“Same same” but different? Exploring the impact of perceived organizational support at the school and teacher levels on teachers’ job engagement and organizational citizenship behavior

All countries in the world are currently trying to implement educational reform, which increases the additional workload of teachers. It is more important to discuss how to inspire teachers’ enthusiasm for educational reform from the perspective of organizational support (OS). Previous research on OS was limited to perceived organizational support (POS), but in recent years group-level OS has been considered the most promising. There is no study comparing POS and group-level OS in education, and therefore this study explored the relationships between OS, job engagement (JE) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in an educational context. In particular, OS was examined at the individual-level (POS) and the aggregated group-level (school organizational support, SOS). Analysis was performed using structural equation modeling (SEM) at both single and multiple levels. SEM results showed direct and positive relationships of individual-level POS with both JE and OCB. Moreover, JE is directly and positively related to OCB and plays the partial mediating role of the indirect and positive impact of POS on OCB. Multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) analysis revealed direct and positive relationships of SOS with teachers’ JE, which was directly and positively related to their OCB. While SOS had no significant positive relationship with OCB, it did have a positive impact on OCB through the mediation of JE. Comparison between SEM and MSEM results revealed the change in effect of OS on OCB from significant to insignificant, thus implying full mediation effect of JE when SOS is considered

Internationalization of quality assurance and the international quality of higher education in Taiwan

Purpose – This study employs survey methods to statistically examine the internationalization of quality assurance (IQA) in Taiwanese higher education. The data collected were analyzed to assess the associations between administrators' opinions of the importance of IQA and their evaluations of its implementation, as well as the relationship between implementation and opinions on seven measures of international quality. The study also explores the mediating effect of implementation assessments on the relationship between opinions of the importance of IQA and opinions of international quality. Design/methodology/approach – This study targeted higher education administrators from universities in Taiwan, including presidents, vice presidents, deans, section chiefs, directors, and heads of schools in various departments. Using systematic sampling methods, 80 universities were selected from a population of 159 higher education institutions in Taiwan, with 17-40 potential participants each in 2015. A total of 2,377 questionnaires were distributed to all the administrators of those institutions, and ultimately, 65 institutions and 337 valid questionnaires were analyzed. Findings – The importance of IQA directly and positively influenced implementation of it on higher education institutions. The implementation directly and positively influenced the level of international quality of the institutions and the importance of IQA had an indirect positive influence on international quality through implementation. The aggregated institution-level results were similar to but much stronger than the individual-level results. Originality/value – This study examined the IQA of higher education in Taiwan, which is increasingly important to institutions' competitiveness in the global higher education market. The data were analyzed using multilevel structural equation modeling at the individual-level and the aggregate-level. The analysis revealed direct and indirect associations between opinions about IQA and institutional quality. This study makes a significant contribution to the literature because it clarifies the role of administrators (individually and collectively) regarding their institutions' educational quality, and it provides useful information that institutions could apply to improve their international competitiveness

Anticipating Daily Intention using On-Wrist Motion Triggered Sensing

Anticipating human intention by observing one's actions has many applications. For instance, picking up a cellphone, then a charger (actions) implies that one wants to charge the cellphone (intention). By anticipating the intention, an intelligent system can guide the user to the closest power outlet. We propose an on-wrist motion triggered sensing system for anticipating daily intentions, where the on-wrist sensors help us to persistently observe one's actions. The core of the system is a novel Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Policy Network (PN), where the RNN encodes visual and motion observation to anticipate intention, and the PN parsimoniously triggers the process of visual observation to reduce computation requirement. We jointly trained the whole network using policy gradient and cross-entropy loss. To evaluate, we collect the first daily "intention" dataset consisting of 2379 videos with 34 intentions and 164 unique action sequences. Our method achieves 92.68%, 90.85%, 97.56% accuracy on three users while processing only 29% of the visual observation on average

Data mining of the GAW14 simulated data using rough set theory and tree-based methods

