Multiple Classrooms Research Articles

Analyzing the impact of classroom design factors on acoustic comfort in higher education hybrid learning environments

The vitality of hybrid learning classrooms has escalated due to enabling factors including advancements in technology, the demand for flexible education, and responses to global crises. However, the inadequate preparation for implementing hybrid classrooms raises concerns about students' ability to understand speech due to a lack of attention to the importance of acoustic quality. As a result, this study aims to investigate the impact of classroom design factors, such as ceiling height, occupancy, and spatial layout configuration, on hybrid classroom acoustic performance. The field measurement data acquired from multiple classrooms was utilized for analysis. The impact of design factors on acoustic parameters, which comprise reverberation time (RT), speech transmission index (STI), and speech clarity (C50), was analyzed through simulation using ODEON room acoustic software. The simulation was conducted based on two distinctive categorizations, which were determined by the size of the classrooms. The outcomes revealed that the design factors consisting of ceiling height, occupancy level, and spatial layout arrangements influenced the acoustic performance at various microphones' locations in hybrid learning classrooms. Although the analysis effectively upholds students' learning experience and performance, it is valuable for designers and educational institutions to establish adequate acoustic qualities for hybrid learning environments.

Fog computing in classrooms: boosting efficiency, responsiveness, user experience

In the context of rapidly advancing smart education systems, the effective management and optimization of modern classroom remain critical challenges. This research presents a novel methodology leveraging cloud and fog computing-based simulations, with a specific focus on the implementation of iFogSim. Empirical findings validate the efficacy of fog computing in monitoring classrooms, demonstrating significant improvements in performance metrics compared to traditional cloud computing architectures. Specifically, fog computing ensures remarkably low latency, with a mere 7 milliseconds, even with scalable integration across multiple classrooms. In contrast, cloud computing infrastructures exhibit considerably higher initial latencies, starting at 210 milliseconds, which further escalate with the increasing number of monitored classrooms. Furthermore, our analysis reveals substantially lower network overhead associated with fog computing, measuring at 5,231.8 kilobytes, in sharp contrast to the significantly higher network usage of 80,808 kilobytes observed with cloud computing solutions. These findings underscore the potential of fog computing as a promising solution for efficient and real-time management classroom in smart education environments.

Training to increase student perceptions of fairness in peer assessment

Peer assessment training was motivated, developed and evaluated to address fairness in higher education group learning. Team-centric pedagogies, such as team-based learning have been shown to improve engagement and learning outcomes. For many instructors using teams, peer assessments are integral for monitoring team performance and ensuring accountability. However, students often view the peer assessment process as unfair due to the potential for biased ratings or perceived lack of peer qualification. Peer assessment fairness training was developed by combining lessons learned from focus groups with instructors, students and learning experts with bias-reducing techniques found to be effective in other settings. The resulting training underwent a summative evaluation across multiple classrooms. Results indicated that students had higher perceptions of fairness in their peer assessments after training. Students were also more confident in their and their peers’ fair rating skills. These results indicate that classroom training could be used to increase peer assessment fairness. Fairer peer assessment provides enhanced access to active and team learning benefits to a broader range of students, potentially impacting the retention of a more diverse population of practitioners in the field.

Child-adult speech diarization in naturalistic conditions of preschool classrooms using room-independent ResNet model and automatic speech recognition-based re-segmentation.

Speech and language development are early indicators of overall analytical and learning ability in children. The preschool classroom is a rich language environment for monitoring and ensuring growth in young children by measuring their vocal interactions with teachers and classmates. Early childhood researchers are naturally interested in analyzing naturalistic vs controlled lab recordings to measure both quality and quantity of such interactions. Unfortunately, present-day speech technologies are not capable of addressing the wide dynamic scenario of early childhood classroom settings. Due to the diversity of acoustic events/conditions in such daylong audio streams, automated speaker diarization technology would need to be advanced to address this challenging domain for segmenting audio as well as information extraction. This study investigates alternate deep learning-based lightweight, knowledge-distilled, diarization solutions for segmenting classroom interactions of 3-5 years old children with teachers. In this context, the focus on speech-type diarization which classifies speech segments as being either from adults or children partitioned across multiple classrooms. Our lightest CNN model achieves a best F1-score of ∼76.0% on data from two classrooms, based on dev and test sets of each classroom. It is utilized with automatic speech recognition-based re-segmentation modules to perform child-adult diarization. Additionally, F1-scores are obtained for individual segments with corresponding speaker tags (e.g., adult vs child), which provide knowledge for educators on child engagement through naturalistic communications. The study demonstrates the prospects of addressing educational assessment needs through communication audio stream analysis, while maintaining both security and privacy of all children and adults. The resulting child communication metrics have been used for broad-based feedback for teachers with the help of visualizations.

