Video Episodes Research Articles

«Обними меня»: три эпохи русского жеста «объятие» (по данным корпуса МУРКО)

The article examines the formal characteristics of the Russian gesture of embrace (Russian: ob”yatie, объятие) as depicted in feature films. The study material consists of video episodes from Soviet and post-Soviet films of the 20th century, represented in the Multimodal Russian Corpus (MURCO) of the Russian National Corpus. The focus is on the duration of the gesture with the emphasis on its beginning and ending phases. The determination of gesture duration necessitates a scientific justification of its elementary structure, delineating crucial phases (preparation—stroke—retraction), and exploring its potential as a social tactile gesture. The research also aims to analyze the cinema aesthetics of three epochs exemplified by films from the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s. Different approaches to film montage, sociocultural and political contexts, meaning genesis in the film, as well as the perspectives of the director, actor, and viewer significantly influence what we see in feature films. Consequently, the question arises of whether a valid study of gestures can be conducted using film material, and it is resolved affirmatively. The results indicate that the realization of the gesture ob”yatie varies. The preparation phase is often a manual movement, while the retraction phase is characterized by the departure of one participant from the situation, ending physical contact at a certain point of the stroke. The proposed method of defining the beginning and ending of the gesture helped to reveal the shortest embrace in the 1936 film Circus (Russian: Цирк) and the longest gesture in the 1961 film My Friend, Kolka! (Russian: Друг мой, Колька!). On average, the duration of the embrace ranges from 6 to 13 seconds.

A Non-Contact and Fast Estimating Method for Respiration Rate of Cows Using Machine Vision

Detecting respiration rate (RR) is a promising and practical heat stress diagnostic method for cows, with significant potential benefits for dairy operations in monitoring thermal conditions and managing cooling treatments. Currently, the optical flow method is widely employed for automatic video-based RR estimation. However, the optical flow-based approach for RR estimation can be time-consuming and susceptible to interference from various unrelated cow movements, such as rising, lying down, and body shaking. The aim of this study was to propose a novel optical flow-based algorithm for remotely and rapidly detecting the respiration rate of cows in free stalls. To accomplish this, we initially collected 250 sixty-second video episodes from a commercial dairy farm, which included some episodes with interfering motions. We manually observed the respiration rate for each episode, considering it as the ground truth RR. The analysis revealed that certain cow movements, including posture changes and body shaking, introduced noise that compromises the precision of RR detection. To address this issue, we implemented noise filters, with the Butterworth filter proving highly effective in mitigating noise resulting from cow movements. The selection of the region of interest was found to have a substantial impact on the accuracy of RR detection. Opting for the central region was recommended for optimal results. The comparison between the RR estimated by the modified cow respiration rate (MCRR) algorithm and the ground truth RR showed a good agreement with a mean absolute relative error of 7.6 ± 8.9% and a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.86. Additionally, the results also indicated that reducing the original frame rate from 25 to 5 frames per second and adjusting the image pixel size from 630 × 450 to 79 × 57 pixels notably reduced computational time from 39.8 to 2.8 s, albeit with a slight increase in mean absolute relative error to 8.0 ± 9.0%.

Recognizing pawing behavior of prepartum doe using semantic segmentation and motion history image (MHI) features

When a doe is approaching delivery, it often exhibits some specific behaviors such as eating less, sleeping less and pawing (scraping the floor with the hoof). Automatic recognition of these behaviors is valuable for farmers to determine whether does are nearing parturition or not. However, it is difficult for humans to recognize the behavior of pawing because movements are subtle and the foreleg is small. In this paper, we proposed a method to recognize the pawing behavior of prepartum does based on semantic segmentation, motion history image (MHI), and multi-scale histogram of oriented gradient (MS-HOG) features. Firstly, the foreleg region of the doe is segmented using YOLO-v5 and Unet. Next, MHI features are extracted from consecutive frames to represent the motion information of foreleg. Since MHI is insufficient to describe the local textures and shape information of the foreleg movements, we extracted MS-HOG based on the MHI features. A support vector machine (SVM) classifier was trained on the extracted features to determine whether or not a given frame contains pawing behavior. Furthermore, a word frequency vector was employed to characterize the proportion of pawing frames in a video episode with a length of one second to facilitate the recognition of pawing behavior. The proposed method was validated using both shorter video episodes and long videos. For the video episodes, our method achieved a classification accuracy of 93.14% and an average error rate of 9.72% in estimating the duration of the behavior. For the long videos, our method achieved a recall of 87.6% and precision of 77.8% when considering a temporal Intersection over Union (tIoU≥0.5). In summary, this study can be further combined with other characteristic behaviors to predict the impending delivery time of the does.

