Success factors of E-assessment in computer science for higher education: perspectives from instructors

Assessment is an essential element in higher education processes, and its use is becoming increasingly widespread with the digitalisation of universities. E-assessment plays a major role in the success of the educational process due to its benefits, such as improving students’ experience and performance and optimising instructors’ effort. This study aims to identify success factors for the use of e-assessment methods from instructors’ perspectives, focusing on computer science (CS) instructors who assess coding assignments in higher education in the UK and Saudi universities. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining 16 interviews with CS instructors in the UK and Saudi universities and a survey as the quantitative element. Survey data revealed clear disparities in the perception of personalised feedback between the UK and Saudi Arabia. Findings indicate a lack of training courses for instructors and a shortage of specific automated tools for assessing coding. Few tools or systems are available for providing automated and personalised feedback, and existing e-assessment tools do not meet instructors’ expectations regarding flexibility, accessibility, scalability, practicality, validity, reliability, and authenticity. Instructors currently spend significant time and effort assessing coding assignments, which may hinder learning outcomes and the enhancement of educational activities. This thesis proposes a comprehensive framework outlining success factors for effective assessment, which can benefit e-assessment tool suppliers, instructors, and universities, ultimately enhancing the quality of instructors’ assessments

Parental Knowledge Attitudes and Practice Towards Headaches Among Elementary School-Aged Children in Al-Baha, Saudi Arabia

Aim: To evaluate parental knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding childhood headaches in Al-Baha, Saudi Arabia, and identify gaps that could inform targeted educational interventions. Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was administered to 399 parents residing in Al-Baha. The survey assessed parental understanding, behavior, and perceptions concerning pediatric headaches. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS version 27.0, applying descriptive statistics, Mann–Whitney U, Kruskal–Wallis, and Spearman’s correlation tests. Results: Among the respondents, 52.4% were female (N = 209) and 47.6% male (N = 190), with a mean age of 42.56 years. Female participants exhibited significantly higher knowledge scores than their male counterparts. The most frequently reported headache triggers were sleep disturbances (79.4%), vision problems (61.7%), and psychological factors (52.1%), whereas malnutrition was identified by only 48.9% of respondents. Symptom monitoring practices varied: 46.1% of parents reported observing symptoms before seeking medical care, while 23.0% considered headaches an emergency. Notably, 57.4% sought professional consultation when symptoms persisted, yet 32.1% administered painkillers without medical advice. Knowledge scores were positively correlated with both attitude scores (r = 0.151, p = 0.002) and practice scores (r = 0.336, p < 0.001). Conclusion: The findings indicate that parental understanding of childhood headaches is often limited, particularly concerning nutritional triggers and evidence-based management strategies. This underscores the urgent need for targeted educational initiatives to enhance awareness, promote appropriate health-seeking behavior, and reduce the risk of mismanagement

Ultrasonographic Assessment of Uterine Measurements and Endometrial Thickness Among Healthy Saudi Females Sample

Mahasin G Hassan,1 Huda M Alnafa,1 Norah Alsofyan,1 Reham S Alsulimi,1 Sumayah Alsllal,1 Noura A Abaalkhail,1 Mona Alzurayr,1 Hessah Alamr,1 Tasneem SA Elmahdi,2 Asma S Aldahes,1 Mayson Wanasi,3 Halima Hawesa1 1Department of Radiological Sciences, College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; 2Department of Diagnostic Radiologic Technology, Faculty of Applied Medical Sciences, Taibah University, Al-Madinah Al-Munawara, Saudi Arabia; 3Department of Radiological Sciences, Al-Ghad International Colleges for Applied Sciences, Madina, Saudi ArabiaCorrespondence: Mahasin G Hassan, Department of Radiological Sciences, College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, PO Box 84428, Riyadh, 11472, Saudi Arabia, Tel +966553661276, Email [email protected]: The present study was conducted to analyze uterine measurements and endometrial thickness throughout the menstrual cycle in Saudi healthy females of reproductive age.Methods: This cohort study was conducted at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Saudi Arabia, among thirty-three females of reproductive age who underwent trans-abdominal pelvic ultrasound scans across four menstrual cycle phases. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS version 26, utilizing descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA, correlation, and regression analysis.Results: Endometrial thickness and layers showed significant variations (p< 0.001) across menstrual phases (early proliferative: 0.59 ± 0.21 cm, late proliferative: 0.77 ± 0.24 cm, secretory: 1.09 ± 0.40 cm, menstrual: 0.52 ± 0.35 cm). Endometrial thickness was positively correlated with number of layers (r=0.576, p< 0.05). The study showed that the average uterine length, width, and thickness were 7.33 ± 0.76 cm, 3.93 ± 1.00 cm and 3.44 ± 0.55 cm, which showed stability across menstrual phases, except for width showing slight variations. Endometrial thickness was positively correlated with uterine thickness (r=0.358, p< 0.05).Conclusion: The study results emphasize the significance of using region-specific reference values in clinical practice. This approach would enable precise evaluation and treatment of gynecological problems. It is encouraged to do future study with larger populations in order to validate these results and improve the therapeutic applicability.Keywords: endometrial thickness, endometrial layering, ultrasound, uterus, menstrual phas