Faculty development initiatives critical to navigate multicultural Business Schools

Due to the increasing complexity of higher educational institutions and the rising mobility of students from new nations and cultures entering higher education, business school environments and their faculty are experiencing greater challenges in providing an inclusive learning experience across multiple classrooms and instructional formats. Business schools need to rise to the occasion to develop their faculty to meet these new challenges, rather than the onus being on faculty alone. This paper reviews the literature and ends with recommendations for business school administrators and management to help foster a business school culture of diversity, inclusion, and acceptance for faculty, staff, and students.

End-to-end child-adult speech diarization in naturalistic conditions of preschool classrooms

Speech and language development are early indicators of overall analytical and learning ability in pre-school children. Early childhood researchers are interested in analyzing naturalistic versus controlled lab recordings to assess both quality and quantity of such communication interactions between children and adults/teachers. Unfortunately, present-day speech technologies are not capable of addressing the wide dynamic scenario of early childhood classroom settings. Due to diversity of acoustic events/conditionsin daylong audio streams, automated speaker diarization technology is limited and must be advanced to address this challenging domain for audio segmentation and meta-data information extraction. We investigate a Deep Learning-based diarization solution for segmenting classroom interactions of 3–5 year-old children engaging with teachers. Here, the focus is on speaker-label diarization which classifies speech segments as belonging to either Adults or Children, partitioned across multiple classrooms. Our proposed ECAPA-TDNN model achieves a best F1-score of 65.5% on data from two classrooms, based on open dev and test sets for each classroom. Also, F1-scores for individual speaker labels provide a breakdown of performance across naturalistic child classroom engagement. The study demonstrates the prospects of addressing educational assessment needs through communication audio stream analysis, while maintaining both security and privacy of all children and adults.

Digesting Digestion: An Educational Laboratory to Teach Students about Enzymes and the Gastrointestinal Tract.

Digestion is a fundamentally important process for an individual's life. However, the physical process of digestion is hidden inside the body, making it challenging to understand and a particularly difficult topic for students to learn in the classroom. Traditional approaches to teaching body processes include a mixture of textbook teaching and visual learning. However, digestion is not particularly visual. This activity is designed to engage students using a combination of visual, inquiry-based, and experiential learning approaches and introduces the scientific method to students in secondary school. The laboratory simulates digestion, creating a "stomach" inside of a clear vial. Students fill the vials with a protease solution and visually observe the digestion of food. By making predictions about the types of biomolecules that will be digested, students begin to learn and understand basic biochemistry in a relatable context, while simultaneously understanding anatomical and physiological concepts. We trialled this activity at two schools, where we received positive feedback from teachers and students, indicating that the practical enhanced student understanding of the digestion process. We see this lab as a valuable learning activity that can be extended broadly across multiple classrooms around the world.

“Miss, our clothes are clean:” contesting liminality in Lebanese kindergarten classrooms

Abstract Across the world, optimistic educational policy discourses promote early childhood education as a key strategy for combating poverty and for building bright futures for the most vulnerable members of society. Viewed from the ground up, this picture of early childhood education as a path to bright futures for all children is often belied by political and economic entrenchments. This article draws on a four-year ethnographic study of multiple classrooms in one Lebanese public kindergarten school that serves the most vulnerable children in Lebanon – Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian children who face daily the insecurities of poverty, displacement, and political violence. Drawing on anthropological theory that illustrates how social identities forged at the level of historical timescales are constructed and contested at the microlevel of everyday life, we pay particular attention to spatio-temporal liminal contexts within which children renounce productions of their own, their peers’, and their families’ marginality.

