Gauging Teachers' Needs with Regard to Technology- Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA) of 21st Century Skills in the Classroom

Several trends in society have led to a request towards schools to integrate 21st Century Skills and technology enhanced formative assessment (TEFA) in their curricula. Although there are frameworks defined at an international level, implementation of technology enhanced formative assessment of 21st century skills at school level is seldom. This paper explores the underlying reasons for this hampered implementation by consulting and collaborating with teachers. It provides an overview of these reasons and proposes a collaborative professionalization approach to overcome detected implementation barriers and challenges.We would like to gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the PREATY Project, that is funded by the European Commission's Lifelong Learning Programme, Project Number 526965-LLP-1-2012-1-GR-COMENIUS-CMP, which has part-funded this work

Progress-Oriented Workshops for Doctoral Well-being: Evidence From a Two-Country Design-Based Research

This paper explores an intervention approach (in the form of workshops) focusing on doctoral progress, to address the problems of low emotional well-being experienced by many doctoral candidates. Doctoral education suffers from two severe overlapping problems: high dropout rates and widespread low emotional well-being (e.g., depression or anxiety symptoms). Yet, there are few interventional approaches specifically designed to address them in the doctoral student population. Among structural, psychosocial, and demographic factors influencing these problems, the self-perception of progress has emerged recently as a crucial motivational factor in doctoral persistence. This paper reports on an iterative design-based research study of workshop interventions to foster such perception of progress in doctoral students? everyday practice. We gathered mixed data over four iterations, with a total of 82 doctoral students from multiple disciplines in Spain and Estonia. An approach to preventive interventions that combines research-backed education about mental health and productivity, peer sharing and discussion of experiences, and indicators of progress, as well as self-tracking, analysis, and reflection upon everyday evidence of their own progress. The paper provides initial evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed interventions, across two institutions in two different countries. Further, our data confirms emergent research on the relationships among progress, emotional well-being, and dropout ideation in two new contexts. Finally, the paper also distills design knowledge about doctoral interventions that focus on progress, relevant for doctoral trainers, institutions, and researchers.This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innova-tion programme under grant agreement No. 669074 (CEITER). It has also received funding from the European Union’s Erasmus Plus programme, grant agreement 2019-1-NO01-KA203-060280 (DE-TEL). The Universidad de Valladolid co-authors acknowledge funding of the European Regional Development Fund and the National Research Agency of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innova-tion, and Universities, under project grant TIN2017-85179-C3-2-R (SmartLET), and PID2020-112584RB-C32, the European Regional Development Fund, and the Regional Government of Cas-tile and Leon, under project grant VA257P18

Orchestrating learning analytics (OrLA): Supporting inter-stakeholder communication about adoption of learning analytics at the classroom level

Producción CientíficaDespite the recent surge of interest in learning analytics (LA), their adoption in everyday classroom practice is still slow. Knowledge gaps and lack of inter-stakeholder communication (particularly with educational practitioners) have been posited as critical factors for previous LA adoption failures. Yet, what issues should researchers, practitioners and other actors communicate about, when considering the adoption of an LA innovation in a particular context? We reviewed and synthesised existing literature on four focus areas related to LA, their adoption, implications for practice, and more general factors that have emerged as crucial when studying everyday classroom adoption of technologies (i.e., classroom orchestration). This synthesis resulted in two conversational frameworks and an inter-stakeholder communication tool. These can be used to guide and support conversations and decisionmaking about the adoption of LA innovations. We illustrate their usefulness with examples of use in ongoing LA adoption processes in Australia, Spain and Estonia.Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación – Ref. VA082U16)Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Projects TIN2014-53199-C3-2-R and TIN2017-85179-C3-2-R),Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (PRX17/00410

MATTER: Metadata Migration and Annotation. Tool of Teacher Education Resources

Despite ongoing research on learning repositories, share and reuse of Teacher Education (TE) resources remains scarce. One of the reasons is that TE communities use their own in-house resources and repositories in a rather isolated way, thus limiting resource exchange in different contexts. Further, current learning metadata specifications such as Dublin Core (DC) and LOM do not address the description of pedagogical characteristics of resources demanded by TE practitioners. To overcome these limitations, the Share.TEC project aims to provide a federated TE metadata repository based on the Common Metadata Model (CMM) as the shared reference metadata model. Key for the success of the Share.TEC project is the migration of existing TE metadata records to the federated repository, performing the necessary format conversions to CMM. Besides, practitioners should be able to make TE-based annotations of resources. These two functionalities are covered by the Metadata Migration and Annotation Tool of Teacher Education Resources (MATTER) that is the subject of this paper. Although MATTER is purposed for the Share.TEC project, it can be potentially used to support the federation of other learning repositories

EFAR-MMLA: An evaluation framework to assess and report generalizability of machine learning models in MMLA