Rough set theory and decision trees are data mining methods used for dealing with vagueness and uncertainty. They have been utilized to unearth hidden patterns in complicated datasets collected for industrial processes. The Genetic Analysis Workshop 14 simulated data were generated using a system that implemented multiple correlations among four consequential layers of genetic data (disease-related loci, endophenotypes, phenotypes, and one disease trait). When information of one layer was blocked and uncertainty was created in the correlations among these layers, the correlation between the first and last layers (susceptibility genes and the disease trait in this case), was not easily directly detected. In this study, we proposed a two-stage process that applied rough set theory and decision trees to identify genes susceptible to the disease trait. During the first stage, based on phenotypes of subjects and their parents, decision trees were built to predict trait values. Phenotypes retained in the decision trees were then advanced to the second stage, where rough set theory was applied to discover the minimal subsets of genes associated with the disease trait. For comparison, decision trees were also constructed to map susceptible genes during the second stage. Our results showed that the decision trees of the first stage had accuracy rates of about 99% in predicting the disease trait. The decision trees and rough set theory failed to identify the true disease-related loci

The Effect of Lavender Aromatherapy on Autonomic Nervous System in Midlife Women with Insomnia

The objective of this study is to determine the effects of 12 weeks of lavender aromatherapy on self-reported sleep and heart rate variability (HRV) in the midlife women with insomnia. Sixty-seven women aged 45–55 years, with a CPSQI (Chinese version of Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index) greater than 5, were recruited from communities in Taiwan. The experimental group (n = 34) received lavender inhalation, 20 min each time, twice per week, for 12 weeks, with a total of 24 times. The control group (n = 33) received health education program for sleep hygiene with no intervention. The study of HRV was analyzed by time- and frequency-domain methods. Significant decrease in mean heart rate (HR) and increases in SDNN (standard deviation of the normal-to-normal (NN) intervals), RMSDD (square root of the mean squared differences of successive NN intervals), and HF (high frequency) of spectral powers analysis after lavender inhalation were observed in the 4th and 12th weeks of aromatherapy. The total CPSQI score of study subjects was significantly decreased in the experimental group (P < 0.001), while no significant difference was observed across the same time period (P = 0.776) in the control group. Resting HR and HRV measurements at baseline 1 month and 3 months after allocation showed no significant difference between the experimental and control groups. The study demonstrated that lavender inhalation may have a persistent short-term effect on HRV with an increase in parasympathetic modulation. Women receiving aromatherapy experienced a significant improvement in sleep quality after intervention. However, lavender aromatherapy does not appear to confer benefit on HRV in the long-term followup

Dose pre-hospital laryngeal mask airway use has a survival benefit in non-shockable cardiac arrest?

Background. Whether pre-hospital laryngeal mask airway (LMA) use poses a survival benefit and should be approved as routine airway management in non-shockable cardiac arrest is of major concern. The present study examined the effectiveness of LMA, in comparison to other pre-hospital airway management on individuals who have experienced non-shockable cardiac arrest. Methods. Adult patients who experienced non-shockable cardiac arrest with activation of the emergency medical service (EMS) made up our study cohort in Taoyuan, Taiwan. The data were abstracted from EMS records and cardiac arrest registration protocols. Results. Among the 1912 enrolled patients, most received LMA insertion (72.4%), 108 (5.6%) bag-valve-mask (BVM) ventilation, 376 (19.7%) high-flow oxygen non-rebreather facemask, and only 44 (2.3%) received endotracheal tube intubation (ETI). With regard to survival to discharge, no significant differences in prevalence were evident among the groups: 2.8% of oxygen facial mask, 1.1% of BVM, 2.1% of LMA, and 4.5% of the ETI group survived to discharge (p = 0.314). In comparison to oxygen facial mask use, different types of airway management remained unassociated with survival to discharge after adjusting for variables by logistic regression analysis (BVM: 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.079 – 1.639 [p = 0.186]; LMA: 95% CI, 0.220–2.487 [p = 0.627]; ETI: 95% CI, 0.325–17.820 [p = 0.390]). The results of Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test of logistic regression model revealed good calibration. Conclusions. Pre-hospital LMA use was not associated with additional survival to discharge compared with facial oxygen mask, BVM, or ETI following non-shockable cardiac arrest