Comparisons of Synchronous and Asynchronous Discussions in an Online Roleplaying Simulation to Teach Middle School Written Argumentation Skills

In this study, different degrees of synchronous and asynchronous online social interactions are investigated in the context of an online educational roleplaying simulation game that is played across multiple classrooms simultaneously to teach argumentation skills and social studies. Results from 45 K–12 middle school social studies teachers and 867 students over 3 study conditions were compared based on the degree of real-time discussion that was embedded in each condition’s version of game (i.e., two scheduled live conferences, one scheduled live conference, and asynchronous-only interactions or zero live conferences). All conditions exhibited significant small to moderate-level pre-post effect sizes, including the condition featuring asynchronous-only discussions. Additionally, the “mid-range” 1 live conference condition exhibited the greatest pre-post effect size in comparison to the other two conditions. This study demonstrates evidence for the benefits of implementing asynchronous-only discussions in digital interventions in comparison to live discussions when synchronous interaction may not be feasible. For designers, implementing both asynchronous and synchronous interactions based on available resources and feasibility can be used to maximize social presence among participants in educational roleplaying games and other virtual learning environments.

The development and validation of the Mutation Criterion Referenced Assessment (MuCRA)

ABSTRACT Most biology undergraduates learn about mutations in multiple classrooms throughout their college career. Understanding personalised genome test results, genome editing controversies, and the appearance of new variants of viruses or antibiotic resistant bacteria all require foundational knowledge about mutations. However, the abstract nature of molecular processes surrounding mutations makes them one of the more difficult topics for students to understand and apply. Instructors need valid assessment tools to document student understanding and tailor their instructional methods to address student knowledge gaps. We describe here the development and validation of the Mutations Criterion Referenced Assessment (MuCRA). This formative assessment was developed through an iterative process involving expert feedback and student responses to both open-ended and multiple-choice questions. The final MuCRA is composed of 10 multiple-choice questions aligned with three learning objectives. The item difficulty for each question was between 0.32–0.65, while the discrimination index ranged from 0.31–0.75 and the reliability (KR20) for the MuCRA was 0.69. The congruence analyses demonstrated distractors are capturing student misconceptions in 9/10 questions. These data indicate that the MuCRA can be used to reliably assess student learning and common misconceptions about mutations.

Use of Socrative as a Teaching Tool in Anatomy during the Covid-19 Pandemic

On March 13th, 2020, in the middle of Semester 2, University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona announced the suspension of classes for one month due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Within days most of the first- and second-year medical students were back in their homes around the Caribbean. Resumption of online teaching was scheduled for April 14th, 2020. This lecturer had been using a free online student response system (SRS) called Socrative to set quizzes for his small Lab tutorial group since 2016 and decided to upgrade to Socrative Pro which had multiple classrooms to set teaching quizzes for first- and second-year medical students. At the end of the semester (2020.S2) a survey was done of 86 second-year medical students. The overwhelmingly positive response of these students to these quizzes led to improvements and continuation of these quizzes.

Studying Youth’ Group Identities, Intergroup Relations, and Friendship Networks: The Friendship and Identity in School Data

AbstractThis data brief introduces the Friendship and Identity in School (FIS) dataset. The FIS data are school-based longitudinal social network data, which have become increasingly important in recent years. Including information on 2,500 adolescents in nine secondary schools in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the FIS data have four important key features that make them uniquely suited for studying the co-evolution of friendship networks and group identities or other time-varying individual characteristics. Specifically, the data include (i) fine-grained multidimensional measures of youth’ ethnic, national, and religious identities, (ii) comparatively large social networks that span multiple classrooms, (iii) up to six waves over four and a half years, and (iv) an ethnoreligiously diverse sample. Besides friendship and identity, the data include other network dimensions such as romantic relations or dislike as well as repeated measurements of various individual attributes ranging from perceived discrimination over intergroup attitudes and religion to leisure time activities and students’ perceptions of parents’ identities and attitudes. In combination, the FIS data provide rich longitudinal information that allows researchers to study the development, change, and interplay of youth’ group identities and friendship networks as well as broader questions concerning intergroup relations, network formation, and peer influence.

