Increasing Social Interactions of Preschool Children With Autism Through Cooperative Outdoor Play

Unstructured activity periods are central components of early childhood education programs. Deficits in social communication and social interaction presented by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) become apparent in these settings during unstructured activities, such as outdoor recess. Thirty-two preschool-aged children with and without ASD participated in the Buddy Game, a structured, cooperative play curriculum that focused on natural peer–peer modeling and imitation. The Buddy Game used familiar songs to promote peer proximity and discrete social bids between peers during outside time. A multiple baseline design across three classrooms was used to study curriculum effects on discrete social bids of children with ASD. Results demonstrated increased social bids from children with ASD to their peers with neurotypical development (NTD) across classrooms. In one classroom, effects maintained after intervention stopped and generalized to other times of the day. Implications for integrated educational settings and early childhood curricula are discussed.

Exploring EFL learners’ inferential reading comprehension skills through a flipped classroom

This study presents the results of a mixed-methods approach in finding the effects of the WebQuest-based flipped classroom on the EFL learners’ inferential reading comprehension skills. A group of EFL learners attending an IELTS course participated in the study. T-test and one-way repeated measures ANOVA were used to analyze the quantitative data. The results showed that the WebQuest-based flipped classroom effectively developed the learners’ inferential reading comprehension skills, and its long-term effect was also confirmed through the delayed post-test scores. The participants’ attitudes towards the WebQuest-based flipped classroom effects were also explored by conducting semi-structured interviews analyzed by utilizing thematic analysis through which the participants’ perspectives were coded and categorized. The findings revealed the EFL learners’ mainly positive attitudes towards the effectiveness of this innovative approach in developing their inferential reading comprehension skills. The pedagogical implications of using WebQuest-based flipped instruction as an efficient and effective alternative to traditional classroom practice are discussed.

Airborne Transmission of Virus-Laden Aerosols inside a Music Classroom: Effects of Portable Purifiers and Aerosol Injection Rates

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shifted attention to the airborne transmission of exhaled droplet nuclei within indoor environments. The spread of aerosols through singing and musical instruments in music performances has necessitated precautionary methods such as masks and portable purifiers. This study investigates the effects of placing portable air purifiers at different locations inside a classroom, as well as the effects of different aerosol injection rates (e.g., with and without masks, different musical instruments and different injection modes). Aerosol deposition, airborne concentration and removal are analyzed in this study. It was found that using purifiers could help in achieving ventilation rates close to the prescribed values by the World Health Organization (WHO), while also achieving aerosol removal times within the Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended guidelines. This could help in deciding break periods between classroom sessions, which was around 25 minutes through this study. Moreover, proper placement of purifiers could offer significant advantages in reducing airborne aerosol numbers (offering orders of magnitude higher aerosol removal when compared to nearly zero removal when having no purifiers), and improper placement of the purifiers could worsen the situation. The study suggests the purifier to be placed close to the injector to yield a benefit, and away from the people to be protected. The injection rate was found to have an almost linear correlation with the average airborne aerosol suspension rate and deposition rate, which could be used to predict the trends for scenarios with other injection rates.

Does classroom diversity improve intergroup relations? Short- and long-term effects of classroom diversity for cross-ethnic friendships and anti-immigrant attitudes in adolescence

This study examined short- and long-term effects of ethnic classroom diversity for intergroup relations in adolescence. Using a five-year panel of Swedish majority youth ( MageT1 = 13.40, MageT5 = 17.30), we found only limited direct effects of classroom diversity on anti-immigrant attitudes. However, classroom diversity increased the likelihood of cross-ethnic friendships, which in turn was associated with lower levels of anti-immigrant attitudes. Moreover, we found that the effect of classroom diversity on friendships remained also after adolescents transitioned to new schools. The findings highlight the importance of longitudinal analyses and contribute to a deeper understanding of how intergroup relations develop during adolescence. It brings new insights related to the longevity of classroom effects and to cross-ethnic friendships’ ability to mediate the diversity–attitudes relationship.

Automated In-Radius Authenticated Attendance System

Attendance is the most time-consuming task though there exist alternatives a specified device is essential to mark attendance some of them are NFC (Mohd Ameer Hakim bin Mohd Nasir and Muhammad Hazimuddin bin Asmuni, 2015. A review of student attendance system using near-field communication (NFC) technology; Ichimura, T. and Kamada, S., 2013. Early Discovery of Chronic Non-Attenders by Using NFC Attendance Management System. IEEE 6th International Workshop on Computational Intelligence and Applications, Hiroshima, IEEE. pp.191–196; FernAndez, M.J.L., et al., 2013. Control of attendance applied in higher education through mobile NFC technologies. Expert Systems with Applications, 40(1), pp.4478–4489; Shen C.W., et al., 2014. Developing a NFC-equipped smart classroom: Effects on attitudes toward computer science. Computers in Human Behavior, 30, pp.731–738.) based attendance, facial feature-based attendance, RFID based attendance, biometric based attendance. Each attendance system mentioned above have its own disadvantages and spamming techniques which makes students to make themselves present though they are not. So, we came up with an idea to overcome all those defects and complete the task within seconds.