Enhancing Student Affect From Multi-Classroom Simulation Games via Teacher Professional Development

Educational simulations often require players to maintain a high degree of engagement for play in the simulation to continue. Student motivation and engagement is tied to affective factors, such as interest and self-efficacy. As such, game designs and teachers who implement them should promote student interest and self-efficacy in play. In this study, a responsive online professional development (ROPD) program was provided to teachers as they implemented a multi-classroom socio-scientific simulation game for middle school social studies classrooms called GlobalEd 2. A series of ANOVAs revealed that student affect toward the game and its content, including student interest and self-efficacy, was highest when their teachers likewise had a high degree of participation in the ROPD program. This evidence demonstrates the importance that ongoing implementation supports can have in classroom-based simulations and serious games and the benefits of ROPD in furthering the impact of simulation games.

Improving Classroom Communication: The Effects of Virtual Social Training on Communication and Assertion Skills in Middle School Students

This study examined the relationship between teacher identification of socially at-risk adolescents and baseline student social competency levels. Additionally, the feasibility and effects of an eight-session, virtual social training were analyzed. Upon completion of the virtual social training, the transfer effects from the targeted intervention into the general education classroom were determined. Study participants (N=90) were comprised of sixth, seventh and eighth-grade students from four public middle schools in Dallas, Texas. Data was collected through classroom teacher questionnaires to measure students’ baseline social behaviors. In addition, pre-post student performance measures in the areas of affect recognition, social inference, and social attribution were administered. Results revealed that middle school teachers were effective identifiers of students with lagging social skills. Baseline ratings of social skills showed a high positive association between student affect recognition and teacher rating of participant total social skills including communication, cooperation, responsibility, and self-control. A high negative association was found between student affect recognition and problem behaviors. A high negative association was also found between student perspective-taking and hyperactivity and externalizing behaviors. Student pre-post test performance measures revealed significant improvement in affect recognition, attribution, and social inferencing after undergoing the virtual social training. At the time of a 5°week follow up, teachers rated participants’ social skills in the areas of communication and assertion as significantly improved. Sixty-eight percent of participants reported increased confidence in social communication skills such as relating, maintaining, adapting, and asserting thoughts after the training. Preliminary findings from this small-scale study provide evidence that a brief eight-session, virtual social training in middle school is a feasible delivery model that can achieve positive effects on social behavior, and that teacher referral was a reliable way to identify students who could benefit from the training. Incorporating teacher perspective aided in translating a previously lab-based training into an ecologically relevant setting while addressing a programming need to meet the social demands of adolescence.

The role of authentic contexts and social elements in supporting organic chemistry students’ interactions with writing-to-learn assignments

Student affect is an important factor in the learning process and may be especially important in gateway courses such as organic chemistry. Students’ recognition of the relevance of the content they are learning and interactions with their peers can support their motivation to learn. Herein, we describe a study focused on how Writing-to-Learn assignments situate organic chemistry content within relevant contexts and incorporate social elements to support positive student interactions with organic chemistry. These assignments incorporate rhetorical elements—an authentic context, role, genre, and audience—to support student interest and demonstrate the relevance of the content. In addition, students engage in the processes of peer review and revision to support their learning. We identified how the authentic contexts and peer interactions incorporated into two Writing-to-Learn assignments supported students’ interactions with the assignments and course content by analyzing student interviews and supported by feedback survey responses. Our results indicate that assignments incorporating these elements can support student affect and result in students’ perceived learning, but that there should be careful consideration of the relevance of the chosen contexts with respect to the interests of the students enrolled in the course and the complexity of the contexts.

Enhancing Student Affect From Multi-Classroom Simulation Games via Teacher Professional Development

Educational simulations often require players to maintain a high degree of engagement for play in the simulation to continue. Student motivation and engagement is tied to affective factors, such as interest and self-efficacy. As such, game designs and teachers who implement them should promote student interest and self-efficacy in play. In this study, a responsive online professional development (ROPD) program was provided to teachers as they implemented a multi-classroom socio-scientific simulation game for middle school social studies classrooms called GlobalEd 2. A series of ANOVAs revealed that student affect toward the game and its content, including student interest and self-efficacy, was highest when their teachers likewise had a high degree of participation in the ROPD program. This evidence demonstrates the importance that ongoing implementation supports can have in classroom-based simulations and serious games and the benefits of ROPD in furthering the impact of simulation games.

LITERATURE REVIEW : PENGARUH PENDIDIKAN KESEHATAN MENGGUNAKAN MEDIA AUDIOVISUAL TENTANG MENARCHE TERHADAP KESIAPAN SISWI SD MENGHADAPI MENARCHE

Physical and mental readiness is needed before menarche because pre-puberty girl may feel anxiety and fear. Health education is one way that can be done because it will increase knowledge and information about menstruation so it will affect on good perceptions of menstruation and increase readiness in dealing with menarche. This research aimed to analyse the influence of health education by using audiovisual media on readiness to face menarche. This study uses the literature review method. The research was conducted by using Google Scholar and Proquest databases with keywords to find articles which are appropriate the inclusion and exclusion criteria to be reviewed. The results on reviewed articles, 3 articles prove that audiovisual education about menarche effective to increase readiness in dealing with menarche, 2 other articles prove that audiovisual media is more effective than the education without audiovisual media and leaflets. The conclusion based on 5 reviewed articles proves that audiovisual health education about menarche given to premenarche elementary student affect their readiness to face menarche because it can provide stimulus of sense for hearing and vision, so that the results obtained are more optimal. This review of the information on reproductive health can be used in the fields of education, approval, and community service regarding reproductive health in elementary school students.

A Comparison of Student Affect after Engaging in a Mathematical Modeling Activity

The study was a comparison of general students of promise affect and mathematical students of promise affect after doing a mathematical modeling activity. Participants’ gender (n=160), in grades 7-8, were nearly equal in number (81 girls & 79 boys). After completing a Model-eliciting Activity (MEA) in groups of three, participants completed the 31-item Chamberlin Affective Instrument for Mathematical Problem Solving, hereafter referred to as CAIMPS (Chamberlin, Moore, & Parks, 2017). Using four subconstructs, it was determined that the only statistically significant difference in student affect among the groups was self-esteem and self-efficacy (SS) with the general students of promise group having a mean of 3.43 and the mathematical students of promise group having a mean of 3.76. Implications are that the difference in SS may have surfaced because of the mathematical demands of the problems that ultimately influenced participants’ ratings. Three subconstructs (Attitude Value Interest [AVI], Anxiety [ANX], and Aspiration [ASP]) may not have realized a statistically significant difference because they were not as contingent upon mathematical content knowledge as was SS. The final implication is that similar affective ratings may be an indication that MEAs are similarly suitable for use with groups containing individuals with varying talents.

Semi-Supervised Learning to Perceive Children's Affective States in a Tablet Tutor

Like good human tutors, intelligent tutoring systems should detect and respond to students' affective states. However, accuracy in detecting affective states automatically has been limited by the time and expense of manually labeling training data for supervised learning. To combat this limitation, we use semi-supervised learning to train an affective state detector on a sparsely labeled, culturally novel, authentic data set in the form of screen capture videos from a Swahili literacy and numeracy tablet tutor in Tanzania that shows the face of the child using it. We achieved 88% leave-1-child-out cross-validated accuracy in distinguishing pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral affective states, compared to only 61% for the best supervised learning method we tested. This work contributes toward using automated affect detection both off-line to improve the design of intelligent tutors, and at runtime to respond to student affect based on input from a user-facing tablet camera or webcam.