Research on children’s classroom behavior based on pressure cushion

Online Distance teaching for multiple smart classrooms by famous teachers, as an effective solver for the problem of lack of excellent teachers, has become a new popular teaching mode. However, one of the key problems to be solved urgently for this teaching mode is how to monitor children’s class status and effectively feedback their listening standing to teachers. Installation of intelligent pressure cushion on the chair of smart classroom to monitor children’s classroom state can be a powerful way to improve teaching effectiveness for the online distance teaching mode. This paper presents a new method for monitoring children’s classroom behavior based on intelligent cushion, which can identify basic children’s classroom behavior by classifying the original intelligent cushion pressure signal and evaluating the effectiveness of the classifier. To be concrete, the present method uses intelligent pressure cushion to collect data and denoises the original data by digital filter, and then extracts the time-domain and frequency-domain features of time-series pressure signals based on sliding time window. Finally, it uses machine learning to identify children’s status. In addition, by feature selection to reduce the data dimension, integrating different classifier to classify the extracted features, the efficiency of the present method is greatly improved.

Multiple Classrooms of Life: English, Ideology and ‘Sparkle’ Moments

ABSTRACTThis essay comprises multiple sets of dialogues between us as colleagues and friends as we revisit the question of the status of English as a global language. Through the metaphor ‘multiple classrooms of life’, we share reflections and narratives arising out of our experiences with English that are embedded in our professional work, scholarship, pedagogy and creative interests. Our discussion encompasses a range of artefacts, including excerpts from our diaries, poems, vignettes, visuals, letters, songs and anecdotes. This amalgam of materials represents our personal engagement with English, as distinct from treating the spread of English simply as a metanarrative played out at a remove from personal experience. We reconstruct ‘sparkle moments’ arising from personal encounters and social interactions that have caused us to reflect on the role of English in our lives. We thus focus on ideology as personally felt and lived from within and through inter-personal interactions.

Breaking Out From Tradition: Redesign of Large Physiology Lecture Increases Engagement, Inclusion, and Student Outcomes

Mounting evidence suggests that traditional lecturing is less effective, less engaging, and less inclusive than active learning. However, transitioning to active learning, particularly in a large science course, presents unique administrative and pedagogical challenges. In this study, we present the results of our recent effort to redesign and restructure our large human anatomy and physiology course at the University of Connecticut.In place of a traditional lecture, we developed an active instructional model that subdivided hundreds of students into “break out” groups of no more than five students. Breakout groups met concurrently in multiple classrooms during the scheduled lecture time to work through modules in the renal and digestive systems with an undergraduate peer facilitator. Modules were designed with input from undergraduate facilitators, with attention to scientific teaching techniques (active learning, inclusive teaching, assessment). Students concept mapped the molecular basis of urine formation in nephrons and the regulation of acid secretion in the gastric pit; worked through an interrupted case study on ulcer formation and modified think‐pair‐share question sets on renal and gastric pharmacology; and practiced critical reflection on the clinical and socioeconomic factors influencing the incidence and treatment of disease.At the end of the semester, students registered in the redesigned course were compared to peers registered in another section, taught by the same instructors, that followed a traditional large lecture format. This assessment involved an analysis of student performance on paired exam questions of varied difficulty, a modified SALG (Student Assessment of Learning Gains), and solicited and unsolicited student feedback. Our results indicate that, on average, students in the redesigned course performed better on exam questions related to the renal and digestive systems. Furthermore, many of these questions were found to be less “discriminating”, indicating less disparity between higher performing and lower performing students. The vast majority (95%) of students gave positive feedback on the redesigned classes, and nearly 90% reported learning gains related to the major concepts from the digestive and renal system. Summarily, our study describes and evaluates a new instructional model for large, undergraduate anatomy and physiology courses that has been developed and implemented using undergraduate students. Most importantly, we offer preliminary evidence supporting the conclusion that this model is more inclusive, more effective, and better liked than traditional lecturing.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

Digital Story Mapping to Advance Educational Atlas Design and Enable Student Engagement

