Bridging students: successful transition from high school to college

38 | P a g e BRIDGING STUDENTS – SUCCESSFUL TRANSITION FROM HIGH SCHOOL TO COLLEGE Tang Yee Voon and Wong Shae Lynn Sunway College Johor Bahru (MALAYSIA) [email protected], [email protected] +607-3596880 Abstract Transitioning from secondary school to college is an important developmental milestone that holds the potential for personal growth and behavioral change (Fromme, 2008). It involves changes in roles, additional challenges and responsibilities, be it academic or social (Conley et al., 2014). However, secondary school students often enter college unprepared for what is expected of them because their high school experiences often fail to prepare them for postsecondary education (Bangser, 2008). Key stressors for college students include personal freedom, college instructors and instructions, programme structures as well as testing and grades (Johnston, 2010). In addition to the stressors, students are not equipped with the skills required for successful college transition. These skills include academic skills, self-understanding (metacognition), selfadvocacy, executive function, motivation and confidence, key cognitive strategies and key knowledge about post-secondary education (Johnston, 2010; Landmark College, 2009). This paper embarks on a study specifically sought to identify transitional barriers faced by postsecondary students who are enrolled in the Pre-University programmes at Sunway College Johor Bahru. The outcome would also highlight the inadequacies of their pre-college preparation years and their lack of crucial skills to survive the college years. It is our hope that through this effort, we are able to establish approaches to support students in making a successful transition from high school to college. Successful transition is imperative because the benefits of postsecondary education are compelling. For an individual, this means getting jobs with higher wages and career advancement opportunities. For the country, this means a productive workforce and international competitiveness. Hence, successful transition to college should be a challenge shouldered by all parties, including policy makers, teachers and parents

Effective teaching practices redefined.

The education sector in Malaysia is becoming increasingly competitive and in order for the college to emerge at the top, effective teaching that promotes student learning must be emphasized. However, the extent to which lecturers understand the meaning of effective teaching is debatable. Following the framework of Berliner (1988) and Sandholtz (2011), both studies agree that student learning can only occur if teachers deal with classroom management concerns first before focusing on teaching instruction. The latter study even pointed out that teachers are often engaged in instructive methodologies instead of reviewing classroom management as a means of effective teaching. This has triggered us to examine our college lecturers’ perspectives of this issue: to query and inspect the extent of our college lecturers’ understanding of effective teaching and we hope to clarify and redefine the prerequisites of being an effective lecturer. This study is conducted by means of a survey to investigate the responses and views of Sunway College lecturers towards the strategies and approaches they have undertaken in classrooms and will aim to understand the subjective meaning of their experience. In addition, the effectiveness of the strategies and approaches employed by lecturers in class would be evaluated from the students’ viewpoints, in lieu of seeking parallelism in views. The outcome of this investigation is intended to provide our college lecturers a more accurate direction towards an effective teaching practice. In addition, students’ perspectives in productive learning can be reestablished, which would allow us to reflect and improvise on our current teaching skills and ultimately achieve a more successful breakthrough at both ends

Holistic engineering design : a combined synchronous and asynchronous approach

To aid the creation and through-life support of large, complex engineering products, organizations are placing a greater emphasis on constructing complete and accurate records of design activities. Current documentary approaches are not sufficient to capture activities and decisions in their entirety and can lead to organizations revisiting and in some cases reworking design decisions in order to understand previous design episodes. Design activities are undertaken in a variety of modes; many of which are dichotomous, and thus each require separate documentary mechanisms to capture information in an efficient manner. It is possible to identify the modes of learning and transaction to describe whether an activity is aimed at increasing a level of understanding or whether it involves manipulating information to achieve a tangible task. The dichotomy of interest in this paper is that of synchronous and asynchronous working, where engineers may work alternately as part of a group or as individuals and where different forms of record are necessary to adequately capture the processes and rationale employed in each mode. This paper introduces complimentary approaches to achieving richer representations of design activities performed synchronously and asynchronously, and through the undertaking of a design based case study, highlights the benefit of each approach. The resulting records serve to provide a more complete depiction of activities undertaken, and provide positive direction for future co-development of the approaches

