Personal Tutor Research Articles

Negative impact from school closures on children and parents in Vietnam during COVID-19

Negative impact from school closures on children and parents in Vietnam during COVID-19

What medical students think about measurement of their well-being: cross-sectional survey and qualitative interviews

ObjectivesTo find out how medical students think well-being should be measured.DesignA mixed-methods study comprising a cross-sectional online survey (November 2020–March 2021) and semi-structured online interviews. Views on the frequency of...

Improving older adults’ accessibility to the web using real-time online interactive guides

Internet use by older adults is increasing and has the potential to improve their mental and social wellbeing, however it is still low compared to other age groups for various online activities. The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate a computerized expert system, GoldNet, which functions as a human expert and guides the user, step-by-step and in real time, when performing online operations. A user study was conducted on 30 older adults (over 65 years old) that attend an adult daycare center. The participants were all novice users with no prior experience using the Internet. A stratified randomized between participants experimental design was used to evaluate users' performance and satisfaction before and after receiving guidance, after practice, and after a two-week period without controlled practice. Participants were assigned to one of three study groups according to the guidance they received: GoldNet guides, video guidance, or guidance from a personal human tutor. During the experiment participants’ eye movements were monitored. The results indicate that by using GoldNet's automated guides, older adults can perform online tasks with high effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction, performing comparably to users trained by a personal human tutor and significantly better than users relying on video guidance. GoldNet was also found beneficial as a refresher tool after a period without controlled training.

Teaching Staff and Student Perceptions of Staff Support for Student Mental Health: A University Case Study

Background: There are significant concerns for student mental health in higher education. New factors affect student mental health, and campus counselling services are overwhelmed. Struggling students turn to ideally placed familiar teaching staff for support. This qualitative study, conducted in an East of England university, aimed to explore student and staff perceptions of support offered by teaching staff to students grappling with their mental health. It is unique, combining both staff and student perceptions, many of which overlapped. Methods: A thematic analysis was conducted of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a small number of self-selecting staff/students. Findings (results): Staff felt inadequate in several aspects, and students agreed to give useful suggestions for their preferred support. Conclusions: It was cautiously established that staff training in mental health literacy (knowledge, skills, attributes, and understanding) was required. Specific training was recommended in pastoral care for personal tutors and for staff pedagogy on health professional programmes. Finally, teaching staff needed support when supporting students with poor mental health. Such training and support can be integrated into a preventative, university-wide, holistic policy for student mental health commensurate with the University Mental Health Charter. Embedding such supportive practice into the curriculum is preferable to add-on services and/or interventions.

Yoga Pose Estimation and Feedback Generation Using Deep Learning.

Yoga is a 5000-year-old practice developed in ancient India by the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. The word yoga means deep association and union of mind with the body. It is used to keep both mind and body in equilibration in all flip-flops of life by means of asana, meditation, and several other techniques. Nowadays, yoga has gained worldwide attention due to increased stress levels in the modern lifestyle, and there are numerous methods or resources for learning yoga. Yoga can be practiced in yoga centers, through personal tutors, and can also be learned on one's own with the help of the Internet, books, recorded clips, etc. In fast-paced lifestyles, many people prefer self-learning because the abovementioned resources might not be available all the time. But in self-learning, one may not find an incorrect pose. Incorrect posture can be harmful to one's health, resulting in acute pain and long-term chronic concerns. In this paper, deep learning-based techniques are developed to detect incorrect yoga posture. With this method, the users can select the desired pose for practice and can upload recorded videos of their yoga practice pose. The user pose is sent to train models that output the abnormal angles detected between the actual pose and the user pose. With these outputs, the system advises the user to improve the pose by specifying where the yoga pose is going wrong. The proposed method was compared to several state-of-the-art methods, and it achieved outstanding accuracy of 0.9958 while requiring less computational complexity.

Knowledge interaction enhanced sequential modeling for interpretable learner knowledge diagnosis in intelligent tutoring systems