Storytelling is recognized as a valid and important method of communicating information and knowledge gleaned from volumes of ever-accumulating data. Practices of data-driven storytelling in journalism and geovisual analytics have contributed to the development of geovisual stories; also called story maps. The benefits of student-focused multi-thematic atlases and digital storytelling methods in education can also be realized in story maps. An online, interactive version of the original paper version of the Wyoming Student Atlas was developed using story mapping technology. Studies on best practices for data-driven storytelling and web map interaction were used to inform the transition of the atlas from a traditional paper format to a collection of story maps. Evaluation of the atlas story maps for educational purposes was conducted by observing students from multiple classrooms as they used the story maps in a lesson. The students and educators responded to a survey after using the story maps. Results of the survey show positive responses to the atlas story maps, including ease of use and preference over a traditional paper atlas. However, certain types of interaction with the map resulted in increased negative or uncertain responses from students concerning their perception of the atlas story maps.

Development of ICT System for Collaborating Multiple Classrooms

Development of ICT System for Collaborating Multiple Classrooms

Your Children Mite Not be Safe at School: An Outbreak of Biting Rat Mites at a Southern California Elementary School Campus

During May, 2017, the Orange County Mosquito and Vector Control District (OCMVCD) received anonymous calls from distressed school staff and parents of children attending an elementary school (Villa Park Elementary School, VPES) in Orange County, California, about an outbreak of pruritic dermatitis that was believed to be caused by biting arthropods. The incident received intense media coverage and led to a partial closure of the campus. With no identified culprit, OCMVCD interviewed VPES staff and surveyed the school property for vertebrate pests and their ectoparasites to determine the source of the outbreak. After thorough inspections of the exterior and interior of classrooms and a carefully-placed, glue-board trap survey, OCMVCD detected signs of significant roof rat activity (feces, rub marks, and harborage sites) throughout the campus and the presence of rat mites inside multiple classrooms. OCMVCD worked with other governmental agencies (Orange County Health Care’s Environmental Health, California Department of Pesticide Regulation’s School Integrated Pest Management Program, local city officials) and the VPES administration to educate parents about the vertebrate pests on the school grounds and the complexities of controlling the rat mite infestation during the school year. OCMVCD also identified deficiencies in the school’s pest control program and developed an integrated vector management plan to address the immediate and long-term health threats to prevent rodent and rat mite outbreaks in the future. This report details the investigation and methodology used to locate and eradicate the vertebrate and ectoparasite threats on the VPES campus and the challenges encountered during the process.

Characterizing elementary teachers’ enactment of high‐leverage practices through engineering design‐based science instruction

AbstractIn an effort to document teachers’ enactments of new reform in science teaching, valid and scalable measures of science teaching using engineering design are needed. This study describes the development and testing of an approach for documenting and characterizing elementary science teachers’ multiday enactments of engineering design‐based science teaching. Using the tenets of ambitious teaching, we explore how Grade 4 teachers utilized elements of high‐leverage practices in an effort to teach science using engineering design. Data included 33 hours of classroom observations, semistructured interviews, and teacher reflections. Using lesson event, classroom organization, and instructional codes analogous to the literature on the engineering design process, we generated and analyzed classroom event maps, noting trends across multiple and individual teacher classrooms. Results indicated percentages of time spent on different phases within the design process among multiple classrooms as well as consistency across individual cases that demonstrate teachers’ capacity to enact ambitious teaching practices through engineering design‐based science instruction. Implications suggest that our approach provides a useful method to not only document and characterize engineering design‐based science teaching practices but also reveals complexities of leveraging student thinking through ambitious engineering teaching practices.

Supporting teachers in taking up productive talk moves: The long road to professional learning at scale

In this paper we describe our early, qualitative work on “teacher talk moves” such as revoicing, situated within the urban classrooms of highly skilled teachers, including their role in the work of managing multiple constraints while maintaining productive inclusivity. We then describe our attempts to discern the impact of these talk tools on student achievement in multiple classrooms, using both post-hoc controls and in vivo studies. We move on to the challenges present in disseminating this work in professional development settings; our approach includes framing talk tools as rational responses to actual classroom challenges. Finally we describe current efforts to disseminate cyber-enabled PD in science education K-12, including a central focus on academically productive talk.