Ferrous Sulphate From Titanium Dioxide Industry For The Treatment Of Petroleum Refinery Wastewater

Kaedah rawatan penggumpalan dan pengelompokan digunakan secara meluas dalam proses industri. Kecekapan proses penggumpalan dan pengelompokan ditentukan oleh dos penggumpal, pH, suhu, kekuatan ionik, kepekatan bahan organik, caj permukaan dan beberapa faktor lain. FeSO4 (penggumpal) tidak didokumentasikan dengan baik dalam rawatan air sisa kilang penapisan petroleum (PRW). Oleh itu, dalam kajian ini, keupayaan FeSO4 dalam rawatan PRW telah dikaji. Kecekapan penyingkiran/pengurangan warna, jumlah pepejal terampai (TSS), kekeruhan dan keperluan okisigen kimia (COD) telah dikira. Penggumpalan dan pengelompokan boleh dipantau melalui pengukuran kegerakan elektroforetik dan penentuan potensi zeta. Dalam kajian ini, interaksi antara FeSO4 dengan zarah koloid bercas negatif dalam PRW dan mekanisme yang terlibat dalam proses penggumpalan dan pengelompokan dikaji. Tingkah laku zarah PRW yang berbeza terhadap FeSO4 bergantung kepada pH dan dos FeSO4 telah ditunjukkan. Coagulation-flocculation treatment method is widely used in industrial processes. The efficiency of coagulation-flocculation process is determined by the coagulant dosage, pH, temperature, ionic strength, nature and concentration of organic matter, the surface charge and several other factors. FeSO4 (coagulant) is not well documented in the treatment of petroleum refinery wastewater (PRW). Therefore, in this research, capability of FeSO4 in the treatment of PRW was studied. The removal/reduction efficiencies for color, total suspended solids (TSS), turbidity and chemical oxygen demand (COD) were calculated. The coagulation-flocculation process can be monitored through the measurement of the electrophoretic mobility and the determination of zeta potential. In this study, the interaction between FeSO4 and the negatively charged colloidal particles in PRW and the mechanisms involved in the coagulation-flocculation process were studied. Different behaviors of PRW particles with FeSO4 depending on the pH and the dosage of the FeSO4 were demonstrated

Performative Authoring: Nurturing Children’s Creativity and Creative Self-Efficacy through Digitally-Augmented Enactment-Based Storytelling