Recognizing the rooting action of prepartum sow in free-farrowing pen using computer vision

The behavior of prepartum sows in natural or semi-natural environments is primarily characterized by their motivation for nest-building. This behavior includes actions such as rooting, pawing, and foraging. Automatic recognition of these specific actions can be beneficial for identifying this nesting behavior and assessing a sow’s maternal ability, as well as predicting the approach of the delivery time. In this study, an automatic method for rooting action recognition was developed for prepartum sow in opened movable crate farrowing pen using computer vision. An object detection model was trained first using the YOLOv5 network to enable the segmentation of the sow body and the head region, as well as posture estimation simultaneously. Then, the FlowNet2.0 network was implemented to estimate the optical flow of sow’s head movement. A histogram of oriented optical flow with adaptive direction adjustment was proposed to select the frames in which the sow’s head moved in the direction of the animal’s body orientation. Finally, a support vector machine (SVM) classifier was trained to classify rooting and non-rooting actions. The input feature vector for the classifier was constructed from variations in head motion direction, sow posture and head position. The developed method was tested using 324 short video episodes (each lasting at least 4 s) and 10 long videos (each lasting about 47 min) of sows in opened movable crate farrowing pens. The test results indicated that the developed method can identify whether a video episode containing rooting action or not with the accuracy, sensitivity, and precision of 93.2%, 93.8%, and 92.7%, respectively. For long videos, our method achieved a sensitivity of 80.3% and precision of 84.5% in detecting temporal rooting action proposals with a temporal Intersection-over-Union (tIOU) ≥ 0.5. The presented method provides an automatic way to detect prepartum sow’s rooting actions, which can be further utilized to recognize their nest-building behavior and predict the impending delivery time of the sows.

A tiny home of one's own

The home occupies a prominent place in our popular and material imagination. The ideal home is a powerful image because it is understood to be a haven from the ills of the world and a material expression of our true selves. This article considers how home, as a tiny home, is framed through two YouTube channels, Living Big in Tiny Homes and Kirstin Dirksen. Extending Sara Ahmed's work on affect, we present this framing as twofold: first, through a sense of ‘with-ness’ where YouTube facilitates an intimate storytelling with materiality; and second, a sense of ‘against-ness’ where both channels facilitate the notion of the materiality of home as separate and bounded. The study draws on detailed analysis of 42 video episodes and accompanying written comments to consider how materialities, affects, and experiences of tiny homes are intersected with the constraints of the ideal of a stand-alone home.

Short Video-Based Mental Health Intervention for Depressive Symptoms in Junior High School Students: A Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial.

Digital interventions for adolescent mental health are emerging in high-income countries, but have faced challenges and are scarce in China. This study investigated the effect of a short video-based mental health intervention on depressive symptoms in Chinese adolescents. A three-arm cluster randomized controlled trial was conducted in four junior high schools in Shanghai from December 2020 to December 2021 with the measurement at baseline, 6 months after study entry, and 12 months. Outcomes were collected by self-completed questionnaires administered by teachers masked to allocation. The primary outcome was depressive symptoms assessed by the Depression Self-Rating Scale for Children (DSRSC). Mixed effects models were used to compare psychologist-led intervention (n=428 students) and teacher-led intervention (n=385) including six short video-based sessions to usual school provision (n=751). Using intention-to-treat analyses, psychologist-led intervention showed more reduction in depressive symptoms compared to usual school provision at 6 months (coefficient -1.00, 95% CI -1.94 to -0.05), but not at 12 months. Using per-protocol analyses among participants who watched at least three video episodes, both psychologist-led (-1.14, -2.20 to -0.09) and teacher-led intervention (-1.23, -2.45 to -0.02) reduced depressive symptoms compared to usual school provision at 6 months, and the effect of teacher-led intervention persisted at 12 months (-1.58, -3.13 to -0.03). Further exploration found that compared with urban students, the between-group differences for depressive symptoms in rural students were more significant (p<0.05 for interaction) and the effects were maintained at 12 months. The short video-based mental health intervention showed potential to reduce depressive symptoms among Chinese adolescents, and the effects were more significant if the minimum video viewing frequency was reached.