Figured Worlds of STEM For Saudi High School Girls: Exploring Identities in a School-Based STEM Course

There is a growing effort from the Saudi Ministry of Education to include integrative science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in the formal curriculum. As an initial step toward this goal, the Ministry launched a number of informal programs that deliver the integrative STEM education experience to students in their school and during their school hours. This study investigates how one of these programs has contributed to building a STEM identity for young female students in their last year of high school and how these identities have motivated or hindered their pursuit of STEM careers. Saudi literature on women in STEM education reflects their relative exclusion from some STEM fields. The importance of this research lies in demonstrating the importance of building STEM identities as a way to overcome the cultural challenges that hinder some Saudi women from choosing STEM fields, specifically engineering, as a career. The study took place in one high school in Riyadh city in Saudi Arabia; seven participants consented to participate. Using a case study methodology and employing identity in practice as a theoretical framework (D. Holland, Skinner, Lachicotte, & Cain, 1998), I was able to trace the students’ identity development over 11 months. Data were collected via several methods: one-time surveys, three observations, and three interviews. I collected the data over three episodes: at the beginning of the program, when the class moved to an online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and after students started their post-secondary education pathways. Thematic analysis of the data demonstrated that formal schooling in Saudi Arabia has a deep impact on students’ understanding of themselves as STEM people. All participating students exhibited a “good STEM student” identity at the start of the program based on their experiences with formal STEM courses. Furthermore, they carried their STEM identities into the informal STEM classroom, and due to the different structure, they began to view their positionalities as STEM students differently and to adapt to the new structure of the informal STEM classroom

To what extent does the presence of anonymity contribute to the fluctuations observed in cyberbullying behaviours demonstrated by students in higher education institutions in Saudi Arabia?