Psychological research, especially by Paul Torrance, has shown that the child’s engagement in creative activities tends to drop precipitously at around the 3rd- to 4th-grade period (8 to 11 years old). This phenomenon, called the ‘Fourth-Grade Slump’, occurs possibly because of an increase in social awareness and critical self-evaluation of competence in the child during this period. Increasing awareness of the complexity of the world’s problems, new paradigms of design focusing on the user, and advances in technology has led to rapid developments in the design and development of tools to support children’s creativity. Research in creativity support tools has generally focused on augmenting creative performance within specific tasks, using strategies such as facilitating access to information, or exposing the user to a space of possible combinations. Much less studied however, is how tools may help to develop positive attitudes towards creativity in individuals. This is important, especially in systems designed for children where the focus on the development of the person, during critical periods of growth such as the period of the Fourth-Grade Slump, may be said to be of equivalent or greater importance than the support of process or the generation of product. In the domain of storytelling or narrative construction, work in child development, educational pedagogy, social psychology, and performance studies have looked at how to tap into the power of children’s imagination during pretend play to nurture their storytelling abilities and their sense of self-efficacy or confidence. These interventions typically take the form of drama workshops or classroom roleplaying exercises. While results appear to provide good evidence that drama interventions and theater-based methods have some positive effects on children’s development of narratives, studies have shown mixed results in terms of the effects on children’s self-efficacy. I refer here to self-efficacy in the sense of a child’s perception of her creative abilities, in other words, her belief that she can produce creative outcomes. This creativity-oriented sense of self-efficacy has been called ‘creative self-efficacy’. This dissertation investigates how pretend play can be harnessed into the design of an interface to support children’s creativity in storytelling and their sense of creative self-efficacy. This overarching question was explored through four phases of research: Exploration, Design, Evaluation, and Integration. The Exploration phase consisted of two studies: a) a set of interviews with elementary school teachers, and b) an experimental study of how the interface or medium may affect children’s creative storytelling process; The Design phase consisted of two experimental studies, and design and development: a) the first study investigated how the physicality of props may support children’s enactment-based storytelling, and b) the second study explored the influence of the presentation of digital contextual/environmental cues on children’s enactment-based storytelling, c) design and development consisted of an exercise using the NEVO methodology to embody design knowledge gained from the Design phase into a concrete usable system, called DiME; The Evaluation phase consisted of two studies: a) the first was a pilot study that tested the usability of DiME and protocol of use with children, and b) the second was an experimental study across two school districts with different profiles investigating the effects of digitally-augmented enactment-based storytelling using DiME, on children’s creativity, story writing and creative self-efficacy; The Integration phase of the research consisted of a workshop with elementary school teachers, which initiated an exploration into how such a story authoring approach may be used in an elementary school curriculum and setting. The body of work that this dissertation presents elucidates (i) a physical enactment-based method for the authoring of stories by children, and (ii) how a digitally-augmented space may move beyond simple drama methods to positively influence the child’s creativity and imagination during storytelling, as well as her self-belief and motivation to engage in creation. The digitally-augmented enactment-based storytelling environment, that I term performative authoring, allows the child to collaboratively create a story through pretend play with a partner, while her enactments are reflected in real-time in the form of animated cartoon characters and objects on a large screen display through the use of motion tracking technologies. I have found that performative authoring has positive effects not only on the child’s creative self-efficacy, especially for the less extraverted children, but also on the richness of the child’s retelling or written narrative of her story. The significance of the results of the studies is with respect to the various domains and subareas represented (child-computer interaction, interactive storytelling, education and educational psychology, creativity and cognition). There is great potential to extend the concept of exploiting digitally-augmented enactment to support and scaffold higher-level cognition, beyond physical enactment. Extensions of this work include making use of more epistemic forms of enactment, instead of full-blown enactment, to support children’s creative story brainstorming, or to make use of digitally-augmented enactment to support other forms of higher thought apart from creativity and imagination. In the domain of storytelling or narrative construction, work in child development, educational pedagogy, social psychology, and performance studies have looked at how to tap into the power of children’s imagination during pretend play to nurture their storytelling abilities and their sense of self-efficacy or confidence. These interventions typically take the form of drama workshops or classroom roleplaying exercises. While results appear to provide good evidence that drama interventions and theater-based methods have some positive effects on children’s development of narratives, studies have shown mixed results in terms of the effects on children’s self-efficacy. I refer here to self-efficacy in the sense of a child’s perception of her creative abilities, in other words, her belief that she can produce creative outcomes. This creativity-oriented sense of self-efficacy has been called ‘creative self-efficacy’ (Beghetto, 2006, 2007). This dissertation investigates how pretend play can be harnessed into the design of an interface to support children’s creativity in storytelling and their sense of creative self-efficacy. This overarching question was explored through four phases of research: I. Exploration, II. Design, III. Evaluation, and IV. Integration. Phase 1 Exploration consisted of two studies: 1A) a set of interviews with elementary school teachers, and 1B) an experimental study of how the interface or medium may affect children’s creative storytelling process; Phase 2 Design consisted of two experimental studies, and design and development: 2A) the first study investigates how the physicality of props may support children’s enactment-based storytelling, and 2B) the second study explores the influence of the presentation of digital contextual/environmental cues on children’s enactment-based storytelling, 2C) design and development consisted of an exercise using the NEVO methodology to embody design knowledge gained from Phase 2 into a concrete usable system, called DiME; Phase 3 Evaluation consisted of two studies: 3A) the first was a pilot study that tested the usability of DiME and protocol of use with children, and 3B) the second was an experimental study across two school districts with different profiles investigating the effects of digitally-augmented enactment-based storytelling using DiME, on children’s creativity, story writing and creative self-efficacy; and Phase 4 Integration consisted of a workshop with elementary school teachers, which initiated an exploration into how such a story authoring approach may be used in an elementary school curriculum and setting. The body of work that this dissertation presents elucidates (i) a physical enactment-based method for the authoring of stories by children, and (ii) how a digitally-augmented space may move beyond simple drama methods to positively influence the child’s creativity and imagination during storytelling, as well as her self-belief and motivation to engage in creation. The digitally-augmented enactment-based storytelling environment, termed performative authoring in this document, allows the child to collaboratively create a story through pretend play with a partner, while her enactments are reflected in real-time in the form of animated cartoon characters and objects on a large screen display through the use of motion tracking technologies. I have found that performative authoring has positive effects not only on the child’s creative self- efficacy, especially for the less extraverted children, but also on the richness of the child’s retelling or written narrative of her story. This dissertation concludes by discussing the significance of the results of our studies with respect to the various domains and subareas represented (child-computer interaction, interactive storytelling, education and educational psychology, creativity and cognition) and extends the concept of exploiting digitally-augmented enactment to support and scaffold higher-level cognition, beyond physical enactment. Extensions of this work include making use of more epistemic forms of enactment, instead of full-blown enactment, to support children’s creative story brainstorming, or to make use of digitally-augmented enactment to support other forms of higher thought apart from creativity and imagination

