Effects of a Fall Reading Break on First Year Students' Course Performance in Programming

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Hulls ◽  
Chris Rennick ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Samar Mohamed
Keyword(s):  
Focus Groups ◽  
Regression Model ◽  
Student Perceptions ◽  
First Year ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Course Performance ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
First Semester ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

This paper presents a mixed methods study into the effects of a fall break on course performance in a first semester programming course in Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo.In 2016, the University of Waterloo instituted a two-day fall break immediately following Thanksgiving Monday, on a three-year pilot. The stated rationale for this break was to address student wellness and mental health issues, especially as this pertains to students transitioning from high school and their “looming midterms”. As of October 2017, there are now 20 institutions in Ontario with a fall break of between one five days in length after the Thanksgiving holiday.A linear regression model was calculated to examine the impact of the fall break on students. This model predicts students who regretted how they spent the fall break will earn 6% less in their first programming course. A logistic regression model was calculated which predicted inexperienced, struggling students have the highest odds of regretting how they spent the break.Three focus groups were conducted with students who experienced the fall break in fall of 2016 or 2017. These focus groups examined student perceptions of the fall break, how they recalled using their time during the break, and their reflections on the br

scholarly journals Substantiation of the Impact of Fitball Gymnastics and Fitness Yoga Activities on the Health Level of University Students

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-213
Author(s):  
E.K. Gilfanova ◽  
T.B. Gorbatenko ◽  
O.Yu. Sharova
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
First Year ◽  
Recreational Facilities ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Health Level ◽  
Pedagogical Research ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

The article considers the possibility of using non-traditional recreational facilities in the educational process with university students. The purpose of the study is to assess the impact of the developed methodology for fitball gymnastics and fitness yoga on the health level of students. To achieve the goal, the following tasks were set: theoretically substantiate the proposed methodology of classes; identify and conduct a comparative analysis of adaptive potential according to the method of R.M. Baevsky and the level of the functional state of first-year students during an experimental study. Scientific novelty lies in the expansion of theoretical and practical approaches to physical education at the university. The positive impact of the proposed teaching methods on the level of functional readiness of first-year students is substantiated and experimentally proved. To improve the methodology, a set of methods was used: analysis of scientific and methodological literature, the method of pedagogical research, pedagogical experiment, methods of mathematical statistics.

scholarly journals Transforming Rural Family Medicine Curriculum From Experiential to Virtual: A Response to COVID-19 Limitations

PRiMER ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
James G. Boulger ◽  
Emily Onello
Keyword(s):  
Medical Students ◽  
First Year ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
University Of Minnesota ◽  
Rural Medicine ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Rural Family ◽  
Second Year ◽  
The University ◽  
Rural Physician

Cessation of all classroom and clinical activities in the spring of 2020 for first- and second-year medical students at the University of Minnesota Medical School Duluth campus both forced and enabled revision of rural medicine instruction and experiences. Creatively utilizing rural family physicians and third-year rural physician associate medical students to interact with first-year students virtually in a number of areas and using electronic connectivity enabled the institution to continue to emphasize rural medical health issues with the students.

Loneliness and the Development of Social Relationships in Malaysian University Students

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Intan H. M. Hashim ◽  
Siamak Khodarahimi
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
University Students ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
First Semester ◽  
The Social ◽  
The University

In this study we investigated loneliness and how social relationships develop in university students. Participants were 67 first-year students beginning their first semester in a university in northern Malaysia. We collected information regarding respondents' background, their descriptions of the social network at the university, and their level of loneliness. The study was conducted in 2 parts over a 10-week period; at 4 weeks after their registration and then at 14 weeks after their registration. Findings suggest development of friendship was still in progress and loneliness had increased at Time 2.

scholarly journals First semester academic performance: The importance of early indicators of non-engagement

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Van der Meer ◽  
Stephen Scott ◽  
Keryn Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Academic Performance ◽  
Student Success ◽  
Grade Point Average ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Grade Point ◽  
Retention Strategy ◽  
First Semester ◽  
Efficiency And Effectiveness ◽  
The University

