scholarly journals Evaluating Two Approaches to Helping College Students Understand Evolutionary Trees through Diagramming Tasks

2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Perry ◽  
Eli Meir ◽  
Jon C. Herron ◽  
Susan Maruca ◽  
Derek Stal
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Real World ◽  
Evolutionary Trees ◽  
College Level ◽  
Learning Gains ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Standard Textbook ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Software Program

To understand evolutionary theory, students must be able to understand and use evolutionary trees and their underlying concepts. Active, hands-on curricula relevant to macroevolution can be challenging to implement across large college-level classes where textbook learning is the norm. We evaluated two approaches to helping students learn macroevolutionary topics. Treatment 1 is a laboratory for the software program EvoBeaker designed to teach students about evolutionary trees. We tested Treatment 1 among nine college-level biology classes and administered pre/posttests to assess learning gains. We then sought to determine whether the learning gains from Treatment 1 were comparable to those derived from an alternate hands-on treatment, specifically the combination of a prerecorded lecture on DVD and paper-based activity based on Goldsmith's Great Clade Race (Treatment 2). Comparisons of pre- and posttests among participants using either Treatment 1 or 2 show large learning gains on some misconceptions and skills beyond knowledge gained from reading standard textbook entries. Both treatments performed equivalently in overall learning gains, though both had areas where they performed better or worse. Furthermore, gains among students who used Treatment 1 representing a wide range of universities suggest that outcomes are potentially applicable to a variety of “real-world” biology classes.

scholarly journals Educational modules and research surveys on critical cybersecurity topics

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (9) ◽  
pp. 155014772095467
Author(s):  
Lixin Wang ◽  
Jianhua Yang ◽  
Peng-Jun Wan
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
College Level ◽  
Network Systems ◽  
University Professors ◽  
Course Content ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Significant Research ◽  
Cyber Education ◽  
Education Needs ◽  
Educational Modules

Cybersecurity comprised all the technologies and practices that protect data as well as computer and network systems. In this article, we develop four course modules on critical cybersecurity topics that can be adopted in college-level cybersecurity courses in which these topics are covered. Our goal for developing these course modules with the hands-on labs is to increase students’ understanding and hands-on experiences on these critical topics that support cyber skills development for college students. The hands-on labs are designed to enhance students’ engagement and provide them hands-on experiences with real-world cyber activities to augment their cyber education of both foundational and advanced skills. We also conduct research surveys on the most-recent significant research in these critical cybersecurity fields. These cybersecurity course modules with the labs are also designed to help college/university professors enhance and update their cybersecurity course content, activities, hands-on lab exercises, and pedagogical methods, as well as emphasize the cyber skills to meet today’s pressing cybersecurity education needs for college students. Our proposed cybersecurity modules with hands-on labs will also help building the nation’s cybersecurity workforce.

The Matchmaking Activity: An Experiential Learning Exercise on Influencer Marketing for the Digital Marketing Classroom

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
April Kemp ◽  
Elizabeth Randon McDougal ◽  
Holly Syrdal
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Experiential Learning ◽  
Learning Outcomes ◽  
Real World ◽  
Digital Marketing ◽  
Marketing Environment ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Classroom Exercise ◽  
Marketing Educators

Influencer marketing is an emerging technological disruptor for marketing across a wide range of industries. This tactic allows companies to promote products in a more organic, trust-affirming manner compared with other forms of paid advertising. As the use of influencer marketing is rapidly growing, marketing educators have a unique opportunity to prepare students to perform this in-demand marketing skill. This article outlines a classroom exercise, called the Matchmaking Activity, which introduces the concept of influencer marketing, provides hands-on experience, and encourages critical thinking to solve a simulated marketing dilemma. The end goal is for students to gain confidence that can be applied to a real-world marketing environment. To assess the effectiveness of the Matchmaking Activity, the exercise was conducted with students in digital marketing classes. Based on findings from a post-activity reflection survey completed by students, the Matchmaking Activity results in the achievement of several desirable learning outcomes. Ideas for adapting this exercise for use in a variety of other marketing courses are also provided.

Process Control System Design Experiences: A Real World Approach

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey R. Mountain ◽  
Angela D. Riddick
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Process Control ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Control Systems ◽  
Real World ◽  
Outreach Program ◽  
Engineering Practice ◽  
Engineering Programs ◽  
Process Control Systems ◽  
Hands On

Hands-on, design oriented experiences have been shown to increase the visibility of the engineering profession; inspiring pre-college students to better prepare in math and science, and pursue an engineering degree. Most of these programs are successful, but they primarily focus on the creative aspects of highly specialized industries with little regard to the detail process of real world engineering design. Many students enroll in engineering programs believing the profession is solely focused on creativity and “building stuff” from a provided set of components. Once faced with the analysis and detail-oriented aspects of engineering practice, or the reality that most engineers are not employed by NASA or in robotics related industries, many students abandon engineering programs for other degree plans. The University of Texas at Tyler is using process control systems design as a theme to expose pre-college and college-level students to “common” engineering practices. This outreach program is part of a National Science Foundation funded project to provide hands-on opportunities to design, build, and test thermal/fluid based process control systems in an effort to attract and retain increased numbers of engineering students. This paper describes the proof of concept Process Control Breadboard System developed to provide a broad spectrum of students with exposure to the design of “common” engineering systems. Pre-college students come to realize that a wide range of engineering disciplines including: agricultural, chemical, electrical, mechanical, and petroleum engineering, consider process controls a part of their discipline. In addition, middle school students get exposed to the detail oriented aspects of real world engineering design; gaining experience in CAD modeling and producing bills of material prior to the hands-on build and test of their systems. Results from a variety of outreach and university level curriculum integration activities, conducted during the first two years of grant funding, will be presented, along with a summary of lessons learned and plans for future activities.