Evaluation of computer vision for detecting agonistic behavior of pigs in a single-space feeding stall through blocked cross-validation strategies

Agonistic behavior at feeding spaces is associated with both welfare and feed intake issues in swine farming. Studying interactive social behaviors of group-housed pigs provides valuable information to improve their production and welfare. The aims of this study were to (1) develop a deep learning pipeline based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) to classify videos depicting four types of interactive behavior between pigs in a single-space feeding stall and (2) validate the CNN + LSTM pipeline through various blocked validation strategies. Four categories of behaviors were classified in this study: head-to-body contact (including gentle nosing, casual contact between head/ears of a pig with a feeding pig, head knocking, tail biting, and pushing); levering where the feeding pig was lifted from behind by another pig; mounting in which the feeding pig was mounted by another pig; and no-contact when a second pig entered the feeding stall without physical contact with the feeding pig. Behavior at the feeding stall was filmed twice, three weeks apart, for two consecutive days each week using six groups of grow-finish pigs (10 per group) housed in pens equipped with FIRE® feeders. This resulted in a total of 15,679 30-frame video episodes for classification. Random validation, blocking-by-time validation, and blocking-by-feeder validation were utilized for training-validation data split. The size of training sets was held constant (N = 7,500) through all validation scenarios. The average validation accuracies were 0.968(±0.001), 0.860(±0.033), 0.766(±0.026), and 0.860(±0.010) for random validation, blocking-by-time validation, and blocking-by-feeder validation (at Feeder 1 and at Feeder 2), respectively. The results indicate that the CNN + LSTM pipeline yielded acceptable predictive performance in random validation. However, performance was substantially worse in blocking-by-time and blocking-by-feeder validations. More work is needed for algorithm generalization to improve its robustness across a variety of real-life application scenarios. We provide public access to the dataset and the code.

Promoting Prospective Mathematics Teachers’ Professional Vision on a Whole-class Reflective Discussion: Contributions of Digital Resources

The present study aims to understand how the professional vision of prospective teachers (PTs) regarding whole-class reflective discussion develops as they explore a multimedia case (MC) in a mathematics teacher education course. The data come from the written productions of seven groups of PTs (N=15) related to whole-class discussion of one 6th grade lesson in two sections of the MC: first, they have focused on the teacher’s lesson plan and on her intentions for the whole-class discussion aiming at the students’ algebraic thinking; and in the second, they have analysed two video episodes of that lesson phase. The results show an integrated development of two processes of PTs’ professional vision – noticed events and the nature of the reasoning about them – with significant evolution from one section to another as they explore the MC. The study shows PTs’ alternative ways of accessing and making sense of the complexity of both ambitious and authentic teaching practices that can also be employed in at distance teacher education and mitigate the consequences of the impossibility to access the classrooms, such as that resulting from the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

The Skills of Mathematics Teachers with Different Professional Experiences to Notice the Evidence of Student Thinking

There are different types of evidence that reflect students' thinking in classroom interactions. Student discourse, gestures, actions can be shown among these. The aim of the current study is to reveal the skills of secondary mathematics teachers with different professional experiences to notice different types of evidence of student thinking. For this aim, the study was designed within the context of a case study, one of the qualitative research methods. The data of the study were obtained through video-based interviews with five secondary mathematics teachers. Six video episodes containing different types of evidence for video-based interviews were shown to teachers. In the interviews, targeted questions were asked to reveal what types of evidence the participating teachers took into account in the videos they watched, how they interpret these types of evidence, and what kind of instructional decisions they suggested. The types of evidence that teachers noticed in the videos and how they made sense of the evidence were analyzed qualitatively. Various findings have been revealed depending on the different professional experiences of the teachers. First, experienced (5 years and above) teachers paid more attention to the types of verbal evidence of student thinking. Student statements and questions were more visible to experienced teachers, especially among oral evidence. Second, the evidence-based comments described by the experienced teachers were aimed at drawing more conclusions. However, it is noteworthy that teachers who make inferences based on student's cognitive thinking also attend postgraduate education or professional experience courses. Third, the instructional decisions of experienced teachers who attended postgraduate education and professional experience courses, based on student thinking, were mostly related to specific mathematical subjects.

