Exploration of Student Online Learning Behavior and Academic Achievement

Students’ online persistence has typically been studied at the macro-level (e.g., completion of an online course, number of academic terms completed, etc.), and was investigated as a dependent variable with predicting variables such as motivation, engagement, economical support, etc. This study examines students’ persistence in an online adaptive learning environment called ALEKS, and the association between students’ academic achievement and persistence. With archived data that included students’ online math learning log and standardized tests scores, we first explored students’ learning behavior patterns with regard to how persistent they were while learning with ALEKS. Three variables indicating three levels of persistence were created and used for cluster analysis. Hierarchical clustering analysis identified three distinctive patterns of persistence-related learning behaviors: (1) High persistence and rare topic shifting; (2) Low persistence and frequent topic shifting; and (3) Moderate persistence and moderate topic shifting. We further explored the association between persistence and academic achievement. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) indicated no significant difference in academic achievement between students with different learning patterns. This result seems to suggest that “wheel-spinning” coexists with persistence and is not beneficial to learning. This finding also suggests that ALEKS, and other intelligent learning environments, would benefit from a mechanism that determines when a student fails that takes into account wheel-spinning behaviors. This would allow for a more appropriate intervention to be provided to learners in a timely manner

THE EFFECT OF USING COMMUNITY LANGUAGE LEARNING METHOD TOWARD SPEAKING SKILL AT THE SECOND YEAR STUDENTS OF MTs AL-MUTTAQIEN PEKANBARU

Penelitian ini dilakukan karena beberapa kendala yang dihadapi oleh siswa dalam belajar bahasa Inggris seperti kosa kata, pengucapan, tata bahasa, kefasihan dan pemahaman. Masalah adalah: beberapa siswa tidak dapat menanggapi pertanyaan dari guru, beberapa siswa takut membuat kesalahan dalam berbicara bahasa Inggris, dan siswa juga tidak dapat berbicara bahasa Inggris dengan lancar. Penelitian ini dilakukan dengan tujuan untuk mengetahui ada tidaknya pengaruh yang signifikan terhadap siswa yang diajarkan metode komunitas belajar bahasa terhadap keterampilan berbicara siswa dan siswa yang diajarkan dengan menggunakan metode konvensional. Desain yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah Quasi Experimental penelitian. Dalam pengumpulan data penulis menggunakan tes, itu digunakan untuk mengetahui keterampilan berbicara siswa kelas dua MTs Al-Muttaqien Pekanbaru. Tes terdiri dari dua tes: Pre tes digunakan untuk menentukan keahlian berbicara siswa sebelum mendapatkan perlakuan dan post tes digunakan untuk menentukan keahlian berbicara siswa setelah mendapatkan perlakuan. Dalam menganalisis data penulis menggunakan tes berbicara. Nilai dari tes dianalisis dengan menggunakan rumus T test. Berdasarkan temuan penelitian, dapat disimpulkan bahwa Ho ditolak dan Ha diterima. Ini berarti bahwa ada pengaruh yang signifikan penggunaan metode Komunitas Belajar Bahasa terhadap Keterampilan Berbicara Siswa kelas dua MTs Al-Muttaqien Pekanbaru. Dengan kata lain, metode Komunitas Belajar Bahasa dapat meningkatkan keterampilan berbicara siswa kelas dua MTs Al-Muttaqien Pekanbaru

Exploring Counselor Educators’ Experiences With Neuroscience-Informed Counseling Pedagogy

Human beings have been curious about the mysteries of the brain for centuries (Bear, Connors, & Paradiso, 2007). Modern advances in neuroscience technology and brain imaging techniques have allowed scientists to see the inner workings of the brains of living people, resulting in increased knowledge and understanding of how the brain functions and how learning occurs (Hardiman, 2012; Sousa, 2017). Findings from neuroscience research are rapidly being used to inform practices in fields such as education (Thomas, Ansari, & Knowland, 2018) and professional counseling (Beeson & Field, 2017; Field, Jones, & Russell-Chapin, 2017; Luke, Miller, & McAuliffe, 2019; Navalta, McGee, & Underwood, 2018; Russell-Chapin, 2016). While neuroscience-informed education and counseling are gaining significant attention and helping to enrich their respective fields, neuroscience-informed counselor education, specifically in regards to teaching and training counseling students, has not matched this momentum. In order to improve and advance counselor education it is important for counselor educators to understand how neuroscience can strengthen the educational process of training counselors and incorporate neuroscience principles related to teaching and learning into their work. The focus of this study was to gain a better understanding of the experiences of counselor educators who use neuroscience to inform their counseling pedagogy and training, specifically their conceptualizations of learning and development, creation of optimal learning environments, and instructional strategies. In this exploration, I hoped to discover meaningful themes in the experiences of counselor educators with neuroscience-informed counseling pedagogy that can support and enhance the field of counselor education. In this phenomenological study, I explored 6 counselor educators experiences integrating neuroscience into their counseling pedagogy. Through multiple interviews and artifact collection, 5 themes were discovered: the neuroscience of learning, the neuroscience of the teaching process, specific methods, neuroscience-informed counselor educator qualities, and beliefs about neuroscience-informed pedagogy. The findings of this study have significant implications for the field of Counselor Education, including greater student learning experiences and outcomes, options for incorporating neuroscience into counseling pedagogy, and specializations in neuroscience-informed pedagogy. Further implications and areas for future research are discussed

