Remote learning through a mobile application in gifted education

During the school closure in the COVID-19 pandemic, students with special needs including gifted students faced many challenges in terms of educational support. The Turkish Ministry of National Education released a mobile app named “I am special, I am in education” to overcome these challenges. This study aimed to explore how gifted children perceived the experience of learning through this mobile app. Using a phenomenological design, the data were collected from 10 gifted students through focus group interviews and student journals. An inductive approach was used to analyze the data. The findings indicated that although gifted students referred to this experience as weird and different, they also stated that using the app helped their learning. They foregrounded that the app needed improvements and a section for live interaction with other gifted students and teachers to increase their motivation. This study suggests some implications for mobile app developers, educators, and parents.

Tasking Students With Empathy: Field Observations, COVID-19, and Assessing an Anthropological Sensibility

In 2019 and 2020 students in an Australian university conducted a short ethnographic exercise, a ‘journal’, with an attunement to the multiplicity of meanings evident in a single space by a range of interlocutors. We emphasised and assessed ‘empathy’ as a short-hand for the kind of anthropological sensibility we hoped to encourage. By requesting an account that represented an awareness of how ‘others’ encounter and come to ‘know’ the world we promoted their adoption of a modality which is central to the discipline. We wanted them to describe the world—the terrain, the stuff of their surroundings—based on their observations of how these others behaved. To couch it in anthropological terms, we wanted them to be attuned to a multiplicity of ‘taskscapes’, Ingold’s term for the mutual constitution of people and places through culturally politically, economically, and spiritually informed actions (‘tasks’) (Ingold, 1993). These ‘taskscapes’ were illustrated through the work of McKee (2016), whose account of multiple simultaneous experiences in the Negev desert by those living in (variously labelled) Israel/Palestine, represented an unexperienced domain for most of the Australian students. Rather than reinforcing the dated notion that anthropology is something that is done ‘elsewhere’, by asking students to focus on anthropology ‘at home’ they embodied their understanding of a transferable concept—introduced via an ‘exotic’ example—through a locally embedded experience. This paper describes the delivery of this assignment in 2019 and 2020 and explores in detail the content of five student journals and their evidence of the targeted learning.

Pengembangan Panduan Pelaksanaan Sosiodrama Ubrug Untuk Meningkatkan Komunikasi Interpesonal

The purpose of this study was to develop a guidebook for the implementation of the Ubrug Banten sociodrama as a group building method in order to improve students' interpersonal communication skills. This research was developed based on aspects of interpersonal communication according to De Vito (2011) which includes openness, empathy (empathy), supportiveness, positiveness and equality. The research method uses RD. The development model uses ADDIE which is simplified into three stages, namely analysis, design and development. The data collection technique used is by conducting an expert due diligence on the product being developed. Statistical data analysis techniques for product development feasibility tests quantitatively and qualitatively. Based on the validation results, it is known that the assessment of the media expert's assessment of the ubrug sociodrama guidebook product obtained a total score of 85% with very feasible criteria, while the assessment of material experts on the material contained in the ubrug sociodrama guidebook product obtained a total score of 81% with criteria very worthy. The Ubrug sociodrama guidebook can assist counseling teachers in delivering material on interpersonal communication skills by means of group guidance with sociodrama techniques in an effort to learn and preserve the cultural arts of the Ubrug Banten area and can assist students in improving interpersonal communication skills through exercises from student journals or assignments found in the guidebook for the Ubrug sociodrama.

What Is the Role of Graduate Student Journals in the Publish-or-Perish Academy? Three Lessons from Three Editors-in-Chief

To be prepared to face the “publish-or-perish” reality of contemporary academia, early career scholars must develop capacity and confidence. While the publication practices of International Relations have received increasing attention in the last 20 years, concern remains around the preparedness of graduate students to participate confidently and competently in the publication process. As three former Editors-in-Chief of a graduate student journal, we suggest that student-run journals can play an important role in professionalization during graduate school. We then reflect on our journal’s context as well as on reforms initiated to improve the policies and practices during our editorial tenure. Bringing our experiences to bear on previous findings in the literature, we outline three key lessons that can help support successful journals at other institutions. First, given the high turnover rate, starting early is key to maintain early enthusiasm and flatten intensity spikes. Second, editors must remain mindful of what we call the ‘workload paradox’—or how the comparatively low workload of some graduate journals can make it harder to manage an editorial team. Finally, we argue that graduate student journals should be understood as places of learning and primarily valued as professionalization and pedagogical spaces.

Conducting a Micro-Evaluation in an EFL Classroom for a Performance-Assisted Learning Activity

Performance–assisted learning (PAL) was introduced at the 2017 annual Japanese Association for Language Teaching (JALT) conference. It was revealed to be a “new concept in education” and that EFL university teachers were “extremely excited about its efficacy and power to motivate” (Head et al., 2018, p. 233). However, it was claimed that in many institutions, English department administrators did not share the same enthusiasm, seeing PAL activities as not academic enough. This study aims to gather a variety of qualitative data to validate the use of PAL. Over 5 weeks, a micro-evaluation involving a number of data sets was conducted on two university classes, containing 46 students in total, for a PAL activity (in this case, a four-page skit). The evaluations were individual student journals, peer-assessment, creative writing, teacher observation, and a video. The study describes the 5-week project procedure, and aims to provide more comprehensive evidence to support the use of PAL in the EFL classroom. Findings indicate very positive student engagement in the project, and a need to give more explicit instruction to students for the creative writing task.

Student journals in today’s world: defining a niche

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Student Journals: Facilitating Medical Student Research And Physician-Scientist Development

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Tutors’ and Multilingual Writers’ Narrative Framing of Writing Center Visits

This study explores how first-year multilingual writers in a classroom community make sense of their first university writing center visits. Employing narrative analysis of student journals, this study illustrates differences in themes writers discuss in their narratives of first writing center visits and themes in self-reflections on their writing. Comparing narratives in student journals and tutor report forms, this study also presents the congruities and discrepancies between writer and tutor views of a session. Writer emphasis on grammar when narrating writing center visits contrasts with writer emphasis on development in self-reflections on their writing. When tutor and writer session descriptions differ, tutors emphasize discussion of development and organization while writers emphasize sentence-level accuracy. Without scaffolding of strategies for writing center use, first-year multilingual writers may privilege sentence-level feedback in their early understanding of the writing center, resulting in a more limited experience of writing center support.