The (Mis)Uses of Race in Research on College Students: A Systematic Review

JCSCORE ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-41
Author(s):  
Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
College Students ◽  
Systematic Review ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Student Affairs ◽  
Educational Outcomes ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Higher Education Journals ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Implicit And Explicit

Race has been one of the most controversial subjects studied by scholars across a wide range of disciplines as they debate whether races actually exist and whether race matters in determining life, social, and educational outcomes. Missing from the literature are investigations into various ways race gets applied in research, especially in higher education and student affairs. This review explores how scholars use race in their framing, operationalizing, and interpreting of research on college students. Through a systematic content analysis of three higher education journals over five years, this review elucidates scholars’ varied racial applications as well as potential implicit and explicit messages about race being sent by those applications and inconsistencies within articles. By better understanding how race is used in higher education and student affairs research, scholars can be more purposeful in their applications to reduce problematic messages about the essentialist nature of race and deficit framing of certain racial groups.

scholarly journals Goal-driven active learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bougie ◽  
Ryutaro Ichise
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Real World ◽  
Imitation Learning ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Fixed Set ◽  
Complex Decision Making ◽  
Complex Decision

AbstractDeep reinforcement learning methods have achieved significant successes in complex decision-making problems. In fact, they traditionally rely on well-designed extrinsic rewards, which limits their applicability to many real-world tasks where rewards are naturally sparse. While cloning behaviors provided by an expert is a promising approach to the exploration problem, learning from a fixed set of demonstrations may be impracticable due to lack of state coverage or distribution mismatch—when the learner’s goal deviates from the demonstrated behaviors. Besides, we are interested in learning how to reach a wide range of goals from the same set of demonstrations. In this work we propose a novel goal-conditioned method that leverages very small sets of goal-driven demonstrations to massively accelerate the learning process. Crucially, we introduce the concept of active goal-driven demonstrations to query the demonstrator only in hard-to-learn and uncertain regions of the state space. We further present a strategy for prioritizing sampling of goals where the disagreement between the expert and the policy is maximized. We evaluate our method on a variety of benchmark environments from the Mujoco domain. Experimental results show that our method outperforms prior imitation learning approaches in most of the tasks in terms of exploration efficiency and average scores.

A CFD Study of Focused Extreme Wave Impact on Decks of Offshore Structures

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Lu ◽  
Pankaj Kumar ◽  
Anand Bahuguni ◽  
Yanling Wu
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Offshore Structures ◽  
Air Gap ◽  
Irregular Waves ◽  
Linear Wave ◽  
Extreme Wave ◽  
Wave Impact ◽  
Loading Test ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Wave Maker

The design of offshore structures for extreme/abnormal waves assumes that there is sufficient air gap such that waves will not hit the platform deck. Due to inaccuracies in the predictions of extreme wave crests in addition to settlement or sea-level increases, the required air gap between the crest of the extreme wave and the deck is often inadequate in existing platforms and therefore wave-in-deck loads need to be considered when assessing the integrity of such platforms. The problem of wave-in-deck loading involves very complex physics and demands intensive study. In the Computational Fluid Mechanics (CFD) approach, two critical issues must be addressed, namely the efficient, realistic numerical wave maker and the accurate free surface capturing methodology. Most reported CFD research on wave-in-deck loads consider regular waves only, for instance the Stokes fifth-order waves. They are, however, recognized by designers as approximate approaches since “real world” sea states consist of random irregular waves. In our work, we report a recently developed focused extreme wave maker based on the NewWave theory. This model can better approximate the “real world” conditions, and is more efficient than conventional random wave makers. It is able to efficiently generate targeted waves at a prescribed time and location. The work is implemented and integrated with OpenFOAM, an open source platform that receives more and more attention in a wide range of industrial applications. We will describe the developed numerical method of predicting highly non-linear wave-in-deck loads in the time domain. The model’s capability is firstly demonstrated against 3D model testing experiments on a fixed block with various deck orientations under random waves. A detailed loading analysis is conducted and compared with available numerical and measurement data. It is then applied to an extreme wave loading test on a selected bridge with multiple under-deck girders. The waves are focused extreme irregular waves derived from NewWave theory and JONSWAP spectra.

scholarly journals Classification of unlabeled online media

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sakthi Kumar Arul Prakash ◽  
Conrad Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Real World ◽  
Graphical Model ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Classification Problem ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Social Media Networks ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Wide Range

