Promoting Students’ Engagement and Interaction in Class Discussions through Group Work

The article aimed to promote students’ engagement, active participation, and interaction in class discussions in Business Information Systems (BIS) course by implementing a group work strategy. This study is conducted as classroom action research on a BIS course consisting of 33 students during the 2022/2023 academic year. The data collection involved observation questionnaire techniques and assessments across two cycles. The observations revealed that the group work strategy effectively improves students’ engagement and interaction levels. Notably, when students were given the opportunity to form their own groups, there was a significant increase in interaction and discussions between peers compared to groups formed by the teacher. This highlights the importance of student autonomy in group formation, as it fosters a sense of collaboration among students. Findings indicated that students perceive group activities as valuable opportunities for enhanced learning, improved understanding, communication skills, and increased enjoyment in the classroom. Educators should strive to balance peer interaction and student-teacher interaction, ensuring that students receive appropriate guidance and support throughout the group work process. Providing clear guidelines, assigning roles, and actively monitoring group dynamics can help create an inclusive and productive collaborative learning environment. يهدف المقال إلى تعزيز مشاركة الطلاب والمشاركة النشطة والتفاعل في المناقشات الصفية في مقرر نظم معلومات الأعمال (BIS) من خلال تنفيذ استراتيجية العمل الجماعي. يتم إجراء هذه الدراسة كبحث عملي في الفصل الدراسي حول مقرر BIS المكون من 33 طالبًا خلال العام الدراسي 2022/2023. شمل جمع البيانات تقنيات استبيان الملاحظة والتقييمات عبر دورتين. وكشفت الملاحظات أن استراتيجية العمل الجماعي تعمل بشكل فعال على تحسين مستويات مشاركة الطلاب وتفاعلهم. ومن الجدير بالذكر أنه عندما أتيحت للطلاب الفرصة لتشكيل مجموعاتهم الخاصة، كانت هناك زيادة كبيرة في التفاعل والمناقشات بين أقرانهم مقارنة بالمجموعات التي شكلها المعلم. وهذا يسلط الضوء على أهمية استقلالية الطالب في تكوين المجموعة، لأنه يعزز الشعور بالتعاون بين الطلاب. أشارت النتائج إلى أن الطلاب ينظرون إلى الأنشطة الجماعية على أنها فرص قيمة لتعزيز التعلم، وتحسين الفهم، وتحسين مهارات الاتصال، وزيادة الاستمتاع في الفصل الدراسي. يجب أن يسعى المعلمون إلى تحقيق التوازن بين التفاعل بين الأقران والتفاعل بين الطالب والمعلم، مما يضمن حصول الطلاب على التوجيه والدعم المناسبين طوال عملية العمل الجماعي. يمكن أن يساعد توفير إرشادات واضحة، وتعيين الأدوار، ومراقبة ديناميكيات المجموعة بشكل فعال في إنشاء بيئة تعليمية تعاونية شاملة ومثمرة

Women’s career advancement in the IT field in the Kingdom of Bahrain

Despite the growing number of women in the IT field in Bahrain, they are under-represented in senior management positions in the Information Technology (IT) field. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to gain better understanding of the factors that influence Bahraini women in their career advancement to upper managerial levels within the IT field. The underrepresentation of women in the IT field has been widely studied in the context of Western countries, however, there are few studies in Eastern Arabic countries. This study will explore how the culture in Bahrain society, which is Arabic and Islamic, shape the experiences of women working in the IT field. The Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT (IDTOGIT) (Trauth, 2002; Trauth et al., 2004; Queensberry & Trauth, 2007) was used in this study as a conceptual and an analytical framework for understanding the factors that influence women’s career advancement in the IT field. This theory examines the variations between women's personal characteristics and their ways of responding to the environmental influences in understanding women’s participation in the IT profession. An interview methodology was used for investigating the work experience of a group of ten Bahraini women in a senior or middle management position in the IT field. The interview methodology helps in getting a more complete picture of what happened in their career advancement, and how they achieved high managerial positions in the IT field. Face-to-face and semi-structured interviews were conducted with the cases in order to investigate the factors that hinder or facilitate their career advancement in the IT field. The constructive grounded theory analysis (Charmaz, 2006) was used for analysing the data of the interviews. The key findings of this study are that women in IT careers, especially at the early age of their career, need to show a high level of performance, productivity, and competencies in the work. Women’s career advancement in the IT field also demands a high level of commitment and motivation to the organisation, determination, challenge and ambition, and interest in IT work. The data analysis has showed that all of these identified individual characteristics are necessary and have a significant impact on the ability and way of responding to the environmental influences identified in this study. The most important environmental influences identified in this study are management support, relationship with peers, training, organisational structure and rules, understanding the IT role, cultural impact on women in the IT field, and work-life balance. Examining the influence of these individual and environmental factors together and the links between them helped to understand the participation of Bahraini women in the IT profession.The research findings will help in understanding some of the reasons behind gender segregation and women’s under-representation in the IT field in Bahrain. The study findings further offer insights into how to improve women’s career advancement in the IT field. Also, it provides a contribution to knowledge in the area of IT and gender by addressing the factors influencing women’s career advancement in the IT field. It is an original contribution to the body of knowledge by establishing the basis of further studies of women in IT careers in Bahrain focusing on career advancement

A Monte Carlo study of arms effect in myocardial perfusion of normal and abnormal cases utilizing STL heart shape

Arms influence in myocardial perfusion single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging has been studied for the last two decades. These studies suggested that arms positioning next to the patient would not show cardiac abnormalities or perfusion defects in SPECT imaging while it would not affect the scan during positron emission tomography (PET) scans. As a recent improvement in Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission (GATE), -a Monte Carlo simulation toolkit- a new feature was added to enable the use of STereoLithography (STL). STL files are implanted as an input geometry for most human organs, which would give superior advantages in details compared to analytical geometry shapes. This study is adopting this recent improvement in GATE to study arms effect in SPECT imaging with the consideration of four scenarios; normal heart perfusion imaging with and without arms positioned next to the patient and two of the same scenarios with a perfusion myocardial defected. The results showed that perfusion defect could be observed with arms next to the patient. For image reconstruction, both filtered backprojection (FBP) and iterative technique – maximum likelihood expectation maximization (MLEM) were used. The MLEM was performed to analyse the four different patient scenarios. The difference in counts between arms-up and arms-down position for the abnormal case was shown to be less than 6%. The conclusion from this paper is that arm influence during abnormal heart SPECT imaging can be measured and has a minimal contribution to the reconstructed images. Keywords: GATE, Reconstruction, SPECT, Arms, Heart, Myocardial, Perfusion, ST