Rates of breastfeeding initiation and duration in the United States: data insights from the 2016–2019 Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System

IntroductionWhile breastfeeding rates in the United States have been increasing, they remain low by international standards with substantial racial, income and education disparities. This study uses recent population-based data to analyze sociodemographic differences in breastfeeding initiation, duration, and exposure to information and education.MethodsWe used the 2016–2019 Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) to compare breastfeeding duration among a representative population from 43 states and the District of Columbia. We modeled the likelihood of never initiating breastfeeding by respondent’s age, race and ethnicity, language, marital status, household income, educational attainment, parity and insurance status. We also compared sources of information and education for respondents who never breastfed to those who breastfed up to 6 months.ResultsAmong 142,643 new mother respondents, representing an estimated population of 7,426,725 birthing individuals, 12.6% never breastfed, 60.4% reported breastfeeding at 3 months and 54.7% at 6 months. While 75.8% of college graduates reported breastfeeding at 3 months, this was only 37.8% of respondents with high school or less. Among those with the lowest six-month rates were non-Hispanic Black participants (36.3%) and those age < 20 (25.5%). Respondents with Medicaid coverage for their delivery were 25% more likely to have never breastfed than the privately insured. Respondents reporting household income <$20,000 were 57$85,000. While 64.1% of those breastfeeding at 6 months reported receiving information from “my” doctor’, this was only 13.0% of those who never breastfeed.DiscussionImproved breastfeeding rates could have significant effects on reducing health disparities in the United States. Clinical and public health policy initiatives need to include culturally sensitive breastfeeding education before and after childbirth, with psychological and direct support from obstetrics and primary care providers. Health plans should support home and community-based in-person and telelactation consulting services. Public policies such as paid family and medical leave and workplace accommodations will also be critical. Given the huge implications of breastfeeding rates on the development of infant immune defenses and a healthy microbiome, improving breastfeeding rates should be a much more important public health priority in the United States

Evaluation of physicochemical characteristics and genetic diversity of widely consumed rice varieties in Kyaukse area, Myanmar

Consumer preferences are greatly influenced by eating and cooking qualities of rice grains, along with the economic value of a specific rice variety. This study was to evaluate ten rice varieties including the check variety IR64 on their physicochemical, cooking and eating qualities as well as to identify their genetic diversity using SSR markers. Most rice varieties are medium-grain types based on length-breadth ratio, whereas the famous Myanmar rice variety, Paw San Bay Kyar, (PSBK) is bold. PSBK showed the best cooking and eating quality traits with intermediate amylose content (AC), intermediate gelatinization temperature (GT), soft gel consistency (GC), and the highest elongation ratio among the studied rice varieties. Seventeen SSR markers linked with cooking and eating traits were used to assess the extent of polymorphism and genetic variation among ten rice varieties. There were 49 alleles in total, with an average of 2.88 alleles per locus. RM592 had the maximum number of alleles. The average PIC value ranged from 0.22 (RM540) to 0.77 (RM592). Cluster analysis with UPGMA method based on Jaccard’s similarity coefficient divided ten rice varieties into two main groups and four sub-clusters. In multiple regression analysis, RM190 and Wx primers were discovered to be significantly associated with AC, GC and GT of cooking and eating quality traits. This study could contribute to the choice of rice varieties with superior cooking and eating qualities for rice breeding programs by implementing physicochemical characteristics and molecular analysis