AbstractThis work investigates the ability to classify misinformation in online social media networks in a manner that avoids the need for ground truth labels. Rather than approach the classification problem as a task for humans or machine learning algorithms, this work leverages user–user and user–media (i.e.,media likes) interactions to infer the type of information (fake vs. authentic) being spread, without needing to know the actual details of the information itself. To study the inception and evolution of user–user and user–media interactions over time, we create an experimental platform that mimics the functionality of real-world social media networks. We develop a graphical model that considers the evolution of this network topology to model the uncertainty (entropy) propagation when fake and authentic media disseminates across the network. The creation of a real-world social media network enables a wide range of hypotheses to be tested pertaining to users, their interactions with other users, and with media content. The discovery that the entropy of user–user and user–media interactions approximate fake and authentic media likes, enables us to classify fake media in an unsupervised learning manner.

scholarly journals An information theoretic approach to link prediction in multiplex networks

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Seyed Hossein Jafari ◽  
Amir Mahdi Abdolhosseini-Qomi ◽  
Masoud Asadpour ◽  
Maseud Rahgozar ◽  
Naser Yazdani
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Link Prediction ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Similarity Measures ◽  
Prediction Method ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Fast Method ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Multiplex Networks ◽  
Wide Range

AbstractThe entities of real-world networks are connected via different types of connections (i.e., layers). The task of link prediction in multiplex networks is about finding missing connections based on both intra-layer and inter-layer correlations. Our observations confirm that in a wide range of real-world multiplex networks, from social to biological and technological, a positive correlation exists between connection probability in one layer and similarity in other layers. Accordingly, a similarity-based automatic general-purpose multiplex link prediction method—SimBins—is devised that quantifies the amount of connection uncertainty based on observed inter-layer correlations in a multiplex network. Moreover, SimBins enhances the prediction quality in the target layer by incorporating the effect of link overlap across layers. Applying SimBins to various datasets from diverse domains, our findings indicate that SimBins outperforms the compared methods (both baseline and state-of-the-art methods) in most instances when predicting links. Furthermore, it is discussed that SimBins imposes minor computational overhead to the base similarity measures making it a potentially fast method, suitable for large-scale multiplex networks.

scholarly journals Comparing optical performance of a wide range of perovskite/silicon tandem architectures under real-world conditions

Nanophotonics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manvika Singh ◽  
Rudi Santbergen ◽  
Indra Syifai ◽  
Arthur Weeber ◽  
Miro Zeman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Solar Cells ◽  
Real World ◽  
Solar Spectrum ◽  
Photocurrent Density ◽  
Angle Of Incidence ◽  
Optical Study ◽  
Optical Performance ◽  
Tandem Solar Cells ◽  
Bottom Cell ◽  
Wide Range

Abstract Since single junction c-Si solar cells are reaching their practical efficiency limit. Perovskite/c-Si tandem solar cells hold the promise of achieving greater than 30% efficiencies. In this regard, optical simulations can deliver guidelines for reducing the parasitic absorption losses and increasing the photocurrent density of the tandem solar cells. In this work, an optical study of 2, 3 and 4 terminal perovskite/c-Si tandem solar cells with c-Si solar bottom cells passivated by high thermal-budget poly-Si, poly-SiOx and poly-SiCx is performed to evaluate their optical performance with respect to the conventional tandem solar cells employing silicon heterojunction bottom cells. The parasitic absorption in these carrier selective passivating contacts has been quantified. It is shown that they enable greater than 20 mA/cm2 matched implied photocurrent density in un-encapsulated 2T tandem architecture along with being compatible with high temperature production processes. For studying the performance of such tandem devices in real-world irradiance conditions and for different locations of the world, the effect of solar spectrum and angle of incidence on their optical performance is studied. Passing from mono-facial to bi-facial tandem solar cells, the photocurrent density in the bottom cell can be increased, requiring again optical optimization. Here, we analyse the effect of albedo, perovskite thickness and band gap as well as geographical location on the optical performance of these bi-facial perovskite/c-Si tandem solar cells. Our optical study shows that bi-facial 2T tandems, that also convert light incident from the rear, require radically thicker perovskite layers to match the additional current from the c-Si bottom cell. For typical perovskite bandgap and albedo values, even doubling the perovskite thickness is not sufficient. In this respect, lower bandgap perovskites are very interesting for application not only in bi-facial 2T tandems but also in related 3T and 4T tandems.

3D Technology – Additive Manufacturing Applications and Prospects (Vol. 24, No. 9, Full Issue)

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (09) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Additive Manufacturing ◽  
3D Printing ◽  
Environmental Impact ◽  
Real World ◽  
Vaccine Development ◽  
Health Screening ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Real World Applications ◽  
Manufacturing Applications

For the month of September 2020, APBN dives into the world of 3D printing and its wide range of real-world applications. Keeping our focus on the topic of the year, the COVID-19 pandemic, we explore the environmental impact of the global outbreak as well as gain insight to the top 5 vaccine platforms used in vaccine development. Discover more about technological advancements and how it is assisting innovation in geriatric health screening.

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