Communication in the face of death and dying - how does the encounter with death influence the patient management competence of medical students? An outcome-evaluation

Background information As part of an elective course, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Palliative Medicine at Duesseldorf University Hospital offers medical students the opportunity to personally meet and talk to a seriously ill patient on one or more occasions. The future physicians are provided with an opportunity to broaden their professional competence, i.e. their knowledge and skills in patient-centred communication at the end of life, and enhance their personal competence, for example in how to professionally handle their own emotions. A topical e-learning module helps the students to prepare for the meetings, and writing a reflection paper forms the basis for the concluding reflection seminar. Objectives The study’s objective is a global and outcome-based evaluation of the elective blended-learning course that provides real-world patient interaction. The outcome-based evaluation or outcome assessment aims to objectively evaluate changes identified in knowledge, skills and attitude among the participants of the elective-course. Furthermore, the evaluation aims to answer the question of whether changes especially in attitude (social skills and self-competence) should be expected after the students have met with severely ill or dying patients. Method On two questionnaires specifically developed for this survey the students were able to provide a global rating of the elective course and describe their learning gains in palliative care. The students’ learning gains were measured by means of 14 items reflecting the specific educational objectives of the offered elective course. Using the German school grading system as a rating scale, the students assessed their learning progress by retrospectively evaluating their skills before and after completion of the elective course (Comparative Self-Assessment, CSA). Results In the time from April 2018 till March 2020, 62 students participated in the evaluation. Overall, learning progress among students could be observed across all areas of competence, and in 50% of all retrospective self-assessment items the learning gains were ≥ 50%. The highest learning gain (63.6%) was observed in the students’ ability to meet a severely ill patient without fear. The lowest learning gain was observed when students had to confront and accept their own mortality. Conclusions The offered elective course supports students in achieving social and self-competence development goals. According to the obtained results, contact with real-world patients helps mould the students’ attitude.

Peer Instruction in Computing Higher Education: A Case Study of a Logic in Computer Science Course in Brazilian Context

One of the challenges of Computing Education Research is the proposition of new learning methods. Researches indicate active learning methods are more effective than traditional ones. Peer Instruction is one of these learning methods that promotes a student-centered class, enabling (s)he constructs his/her comprehension through a structured approach with questions and peer discussions, used in Computing in the last years. Nevertheless, researches about the use of this method are very scarce in South America. Accordingly, this research aims to discuss the impact of Peer Instruction use on higher education from a Logic in Brazilian Computer Science course. The research context is an undergraduate course in Computer Science in the first term of 2018 at the Federal University of Jataí. Sufficient evidence was found for the veracity of two propositions related to this study: (i) Peer Instruction use guarantees a learning gain of students, and (ii) Peer Instruction is well accepted by students. Therefore, it concluded that Peer Instruction use is suitable for Logic courses in Computing Higher Education in Brazil, with good acceptance from students.

Efficiency of University Course during the Covid-19 Pandemic

The education in this field of electronic banking has to adapt to rapid progress in technologies used for provision of banking services. The paper aims to shortly present the course of Electronic Services in Banking and to measure and compare the efficiency of education in the course before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. The efficiency of the educational process in the course was measured as learning gain by comparing pre-course and post-course tests' results using absolute gain, relative gain, and class average normalized gain during a period of five years. The education in the course was evaluated as effective in all observed cases. The additional surveys were conducted before and after the course completion detecting positive shifts in students’ knowledge and their adoption of electronic services in banking.

Group Size and Peer Learning: Peer Discussions in Different Group Size Influence Learning in a Biology Exercise Performed on a Tablet With Stylus

Determining the optimal discussion group size to improve performance and learning has created an intense debate in psychology and provided mixed findings in laboratory and field settings. In a quasi-experimental study in the education field, we examined the effect of discussion group size on individual learning in a biology exercise performed on a tablet with stylus. The sample involved 102 secondary school students divided into four classes, each corresponding to one of the four experimental conditions (alone without peer discussion vs discussion in dyads vs triads vs four-member groups). They were asked to draw individually a functional schema of the human respiratory system, once before and once after discussing with peers (or reflecting alone). Both drawings were evaluated by four independent coders, and the learning gain for each student was computed from these evaluations. Results revealed that learning gain was greater for students discussing in four-member groups than for those in the other conditions. Additional analyses suggested that this effect was moderated by the students’ gender, with the learning gain being greater after discussion in four-member groups among females only. These findings suggest that group size of four individuals might be the optimal configuration to improve peer learning.