ДИДАКТИКА РОБОТИ З ВІДЕОМАТЕРІАЛАМИ У ПРОЦЕСІ ВИВЧЕННЯ НІМЕЦЬКОЇ МОВИ

The article considers the linguadidactical possibilities of using video materials in the educational process and substantiates the expediency of their use in German language classes. It is established that working with video materials mainly promotes the development of skills and abilities of listening and speaking, as well as actively contributes to the formation and further development of socio-cultural competence. The use of video in the classroom allows to individualize learning and intensify the selfdirected work of students. The introduction of video materials in the classroom also provides opportunities to create an artificial foreign language environment at any time and stage of study, adds a sense of realism, and promotes the development of audile and memory. Recently, there has been a notable increase of interest in educational videos as an effective means of teaching a foreign language, and the effectiveness of using video in German classes depends on the level of language training of students, thorough thematic selection of films and educational goals. The potential of videos is fully exploited if you integrate different activities. The most active and truly creative form of modern video work is the independent creation and viewing of video episodes. Working with video removes even a small risk of passive-receptive consumption of information, as well as increases the role of independent creative work. Preparatory explanatory conversations about the video are more useful than watching and working on the video itself, which can often only be an occasion for real communication and facilitate further understanding of the film. In addition, the effectiveness of foreign language teaching by this tool is also facilitated by the technical capabilities of video. Methodological processes based on the perception of image and sound can be used to achieve various goals of educational activities, development of creative abilities and skills through exercises for commenting and making dialogues. The use of video contributes to a more effective coverage of new language and subject material, strengthening and practical application of knowledge, the formation of receptive capabilities, executive skills and productive word use. Also, the use of video materials introduces elements of novelty, significantly expands and diversifies classes, increases cognitive activity and motivation of students, interests them in learning a particular topic and a foreign language in general

In‐service mathematics teachers’ video‐based noticing of 3D printing pens “in action”

AbstractWe adopt five observation categories, namely classroom management, classroom environment, communication, mathematical content and tasks, to analyse four in‐service secondary mathematics teachers’ noticing upon watching video episodes showing an actual mathematics lesson that implemented 3D Printing Pens for teaching and learning shape and space. We use coding to analyse what the participants generally identified as important or noteworthy in the video. Moreover, we employ thematic analysis to delve deeper into the participants’ interpretations and decisions in relation to using 3D Pens for teaching and learning mathematics. Our findings have implications for teachers’ professional development in the area of technology integration especially in terms of their realisation of the affordances of novel‐to‐them technologies. We also report methodological and conceptual contributions towards teacher noticing. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Various frameworks have been proposed for conceptualising teachers’ expertise in technology‐rich pedagogies; however, few have addressed teachers’ initial experience of adopting a novel‐to‐them technology in subject teaching. In teacher education, the method of video‐based noticing has been widely undertaken in the last two decades to help preservice and in‐service teachers visualise complex classroom situations and interpret classroom events. What this paper adds This study investigates what in‐service mathematics teachers find significant, the pedagogical considerations they make and their professional development in integrating technologies for teaching and learning mathematics. Particularly, video‐based noticing is used as a means for facilitating teachers’ professional growth through realising the affordances of 3D Printing Pens in mathematics education. Implications for practice and/or policy This study provides qualitative evidence that video‐based noticing was productive in facilitating teachers’ technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK), in particular, in realising the educational affordances of a novel‐to‐them technology. The videos captured the dynamic process of students’ drawing with 3D Pens “in action” rather than merely capturing their final products in a static manner, which facilitated the teachers’ reflections about the evolution of students’ mathematical thinking.

Humor as Political Possibility: Critical Media Literacy in LGBTQ+ Participatory Cultures

ABSTRACTThe author contributes new insights into everyday literacies in participatory cultures using a multimodal analysis of three LGBTQ+ reaction videos on YouTube. LGBTQ+ reaction videos respond, often comedically, to oppressive media forms and technologies. In the analysis, the author considers how reaction video makers draw on seven meaning‐making modes and multimodal techniques in digital composition to enact practices of critical media literacy, namely, to identify, interrogate, and disrupt dominant ideologies that undergird media forms and technologies. Through analytic video logging and multimodal analysis of video episodes, the author also examines the role of humor in enactments of these practices. The article forwards the conceptual framework of humor as political possibility made manifest in the range of ways that video makers construct slips of humor, compose multimodal parodies, and create satires that critique dominant ideologies and imagine new ways of being in the world. Examining literate activities in participatory cultures with a focus on LGBTQ+ identities has purchase to explicate possibilities to name, challenge, and transform dominant ideologies toward more just futures.

