Concussion treatment through Baria zasal: An exploration of Traditional Mongolian Medicine

There is no specific treatment for concussion in modern medicine; existing treatments are limited to resting and restoring cognition. For Mongolians, seeking concussion treatment from a bariachi, an advanced practitioner of the baria zasal traditional massage therapy, is very common. The baria zasal technique has been passed down the generations for millions of years, keeping with the Mongolian nomadic culture and way of life. However, this Mongolian treatment is little known or researched internationally. Due to the lack of literature on this subject, conducting a meta-analysis or systematic review was impossible. We reviewed the literature published in Mongolian about this technique. We also searched articles published from 1 January 1921 to 20 June 2021 in PubMed using "concussion", "baria zasal", and "Bariachi" keywords. Although informal observation indicates this is a commonly sought treatment among patients, there are very few published scientific articles about the practice outside the realm of cultural anthropology. This may be due to a few reasons: the informal, semi-religious setting in which the treatment takes place makes it difficult to conduct scientific field research; concussion is a mild traumatic brain injury, making it impossible to identify changes in the brain as a result of the treatment using imaging methods and therefore difficult to verify; and lastly, baria zasal is generally uncontested as a treatment even by Mongolian medical professionals, therefore it has not been the subject of empirical debate. Moreover, it is not classified under a specific system, each bariachi having its technique. As bariachis do not receive formal training, their treatments often depend on instincts, natural talents, and personal abilities. Therefore, it is recommended to study the techniques of baria zasal of concussion to explain its enduring popularity in Mongolia and to ascertain how it interacts with standard western medical treatment.

Biology Education in Perspective: An Inquiry into Ghanaian Senior High School Students’ Attitude Towards Biology Practical Lessons

This study aimed at finding out the attitude of students towards Biology practical lessons in selected Senior High Schools in Ghana. The study adopted the descriptive sample design, involving both quantitative and qualitative research approaches. The population of the study comprised 408 students and 24 teachers. The students and teachers were chosen at random from a table of random numbers respectively. Data was collected using informal observation, questionnaire and documents. The questionnaire was made up of both open and close-ended questions. The Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23.0 was the software that was used in processing the quantitative data. The findings of the study revealed that 5% of students from well-endowed schools, as against 40.5% of those from less-endowed schools, indicated that they have poor attitudes towards Biology practical lessons and this was confirmed by their teachers. It was also shown that practical lessons in Biology, in both well-endowed and less-endowed Senior High Schools, were greatly impeded by lack of proper laboratory, lack of laboratory assistants/technicians and inadequacy of practical equipment and materials for practical work. Based on the findings of the study, the government, Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) and other stakeholders should help in providing the needed resources such as well-equipped laboratories and materials among others to facilitate the teaching and learning of Biology practical in the schools.

Giving Voice to the Voiceless: Probing Current Issues for Student Teachers in EFL Teacher Education Program in Iran

The present study attempted to give insight into the features of an effective English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher education program by exploring student teachers’ beliefs, ideas, and the challenges they encounter during their teacher education program. The data were collected through several semi-structured focus group interview sessions with a total number of forty-one BA, MA, and PhD students studying teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) at university. The qualitative grounded theory design was used to analyze the data, and the findings of the study were corroborated with interpretations obtained from the informal observation of several university classes in a TEFL teacher education program in Iran. The inductive analysis of the data resulted in developing the following categories: the challenge of developing the ability to move back and forth from theory to practice, the struggle to establish a professional identity, the quest for the ‘self’, less-practiced reflective practice, and the missing connection between teacher education programs and schools. The discussion concerning the challenges and issues culminated in implications for EFL teacher education programs through which they can take the issues that student teachers normally experience into account and help them pave the way for an effective EFL teacher education program.

Information Literacy Alliances

Informal observation by University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona librarians and anecdotal evidence from UWI faculty suggested that information literacy skills among students at the UWI Mona are inadequate for university level. Results of an informal survey of IL in select high school libraries in Jamaica indicated school IL programmes were not preparing students adequately. Therefore, the authors propose forging alliances between the University Mona Library and high school libraries to improve IL programmes in the high schools. The paper draws on three recent successful cases of collaboration between the UWI Mona library and high schools. It ends with some recommendations.

On non-adjacent letter repetition and orthographic processing: Lexical decisions to nonwords created by repeating or inserting letters in words

Informal observation suggests that it is harder to notice the spelling mistake in “silencne” than “silencre.” This concurs with current evidence that non-adjacent letter repetition in correctly spelled words makes these words harder to recognize. One possible explanation is provided by open-bigram coding. Words containing repeated letters are harder to recognize because they are represented by fewer bigrams than words without repeated letters. Building on this particular explanation for letter-repetition effects in words, we predicted that nonwords in a lexical decision task should also be sensitive to letter repetitions. In particular, we examined two types of nonwords generated from the same baseword: (1) nonwords created by repeating one of the letters in the baseword (e.g., silence => silencne); and (2) nonwords created by inserting a letter that is not present in the baseword (e.g., silencre). According to open-bigram coding, nonwords created by repeating a letter are more similar to their baseword than nonwords created by inserting a letter, and this should make it harder to reject letter repetition nonwords than letter insertion nonwords. We put these predictions to test in one on-line pilot study (n=31), one laboratory experiment (n=36), and one follow-up on-line experiment (n=40) where we manipulated the distance between repetitions (one, two, three, or four letters). Participants found it harder to reject repetition nonwords than insertion nonwords, and this effect diminished with increasing distance.