Success, progression and retention of students are goals of many university strategic directions and policies. For many decades it has been recognised that the greatest focus in any retention strategy should be on first-year students. University of Otago too has goals around student success. The Strategic Plan of the institution also identified that in the context of a fiscally constrained environment, all of our activities and processes need to be assessed for efficiency and effectiveness.  To this end, a pilot was undertaken in one area of the university to identify possible indicators of first-year students’ non-engagement in the first semester and their possible impact on the first semester academic performance. The findings suggest that there are indeed some indicators that predict Grade Point Average at the end of the first semester.

scholarly journals The Importance of First Semester Seminars for At-Risk First-Year Students: Analysis of Student Skills and Time Spent on Class Preparation

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 510
Author(s):  
David E. Reed ◽  
Guinevere Z. Jones
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
At Risk ◽  
First Year ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Student Survey ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
First Semester ◽  
High School To College ◽  
Transition From High School ◽  
The University

The high-school-to-college transition can be difficult as students are adapting to a multitude of academic and social changes simultaneously. The University of Wyoming has created a first-semester program targeted at development of student skills for at-risk students using paired first-year seminar classes. Using student survey data from both pre- and post-course series, students were asked how important they thought academic and non-academic skills were as well as how much preparation time they were spending outside of class. Results from this work show large changes in the importance of skills and time spent studying during the transition from high school to college. This highlights the need to focus specifically on teaching skills to help students through the transition and suggests that not all skills are equal and data shows that students take longer than one semester to match their expected and actual amounts of time they spend outside of class studying.

scholarly journals Strategies for Determining German Nouns' Gender by College Students

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Svitlana Kiyko ◽  
Yuriy Kiyko ◽  
Viktor Drebet
Keyword(s):  
Native Language ◽  
Correct Choice ◽  
German Language ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Gender Categorization ◽  
National University ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Given

The article is dedicated to the study of strategies for determining the gender of nouns of the German language by Ukrainian-speaking first-year-students at the Yuriy Fedkovych National University of Chernivtsi, Ukraine. The purpose of the study is to establish the strategies for determining the gender of nouns on the basis of phonetic, morphological, and semantic criteria and experimentally trace the impact of interlingual and intralingual interference in the process of gender categorization of nouns. The material of the study included 60 nouns, out of which 30 were phonetic equivalents and 30 – semantic ones. Each group contained 10 nouns of the masculine, feminine and neuter gender respectively, with the same number of structurally different nouns among them, which were selected according to semantic, morphological, and phonetic rules of gender identification. To identify strategies for determining the gender of German nouns, two psycholinguistic experiments were held with a month interval. The experiments involved 30 first-year-students at the University of Chernivtsi (German department), who had to decide whether the noun gender specified in DMDX program is correct. Thus, the article in half of the given nouns was set incorrectly in the program. The obtained results indicate that the gender of the noun of the native language significantly affects gender determining of the German phonetic equivalent (85% of all mistakes in determining the gender in Experiment 1 and 47% – in Experiment 2). The students also focus on the suffixes or endings of German nouns when choosing the correct gender. Phonetic or semantic rules for determining gender play a secondary role. The gender of a noun in the native language prevents the correct choice of the gender in the German language, which is twice as often recorded for phonetic equivalents.

scholarly journals Methods of using non-traditional types of physical exercises when working with pathologies that have arisen under the influence of environmental degradation

2021 ◽  
Vol 937 (2) ◽  
pp. 022011
Author(s):  
Nikolay Ryzhkin ◽  
Anna Ivanova
Keyword(s):  
First Year ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Physical Exercises ◽  
Medical Groups ◽  
Pedagogical Orientation ◽  
Serious Disease ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Game Forms