Producción CientíficaMultimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) researchers are progressively employing machine learning (ML) techniques to develop predictive models to improve learning and teaching practices. These predictive models are often evaluated for their generalizability using methods from the ML domain, which do not take into account MMLA’s educational nature. Furthermore, there is a lack of systematization in model evaluation in MMLA, which is also reflected in the heterogeneous reporting of the evaluation results. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes an evaluation framework to assess and report the generalizability of ML models in MMLA (EFAR-MMLA). To illustrate the usefulness of EFAR-MMLA, we present a case study with two datasets, each with audio and log data collected from a classroom during a collaborative learning session. In this case study, regression models are developed for collaboration quality and its sub-dimensions, and their generalizability is evaluated and reported. The framework helped us to systematically detect and report that the models achieved better performance when evaluated using hold-out or cross-validation but quickly degraded when evaluated across different student groups and learning contexts. The framework helps to open up a “wicked problem” in MMLA research that remains fuzzy (i.e., the generalizability of ML models), which is critical to both accumulating knowledge in the research community and demonstrating the practical relevance of these techniques.Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional - Agencia Nacional de Investigación (grants TIN2017-85179-C3-2-R and TIN2014-53199-C3-2-R)Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional - Junta de Castilla y León (grant VA257P18)Comisión Europea (grant 588438-EPP-1- 2017-1-EL-EPPKA2-KA

Factor reumatoide salival en síndrome de Sjögren primario y secundario.

Sjögren's syndrome is a chronic autoimmune disease, characterized by the presence of hyposalivation and xerophthalmia, which in addition to other factors is diagnosed by the presence of rheumatoid factor in blood. The objective of the present study is to evaluate the presence of rheumatoid factor (IgG-IgM) in the saliva of patients with primary and secondary Sjögren's syndrome. Materials and methods: Forty samples from patients with primary and secondary Sjögren's syndrome previously diagnosed by the Arthritis and Rheumatism Specialist Center of the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon were analyzed. Samples were taken from the saliva using the Carlson-Crittenden device to evaluate the IgG-IgM immunocomplex using the ELISA method. Results: No significant difference was found between the presence of IgM in primary (0.099±0.016) and secondary Sjögren syndrome (0.098±0.017), however, a high presence of IgG was found in the group of patients with secondary Sjögren's syndrome (0.134±0.054). Conclusion: The search for diagnostic tools using salivary biomarkers has come with economic and clinical advantages, however, in the present study no significant changes were found in salivary rheumatoid factor between both groups.El síndrome de Sjögren es una enfermedad autoinmune crónica, caracterizada por la presencia de hiposalivación y xeroftalmia, la cual además de otros factores es diagnosticada por la presencia del factor reumatoide en sangre. El objetivo del presente estudio es evaluar la presencia del factor reumatoide (IgG-IgM) en saliva parotídea de pacientes con síndrome de Sjögren primario y secundario. Materiales y métodos: Se analizaron 40 muestras de pacientes con síndrome de Sjögren primario y secundario previamente diagnosticados por el Centro de Especialistas en Artritis y Reumatismo de la Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, a los cuales se les tomó una muestra de saliva parotídea mediante el dispositivo Carlson-Crittenden para evaluar mediante el método ELISA el inmunocomplejo IgG-IgM. Resultados: No se encontró diferencia significativa entre la presencia de IgM en el síndrome de Sjögren primario (0.099±0.016) y secundario (0,098±0,017), sin embargo en cuanto a la presencia de la IgG se encontró elevada en el grupo de pacientes con síndrome de Sjögren secundario (0,134±0,054). Conclusión: La búsqueda de herramientas diagnósticas mediante biomarcadores salivales ha traído consigo ventajas económicas y clínicas, sin embargo en el presente estudio no se encontró un cambio significativo en el factor reumatoide salival entre ambos grupos

Multimodal Data Value Chain (M-DVC): A Conceptual Tool to Support the Development of Multimodal Learning Analytics Solutions

Producción CientíficaMultimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) systems, understood as those that exploit multimodal evidence of learning to better model a learning situation, have not yet spread widely in educational practice. Their inherent technical complexity, and the lack of educational stakeholder involvement in their design, are among the hypothesized reasons for the slow uptake of this emergent field. To aid in the process of stakeholder communication and systematization leading to the specification of MMLA systems, this paper proposes a Multimodal Data Value Chain (M-DVC). This conceptual tool, derived from both the field of Big Data and the needs of MMLA scenarios, has been evaluated in terms of its usefulness for stakeholders, in three authentic case studies of MMLA systems currently under development. The results of our mixed-methods evaluation highlight the usefulness of the M-DVC to elicit unspoken assumptions or unclear data processing steps in the initial stages of development. The evaluation also revealed limitations of the M-DVC in terms of the technical terminology employed, and the need for more detailed contextual information to be included. These limitations also prompt potential improvements for the M-DVC, on the path towards clearer specification and communication within the multi-disciplinary teams needed to build educationally-meaningful MMLA solutions.Junta de Castilla y León (Project VA257P18)Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Project TIN2017-85179-C3-2-R)CEITER (grant agreements no. 669074