Scaffolding Facilitates Inter-School Collaborative Learning: A Case Study in China

Inter-school collaborative learning (ICL) has significant meaning for bridging the educational gap between urban and rural schools. This study examines the effectiveness of three scaffolding conditions on learning outcomes in an ICL environment. One urban primary school and one rural school were selected to participate in the inter-school collaboration. Three 6th grade classes in each school were randomly assigned to one of three scaffolding conditions: lowest-coercion scaffolding (class A), highest-coercion scaffolding (class B), or adaptive scaffolding (class C). Detailed scaffolds were designed and developed to support ICL from 8 dimensions, including 18 strategies and 27 scaffolding tools. Both process data and summative data were collected to measure the learning outcomes at both group and individual levels. Results showed that pupils with highest-coercion or adaptive scaffoldings (in class B and class C) performed better than those with lowest-coercion scaffolding (in class A). Questionnaire results also supported the effectiveness of scaffolds on inter-school collaborative learning. Findings also revealed that middle-coercion adaptive scaffolding was significantly most supportive for urban school while highest-coercion scaffolding was most suitable for rural school

Development of a Scaffold Design Model in Inter-school Collaboration Environment: A Design-based Research

This study examines the development of a theoretical framework for scaffold design in an inter-school collaboration environment. The research question primarily deals with how to design scaffolds for an Inter-school Collaborative Learning (ICL). Design-based research methodology was used in this study. Literature review, questionnaire survey, field survey, and interviews were used during the course of research. Forty-seven secondary schools in 25 provinces in China were selected and participated in the study. This paper reports the first circle of design-based research. Through design-based research, a scaffold design model was developed and revised. Eight key types of scaffolding for ICL were identified. Elaborated strategies and tools were summarized for implementation of these scaffolds

A nodule on the forearm

Glomus tumors are benign tumors of the skin. Clinically, these tumors can present as solid, painful subcutaneous nodules, frequently seen on the hand (particularly subungual region). Glomangiomyomas are the least common histological type of glomus tumor. In the literature, there are only a few glomangiomyoma cases of the forearm location. We report a patient with a painful nodule, diagnosed as glomangiomyoma. Surgical excision was performed and no recurrence was observed after 5 years' follow-up

Maximizing NVivo Utilities to Analyze Open-Ended Responses

Open-ended responses are widely used to explore and understand participants’ experiences and perspectives in a variety of fields. As one of the most powerful computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software, NVivo allows researchers to analyze open-ended responses to survey and/or interview questions, as well as other text data like reflective writing, image, and videos. The purpose of this paper is to describe and demonstrate how the NVivo word frequency, text search, and matrix coding features can be used to analyze qualitative data from a longitudinal evaluation project. The authors show how the matrix coding feature maximizes NVivo utilities in an analysis of open-ended responses and highlights differences across and within participants’ groups. The authors explain this approach by presenting a step by step overview: data cleaning and case coding; data import; word frequency analysis; text coding and reference extracting; and matrix coding and inductive analysis. Using this approach, the Clinical Translational Science Institute (CTSI) evaluation team acquired deeper insight into the participants’ experiences and perspectives about CTSI programs and received insights that may lead to improvement. From a methodological perspective, this approach capitalizes on NVivo’s features to mine qualitative data. The methodology described in this paper is applicable to other educational or program evaluations. Also, it is appropriate for analyzing large samples or longitudinal qualitative data in marketing and management

What Open-Ended Comments Reveal: An Analysis of a Clinical Translational Science Institute’s Annual Surveys

Analyzing open-ended responses can provide insight regarding participants’ experiences or illuminate organizational issues. The purpose of this study was to qualitatively analyze 1096 open-ended responses to a longitudinal survey and report patterns observed across participants. Word frequency, text search and matrix coding were used to analyze the data. Thematic differences were noted by the college group denoting the participant’s primary appointment. Although perceived gaps between expectations and service delivery were expected, participants’ statements pointed out informational inaccuracies or an absence of awareness. The inherent richness and insight of the analysis yielded complexities, otherwise not discernable using quantitative analyses. The authors offer suggestions for improving the university clinical translational science institute’s delivery of biomedical research services