One of the fundamental tasks when providing personalized tutoring services to learners in online learning systems, such as intelligent tutoring systems and massive open online courses, is the learner knowledge diagnosis (LKD). LKD obtains the learner knowledge proficiency on skills by modeling their learning performance. Learners’ knowledge construction process is not static, but evolves overtime; hence, the evolution of learners’ knowledge proficiency must be dynamically traced. Moreover, considering the wide usage of online learning systems by large numbers of learners, the LKD task also needs to meet the requirements of large-scale assessment and interpretability to explain the diagnosed results. The existing models are either designed for static scenarios or find it difficult to explain the causality between learner performance and knowledge proficiency, as well as the item characteristics. To solve these issues, we propose herein a novel model, called the knowledge interaction-enhanced dynamic LKD (KIEDLKD), to develop learner performance, and hence, dynamically diagnose and trace the evolution of each learner’s knowledge proficiency during the exercising activities. We first propose a dynamic LKD framework by unifying the strength of the memory capacity of the key-value memory network to enhance the representation of the knowledge state during learner performance modeling and the interpretability of the Item Response Theory (IRT) to explain the learner performance in terms of knowledge proficiency and item characteristics (i.e., item difficulty and discrimination). In this framework, we diagnose and trace each learner’s knowledge proficiency on each knowledge concept (KC) over time and store them into an auxiliary memory using the key-value memory network. We further infer their general proficiencies and the IRT-based item characteristics using another neural network. Moreover, we propose the knowledge interaction concept among KCs and incorporate it into the LKD procedure to further exploit the long-term dependencies in the exercising sequences, thereby devising the KIEDLKD model. We also incorporate the learner-oriented cognitive item difficulty into our model, based on each learner’s exercising history, to adaptively model the item difficulty. Based on these factors, our KIEDLKD model can not only output the learners’ knowledge proficiency in a multi-granularity manner but also output the item characteristics, making it possible to interpret the learner performances in terms of their current knowledge states and item characteristics. Extensive experiments are conducted from six perspectives on five real-world datasets to test our model.The results of learner performance prediction demonstrate the superiority of our model on the LKD task. It can also automatically discover the underlying interaction between each pair of latent KCs, and the underlying concepts for each exercise. The ablation study verifies the contributions of each component in our model. Moreover, it can depict the evolution of learner knowledge proficiency in a multi-granularity manner and provide additional information for skill domain analysis, which enables the interpretability of our model.

Personal Tutoring Scheme: Expectations, Perceptions and Factors Affecting Students’ Engagement

An effective Personal Tutoring Scheme (PTS) is a crucial part of the strategy to support students’ progression and success rates in Higher Education institutions. This study investigated students’ expectations and perceptions of the PTS in a post-1992 university in the UK. Data collection was achieved through a survey completed by 1,078 students from all Faculties and was used to assess trends and factors affecting students’ expectations and perceptions of the PTS. Results indicated that there is a gap between students’ expectations and perceptions, but that in comparison to previous literature this gap seems to be reducing. Unsurprisingly, frequency and regularity of meetings are linked with the development of a relationship with the Personal Tutor (PT) and a higher level of satisfaction. Higher Education institutions still have further work to do to close the gap between students’ expectations and perceptions; however, the results of this study indicate that this work is currently being undertaken.

Making the invisible visible: Value and reward for personal tutors

Academic advising is a core part of the teaching and learning experience in higher education, but it receives little recognition in workload allocations or institutional prestige. We argue that it is high time that personal tutoring and academic advising be valued and esteemed as much as other core parts of the modern academy.

Help-seeking behaviours for mental health in higher education

ABSTRACT Researchers have studied help-seeking behaviours regarding students’ mental health, highlighting their reluctance when in higher education. This study aimed to identify the facilitators and barriers to formal and informal sources of help-seeking for mental health difficulties in students based in the UK. Data from 304 participants (82% females) was explored using quantitative self-report methods. The results indicated that help-seeking behaviours were related with living arrangements, sexuality and age: Commuter students were more likely to seek help from their personal tutor compared to those living on campus. Students who identified as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, Questioning and Transitioning (LGBTQQ) were more likely to engage with off-campus services than non-LGBTQQ students and young people were more likely to seek informal support from family and friends compared to older students. In contrast, the findings show that student help-seeking behaviours were related with a sense of belonging and ethnicity: As students sense of belonging to their university increased, so did their help-seeking behaviour. Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic (BAME) students were more likely to engage with professional services from personal tutors and mental health services in comparison to White students, who were more likely to seek help from their peers. Findings highlighted the importance of creating effective programmes that encourage students to discuss mental health and improve help-seeking behaviours.

Career intentions, their influences and motivational factors in diagnostic radiography: A survey of undergraduate students

IntroductionThe choice of career and speciality can be a complex process. It is unclear what influences career decisions within undergraduate radiographers and whether the curriculum provides sufficient support. MethodsAn online cross-sectional survey was undertaken. All undergraduate diagnostic radiography students within one UK higher education institution were invited to participate. Questions were related to anticipated career choice, motivational factors and influences. ResultsThe response rate was 67.6% (90/133). The most popular specialist area for career preference was general radiography. The top three motivational factors were work life balance, career development and job satisfaction. The most influential factors on career choice were clinical placements, radiographers on placements and formal teaching. Career guidance was predominantly sourced from the personal academic tutor and was informed by role models. ConclusionRadiography academic teams and clinical placement providers must work together to ensure that students have access to high quality placements across specialities. The experiences received during undergraduate training are important in specialty choice. Implications for practiceCareer guidance is essential and should begin as early as possible. Clinical and academic radiographers need to appreciate the influence they have on students future career plans.

