the quality and readability of rhinoplasty information to support decision-making.

Understanding graphic representations of interaction at universities: selection, interpretation and graphic format / Comprensión de la representación gráfica de la interacción en universitarios: selección, interpretación y formato gráfico

The study examined psychology students’ understanding of interaction graphs. The sample was divided into two groups based on the students’ level of instruction. In an interview, each student solved an interaction problem with graphic representations taken from their textbooks. There were two different types of task: a selection task and an interpretation task. The understanding and assessment of the adequacy of the graphic format were analysed categorically, and the differences between groups were studied. The data generally showed a low level of understanding of interaction graphs, although there were differences that revealed better results in the group with more instruction. Likewise, students generally preferred bar graphs over line graphs to represent interaction. However, students who clearly perceived the interaction chose line graphs to represent it. These data point to the need for statistical instruction based not only on the construction of graphs but also on their interpretation aimed at detecting conceptual relationships.

A mixed-meta method on the efficacy and impact of constructivist applications on permanent learning

ABSTRACT The present study aimed to investigate the research on permanence and efficacy of constructivist applications with the mixed-meta method. Mixed-meta method involves the investigation of research based on two dimensions to collect comprehensive quantitative (meta-analysis) and qualitative (meta-thematic analysis) data with a literature review. Quantitative studies were scanned based on certain criteria in certain databases and analyzed with the CMA 2.0 software. Moderator analyzes that included the course field, instruction level, application duration, and sample size variables in the studies that investigated the impact of constructivist approach on permanence were also conducted. The analyses revealed that the effect size of the studies and the relevant moderators on permanence was high. Qualitative studies were analyzed with the Maxqda 22 software in meta-thematic analysis. The findings revealed that constructivist approach themes included “contribution to personal development”, “technological contribution of the approach to learning”, “problems experienced during the applications” and “solution suggestions”. Thus, the qualitative findings demonstrated that the constructivist approach had a positive effect on permanence. The findings also demonstrated that the constructivist approach generally had a positive effect on various instructional levels, course fields, application durations and samples, and a good impact on permanence.

Assessing Autistic Traits, Hikikomori Tendencies, Pathological Videogaming, and Eating Disorders in University Students: Are Pathological Videogaming and Eating Disorders Gender-Specific Manifestations of the Autism Spectrum?

In the previous literature, specific attention has been paid to investigate autism spectrum symptoms and traits in university students. In this framework, we aimed to evaluate the presence and correlates of autistic traits, hikikomori tendencies, altered eating behaviors, and pathological videogaming in a sample of Italian university students enrolled in bachelor's degree courses. A total of 1192 students were recruited via an online survey and assessed with the Hikikomori Questionnaire-25, the Adult Autism Subthreshold Spectrum Questionnaire, the Eating Attitude test-26, and the Assessment of Internet and Computer Game Addiction. Our results highlighted significant differences in the prevalence of autistic traits, social withdrawal tendencies, altered eating habits, and pathological videogame use in university students based on gender, age, parents' level of instruction, and field of study. A significant effect of the presence of autistic traits and gender on the scores obtained with the other questionnaires was reported. Our results not only support the role of autistic traits as a vulnerability factor for the development of a set of psychopathological conditions but also suggest that gender could modulate this vulnerability, supporting the hypothesis of gender-specific phenotypes in the autism spectrum.

The role of age, grade level, and subject area in determining the inclusion of digital citizenship elements in elementary school curricula: Perspectives of teachers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

This study examined teachers' inclusion of digital citizenship elements in elementary school curricula. Employing a quantitative research design, the study utilized a survey questionnaire as the primary data collection instrument. A quantitative approach was employed in this study because it could efficiently measure the extent and variance of digital citizenship inclusion across diverse teacher demographics, enabling statistically significant comparisons and actionable insights for curriculum development. The sample consisted of 300 elementary school teachers at an educational institution in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire assessed the degree to which participants incorporated digital citizenship elements, including respect for self and others, self-education and communication with others, and protecting oneself and others, in curricula. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and one-way ANOVA tests. The findings revealed significant differences in teachers’ inclusion of digital citizenship elements based on age, grade level of instruction, and taught subject matter. The study highlights the importance of tailoring digital citizenship education to meet the diverse needs of teachers. These findings contribute to the development of targeted professional development programs and curriculum frameworks that foster responsible and ethical digital participation. The study also holds pedagogical significance by emphasizing the need to account for variations in digital citizenship inclusion across teacher demographics.

A Study about Identifying the Factors Related to Mainstream Teachers’ Attitudes toward Inclusive Education

The study used a descriptive methodology to investigate teachers' perspectives on inclusive education practices in urban schools, with teacher attitudes serving as the dependent variable and taking into account factors such as disability types, the role of co-teaching, administrative support, and in-service training for inclusive educational success. The survey included 122 District East high school mainstream teachers from the Karachi Division. Participation was completely voluntary and considered a convenience sample. Females responded at a greater rate (69%), and the majority of participants were above the age of 45 with Master's degrees. The study reveals an evenly divided instruction level between three teaching levels, with seminar/workshop attendance ranking was comparatively high. However, only few of them had no special needs courses. The study found that mainstream teachers' attitudes toward the inclusion of children with special needs are typically positive, but they may be improved, consistent with earlier studies. In conclusion, the study reveals that teachers have modest views on inclusive education with significant challenges in all five sub-domains. Despite this, most teachers believe children with special needs can be effectively taught in regular classrooms.