Enhancing Cultural Competence Among Dental Students Through Active Teaching and Experiential Learning

Dental schools are required to utilize teaching practices that increase students’ culture competence and ensure their ability to deliver equitable oral care. This study explored the impact of active teaching, an approach that offered comprehensive engagement and experiential learning. Students participated in small group activities, conducted interviews and developed reflective writings. A QUAN→qual sequential mixed method was used to analyze their reflective writings. Quantitative results indicated that students’ cultural competence was significantly enhanced. Qualitative findings showed that students recognized their unconscious biases and reported an increase of cultural competence. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of experiential learning, particularly the addition of small group discussions, in instruction aimed at enhancing cultural competence among 84 first year pre-doctoral dental students

The impact of international trade on Guangdong's industrial agglomeration -An empirical analysis of manufacturing industry in Guangdong Province, China

Guangdong, the forerunner of implementing open door policies in China, has experienced the prevailing industrial agglomeration since 1990s. Previous research attributed this concentration to many factors other than international trade which is a key characteristic of Guangdong economic development. Based on the study of the manufacturing industry in Guangdong, this paper aims to find out whether international trade pushes industrial agglomeration. This paper will observe eleven manufacturing sectors in Guangdong over the 2000-2009 period and build the models with transformed measures of industrial agglomeration and international trade as well as two other factors. Next the models will be examined in different ways such as Cross-Section Weighted Least Squares (CSWLS), Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) and Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). The finding of this paper is that international trade does have a positive impact on agglomeration at least in some sectors of manufacturing industry in Guangdong Province, China

UKnow: A Unified Knowledge Protocol for Common-Sense Reasoning and Vision-Language Pre-training

This work presents a unified knowledge protocol, called UKnow, which facilitates knowledge-based studies from the perspective of data. Particularly focusing on visual and linguistic modalities, we categorize data knowledge into five unit types, namely, in-image, in-text, cross-image, cross-text, and image-text. Following this protocol, we collect, from public international news, a large-scale multimodal knowledge graph dataset that consists of 1,388,568 nodes (with 571,791 vision-related ones) and 3,673,817 triplets. The dataset is also annotated with rich event tags, including 96 coarse labels and 9,185 fine labels, expanding its potential usage. To further verify that UKnow can serve as a standard protocol, we set up an efficient pipeline to help reorganize existing datasets under UKnow format. Finally, we benchmark the performance of some widely-used baselines on the tasks of common-sense reasoning and vision-language pre-training. Results on both our new dataset and the reformatted public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of UKnow in knowledge organization and method evaluation. Code, dataset, conversion tool, and baseline models will be made public

EvEval: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Event Semantics for Large Language Models

Events serve as fundamental units of occurrence within various contexts. The processing of event semantics in textual information forms the basis of numerous natural language processing (NLP) applications. Recent studies have begun leveraging large language models (LLMs) to address event semantic processing. However, the extent that LLMs can effectively tackle these challenges remains uncertain. Furthermore, the lack of a comprehensive evaluation framework for event semantic processing poses a significant challenge in evaluating these capabilities. In this paper, we propose an overarching framework for event semantic processing, encompassing understanding, reasoning, and prediction, along with their fine-grained aspects. To comprehensively evaluate the event semantic processing abilities of models, we introduce a novel benchmark called EVEVAL. We collect 8 datasets that cover all aspects of event semantic processing. Extensive experiments are conducted on EVEVAL, leading to several noteworthy findings based on the obtained results

Exploring How U.S. Dental Schools Teach Removal of Carious Tissues During Cavity Preparations

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153710/1/jddj002203372017811tb06241x.pd