‘I'll play the game, but I cannot stay’ : The role of third space professionals in encouraging the retention, success and sense of belonging of undergraduate students

In 2019, a diverse, post-92, Midlands university implemented a new, hybrid third space role called the ‘academic coach’ (AC) to support its mission towards to support its mission to make its educational provision fully accessible to all its students, to retain them and to ensure their success to support its mission to make its educational provision fully accessible to all its students, to retain them and to ensure their success of all its students. Since a sense of belonging to their institution is such a powerful influence on students’ sense of wellbeing, their development of an academic identity and their resilience in the higher education context, with consequent positive impact upon their retention and success, this role is devoted to the pastoral care and personal tutoring of levels three and four students. This case study considers the journey of the AC in defining and shaping this new role and offers the ACs’ perceptions of their influence on the experience of students at levels three and four by enhancing collaborative and learning relationships within the wider university.

Heat and Flow in times of Corona

This paper describes the set-up of the course Heat and Flow in the second year of the bachelor program in Mechanical Engineering of Eindhoven University of Technology. Before the corona pandemic and its associated lockdown, several measures have been taken to increase the success rate of this course, which used to be very low. In particular next to the normal course elements of lectures, instruction and exercise sessions, a complete online version of the course has been developed. In this way students with different learning styles are served. In order to stimulate students to spend sufficient time on the course well before the exam, a system of compulsory progress tests has been developed. A good result for each test is a requirement to pass the exam of the course. The number of attempts for each test is unlimited within a certain time frame. The combination of both developments significantly improved the success rate of the course. During the corona pandemic, the same system was maintained by offering all elements of the course in a synchronous way, but online. The written exam was replaced by an online proctored exam. Students were satisfied by this way of teaching, but the participation in the exercise sessions was very low. This can be improved by organizing them in small groups, each with a personal tutor.

How to Make it in Cairo: The Early Career of Burhān al-Dīn al-Biqāʿī

How it all went wrong for Burhān al-Dīn al-Biqāʿī (809–85/1406–80), a fifteenth-century Quran exegete and historian active in Cairo, has been well covered. Modern scholarship has discussed the downward trajectory of his later career from 868/1464, in which his embroilment in two controversies—respectively on the use of the Bible in tafsīr and the poetry of Ibn al-Fāriḍ—so eroded his position in Cairene society that he was forced to flee to Damascus in 880/1475. A third controversy—on the theodicy of al-Ghazālī—incensed the Damascene populace, and he died destitute in 885/1480. While charting his declining fortunes reveals much about the religio-intellectual environment in which he operated, these three episodes all date from after al-Biqāʿī had succeeded in securing himself a position in Cairo as the resident Quran exegete at the Ẓāhirīyah Mosque, and also as first the personal tutor of Sultan Jaqmaq and then as a confidant of Sultan Īnāl. The issue, however, of how it all went right for al-Biqāʿī is relatively overlooked. This article is aimed at two complementary purposes. First, it will provide an overview of how al-Biqāʿī sought to increase the social and cultural capital resources at his disposal to build and expand the social network that underpinned his career in Cairo and that subsequently crumbled under the weight of the later controversies. In doing so, it will outline in more detail al-Biqāʿī’s origins, before moving to discuss the key relationships—particularly his patron-client relationships—he established and how these facilitated his making his way in Cairo. Having done so, it will turn to its second purpose: namely, it will argue that the descriptive reconstruction of al-Biqāʿī’s life and career should be read against the interpretative frameworks employed by the authors of our sources, and that doing so leads to a deeper understanding of not only al-Biqāʿī himself, but of the social contexts in which he operated.

Contradictory Perspectives on Academic Support: Beyond Linear Logic

This paper employs a Square of Opposition as an interpretivist heuristic device in order to interrogate perceptions of academic support. The Square of Opposition is used to move beyond binary explanations of academic development subsumed within learner-/discipline-focussed practices or institutionally /epistemologically constrained systems; an exemplar data set is used to achieve this. The results of this analysis demonstrate that positions that might normally be understood as opposed in fact share common features, at least where some key concepts are concerned. In particular, two “contradictories” are explored: the first of these critiques the differences and similarities between contested meaning-making and knowledge dissemination and the second analyses the disjuncture between skills-focussed instruction and academic literacy as a social practice. This form of analysis offers new insights that directly speak to the ways in which we conceive of, and enact, teaching, personal tutoring and academic advising.

