Pedagogical approaches to support student resilience in higher-education settings: A systematic literature review

In recent years, Higher education (HE) students have continued to report rising rates of anxiety, depression and stress. One strategy employed to address these developments has been providing educational and administrative services that help to support and promote student resilience. Efforts to improve student resilience in HE may be bolstered by programs and strategies that go beyond traditional healthcare service delivery: for instance, initiatives such as in-course pedagogical approaches which target enhancing student resilience awareness and understanding. This systematic review aimed to identify, analyze, and synthesize the essential characteristics and programmatic features (e.g., methods) of pedagogical approaches (i.e., teaching strategies, curricula or other features) designed to support resilience among students in HE contexts. Searches were carried out in ERIC, PsychINFO, and SCOPUS and returned 1,545 results. Ultimately, thirty-five articles were included in the final synthesis. A three-level thematic analysis of the included thirty-five articles was conducted, in order to develop rigorous and consistent analytical themes. The five analytical themes that were subsequently developed included: 1) resilience education: reflection, understanding, awareness; 2) individual strategies: personal skill development; 3) institution- or department-level: structural, curricular opportunities; 4) interpersonal strategies: relational skill development; and 5) learning community: cohesion, integration, resource awareness. The implications and effectiveness of these themes for HE instructors are discussed

Active and Safe Routes to School: Evaluating School Travel Planning to Support Children\u27s Active Travel

Most Canadian children are not achieving their daily recommended physical activity (PA) levels despite the many emotional, psychological, and physical benefits of PA. Walking or wheeling to/from school, or active school travel (AST), is a viable method for improving children’s daily participation in PA. In Canada, the Active and Safe Routes to School initiative promotes AST through its comprehensive School Travel Planning (STP) program. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, broadly, this thesis investigates the i) implementation and ii) effectiveness of a regional, two-year STP program supporting AST. This thesis includes a systematic review of AST intervention models implemented in North America, a qualitative investigation of the program’s implementation and sustainability, and a quantitative analysis of the STP program’s impact on AST participation and perceptions. Findings are relevant to intervention facilitators and evaluators, school administrators, public health practitioners, local law enforcement agencies, community planners, and parents

Density Tapering of Linear Arrays Radiating Pencil Beams: A New Extremely Fast Gaussian Approach

In this communication, a very simple and extremely fast algorithm is proposed for the pencil beam synthesis of linear sparse arrays having uniform distribution of the excitations. The key idea is that of selecting, as a desired pattern, a Gaussian function having small standard deviation, so as to obtain a narrow beam. This immediately provides the excitation density of the corresponding continuous array of infinite length. Starting from this result and considering a linear array of length L with N elements having equal excitations, an extremely fast and accurate algorithm based on a density tapering approach is proposed that yields suitable positions of the elements, in such a way as to provide an array factor that well approximates the desired pattern. Numerical examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the developed procedure, also when compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. The proposed approach does not consider the mutual coupling between the array elements, but it is numerically shown that this effect produces quite acceptable degradation on the synthesized patterns. Finally, it is shown that also problems involving thousands of elements can be solved in a very accurate way in few milliseconds

Gaussian approach versus Dolph-Chebyshev synthesis of pencil beams for linear antenna arrays

A very simple and fast method for the synthesis of pencil beams with linear antenna arrays of equally spaced elements is presented. The proposed procedure starts selecting the desired pencil beam as a Gaussian function. This is very convenient for two reasons: first, the continuous line-source distribution that exactly produces the desired pencil beam (i.e. the Fourier transform of it) is in turn a Gaussian function and is immediately calculated. Second, a suitable weighted sampling of this distribution gives the excitations of the array elements in closed form. Two numerical examples reveal the good performances of the proposed approach, also in comparison with the classical method by Dolph-Chebyshev. It is shown that the synthesised array factors well approximate the desired pencil beams in real time, in particular ensuring a very good behaviour in the side lobe regions. Furthermore, the \u2018dynamic range ratio\u2019 of the excitations, defined as the ratio between the maximum and the minimum amplitude of the excitations, is very low and close to unity when the array length is sufficiently small

Limiting Performance of Millimeter-Wave Communications in the Presence of a 3D Random Waypoint Mobility Model

This paper proposes a mathematical framework for evaluating the limiting capacity of a millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication involving a mobile user (MU) and a cellular base station. The investigation is realized considering a threedimensional (3D) space in which the random waypoint mobility model is used to probabilistically identify the location of the MUs. Besides, the analysis is developed accounting for path-loss attenuation, directional antenna gains, shadowing, and modulation scheme. Closed-form formulas for the received signal power, the Shannon capacity, and the bit error rate (BER) are obtained for both line-of-sight (LoS) and non-LoS scenarios in the presence of a noise-limited operating regime. The conceived theoretical model is firstly checked by Monte Carlo validations, and then employed to explore the influence of the antenna gain and of the cell radius on the capacity and on the BER of a fifth-generation (5G) link in a 3D environment, taking into account both the 28 and 73 GHz mmWave bands

3D Millimeter-Wave Peer-to-Peer Networks With Boundary Located Destination

This letter presents a theoretical analysis for estimating the coverage probability and the average link capacity of an interfered peer-to-peer millimeter-wave communication, when the destination lies at the boundary of a three-dimensional cell. The proposed model provides closed-form expressions for the statistics of the desired and undesired signal powers, by accounting for the impact of directional antenna gains, path-loss attenuation, mid-scale fading, interference, and noise

Low-Complexity Phase-Only Scanning by Aperiodic Antenna Arrays

This letter proposes a simple and fast method for phase-only beam-scanning of linear aperiodic arrays. The method adopts a three-step procedure, consisting in the placement of the array elements by proper distribution functions, in the synthesis of the excitation amplitudes by an extended Gaussian approach, and in the evaluation of the excitation phases by a closed-form shifting. Numerical examples and comparisons with existing approaches are presented to check the effectiveness of the method, with the final aim of confirming its satisfactory behavior in terms of trade-off between accuracy and computational cost

New Fourier Transform Approach to the Synthesis of Shaped Patterns by Linear Antenna Arrays

A new Fourier Transform (NFT) approach is developed for the synthesis of shaped patterns radiated by linear antenna arrays. The proposed method exploits in an innovative way the FT relation between the source distribution and the radiated pattern. Precisely, the finite dimension of real sources is firstly taken into account by using the sampling theorem to approximate the desired pattern as a band-limited function. It is this step that allows one to obtain an important performance improvement. Then, a continuous source is evaluated from the approximate desired pattern to finally obtain the element excitations. Numerical examples validate the method