High-School Students’ Topic-Specific Epistemic Beliefs about Climate Change: An Assessment-Related Study

This study belongs to assessment-related research and aimed to investigate Finnish high-school students’ (n = 211) topic-specific epistemic beliefs about climate change and whether the Norwegian topic-specific epistemic beliefs questionnaire (TSEBQ) was also valid among Finnish respondents. Thus, research data were not only derived from the TSEBQ but also from topic knowledge tests and students’ views on their favorite school subjects and interest in science subjects. Principal component analysis (PCA) showed that the statistical model, originally based on 49 questions, was congruent with the Norwegian four-factor model (Certification, Source, Justification and Simplicity). However, according to the reliability analysis and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the performance of the Simplicity factor was unclear. In CFA, the three-factor structure (without Simplicity) was supported. The effects of topic knowledge, topic interest and gender on the TSEBQ factors were examined by using hierarchical regression analysis (HRA). The TSEBQ was shown to be a reliable tool for measuring the topic-specific epistemic beliefs of Finnish students. More specifically, the results support the claim that topic-specific epistemic beliefs can be educationally and culturally bound. HRA showed that students’ topic knowledge in chemistry and biology was related to certainty of knowledge and justification for knowing. Moreover, female students performed significantly better in topic knowledge and more often planned to pursue a science career in the future.

Fiddly Fives: Management of Impacted Second Premolars

Second premolars are the third most likely teeth to be affected by impaction after third molar and maxillary canine teeth. Although the presence of an impacted second premolar is relatively common, and is a situation that often presents to general dentists in practice, there is relatively little published regarding this topic. Knowledge of this condition is essential for all those involved with the management of these cases. This article explores the aetiology, assessment and treatment options available to manage this condition, using examples from cases treated within our department. CPD/Clinical Relevance: An understanding of the aetiology, assessment and various treatment options available to manage impacted second premolars will inform better treatment planning.

Students’ Interpretations of a Persuasive Multimodal Video About Vaccines

The present study investigated students’ ( N = 404) interpretations of the main message and use of modes in a persuasive multimodal video on vaccines. It also examined whether students’ topic knowledge, language arts grades, and self-identified gender were associated with their interpretations. Students analyzed a YouTube video in which two entertainers demonstrated the importance of vaccinating children. Students’ interpretations of the usefulness of vaccines varied in terms of quality of reasoning, which was associated with students’ topic knowledge. Notably, many students’ interpretations of the use of modes were incomplete, or they did not even mention certain modes in their response. The results suggest that students should be explicitly taught how to interpret different modes and their uses for argumentative purposes.

Topic Enhanced Controllable CVAE for Dialogue Generation (Student Abstract)

Neural generation models have shown great potential in conversation generation recently. However, these methods tend to generate uninformative or irrelevant responses. In this paper, we present a novel topic-enhanced controllable CVAE (TEC-CVAE) model to address this issue. On the one hand, the model learns the context-interactive topic knowledge through a novel multi-hop hybrid attention in the encoder. On the other hand, we design a topic-aware controllable decoder to constrain the expression of the stochastic latent variable in the CVAE to reduce irrelevant responses. Experimental results on two public datasets show that the two mechanisms synchronize to improve both relevance and diversity, and the proposed model outperforms other competitive methods.