Implementation of best practices in online learning: A review and future directions

Best practices for helping students learn and retain information have been well established by research in cognitive science (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014; Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013). Specifically, repeated testing has been shown in numerous instances to enhance recall. In particular, we know that students retain information best when it has been recalled versus re-studied (Butler, 2010) and rehearsed with delayed (spaced) versus massed presentation (Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006), and when the items to be studied and later tested are similarly framed (McDaniel, Wildman, & Anderson, 2012). Although these effects were initially demonstrated in laboratory settings, a number of researchers have shown that they generalize to classroom environments (e.g. Vlach & Sandhofer, 2012) and some have demonstrated their utility in fully online courses as well (McDaniel et al., 2012). However, in multiple studies we have found that implementing some of these best practices using publisher-provided textbook technology supplements (TTS) does not meaningfully improve recall (Bell, Simone & Whitfield, 2015; 2016), at least when these supplements are used “out-of-the-box” in face-to-face courses. We conclude when using TTS in an online environment there is a mismatch between student and faculty goals, in that students are motivated by short-term goals of getting high score of a quiz even if the behaviors used to achieve that score do not enhance long-term recall or generalization of the learned material, which typically are the goals of faculty. We argue that TTS can be reconfigured to reinforce meaningful engagement with the material for all students, regardless of learning history or other individual differences of students (e.g., Gluckman, Vlach & Sandhofer, 2014). Actually, in order to continue to require the purchase of these TTS by students, we should determine whether their use is beneficial to all types of students. A related empirical question is whether recall of factual information in an online environment is correlated with the later ability to use that information in a novel situation (generalizability). Whereas some researchers have found that factual information learned via repeated testing does help students to draw inferences about the implications of those facts in later testing (Butler, 2010), others have failed to find a correlation between testing effects and generalizability of the learned material (Gluckman et al., 2014). The literature on this question is still somewhat small, however, (see Carpenter, 2012, for a brief review) and this is particularly true of investigations involving online learning. In this paper we review the existing literature of the spacing benefit and online learning. We end with a proposal for the need of new research specific to the online environment that manipulates delayed repeated testing and examines whether successful retention of factual information promotes long-term application of that material

Combined nutritional stress and a new systemic pesticide (flupyradifurone, Sivanto®) reduce bee survival, food consumption, flight success, and thermoregulation.

Flupyradifurone (FPF, Sivanto®) is a new butenolide insecticide that, like the neonicotinoids, is a systemic nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) agonist. However, FPF is considered bee-safe (according to standard Risk Assessment tests), and is thus a potential solution to the adverse effects of other pesticides on beneficial insects. To date, no studies have examined the impact of nutritional stress (decreased food diversity and quality) and FPF exposure on bee health although both stressors can occur, especially around agricultural monocultures. We therefore tested the effects of a field-realistic FPF concentration (4 ppm, FPFdaily dose = 241 ± 4 ng/bee/day, 1/12 of LD50) and nutritional stress (nectar with low-sugar concentrations) on honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) mortality, food consumption, thermoregulation, flight success (unsuccessful vs. successful), and flight ability (duration, distance, velocity). Flight and thermoregulation are critical to colony health: bees fly to collect food and reproduce, and they thermoregulate to increase flight efficiency and to rear brood. We studied the effects across seasons because seasonality can influence bee sensitivity to environmental stress. We demonstrate that, depending upon season and nutritional stress, FPF can reduce bee survival (-14%), food consumption (-14%), thermoregulation (-4%, i.e. hypothermia), flight success (-19%), and increase flight velocity (+13%). Because pesticide exposure and nutritional stress can co-occur, we suggest that future studies and pesticide risk assessments consider both seasonality and nutritional stress when evaluating pesticide safety for bees

Peccei--Quinn mechanism in gravity and the nature of the Barbero--Immirzi parameter

A general argument provides the motivation to consider the Barbero--Immirzi parameter as a field. The specific form of the geometrical effective action allows to relate the value of the Barbero--Immirzi parameter to other quantum ambiguities through the analog of the Peccei--Quinn mechanism.Comment: Accepted for publication on Phys. Rev. Let

Numerical and experimental study of the effects of noise on the permutation entropy

We analyze the effects of noise on the permutation entropy of dynamical systems. We take as numerical examples the logistic map and the R\"ossler system. Upon varying the noise strengthfaster, we find a transition from an almost-deterministic regime, where the permutation entropy grows slower than linearly with the pattern dimension, to a noise-dominated regime, where the permutation entropy grows faster than linearly with the pattern dimension. We perform the same analysis on experimental time-series by considering the stochastic spiking output of a semiconductor laser with optical feedback. Because of the experimental conditions, the dynamics is found to be always in the noise-dominated regime. Nevertheless, the analysis allows to detect regularities of the underlying dynamics. By comparing the results of these three different examples, we discuss the possibility of determining from a time series whether the underlying dynamics is dominated by noise or not

Are Consumers Indeed Misled? Congruency in Consumers' Attitudes towards Wine Labeling Information versus Revealed Preferences from a Choice Experiment

Please Contact Authors for Updated Version before Citingdiscrete choice experiment vs. attitude measurement, food labeling, willingness to pay, consumers, wine, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Marketing,

A New 3D Tool for Planning Plastic Surgery

Face plastic surgery (PS) plays a major role in today medicine. Both for reconstructive and cosmetic surgery, achieving harmony of facial features is an important, if not the major goal. Several systems have been proposed for presenting to patient and surgeon possible outcomes of the surgical procedure. In this paper, we present a new 3D system able to automatically suggest, for selected facial features as nose, chin, etc, shapes that aesthetically match the patient's face. The basic idea is suggesting shape changes aimed to approach similar but more harmonious faces. To this goal, our system compares the 3D scan of the patient with a database of scans of harmonious faces, excluding the feature to be corrected. Then, the corresponding features of the k most similar harmonious faces, as well as their average, are suitably pasted onto the patient's face, producing k+1 aesthetically effective surgery simulations. The system has been fully implemented and tested. To demonstrate the system, a 3D database of harmonious faces has been collected and a number of PS treatments have been simulated. The ratings of the outcomes of the simulations, provided by panels of human judges, show that the system and the underlying idea are effectiv

A matrix representation of graphs and its spectrum as a graph invariant

We use the line digraph construction to associate an orthogonal matrix with each graph. From this orthogonal matrix, we derive two further matrices. The spectrum of each of these three matrices is considered as a graph invariant. For the first two cases, we compute the spectrum explicitly and show that it is determined by the spectrum of the adjacency matrix of the original graph. We then show by computation that the isomorphism classes of many known families of strongly regular graphs (up to 64 vertices) are characterized by the spectrum of this matrix. We conjecture that this is always the case for strongly regular graphs and we show that the conjecture is not valid for general graphs. We verify that the smallest regular graphs which are not distinguished with our method are on 14 vertices.Comment: 14 page