Do Students Overestimate Their Contribution to Class? Congruence of Student and Professor Ratings of Class Participation

As student participation is an essential component of many classes, this research attempted to foster congruence between student and professor ratings of class participation. Study 1 (N = 196) explored the utility of a detailed grading rubric in assessing class participation. As predicted, providing students and faculty with the same rubric resulted in a moderate correlation between their ratings. Consistent with previous research, results indicated a mean difference between student and professor ratings, particularly for low participators. Utilizing this rubric, Study 2 (N = 87) examined congruency at mid- and end-term. Contrary to what was predicted, feedback provided at mid-term did not increase congruence at end-term. A potential implication of this finding is underdeveloped metacognitive skills in low participators. Perhaps, more frequent and substantive feedback is essential for these students

Demonstrating the validity of the Video Game Functional Assessment-Revised (VGFA-R)

Problematic video play has been well documented over the course of the last decade. So much so the DSM-5 (APA, 2013) has included problematic video gaming as disorder categorized as Internet Gaming Disorder. The field of applied behavior analysis has been utilizing functional assessments for the last 30 years and has showed evidence of effective results across different populations and environments. Therefore, the purpose of this investigation (comprising three studies) was to validate an indirect functional assessment entitled the Video Game Functional Assessment-Revised (VGFA-R). Using academic experts in the field of video game addiction and applied behavioral analysis (n=6), the first study examined the content validity of the VGFA-R and was able to demonstrate the assessment exceeded the criterion for an established assessment. A second study comprising a survey of 467 gamers examined the factorability by using a confirmatory factor analysis, and found that VGFA-R had an overall variance above .60. Within the third laboratory-based study using gamers (n=11), the VGFA-R was examined for construct validity and found the VGFA-R was able to predict 85% of the appropriate function of behavior. Implications of the study are discussed along with the strengths and limitations of the study and future research directions

An institutional ethnography of chronic pain management in family medicine (COPE) study protocol

Background: Patients with chronic conditions and multiple comorbidities represent a growing challenge for health care globally. Improved coordination of care is considered essential for providing more effective and cost-efficient care for these patients with complex needs. Osteoarthritis is one of the most common and debilitating chronic conditions, is the most frequent cause of chronic pain yet osteoarthritis care is often poorly-coordinated. Primary care is usually the first contact for patients requiring relief from chronic pain. Our previous work suggests discordance between the policy goals of improving patient care and the experience of osteoarthritis patients. We plan to investigate the empirical context of the primary care setting by focusing on primary physicians’ conceptualizations and performance of their work in treating complex patients with chronic pain. This will allow for an exploration of how primary health care is – or could be – integrated with other services that play an important role in health care delivery. Methods: Our study is an Institutional Ethnography of pain management in family medicine, to be carried out in three phases over 3 years from 2014/15 to 2018. Over the first year we will undertake approximately 80 key informant interviews with primary care physicians, other health care providers, policymakers and clinical experts. In the second year we will focus on mobilizing our networks from year one to assist in the collection of key texts which shape the current context of care. These texts will be analyzed by the research team. In the final year of the study we will focus on synthesizing our findings in order to map the social relations informing care. As is standard and optimal in qualitative research, analysis will be concurrent with data collection. Discussion: Our study will allow us to identify how the work of coordinating care across multiple settings is accomplished, in practice as well as discursively and textually. Ultimately, we will identify links between everyday experience of care for patients with chronic pain, and broader discourses related to health care system inefficiencies, integration and patient-centred care. An expected outcome of this study will be the development of new, or augmentation of existing, models of care, that are based in the local realities of primary care practice.We acknowledge the support of a Canadian Institutes of Health Research operating grant. The principal investigator, Fiona Webster, is also supported by a CIHR New Investigator Award for this program of research