No Evidence of a Major Learning Slide 14 Months into the COVID-19 Pandemic in Denmark

We study the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children’s academic performance in Denmark 14 months into the pandemic using nationwide and exceptionally rich data on reading test scores and family background (N ≈ 200.000 per year). We find no evidence of any major learning slide. While pupils in grade 8 experienced a three percentile points loss in reading performance, pupils in grades 2 and 4 experienced a learning gain of about five percentile points, possibly resulting from school closures being significantly longer among older (22 weeks) than younger children (eight weeks). Importantly and in contrast to expectations, we find little evidence of widening learning gaps by family background. Still, in grade 8 we see a tendency for gaps by parental income and employment status to widen slightly. Further analyses point to that all of these patterns were already in place a few months into pandemic, suggesting that learning gaps did not widen during the subsequent year in which most of the total lockdown period occurred. We also find some indication that boys and low-performing pupils suffered more from school closures than girls and high-performing pupils, but these differences are minor.

Pedagogies of the Best Dressed: School-Business Relationships in New Zealand 1990-2004, Including the Case of Food

<p>In the 1990s there was public speculation that New Zealand schools and businesses were establishing new and more relationships. Three broad public discourses sought to articulate this shift and its effects. They collectively represented business motives for school-business relationships as commercial, social, or operationally focused, or mixtures of these. This thesis argues with evidence from literature and original research, and with special attention on the activities of the food industry, that the prime business motive for school-business relationships was commercial. This motive is explored within the interwoven cultural contexts of changing businesses, changing childhoods and changing schools. In recent years businesses have assumed greater power as corporate meaning-makers in childhood identities as the boundaries between the cultural categories of advertising, entertainment and education collapse and new hybrid forms emerge including new school-business relationship forms. As business integrate public relations with their marketing objectives, this meaning-making role in an information society has intensified and fulfils a wide range of objectives from increased sales to management of public opinion. Businesses with the most fragile public profiles have gravitated to schools the most, and school children have become both key producers and key consumers of the sign value of the socially responsible business. Childhood is considered within a social constructionist perspective and it is argued that businesses influence childhood identity through the transgressive pedagogies of children's popular culture, and the commercialized adult discourses of child development and innocence. The tensions between these are being brought to some resolution in the increasingly popular commercialized edutainment pedagogies offered to students in schools, which simultaneously address adult and child desires. Responding to school-business relationships in New Zealand from 1990 was the marketised and corporatised school. The structural and cultural dimensions of New Zealand's marketisation reforms enabled pervasive discourses of competitive entrepreneurialism and managerial pragmatism to jostle with educational ethics in school-business relationship decision-making. Many school-business relationships found favour as fundraising opportunities or complex and financially advantageous relationships, limiting the potential for teacher dissent or community deliberation and debate. Teachers maintained an influential role in the key area of curriculum-related school-business relationships, but in this research, their perceptions about sponsored materials and programmes were overwhelmingly constructed within a discourse of curriculum utility and student appeal. The corporate agenda was usually positioned as benign advertising and marketing and there wes little understanding of the evolution of corporate public relations in recent years. Teachers decoupled the learning gain through school-business relationships from this corporate marketing. This steered them away from undertaking a deeper analysis of the corporate cultural agenda, limited their interest in the school's wider business relationships, and created a compelling argument for commercialized edutainment in schools. The business-like school was less capable of a critical understanding of the education-like business, and was often disinterested in resistance to school-business relationships. This thesis argues that school-business relationships need to be rescued by teachers from a discourse of pragmatic utility, and critically reconsidered as corporate pedagogies seeking to construct a consuming childhood and further various corporate ideologies and agendas. Schools as meaning-makers themselves are vital to this cultural assessment.</p>

Pedagogies of the Best Dressed: School-Business Relationships in New Zealand 1990-2004, Including the Case of Food