An Exploration into the Experiences of Women Student Veterans and their Campus Support Utilization: A Phenomenological Study

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to describe the experiences of women student veterans and the role of self-efficacy in their utilization of campus support services. The theory guiding this study was Bandura’s self-efficacy theory as it relates to the influences of the utilization of campus support by women student veterans. Drawing on this theory, this study sought to answer the following central research question: How do women student veterans describe their experiences using academic, administrative, and health support services on campus? This qualitative study employed a hermeneutic phenomenological approach using purposeful sampling techniques, namely maximal variation and criterion sampling, to describe the experiences of women student veterans and their campus support service usage at any US-based college or university. The ten participants were selected using the following criteria: woman, former or current servicemember, currently or formerly enrolled in an undergraduate degree program, and enrolled in an undergraduate degree program within the last five years. The data were collected using individual interviews and letter-writing techniques. Further, this study utilized Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña’s data analysis model to code, group, cluster, and identify themes in the data. The results of this study were that when academic and administrative support services prioritized human connection and cultural awareness, women student veterans reported favorable experiences. When services lacked human connection and cultural awareness, participants relied on their military influences for support

Knowledge Extraction from Textual Resources through Semantic Web Tools and Advanced Machine Learning Algorithms for Applications in Various Domains

Nowadays there is a tremendous amount of unstructured data, often represented by texts, which is created and stored in variety of forms in many domains such as patients' health records, social networks comments, scientific publications, and so on. This volume of data represents an invaluable source of knowledge, but unfortunately it is challenging its mining for machines. At the same time, novel tools as well as advanced methodologies have been introduced in several domains, improving the efficacy and the efficiency of data-based services. Following this trend, this thesis shows how to parse data from text with Semantic Web based tools, feed data into Machine Learning methodologies, and produce services or resources to facilitate the execution of some tasks. More precisely, the use of Semantic Web technologies powered by Machine Learning algorithms has been investigated in the Healthcare and E-Learning domains through not yet experimented methodologies. Furthermore, this thesis investigates the use of some state-of-the-art tools to move data from texts to graphs for representing the knowledge contained in scientific literature. Finally, the use of a Semantic Web ontology and novel heuristics to detect insights from biological data in form of graph are presented. The thesis contributes to the scientific literature in terms of results and resources. Most of the material presented in this thesis derives from research papers published in international journals or conference proceedings

Examining Social Emotional Learning for Gifted Students

The purpose of this intrinsic qualitative study was to investigate the use of universal social emotional learning (SEL) curricula as a primary means for supporting the social and emotional developmental needs of gifted students in a large school district in the western U.S. The District, or case for this study, was not using any specific systemic social and emotional programming for their identified gifted learners. Through a constructivist social cognitive theoretical lens, the efficacy of universal curricula for gifted learners was explored. The increasing use of SEL in school reform efforts to improve academic success has provided much research on SEL curricula (Durlak et al., 2011; Elias et al., 1997; Zins et al., 2007). The goal of this study was to provide educational leaders a way to examine universal SEL programs’ efficacy for the affective programming needs of gifted learners. The large school district setting yielded participants purposively chosen to include one class in each of three elementary schools (n = 3) where gifted learners were included in regular education classrooms using three different universal SEL curricula – Well-Managed Schools, Second Step, and Conscious Discipline. A multi-step process was used to create an evaluation tool, the Social Emotional Learning for Exceptional Children’s Thinking and Emotional Development (SELECTED) Rubric™ (2017) with categories and sub-categories based on analysis of research-based best practices for supporting the social and emotional needs of gifted learners. Resources and references came from the National Association for Gifted Children’s (NAGC) standards, the state’s Department of Education, and others (e.g., Eckert & Robins, 2017; Neihart et al., 2016a; Robinson et al., 2007; Rogers, 2002; VanTassel-Baska et al., 2009). Data were collected via document analysis, 30-minute semi-structured interviews of the teachers and two district administrators, and the evaluation of the three universal curricula via the Rubric. The results of this study indicate that although teachers had various levels of knowledge about the affective needs of gifted students, they all saw weaknesses in their SEL interventions for meeting their gifted students’ needs. The findings of the study are based on a small sample size, yet the use of universal SEL curricula was not substantiated by these findings as an effective way to meet the unique affective needs of gifted students