دور البرامج التلفزیونیة على الیوتیوب فی تعزیز ونشر الأفکار التطوعیة بالتطبیق على برنامج «صناع الأمل» دراسة تحلیلیة

هدفت هذه الدراسة بعنوان دور البرامج التلفزيونية على اليوتيوب في تعزيز ونشر الأفکار التطوعية بالتطبيق على برنامج صناع دراسة تحليلية التعرف على أبرز الجوانب التطوعية التي يبذلها الأفراد من مختلف أرجاء الوطن العربي لخدمة مجتمعاتهم عبر رصدها للمحتوى الخاص برنامج تلفزيوني على قناة اليوتيوب بعنوان صناع الأمل . و قد اعتمدت الباحثة في الدراسة على أداة تحليل المضمون لجمع البيانات شملت عينة قوامها 59 حلقة فيديو منشورة على المنصة الرقمية الخاصة بالبرنامج على اليوتيوب. وأظهرت النتائج أن الإعلام المرئي ممثلا وفقا لهذه الدراسة في برنامج صناع الأمل تمکن في إبراز مجالات مختلفة للتطوع شملت مجالات التطوع في المهارات المهنية بالإضافة إلي الشکل المتعارف عليه والمتمثل في الاعمال الخيرية . کذلک أظهرت نتائج الدراسة أهمية تحفير الفئات المختلفة على التطوع خاصة تلک التي تشعر بالتهميش في المجتمع مثل فئة المرأة وکبار السن والشباب صغير السن لما لهم من أدوار خلاقة في بناء المجتمع عبر بذل المزيد من الجهود التطوعية. کما أظهرت نتائج أن اکتساب الخبرات کان أحد الفوائد الجوهرية والمحورية للتطوع. Role of TV Shows on YouTube in Promoting and Spreading Voluntary Ideas Applied to the “Makers of Hope” Program: an Analytical Study Role of TV Shows on YouTube in Promoting and Spreading Voluntary Ideas Applied to the “Makers of Hope” Program: an Analytical Study The aim of this study entitled, Role of TV Shows on YouTube in Promoting and Spreading Voluntary Ideas Applied to the “Makers of Hope” Program: an Analytical Study, is to identify the most important voluntary aspects that individuals from different parts of the Arab world are making to serve their societies by monitoring the special content of a YouTube TV program entitled“ of Hope. The researcher relied in the study on the content analysis method to collect the data of a sample of 59 video episodes posted on the program's digital platform on YouTube. The results showed that the visual media represented according to this study in the Makers of Hope program was able to highlight various areas of volunteering, including areas of volunteering in professional skills in addition to the common form of charity. The results of the study also showed the importance of digging different groups to volunteer, especially those that feel marginalized in society, such as women, the elderly and youth, because of their creative roles in building society through making more voluntary efforts. The results also showed that the acquisition of experiences was one of the fundamental and central benefits of volunteering.

Behavioral evidence for memory replay of video episodes in the macaque.

Humans recall the past by replaying fragments of events temporally. Here, we demonstrate a similar effect in macaques. We trained six rhesus monkeys with a temporal-order judgement (TOJ) task and collected 5000 TOJ trials. In each trial, the monkeys watched a naturalistic video of about 10 s comprising two across-context clips, and after a 2 s delay, performed TOJ between two frames from the video. The data are suggestive of a non-linear, time-compressed forward memory replay mechanism in the macaque. In contrast with humans, such compression of replay is, however, not sophisticated enough to allow these monkeys to skip over irrelevant information by compressing the encoded video globally. We also reveal that the monkeys detect event contextual boundaries, and that such detection facilitates recall by increasing the rate of information accumulation. Demonstration of a time-compressed, forward replay-like pattern in the macaque provides insights into the evolution of episodic memory in our lineage.