<p>In the 1990s there was public speculation that New Zealand schools and businesses were establishing new and more relationships. Three broad public discourses sought to articulate this shift and its effects. They collectively represented business motives for school-business relationships as commercial, social, or operationally focused, or mixtures of these. This thesis argues with evidence from literature and original research, and with special attention on the activities of the food industry, that the prime business motive for school-business relationships was commercial. This motive is explored within the interwoven cultural contexts of changing businesses, changing childhoods and changing schools. In recent years businesses have assumed greater power as corporate meaning-makers in childhood identities as the boundaries between the cultural categories of advertising, entertainment and education collapse and new hybrid forms emerge including new school-business relationship forms. As business integrate public relations with their marketing objectives, this meaning-making role in an information society has intensified and fulfils a wide range of objectives from increased sales to management of public opinion. Businesses with the most fragile public profiles have gravitated to schools the most, and school children have become both key producers and key consumers of the sign value of the socially responsible business. Childhood is considered within a social constructionist perspective and it is argued that businesses influence childhood identity through the transgressive pedagogies of children's popular culture, and the commercialized adult discourses of child development and innocence. The tensions between these are being brought to some resolution in the increasingly popular commercialized edutainment pedagogies offered to students in schools, which simultaneously address adult and child desires. Responding to school-business relationships in New Zealand from 1990 was the marketised and corporatised school. The structural and cultural dimensions of New Zealand's marketisation reforms enabled pervasive discourses of competitive entrepreneurialism and managerial pragmatism to jostle with educational ethics in school-business relationship decision-making. Many school-business relationships found favour as fundraising opportunities or complex and financially advantageous relationships, limiting the potential for teacher dissent or community deliberation and debate. Teachers maintained an influential role in the key area of curriculum-related school-business relationships, but in this research, their perceptions about sponsored materials and programmes were overwhelmingly constructed within a discourse of curriculum utility and student appeal. The corporate agenda was usually positioned as benign advertising and marketing and there wes little understanding of the evolution of corporate public relations in recent years. Teachers decoupled the learning gain through school-business relationships from this corporate marketing. This steered them away from undertaking a deeper analysis of the corporate cultural agenda, limited their interest in the school's wider business relationships, and created a compelling argument for commercialized edutainment in schools. The business-like school was less capable of a critical understanding of the education-like business, and was often disinterested in resistance to school-business relationships. This thesis argues that school-business relationships need to be rescued by teachers from a discourse of pragmatic utility, and critically reconsidered as corporate pedagogies seeking to construct a consuming childhood and further various corporate ideologies and agendas. Schools as meaning-makers themselves are vital to this cultural assessment.</p>

Temporal Assessment of Self-Regulated Learning by Mining Students’ Think-Aloud Protocols

It has been widely theorized and empirically proven that self-regulated learning (SRL) is related to more desired learning outcomes, e.g., higher performance in transfer tests. Research has shifted to understanding the role of SRL during learning, such as the strategies and learning activities, learners employ and engage in the different SRL phases, which contribute to learning achievement. From a methodological perspective, measuring SRL using think-aloud data has been shown to be more insightful than self-report surveys as it helps better in determining the link between SRL activities and learning achievements. Educational process mining on the basis of think-aloud data enables a deeper understanding and more fine-grained analyses of SRL processes. Although students’ SRL is highly contextualized, there are consistent findings of the link between SRL activities and learning outcomes pointing to some consistency of the processes that support learning. However, past studies have utilized differing approaches which make generalization of findings between studies investigating the unfolding of SRL processes during learning a challenge. In the present study with 29 university students, we measured SRL via concurrent think-aloud protocols in a pre-post design using a similar approach from a previous study in an online learning environment during a 45-min learning session, where students learned about three topics and wrote an essay. Results revealed significant learning gain and replication of links between SRL activities and transfer performance, similar to past research. Additionally, temporal structures of successful and less successful students indicated meaningful differences associated with both theoretical assumptions and past research findings. In conclusion, extending prior research by exploring SRL patterns in an online learning setting provides insights to the replicability of previous findings from online learning settings and new findings show that it is important not only to focus on the repertoire of SRL strategies but also on how and when they are used.