A Computational Linguistic Analysis of Learners Discourse in Computer-Mediated Group Learning Environments

Communication, collaboration and the social co-construction of knowledge are now considered critical 21st century skills and have taken a principal role in recent theoretical and technological developments in education research. The overall objective of this dissertation was to investigate collaborative learning to gain insight on why some groups are more successful than others. In such discussions, group members naturally assume different roles. These roles emerge through participants’ interactions without any prior instruction or assignment. Different combinations of these roles can produce characteristically different group outcomes, being either less or more productive towards collective goals. However, there has been little research on how to automatically identify these roles and fuse the quality of the process of collaborative interactions with the learning outcome. A major goal of this dissertation is to develop a group communication analysis (GCA) framework, a novel methodology that applies automated computational linguistic techniques to the sequential interactions of online group communication. The GCA involves computing six distinct measures of participant discourse interaction and behavioral patterns and then clustering participants based on their profiles across these measures. The GCA was applied to several large collaborative learning datasets, and identified roles that exhibit distinct patterns in behavioral engagement style (i.e., active or passive, leading or following), contribution characteristics (i.e., providing new information or echoing given material), and social orientation. Through bootstrapping and replication analysis, the roles were found to generalize both within and across different collaborative interaction datasets, indicating that these roles are robust constructs. A multilevel analysis shows that the social roles are predictive of success, both for individual team members and for the overall group. Furthermore, the presence of specific roles within a team produce characteristically different outcomes; leading to specific hypotheses as to optimal group composition. Ideally, the developed analytical tools and findings of this dissertation will contribute to our understanding of how individuals learn together as a group and thereby advance the learning and discourse sciences. More broadly, GCA provides a framework to explore the intra- and inter-personal patterns indicative of the participants’ roles and the sociocognitive processes related to successful collaboration

Developing the scales on evaluation beliefs of student teachers

The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to investigate the validity and the reliability of a newly developed questionnaire named ‘Teacher Evaluation Beliefs’ (TEB). The framework for developing items was provided by the two models. The first model focuses on Student-Centered and Teacher-Centered beliefs about evaluation while the other centers on five dimensions (what/ who/ when/ why/ how). The validity and reliability of the new instrument was investigated using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis study (n=446). Overall results indicate that the two-factor structure is more reasonable than the five-factor one. Further research needs additional items about the latent dimensions “what” ”who” ”when” ”why” “how” for each existing factor based on Student-centered and Teacher-centered approaches

Training Faculty to Adopt the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm, IPP and its Influence on Teaching and Learning: Process and Outcomes

This is the second of two articles describing the action research undertaken by the three trainees and their trainer (author of this article). After formal training, the training team integrated the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP) into their undergraduate courses from fall of 2010 through May 2013 in the College of Professional Studies (CPS) at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The first article was published in this journal in fall 2012 and provided a narrative describing the faculty development process, predicated on the five constructs of the IPP: Context, Experience, Reflection, Action and Evaluation. This article includes a full description of the training protocol, data collection process, and the qualitative data analysis methods. This training team used an Action Research model put forth by Reil over two years and nine months to determine the influence of the IPP on their teaching. This study seeks to provide others who teach at Jesuit Colleges and Universities a rationale for using the IPP both as pedagogy, a curriculum guide along with specific instructional practices, and learning activities. In addition, a replicable IPP training protocol is provided that is based on best practices derived from analogous research in the fields of contemporary learning, cognitive, and educational research. The study also provides the outcomes related to the impact the infusion of the IPP had on the instructors’ curricula, pedagogies, instructional strategies, learning activities, and assessment practices, as well as the student-teacher learning relationship