Abstract The article presents an experimental method of using game forms of classes aimed at improving the level of physical development of students with poor health and low level of physically fit. We worked with students with excessive weight gain not associated with health abnormalities. The group of students who, as a result of a medical examination, were found to have diseases of the endocrine glands, where excess weight is a concomitant sign of a serious disease did not include in the research. One of the objectives of the study was to identify changes in the students’ state of health and increase interest in classes, activating physical education classes for first-year students with various degrees of disorders of physically fit. The analysis of the impact of the proposed program on students, taking into account the specifics of the faculties and various specialties, will allow us to enrich the curriculum in physical culture. As well as, this will allow us to include in the program of classes non-traditional types of physical exercises while working with special medical groups, taking into account the pedagogical orientation of the faculties of the university.

First Year Students' Views on Changing Their Campus Alcohol Culture

NASPA Journal ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Reis ◽  
William L Riley
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Use ◽  
Social Networking ◽  
Adolescent Development ◽  
Campus Culture ◽  
First Year ◽  
Educational Programming ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Student Responsibility ◽  
First Semester ◽  
The University

A survey on campus culture and alcohol use was completed by 1,864 first-year students in their first semester of enrollment at a large public Midwest university. Twenty-four percent of these students agreed that students can do nothing about alcohol abuse as part of campus culture, as opposed to 46% disagreeing with this statement and 24% standing neutral on the question. As compared to the students believing nothing can be done, students in the “alcohol culture can be changed” group drank less and reported higher levels of self-efficacy in their own use of alcohol. The students asserting “change in alcohol culture is not possible” agreed that the university had a reputation as a party school and reported more tolerance of intoxicated behavior. The contrasting profiles of these two groups of students suggest that there is a broader view of alcohol use, student responsibility, and definitions of culture than is sometimes recognized. Implications for campus-sponsored educational programming are discussed in terms of adolescent development and social networking.

scholarly journals Which Grammatical Errors Do First-Year University Students Make and Do Those Errors Matter? A Focusing Inquiry

Teachers Work ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Michael Cop ◽  
Hunter Hatfield
Keyword(s):  
Health Professional ◽  
Health Sciences ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
First Semester ◽  
Test Taking ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
The University ◽  
First Year University ◽  
Grammatical Competency

Students in Health Sciences First Year (a gateway to health professional programmes) at the University of Otago sit an English diagnostic test before they begin their first semester. This test determines which students will need extra English tuition. We initiated a focusing inquiry with the 2014-2015 data from these tests to form relevant learning outcomes for students and to discover information that might be relevant to secondary schools throughout New Zealand. Our focusing inquiry revealed that many of our first-year students could benefit from further grammatical and test-taking tuition—not only because of linguistic and test-taking deficits, but also because the data demonstrate a relationship between successful placement in health professional programmes and grammatical competency. That is, our data show that students who make an error in any of the grammatical categories that we tested are less likely to get an offer of place in the Health Sciences professional programmes at the end of their first year.

scholarly journals Pathopsychological gender features of the adaptation and motivation processes among students of higher educational medical institutions of the first semester of training

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Medical School ◽  
Male Students ◽  
First Year ◽  
Adaptation Period ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
First Semester ◽  
Physiological Processes ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The University ◽  
Gender Features

The analysis of the peculiarities of the adaptation period of the first-year students of the medical school is given, as well as motivation as a biochemical and physiological processes of the organism. It is indicated that motivation is not a static concept and is subject to transformation, and the activity of the organism is determined by the dominant motivation, which subordinates all others. Adaptational and motivational gender features were studied among 67 first year students of the medical school. The obtained data testify to the predominantly external motivation of male students and internal motivation among female students. The motives of choice for girls were the cognitive motives and motives of professional achievements, while the guys had social motives and motives for personal prestige. Identified features of motivation are the most significant for academic achievement. Also, a pronounced psychoasthenic syndrome (especially among girls) was revealed, that confirms the study in the first year of the university as a stressful and disadaptive factor. The obtained data is required further in-depth study.

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