Is Segregated Language Support Fit for Purpose? Insights From German Language Support Classes in Austria

<p style="text-align: justify;">In Austria, segregated German language support classes (GLSC) were introduced in the school year 2018/19 to intensively support students who had previously little or no contact with German, the official language of instruction. These classes have been widely criticised; however, a formal evaluation of their effects has yet to be published. In absence of this evaluation, this article describes the language support model as it currently exists in Austria and reviews existing evidence about its efficacy. The literature review synthesises findings from educational research undertaken in other contexts that offer insight into features of ‘good practice’ in language support models. The article then explores the extent to which GLSC comply with these features. As such, this review allows insights into ways of ensuring students’ language and socio-emotional development – all central aspects of academic success – in language support models. It therefore allows research-informed understanding of the effects of the newly implemented model of German support classes in Austria and makes recommendations for further development.</p>

Building Students’ Personality for Employment Readiness through Soft-skills Training

A winning personality is the physical attribute of a person and is considered as his or her success in personal, academic, and professional careers. However, in the ESL context, most engineering students seem to be unaware of the need for and importance of an appealing personality for achieving success in both personal and professional careers. Although students are given a short-term training in soft-skills by their respective college or institute, engineering students seem to lack aspects of a pleasing personality which helps them in job placements and later in the work environment. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to understand and build engineering students’ personality traits such as enthusiasm, dependability, and teamwork for a successful career. For this purpose, to understand the students’ personality types, 25 engineering students were administered a pre-test based on Carl Jung and Isabel Briggs Myers’ typological approach to personality. Students were helped in building personality through the soft-skills training. The data was analyzed and interpreted both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results indicated that having a pleasing personality and exhibiting soft-skills enables in building students’ individual personality for employment readiness. Implications were offered to students, placement trainers, and teachers. It is concluded that having a charming personality will support students in landing their desired jobs.

Rethinking employability: how students build on interest in a subject to plan a career

As universities prioritise employability, there is increased attention to promoting students’ career decidedness. In this mixed method, cross-sectional study, we explore whether and how students’ interest in their academic subject affects their career decidedness. Using surveys of 428 undergraduates studying sciences in a UK university (60% F, average age = 19.9) and case examples from follow-up interviews with 15 students, we examine students’ interest development and its relation to their career decidedness and their desire for meaningful, interesting work. Findings showed that most students who were studying science in university had a well-developed interest that had motivated their choice of programme, and their subject interest and career decidedness were linked. Regression analyses indicated that students’ interest in their subject was a significant predictor of career decidedness, mediated by students’ desire to pursue that interest in their career. Open-ended comments on the surveys suggested that decidedness was informed by coursework, proactive career exploration, work experience, interest, feasibility, and familial contacts. Interviews confirmed these factors and illustrated how they contributed to students’ career decidedness. We propose implications for academics and career counsellors who might help students refine their interest by considering connections between their academic subject, interest, and related career options. We argue that educators and policy-makers need to reframe employability interventions and think beyond teaching students skills or attributes that lead to employment. Educators can start with students’ interest in their subject and support students’ exploration of how they can continue to pursue that interest in various careers.

Effect of information gain on document classification using k-nearest neighbor

State universities have a library as a facility to support students’ education and science, which contains various books, journals, and final assignments. An intelligent system for classifying documents is needed to ease library visitors in higher education as a form of service to students. The documents that are in the library are generally the result of research. Various complaints related to the imbalance of data texts and categories based on irrelevant document titles and words that have the ambiguity of meaning when searching for documents are the main reasons for the need for a classification system. This research uses k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) to categorize documents based on study interests with information gain features selection to handle unbalanced data and cosine similarity to measure the distance between test and training data. Based on the results of tests conducted with 276 training data, the highest results using the information gain selection feature using 80% training data and 20% test data produce an accuracy of 87.5% with a parameter value of k=5. The highest accuracy results of 92.9% are achieved without information gain feature selection, with the proportion of training data of 90% and 10% test data and parameters k=5, 7, and 9. This paper concludes that without information gain feature selection, the system has better accuracy than using the feature selection because every word in the document title is considered to have an essential role in forming the classification.

Smiles: A Strengths-Based On-Ramp Mathematics Task

Use this activity to support students in working together, recognizing one another’s contributions, and leveraging their mathematical strengths to solve challenging problems.

Learning in the Face of Digital Distractions

Digital distractions are an important and prevalent aspect of college students' lives. Using a self-regulated learning perspective, this chapter provides an in-depth understanding of students' digital distractions in academic settings and highlights how college instructors can empower their students to manage digital distractions and self-regulate their own learning. In particular, the chapter discusses both the causes and consequences of engaging in digital distractions with a focus on the impact of multitasking. In addition, the chapter argues that students' engagement in digital distractions is closely connected to their motivation and emotions. This chapter highlights how college students can regulate their digital distractions throughout the learning process during each phase of self-regulated learning. Finally, the chapter reviews the ways college instructors can support students' management of distractions through their instructional approaches.

Towards an Anti-Racist, Culturally Responsive, and LGBTQ+ Inclusive Education

This chapter summarizes the ongoing efforts of faculty to develop a program of study embedded in an educational doctorate (EdD) program intended to develop critically conscious educational leaders and change agents. It discusses how courses were collaboratively developed as well as how faculty decided on and began to employ an experimental self-study action research Dissertation in Practice. This chapter then outlines what was learned as a team of collaborators about the best ways to establish coherence and cultivate deep learning to support students' ability to work with adults in the context of instruction and curriculum to address historically entrenched inequities that differentially disadvantage some students while granting privileges to others.

Gamification Tools to Facilitate Student Learning Engagement in Higher Education

Gamification is a novel technology that can potentially motivate student learning. This chapter reflects on the implementation of a gamified application to support students' learning in terms of learning important facts concerning their study program. The scope of the chapter refers to two design features in which tests were conducted on the different configurations in a field experiment among UK university students. The initial feature identified was feedback, where it was anticipated that engagement would increase, with tailored feedback having a greater impact than generic feedback. The next feature identified was circumventing users from binge gaming through session limits, as this may potentially prevent deep learning. The findings suggest that tailored feedback was less effective than generic feedback, contradicting the initial anticipation. Session limits were found to not circumvent binging without a reduction in sessions. The findings suggest that gaming properties of gamified applications could impact sustaining and encouraging play.

Guiding the Next Step

This article examines the mentorship gap students face between the completion of a manuscript and its subsequent submission to a journal. Without continued faculty support, students often face unexpected hurdles as they enter the publication process. To alleviate these issues, the article discusses the value of extending undergraduate research mentorship.