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.

Pupillary dynamics of optimal effort

ABSTRACTWhile a substantial body of work has shown that cognitive effort is aversive and costly, a separate line of research on intrinsic motivation suggests that people spontaneously seek challenging tasks. According to one prominent account of intrinsic motivation, the Learning Progress Motivation theory, the preference for difficult tasks reflects the dynamic range that these tasks yield for minimization of performance accuracy prediction errors (Oudeyer, Kaplan & Hafner, 2007). Here we test this hypothesis, by asking whether greater engagement with intermediately difficult tasks, indexed by subjective ratings and objective pupil measurements, is a function of trial-wise changes in performance prediction error. In a novel paradigm, we determined each individual’s capacity for task performance and used difficulty levels that are too low, intermediately challenging or high for that individual. We demonstrated that intermediately challenging tasks resulted in greater liking and engagement scores compared with easy tasks. Task-evoked and baseline pupil size tracked objective task difficulty, where challenging tasks were associated with smaller baseline and greater phasic pupil responses than easy tasks. Most importantly, pupil responses were predicted by trial-to-trial changes in expected accuracy, performance prediction error magnitude and changes in prediction errors (learning progress), whereas smaller baseline pupil responses also predicted greater subjective engagement scores. Together, these results suggest that what is underlying the link between task engagement and intermediate tasks might be the dynamic range that these tasks yield for minimization of performance accuracy prediction errors.

ANALISIS MOTIVASI BELAJAR SISWA SEKOLAH DASAR DALAM PEMBELAJARAN DARING DI DESA SADANG SELAMA PANDEMI COVID-19

The purpose of conducting this research is to find out the students’ motivation in online learning process, to find out the problems faced by the student, parents, and teachers and described the effective solution for the problems in Sadang. The researcher used descriptive qualitative in conducting this research. The technique in collecting data, the researcher used documentation, observation, and interview. The result of this research shows that students’ have a good motivation in learning process in the first condition, but gradually they feel bored and saturated. The problems faced by the teachers is about the difficulties to give the material, the learning process is not effective because teachers can not directly give explanation of the material to the students, teachers get difficulties to build a good motivation in learning process. The problems faced by the parents is about helping students to study, finished the homework, and worried about the students’ psychology progress. the researcher believed that every problems will have an alternative solution. By inviting students to discuss together about the material and created kind of study group with other students can make the students excited to study. Have a good communication and collaboration with parents is the appropriate solution for all of the teachers’ problems, teachers can discuss about the learning progress, and monitoring the students by parents. Teachers should have variative way in learning process to created students’ creativity. The solution for parents is help students during learning process and invite them to play together, it will make them excited to study.

Validity of Automated Learning Progress Assessment in English Written Expression for Students with Learning Difficulties

We evaluated the validity of an automated approach to learning progress assessment (aLPA) for English written expression. Participants (n = 105) were students in Grades 2–12 who had parent-identified learning difficulties and received academic tutoring through a community-based organization. Participants completed narrative writing samples in the fall and spring of one academic year, and some participants (n = 33) also completed a standardized writing assessment in the spring of the academic year. The narrative writing samples were evaluated using aLPA, four hand-scored written expression curriculum-based measures (WE-CBM), and ratings of writing quality. Results indicated (a) aLPA and WE-CBM scores were highly correlated with ratings of writing quality; (b) aLPA and more complex WE-CBM scores demonstrated acceptable correlations with the standardized writing subtest assessing spelling and grammar, but not the subtest assessing substantive quality; and (c) aLPA scores showed small, statistically significant improvements from fall to spring. These findings provide preliminary evidence that aLPA can be used to efficiently score narrative writing samples for progress monitoring, with some evidence that the aLPA scores can serve as a general indicator of writing skill. The use of automated scoring in aLPA, with performance comparable to WE-CBM hand scoring, may improve scoring feasibility and increase the likelihood that educators implement aLPA for decision making.

Design and Development of a Self-Diagnostic Mobile Application for Learning Progress in Non-Face-to-Face Practice Learning

Due to COVID-19, non-F2F (non-face-to-face) learning is being conducted in educational sites around the world. Unlike theoretical subjects, which have a variety of applicable non-F2F learning content, in practical subjects, learners may undergo many difficulties due to many learning activities. Therefore, this research tries to design and develop a mobile application that allows learners to perform a self-diagnostic on their learning progress. In this research, we conducted a mobile application usability evaluation for 36 students who participated in non-F2F Arduino practice learning. To this end, we applied the ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implement, and Evaluation) model to develop a self-diagnostic mobile application for students’ learning progress according to the learning content. The research tool modified and distributed the question item appropriate for this subject’s study for the mobile usability evaluation that was used in the previous study. This research applied the ADDIE model to analyze the characteristics of students and learning contents, including designed learning contents, database, menu structure, developed learning contents, and mobile application. After using this in non-F2F practice learning for 15 weeks, a mobile application usability evaluation was conducted. As a result of the study, due to receiving usability scores between 3.53 and 4.42, it was found that the learning progress self-diagnostic in non-F2F practice learning was essential and that mobile applications were useful in non-F2F practice learning. Additionally, 33 out of 36 students responded that it would be useful for their learning if they actively used it in other subjects as well. We have found that leveraging self-diagnostic mobile applications through the mobile application usability evaluation tool can be useful for non-F2F practice learning. Additionally, it is expected to be useful for non-F2F practice learning if additional research is conducted on other factors as well such as teaching presence, online learning engagement, and learning flow in the future.

Humans monitor learning progress in curiosity-driven exploration

Curiosity-driven learning is foundational to human cognition. By enabling humans to autonomously decide when and what to learn, curiosity has been argued to be crucial for self-organizing temporally extended learning curricula. However, the mechanisms driving people to set intrinsic goals, when they are free to explore multiple learning activities, are still poorly understood. Computational theories propose different heuristics, including competence measures (e.g., percent correct) and learning progress, that could be used as intrinsic utility functions to efficiently organize exploration. Such intrinsic utilities constitute computationally cheap but smart heuristics to prevent people from laboring in vain on unlearnable activities, while still motivating them to self-challenge on difficult learnable activities. Here, we provide empirical evidence for these ideas by means of a free-choice experimental paradigm and computational modeling. We show that while humans rely on competence information to avoid easy tasks, models that include a learning-progress component provide the best fit to task selection data. These results bridge the research in artificial and biological curiosity, reveal strategies that are used by humans but have not been considered in computational research, and introduce tools for probing how humans become intrinsically motivated to learn and acquire interests and skills on extended time scales.

Personalized and adaptive learning

Education Technology advances many aspects of learning. More and more learning is taking place online. Learners’ learning behaviors, style, and performance can be easily profiled through learning analytics which collects their online learning footage. It enables and encourages educational research, learning software application development, and online education practices towards personalized and adaptive learning. As we continue to see personalized and adaptive learning progress, we must also pay attention to the negative impacts that feed into our research. In this paper, we will present our introspection of personalized and adaptive learning and argue that it is the social and moral responsibility of educators and institutions to apply personalized and adaptive learning wisely in their education practice. Educators and institutions should also recognize the realistic diversities of individual students’ learning styles and variable learning progress, contextually dependent learning accessibility, and their correspondent support needs for the fine-grained learning activities. We argue that the strategically balanced practices and innovated learning technology are crucial towards an optimized learning experience for the learners.