Recognition of aggressive episodes of pigs based on convolutional neural network and long short-term memory

Aggression is considered as a major animal welfare problem in commercial pig farming. The aim of this study is to develop a deep learning method based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) to recognise aggressive episodes of pigs. Compared to previous studies of pig behaviours based on deep learning, this study directly process video episodes rather than individual frames. In the experiment, nursery pigs (8/pen) were mixed for 3 days and then 8 h of video was recorded in each day. From these videos, 600 aggressive 2 s-episodes were manually selected and then augmented into 2400 episodes by using horizontal, vertical and diagonal mirroring. From the videos, 2400 non-aggressive 2 s-episodes were also manually selected. 80% of the data were randomly allocated as training set and the remaining 20% as validation set. Firstly, the CNN architecture VGG-16 was used to extract spatial features. These features were then input into LSTM framework to further extract temporal features. Through fully connected layer, the prediction function Softmax was finally used to determine if the current episode is aggression or non-aggression. Using the proposed method, aggressive episodes could be recognised with an accuracy of 97.2%. This result indicates that this method can be used to recognise aggressive episodes of pigs. Additionally, this paper further investigates the validity of this method under the conditions of skipping frames and reducing the episode length. The results show that a frame skipping approach whereby 30 fps is reduced into 15 fps within each 2 s-episode can improve the accuracy into 98.4% and halve the total running time.

Developing prospective teachers’ noticing and notions of productive struggle with video analysis in a mathematics content course

This study examined the development of prospective teachers’ (PTs) understanding of productive struggle using video episodes which PTs analyzed through the lens of professional teacher noticing. Our qualitative study included 66 PTs in four sections of a semester-long mathematics content course for prospective elementary and middle school teachers that focused on numbers and operations. The goal was to give PTs opportunities to observe students struggling with the course content the PTs were studying and to enact their specialized content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge for teaching simultaneously. Findings suggest that the PTs develop the ability to attend to and interpret the mathematics underlying the student struggles through video analyses. They also begin to identify teaching strategies and practices that appear potentially useful for supporting productive struggle. The use of a productive struggle framework helped the PTs develop a language for discussing productive struggle. Findings also suggest that PTs who had very little knowledge of productive struggle became more aware of what it looks like in practice, discuss ways to support students’ struggle and suggest its potential value in supporting students’ understanding of mathematics. One implication for this study is to carefully weave opportunities to develop teaching practices such as support of productive struggle into the content course for teaching. The PTs may better bridge the stance between being a student and becoming a teacher in what productive struggle looks like in learning mathematics.

Automated video analysis of sow nursing behavior based on fully convolutional network and oriented optical flow

This study aims to develop a method to automatically recognize nursing behaviors of sow in videos by exploiting the spatio-temporal relations. The method firstly detected spatio-temporal key cuboids which may have nursing interactions in them, and then Oriented Nursing Flows (ONuF) of the spatio-temporal key cuboids was proposed to further recognize nursing behaviors. In the first step, the temporal key episodes were first detected in video using optical flow-based features containing the distribution of nursing pixel and distance among moving pixels to estimate the distribution of motion all over the frame. Then, spatial key regions in the temporal key episodes were located by identifying the spatial position and geometric properties of the sow and her piglets using a fully convolutional network-based semantic segmentation approach. In the second step, to further recognize nursing behavior, a new feature descriptor ONuF, estimating the motion orientation change and motion magnitude of spatio-temporal key cuboids, was proposed and used to learn a SVM classifier. Testing on a set of 451 video episodes, the accuracy of classifying nursing was 94.5% with a sensitivity of 89.4% and with a specificity of 99.1%. Testing on a set of two days of continuous videos, the accuracy of recognizing nursing was 97.6% with a sensitivity of 92.1% and with a specificity of 98.6%. In addition, the nursing duration and nursing interval were counted from the recognition results of nursing behaviors in continuous videos. The results indicate that the method exploiting the spatio-temporal relations using fully convolutional network and oriented optical flow can be used for automatically recognizing nursing behaviors from daily behavioral videos of lactating sows.

