Mentoring for Effective Teaching - An Analysis of Austrian Teachers’ School-based Mentoring Practices

Mentoring studies worldwide indicate various methods of mentoring yet there are commonalities for mentoring around the classroom and school practices. Gauging a country’s potential for mentoring early-career teachers can provide understandings of current mentoring practices towards initiating advancements. This quantitative study drew upon a validated survey instrument to gain insights on how mentoring occurs in Austria. Participants (mentors, n=63) provided indications on their mentoring experiences across five factors (personal attributes, system requirements, pedagogical knowledge, modelling, and feedback). Results show that these mentors were motivated to support their mentees, particularly with pedagogical knowledge (e.g., classroom management). As a self-reporting instrument, participants claimed they mentored on 9 of the 11 pedagogical knowledge items with percentages greater than 68%, however, only a little more than half mentored content knowledge and assessment. Using the survey provided information on what to focus on for advancing mentoring practices in Austria - especially with questions of support in the areas of planning, implementation, questioning techniques and assessment

The communication of CSR activities via social media A qualitative approach to identify opportunities and challenges for small and medium-sized enterprises in the agri-food sector

Within this paper we analyze a state-of-the-art type of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, communication via social media. This type of communication with stakeholders is of growing importance. Opportunities and challenges of communication through social media channels are identified with special emphasis on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the agri-food sector. 8 expert interviews were conducted on the basis of a broad literature review. The results of the qualitative interviews are analyzed by means of a comprehensive computer aided qualitative content analysis. The study enables the reader to get insights into the current situation regarding the implementation of CSR communication through social media channels in SMEs. Opportunities and threats of the application of social media are identified. The results are compared with relevant findings from literature

Studying Moral-based Differences in the Framing of Political Tweets

In this paper, we study the moral framing of political content on Twitter. Specifically, we examine differences in moral framing in two datasets: (i) tweets from US-based politicians annotated with political affiliation and (ii) COVID-19 related tweets in German from followers of the leaders of the five major Austrian political parties. Our research is based on recent work that introduces an unsupervised approach to extract framing bias and intensity in news using a dictionary of moral virtues and vices. In this paper, we use a more extensive dictionary and adapt it to German-language tweets. Overall, in both datasets, we observe a moral framing that is congruent with the public perception of the political parties. In the US dataset, democrats have a tendency to frame tweets in terms of care, while loyalty is a characteristic frame for republicans. In the Austrian dataset, we find that the followers of the governing conservative party emphasize care, which is a key message and moral frame in the party's COVID-19 campaign slogan. Our work complements existing studies on moral framing in social media. Also, our empirical findings provide novel insights into moral-based framing on COVID-19 in Austria.Comment: Accepted for publication in ICWSM-2021 - link to published version will be adde

Downregulation of Tumor Necrosis Factor Expression in the Human Mono-Mac-6 Cell Line

Mono-Mac-6 cells, but not U937 cells, can be Induced to rapidly express tumor necrosis factor (TNF) mRNA and protein when triggered with Ilpopolysaccharlde (LPS) at 1 pg/mI. Preincubatlon of the cells for 3 d with low amounts of LPS (10 ng/mI) results In nearly complete suppression of TNF secretion. This downreguiatlon appears to occur at the pretranslational level since specIfIc mRNA is virtually undetectable under these conditions. By contrast, the same prelncubatlon with 10 ng/mI LPS results in enhanced phagocytosls (28.6-67.2% for Staphylococcus aureus), demonstrating that not all monocyte functions are suppressed. While these results show that only stringent exclusion of LPS from culture media allows for Induction of TNF In the Mono-Mac-6 cell line, the pronounced effect of LPS preincubatlon may also provide a suitable model with which to study the mechanisms of LPS-lnduced desensitizatIon

Framing Analysis of Health-Related Narratives: Conspiracy versus Mainstream Media

Understanding how online media frame issues is crucial due to their impact on public opinion. Research on framing using natural language processing techniques mainly focuses on specific content features in messages and neglects their narrative elements. Also, the distinction between framing in different sources remains an understudied problem. We address those issues and investigate how the framing of health-related topics, such as COVID-19 and other diseases, differs between conspiracy and mainstream websites. We incorporate narrative information into the framing analysis by introducing a novel frame extraction approach based on semantic graphs. We find that health-related narratives in conspiracy media are predominantly framed in terms of beliefs, while mainstream media tend to present them in terms of science. We hope our work offers new ways for a more nuanced frame analysis

Social Desirability and the Willingness to Provide Social Media Accounts in Surveys. The Case of Environmental Attitudes

[EN] This paper contributes to the research on combining public opinion surveys and social media data by a) analyzing the effects of social desirability on the willingness to provide social media account information in surveys, and b) evaluating the congruence of opinions expressed in the survey and on social media. We analyze these questions by considering the willingness to make a sacrifice for the environment, i.e., the willingness to pay higher taxes and higher prices. Our results show that Facebook users who oppose environmental measures are less likely to share their account information in the survey, whereas this effect could not be found among Twitter users. Considering the congruence of opinions expressed in the survey and on Twitter, we find similar tendencies both at the aggregate and the individual level.Klösch, B.; Hadler, M.; Reiter-Haas, M.; Lex, E. (2022). Social Desirability and the Willingness to Provide Social Media Accounts in Surveys. The Case of Environmental Attitudes. En 4th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2022). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 119-127. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2022.2022.1506911912

mCPT at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Multilingual Label-Aware Contrastive Pre-Training of Transformers for Few- and Zero-shot Framing Detection

This paper presents the winning system for the zero-shot Spanish framing detection task, which also achieves competitive places in eight additional languages. The challenge of the framing detection task lies in identifying a set of 14 frames when only a few or zero samples are available, i.e., a multilingual multi-label few- or zero-shot setting. Our developed solution employs a pre-training procedure based on multilingual Transformers using a label-aware contrastive loss function. In addition to describing the system, we perform an embedding space analysis and ablation study to demonstrate how our pre-training procedure supports framing detection to advance computational framing analysis.Comment: Accepted for publication at SemEval'2