'Excuse the cat…' Reflections on online mentoring during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the pandemic, first year students in particular have seemed even more lonely, sad and stressed than usual without a network of friends and social activities to support them (1). These concerns are often expressed during online personal tutoring, individual supervision and one-to-one meetings. There do, however, appear to be some unanticipated positives to mentoring students online. Meetings are easy to arrange, and travel and room bookings are unnecessary, allowing faculty to meet with students more frequently to respond more quickly to a worried student's email requesting a meeting (2).

Hemchandra Kanji Mehta

Hemchandra Kanji Mehta (“Hemant”) was born in Gujarat, India, where his father was the personal tutor to the prince, but when the need at the palace changed and India’s great...

Chinese students and personal tutorials in a British overseas campus: The strategic choices of emerging adults

Personal tutorials are an essential feature of student support in British universities, and therefore they are duplicated on British overseas campuses. It appears that Chinese students are reluctant to seek help when they experience personal difficulties that affect their engagement with learning and their academic performance. Limited literature explores this phenomenon with relevant studies only focusing on Chinese students’ experiences abroad. Furthermore, these studies mainly refer to cultural factors related to traditional Confucianism to explain why these students do not engage with support structures. Drawing on the theory of Emerging Adulthood, this paper analyses the experiences of students on a Chinese branch campus of a British university. A mixed methods research approach was considered the most appropriate means of engaging with the participants; a quantitative study was used in an exploratory fashion to provide unbiased insight into student opinion and experience, and a qualitative content analysis was used to analyse participants’ comments in the open field questions. The findings reveal an alternative portrayal of the “Chinese Personal Tutee”, distant from the traditional Confucian model still predominantly used as an analytical tool in research on Chinese youth. Chinese students on an international campus strategically select their sources of help and prefer to build symmetrical relationships with personal tutors based on personal goals rather than asymmetrical relationships based on ‘care’ provided by adults. Consequently, ‘transnational’ personal tutorial systems pursuing Chinese students’ successful engagement ought to be conceptualized by considering their emerging adulthoods and by respecting their sense of agency.

Does Inequality Stay in the Shadow? The Cross-national Effects of Educational Equity on Private Tutoring and Student Achievement

By using multiple regression and hierarchical linear modeling, this study investigates shadow education across and within national educational systems in order to estimate the effect of educational equity on the relationship between private tutoring and student achievement. Data are from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 and supplemented by World Bank data. Results indicate students’ participation in three types of private tutoring (commercial company, personal, and family tutoring) are negatively related to student achievement in the cross-national sample. Evidence suggests, however, that private tutoring may differently associate with student achievement depending on student- and nation-level educational equity factors and contexts. Finally, the validity of private tutoring as a measure of shadow education is deconstructed given these results.

Developing a Task-Based Dialogue System for English Language Learning

This research involved the design of a task-based dialogue system and evaluation of its learning effectiveness. Dialogue training still heavily depends on human communication with instant feedback or correction. However, it is not possible to provide a personal tutor for every English learner. With the rapid development of information technology, digitized learning and voice communication is a possible solution. The goal of this research was to develop an innovative model to refine the task-based dialogue system, including natural language understanding, disassembly intention, and dialogue state tracking. To enable the dialogue system to find the corresponding sentence accurately, the dialogue system was designed with machine learning algorithms to allow users to communicate in a task-based fashion. Past research has pointed out that computer-assisted instruction has achieved remarkable results in language reading, writing, and listening. Therefore, the direction of the discussion is to use the task-oriented dialogue system as a speaking teaching assistant. To train the speaking ability, the proposed system provides a simulation environment with goal-oriented characteristics, allowing learners to continuously improve their language fluency in terms of speaking ability by simulating conversational situational exercises. To evaluate the possibility of replacing the traditional English speaking practice with the proposed system, a small English speaking class experiment was carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed system. Data of 28 students with three assigned tasks were collected and analyzed. The promising results of the collected students’ feedback confirm the positive perceptions toward the system regarding user interface, learning style, and the system’s effectiveness.

Are the kids alright? Exploring students’ experiences of support mechanisms to enhance wellbeing on an engineering programme in the UK

ABSTRACT In this paper, we aim to explore students’ experiences of support mechanisms that support their wellbeing on an engineering degree programme at a research-intensive higher education institution and understand how theory relates to practice. This study was conducted using a mixed-methods approach involving student survey responses (N = 173), interviews with 16 students and focus groups. Kahu and Nelson’s conceptual framework was used as a lens through which to explore student support mechanisms. Preliminary data analysis indicates that the intense workload adversely affects students as do some of the interactions they have with personal tutors and their peers. Our findings suggest that workload needs to be reduced, personal tutors need to fill gaps in their skills set, especially associated with student support, and institutional and departmental protocols be continually updated to support student wellbeing. Additionally, student wellbeing officers and professional, dedicated wellbeing advisors could be part of a long-term solution.