Training Petting Zoo Sheep to Act Like Petting Zoo Sheep: An Empirical Evaluation of Response-Independent Schedules and Shaping with Negative Reinforcement

Shaping through differential reinforcement of successive approximations to a target response has been a cornerstone procedure for the training of novel behavior. However, much of how it has traditionally been implemented occurs through informal observation, rather than any direct, systematic measurement. In the present study, we examine the use of response-independent food schedules and shaping for increasing approach and contact behaviors in petting zoo sheep. In Experiment 1, a fixed-time (FT) 15 s food schedule was used to effectively increase approach and contact behaviors in one sheep. In Experiment 2, negative reinforcement in the form of removal of the presence of a trainer was made contingent on the successful completion of approximations within a shaping procedure and later switched to food rewards. A changing-criterion design was used to empirically examine the effects of the shaping procedure during each step of the program. The result is one of the first studies to demonstrate the utility of using negative reinforcement within a shaping procedure to successfully intervene on approach/avoidance behaviors in an applied animal setting.

Ecological origins of perceptual grouping principles in the auditory system

Events and objects in the world must be inferred from sensory signals to support behavior. Because sensory measurements are temporally and spatially local, the estimation of an object or event can be viewed as the grouping of these measurements into representations of their common causes. Perceptual grouping is believed to reflect internalized regularities of the natural environment, yet grouping cues have traditionally been identified using informal observation and investigated using artificial stimuli. The relationship of grouping to natural signal statistics has thus remained unclear, and additional or alternative cues remain possible. Here, we develop a general methodology for relating grouping to natural sensory signals and apply it to derive auditory grouping cues from natural sounds. We first learned local spectrotemporal features from natural sounds and measured their co-occurrence statistics. We then learned a small set of stimulus properties that could predict the measured feature co-occurrences. The resulting cues included established grouping cues, such as harmonic frequency relationships and temporal coincidence, but also revealed previously unappreciated grouping principles. Human perceptual grouping was predicted by natural feature co-occurrence, with humans relying on the derived grouping cues in proportion to their informativity about co-occurrence in natural sounds. The results suggest that auditory grouping is adapted to natural stimulus statistics, show how these statistics can reveal previously unappreciated grouping phenomena, and provide a framework for studying grouping in natural signals.

Ecological origins of perceptual grouping principles in the auditory system

Events and objects in the world must be inferred from sensory signals to support behavior. Because sensory measurements are temporally and spatially local, the estimation of an object or event can be viewed as the grouping of these measurements into representations of their common causes. Per-ceptual grouping is believed to reflect internalized regularities of the natural environment, yet grouping cues have traditionally been identified using informal observation, and investigated using artificial stim-uli. The relationship of grouping to natural signal statistics has thus remained unclear, and additional or alternative cues remain possible. Here we derive auditory grouping cues by measuring and summarizing statistics of natural sound features. Feature co-occurrence statistics reproduced established cues but also revealed previously unappreciated grouping principles. The results suggest that auditory grouping is adapted to natural stimulus statistics, show how these statistics can reveal novel grouping phenomena, and provide a framework for studying grouping in natural signals.

From Teacher Talk to Student Talk

Informal observation in the Caribbean seems to indicate persistent application of traditional teacher-dominated strategies. For this chapter, data were collected from fifty-one Grade K to 3 teachers from six Caribbean countries, including three twin islands, to investigate the application of student-talk as an instructional strategy in repositioning learners for success with oral language skills. The data included an online survey and non-participant classroom observation using a mixed-methods research design drawing on qualitative and quantitative indicators. The study revealed that along with some evidence of student to teacher interaction, talk in the classrooms was primarily teacher-directed and students were usually expected to be silent except when responding to questions posed by the teacher. In addition, it was found that student to student talk was not encouraged generally, and the representation of a classroom environment favorable for the development of oral language skills was limited.

Introducing a Practical Educational Tool for Correlating Algorithm Time Complexity with Real Program Execution

Algorithm time complexity is an important topic to be learned for programmer; it could define whether an algorithm is practical to be used on real environment or not. However, learning such material is not a trivial task. Based on our informal observation regarding students’ test, most of them could not correlate Big-Oh equation to real program execution. This paper proposes JCEL, an educational tool that acts as a supportive tool for learning algorithm time complexity. Using this tool, user could learn how to correlate Big-Oh equation with real program execution by providing three components: a Java source code, source code input set, and time complexity equations. According to our evaluation, students feel that JCEL is helpful for learning the correlation between Big-Oh equation and real program execution. Further, the use of Pearson correlation in JCEL shows a promising result.