Rapid improvements in technology, particularly in the communications industry, have caused a major evolution in the way individuals make contact, socialise and interact with one another. Unquestionably, these improvements have also had negative impact. Social media has contributed to the world by allowing the transfer of social communication from the real world into the virtual world. It should be acknowledged that social media has a great deal of benefit for individuals. The ease of social media use has helped individuals to connect with wider audiences anytime and anywhere. However, advancements in and features of social media can also lead to harmful effects, such as cyberbullying, which is the focus of this research. Bullying is a social issue in the real world that has shifted into cyberspace under the name ‘cyberbullying’. Previous research on cyberbullying has developed an understanding of such a problem, with some gaps that still need to be addressed. The overall research aim was to develop an understanding of cyberbullying causes in higher education students in Saudi Arabia. It should be taken into consideration that after this research started, universities moved their activities completely online because of Covid-19. This can motivate such research, as cyber-related work is likely to become increasingly important when working from home becomes the new normal. This research addresses three key gaps. First, the age gap is addressed, since the cyberbullying research field has focused intensively on younger age groups rather than university students. Second, the population gap is addressed, as very few cyberbullying studies have been conducted in the Saudi Arabian context. There are many social media users in the country, so this research aims to explore a new culture. Third, the research field gap is explored; previous cyberbullying studies have tended to overlook the factor of technology when exploring cyberbullying and lack a standardised theoretical approach with which to unify inconsistent results. To address these gaps, the social media cyberbullying model (SMCBM) developed by Lowry et al. (2016) was used. This model was modified based on Akers’ (2009) theory of social learning and social structure (SSSL). The original SSSL model was adopted from the criminology field, while the developed SMCBM model was contextualised to fit cyberspace, adding the information technology artefacts of anonymity and social structure. Testing such a model can contribute to the field of cyberbullying. This model was tested via a questionnaire sent to 414 Saudi university students, from University of Hail, who have been involved in cyberbullying. Moreover, to explain some results and obtain a profound understanding of particular parts of the questionnaire, it was followed by interviews with 10 students. Based on the questionnaire and interview findings, the results of this research support the SMCBM. Anonymity contributed to the social learning variables of cyberbullying through social media, thus encouraging the frequency of cyberbullying. There were notable findings related to the perception of the cost of cyberbullying, and the situational morality of cyberbullying, among the sample. As for the cost, the participants seemed to consider the consequences of cyberbullying, due to the religious background of the sample, as well as the enforcement of internet crime laws and cyberbullying campaigns by public authorities in Saudi Arabia. As a result, the sample demonstrated a stringent attitude towards cyberbullying, likely influenced by an increased awareness of its potential repercussions. As for the situational morality, in addition to conventional explanations such as revenge and attention-seeking, the research uncovered a different perspective, revealing a prevailing belief among participants that cyberbullying served a greater purpose in defending ethics, religion, and traditions, which reflects a nuanced situational morality among the respondents. The research results have some indications with regard to cyberbullying. Most importantly, some suggestions are provided for universities to minimise bullying in the online learning proces

Privacy Perceptions of Twitter Users in Saudi Arabia.

The operators of the numerous social networking outlets are very much conscious that their proceeds might upsurge as individuals enlarge their preparedness to reveal personal data regarding themselves. This implies that privacy has become a major concern to most technology users. The way information is used by the social network operators remains a major privacy concern across the globe including in countries such as Saudi Arabia. In view of this background information, this study sought to investigate the perceptions of privacy of Twitter users in Saudi Arabia. The study objectives the study included to assess the understanding of the twitter users (Saudi Arabians) about privacy issues in social network services and their use of privacy settings as the first objective. The second objective was to determine whether the merits of online social interacting overweigh the dangers of sharing private data or the willingness to share data, the third one to examine the significance of twitter in one’s life, and the final one to examine the impact of the understanding of the user of privacy on the data shared over twitter. The optioned for the quantitative path as the research approach since it facilitated the testing of the outlined research hypotheses. The major constructs to this end encompassed age, trust, education, experience, and gender. On the other hand, the dependent variable was the perceptions of privacy of twitter users. The findings revealed that the perceptions of privacy of Twitter users in Saudi Arabia is affected by variables that include trust, age, gender, education, and experience in different ways. The study recommends that users characteristics are playing an important part in information sharing online, the need to undertake a broader as well as wider study that will include diverse and a large number of participants to gather as many views as possible

Unsupervised Transformer-Based Anomaly Detection in ECG Signals

Anomaly detection is one of the basic issues in data processing that addresses different problems in healthcare sensory data. Technology has made it easier to collect large and highly variant time series data; however, complex predictive analysis models are required to ensure consistency and reliability. With the rise in the size and dimensionality of collected data, deep learning techniques, such as autoencoder (AE), recurrent neural networks (RNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM), have gained more attention and are recognized as state-of-the-art anomaly detection techniques. Recently, developments in transformer-based architecture have been proposed as an improved attention-based knowledge representation scheme. We present an unsupervised transformer-based method to evaluate and detect anomalies in electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The model architecture comprises two parts: an embedding layer and a standard transformer encoder. We introduce, implement, test, and validate our model in two well-known datasets: ECG5000 and MIT-BIH Arrhythmia. Anomalies are detected based on loss function results between real and predicted ECG time series sequences. We found that the use of a transformer encoder as an alternative model for anomaly detection enables better performance in ECG time series data. The suggested model has a remarkable ability to detect anomalies in ECG signal and outperforms deep learning approaches found in the literature on both datasets. In the ECG5000 dataset, the model can detect anomalies with 99% accuracy, 99% F1-score, 99% AUC score, 98.1% recall, and 100% precision. In the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia dataset, the model achieved an accuracy of 89.5%, F1 score of 92.3%, AUC score of 93%, recall of 98.2%, and precision of 87.1%