Learning Math with Curious George and the Odd Squad: Transmedia in the Classroom

This paper presents two studies of transmedia interventions in the classroom. The two studies address how narrative-based transmedia curricular resources can support student learning in early mathematics. The studies were designed to identify the affordances (features and advantages) of transmedia-based learning in preschool and first grade classrooms. Study 1 included a 4-week intervention, where students interacted with 16 digital learning games featuring the popular Curious George animated character, hands-on materials downloaded from a Curious George public media website, three Curious George video episodes, and books and other common classroom materials. Sixty-eight preschool children were recruited from a school serving low-income communities in the San Francisco Bay Area that took part in the intervention. Measures included rigorous assessments of mathematics ability. Other data collection included classroom observations, and interviews with participating teachers. Over the course of the intervention, children’s knowledge of mathematics increased significantly, as measured by the Test of Early Mathematics Ability. Results of qualitative data analysis suggest that the transmedia aspect of the intervention brought affordances to students’ learning experiences. Study 2 involved an intervention with first grade students that included narrative-based digital and non-digital learning resources from the popular Odd Squad public television series. During the study, participating students used a school-based intervention that included videos, online games, interstitials, and hands-on activities from an Odd Squad transmedia suite. Four first grade teachers from the San Francisco Bay Area and their classrooms (n = 83 first grade students and their families) participated in the study. Measures included verbal and written assessments of mathematics ability. Other data collection included interviews with participating teachers and parents. Over the course of the Odd Squad intervention, students’ overall knowledge of mathematics in the domains of Number and Operations and Algebraic Thinking increased significantly, as well as their competency with mathematics vocabulary and the concept of fact families. Results of qualitative data analysis of teacher and parent interview data suggest that the transmedia aspect of the intervention brought affordances to first grade students’ learning experiences, including an engaging narrative domain to spur student motivation, presentation of content across multiple modalities, and supportive game-based learning.

Periscope: Looking into Learning in Best-Practices Physics Classrooms

Periscope is a set of lessons to support learning assistants, teaching assistants, and faculty in learning to notice and interpret classroom events the way an accomplished teacher does. Periscope lessons are centered on video episodes from a variety of best-practices university physics classrooms. By observing, discussing, and reflecting on teaching situations similar to their own, instructors practice applying lessons learned about teaching to actual teaching situations and develop their pedagogical content knowledge. Instructors also get a view of other institutions’ transformed courses, which can support and expand the vision of their own instructional improvement and support the transfer of course developments among faculty. Periscope is available for free to educators at http://physport.org/periscope.

Utilizing an Innovative Preceptor Video Mini-Series to Prepare Students for Experiential Rotations: Does it Work?

Objectives: To determine whether an innovative Mini-Series training model originally developed for preceptors could be beneficial to pharmacy students prior to and/or after beginning their introductory or advanced pharmacy practice experiences.&#x0D; Methods: This program consists of twelve incremental video episodes, each ranging from five to eight minutes in length. It tells the story of a young pharmacy preceptor as she guides a third and fourth year student through a challenging six-week clinical hospital rotation. Two to three reflection questions were written for each individual episode, focusing on student issues portrayed in the videos. Two-hour viewing sessions, consisting of all (12) video episodes and facilitated student reflection were held for 2nd – 4th year professional students on two campuses. At conclusion of each session, students completed a short evaluation to gauge the effectiveness and potential application of the Mini-Series program.&#x0D; Results: Fifty-six (56) students (22 fourth-year, 6 third-ear, and 28 second-year) participated in the voluntary viewing sessions. All students either agreed or strongly agreed that the Mini-Series program was entertaining and educational. In addition, 82% of students strongly agreed this program would be beneficial for students prior to taking their first experiential rotation, while only 47% strongly agreed it would be beneficial after they had started rotations. On a 5-point Likert scale (1=strongly disagree, 5=strongly agree), participants reported a mean of 4.6 that this medium is more effective than traditional lecture orientations held by the Office of Experiential Programs. On three open-ended questions, students provided a diversity of suggestions for enhancing the Mini-Series to make it more effective for students.&#x0D; Implications: The “Mini-Series” model was well received by students as a training medium to deliver educational content. As a result, more programs are being developed utilizing this innovative teaching method to help prepare students for future experiential rotations.&#x0D; Conflict of Interest&#x0D; The authors report no conflicts of interest or financial incentives to disclose related to this project. Dr. Craig D. Cox conceptualized, developed, and directed the Mini-Seriesprogram described in the manuscript. All funding for and all income generated by the program studied is the property of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Pharmacy.&#x0D; &#x0D; Type: Original Research