Authorship Attribution, Idiolectal Style, and Online Identity: a specialised corpus of Najdi Arabic tweets

This thesis investigates a synergy of approaches, namely corpus linguistics, stylistics, computational linguistics, and computer-mediated communication to address forensic authorship attribution problems in Arabic. It aims to explore how authorship as a concrete matter can communicate and reveal the theoretical notion of the idiolect. On another front computer sciences, specifically in machine learning, tackle authorship from a standpoint of accuracy. Corpus linguistics is a common ground where both fields meet, as linguists and computer scientists use corpora to test their methods. Linguists approach it from a stylistic, qualitative point of view because it provides them with the explicability a courtroom would require when presenting their analysis report as expert witnesses. Computational scientists, on the other hand, focus on the quantitative, statistical aspect of analysis which generated, until recently, black box tools that do not necessarily show the tool’s trail of analysis

To what extent does the presence of anonymity contribute to the fluctuations observed in cyberbullying behaviours demonstrated by students in higher education institutions in Saudi Arabia?

Rapid improvements in technology, particularly in the communications industry, have caused a major evolution in the way individuals make contact, socialise and interact with one another. Unquestionably, these improvements have also had negative impact. Social media has contributed to the world by allowing the transfer of social communication from the real world into the virtual world. It should be acknowledged that social media has a great deal of benefit for individuals. The ease of social media use has helped individuals to connect with wider audiences anytime and anywhere. However, advancements in and features of social media can also lead to harmful effects, such as cyberbullying, which is the focus of this research. Bullying is a social issue in the real world that has shifted into cyberspace under the name ‘cyberbullying’. Previous research on cyberbullying has developed an understanding of such a problem, with some gaps that still need to be addressed. The overall research aim was to develop an understanding of cyberbullying causes in higher education students in Saudi Arabia. It should be taken into consideration that after this research started, universities moved their activities completely online because of Covid-19. This can motivate such research, as cyber-related work is likely to become increasingly important when working from home becomes the new normal. This research addresses three key gaps. First, the age gap is addressed, since the cyberbullying research field has focused intensively on younger age groups rather than university students. Second, the population gap is addressed, as very few cyberbullying studies have been conducted in the Saudi Arabian context. There are many social media users in the country, so this research aims to explore a new culture. Third, the research field gap is explored; previous cyberbullying studies have tended to overlook the factor of technology when exploring cyberbullying and lack a standardised theoretical approach with which to unify inconsistent results. To address these gaps, the social media cyberbullying model (SMCBM) developed by Lowry et al. (2016) was used. This model was modified based on Akers’ (2009) theory of social learning and social structure (SSSL). The original SSSL model was adopted from the criminology field, while the developed SMCBM model was contextualised to fit cyberspace, adding the information technology artefacts of anonymity and social structure. Testing such a model can contribute to the field of cyberbullying. This model was tested via a questionnaire sent to 414 Saudi university students, from University of Hail, who have been involved in cyberbullying. Moreover, to explain some results and obtain a profound understanding of particular parts of the questionnaire, it was followed by interviews with 10 students. Based on the questionnaire and interview findings, the results of this research support the SMCBM. Anonymity contributed to the social learning variables of cyberbullying through social media, thus encouraging the frequency of cyberbullying. There were notable findings related to the perception of the cost of cyberbullying, and the situational morality of cyberbullying, among the sample. As for the cost, the participants seemed to consider the consequences of cyberbullying, due to the religious background of the sample, as well as the enforcement of internet crime laws and cyberbullying campaigns by public authorities in Saudi Arabia. As a result, the sample demonstrated a stringent attitude towards cyberbullying, likely influenced by an increased awareness of its potential repercussions. As for the situational morality, in addition to conventional explanations such as revenge and attention-seeking, the research uncovered a different perspective, revealing a prevailing belief among participants that cyberbullying served a greater purpose in defending ethics, religion, and traditions, which reflects a nuanced situational morality among the respondents. The research results have some indications with regard to cyberbullying. Most importantly, some suggestions are provided for universities to minimise bullying in the online learning proces