Applying Relatedness to Explain Learning Outcomes of STEM Maker Activities

A growing interest has been observed among K-12 school educators to incorporate maker pedagogy into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education to engage students in the design and making process. Both cognitive engagement and emotional engagement of students can be promoted through satisfying the psychological need of relatedness that concerns a sense of connection and belonging. How to support relatedness would influence the effective development of students’ cognitive competencies, namely creativity and critical thinking, and non-cognitive characteristics, namely interest and identity. Therefore, the present study investigated how two relatedness support strategies—real-world problems (RWP) and mentoring influence the development of student’s STEM-related cognitive competencies and non-cognitive characteristics in STEM marker activities. We implemented a 7-week intervention study with three classes of Grade 9 students (aged 13–15 years) in Hong Kong (n = 95). Three intervention conditions were designed in the experiment, comprising textbook problem (TBP), RWP, and RWP with mentoring (RWPM). Our analysis showed that (i) the differences in creativity among the three groups were non-significant, (ii) the RWP and RWPM groups showed stronger critical thinking than the TBP group, and (iii) the RWPM group exhibited stronger STEM interest and identity than the other two groups. This study revealed the effectiveness of adopting RWP strategy in developing secondary students’ perceived cognitive competencies (e.g., creativity and critical thinking) and the feasibility of employing a mentoring mechanism for cultivating learners’ perceived non-cognitive characteristics (e.g., STEM identity and interest). Hence, we also offered practical suggestions for teachers.

Speed Dating with Voice User Interfaces: Understanding How Families Interact and Perceive Voice User Interfaces in a Group Setting

As voice-user interfaces (VUIs), such as smart speakers like Amazon Alexa or social robots like Jibo, enter multi-user environments like our homes, it is critical to understand how group members perceive and interact with these devices. VUIs engage socially with users, leveraging multi-modal cues including speech, graphics, expressive sounds, and movement. The combination of these cues can affect how users perceive and interact with these devices. Through a set of three elicitation studies, we explore family interactions (N = 34 families, 92 participants, ages 4–69) with three commercially available VUIs with varying levels of social embodiment. The motivation for these three studies began when researchers noticed that families interacted differently with three agents when familiarizing themselves with the agents and, therefore, we sought to further investigate this trend in three subsequent studies designed as a conceptional replication study. Each study included three activities to examine participants’ interactions with and perceptions of the three VUIS in each study, including an agent exploration activity, perceived personality activity, and user experience ranking activity. Consistent for each study, participants interacted significantly more with an agent with a higher degree of social embodiment, i.e., a social robot such as Jibo, and perceived the agent as more trustworthy, having higher emotional engagement, and having higher companionship. There were some nuances in interaction and perception with different brands and types of smart speakers, i.e., Google Home versus Amazon Echo, or Amazon Show versus Amazon Echo Spot between the studies. In the last study, a behavioral analysis was conducted to investigate interactions between family members and with the VUIs, revealing that participants interacted more with the social robot and interacted more with their family members around the interactions with the social robot. This paper explores these findings and elaborates upon how these findings can direct future VUI development for group settings, especially in familial settings.

Disentangling Between-Person and Reciprocal Within-Person Relations Among Perceived Leadership and Employee Wellbeing

Based on transactional stress theory and theoretical propositions regarding affective perceptions and reactions, we develop and test a model of reciprocal within-person relations between perceptions of directive and empowering leadership and employee emotional engagement and fatigue. A sample of n = 1,610 employees participated in a study with a three-wave fully crossed and lagged panel design across 6 months. We used a random intercepts cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) to separate within- from between-person sources of variance in leadership perceptions and employee wellbeing. Consistent with previous research, at the between-person level of analysis, we found that directive leadership was positively related to both engagement and fatigue, whereas empowering leadership was positively related to engagement and negatively related to fatigue. Interestingly, at the within-person level, we found that some of these relations occur reciprocally, in that directive leadership predicts engagement and, simultaneously, engagement positively predicts perceptions of both directive and empowering leadership. These findings challenge existing assumptions about the directionality of the association between perceived leadership and employee wellbeing and contribute to an enhanced understanding of the role of employee wellbeing for the development of leadership perceptions over time.

Longitudinal Effects in the Effectiveness of Educational Virtual Field Trips

Virtual and immersive virtual reality, VR and iVR, provide flexible and engaging learning opportunities, such as virtual field trips (VFTs). Despite its growing popularity for education, understanding how iVR compared to non-immersive media influences learning is still challenged by mixed empirical results and a lack of longitudinal research. This study addresses these issues through an experiment in which undergraduate geoscience students attended two temporally separated VFT sessions through desktop virtual reality (dVR) or iVR, with their learning experience and outcomes measured after each session. Our results show higher levels of enjoyment and satisfaction as well as a stronger sense of spatial presence in iVR students in both VFTs compared to dVR students, but no improvement in learning outcomes in iVR compared to dVR. More importantly, we found that there exists a critical interaction between VR condition and repeated participation in VFTs indicating that longitudinal exposure to VFTs improves knowledge performance more when learning in iVR than through dVR. These results suggest that repeated use of iVR may be beneficial in sustaining students’ emotional engagement and compensating the initial deficiency in their objective learning outcomes compared to other less immersive technologies.

Symbols in the Ukrainian Public Discourse (Analysis of Presidential Speeches on the Occasion of Constitution Day)

This article develops the understanding of symbols as a certain type of signs, the meaning of which is established by agreement or habit. There is an opinion that symbols in public discourse are a reflection of values and anti-values of the society, which are formed in the process of mass communication. This article identifies the main features of the characters, including emotional engagement, attachment to a particular act of communication, as well informativeness. The types of meaning are determined, and the mechanism of nomination is explained. The article reveals the concept of semantic competition. M. Edelman’s opinion that value structures can be divided into mono-, bi- and multimodal — depending on the number of values assigned to key symbols. The presidential speeches delivered before the Ukrainian Constitution Day in 2017–2020 were analyzed in this article. Thanks to the content analysis of emotionally colored words, the symbols, which are characteristic for the speeches of P. Poroshenko and V. Zelensky, were identified focusing both on similarities and differences of Ukrainian values and anti-values. This article analyzes the nominations used by speakers to give meaning to key symbols. Aspects of semantic competition of the key symbols are defined here as well. It was revealed that during the tenure of President Poroshenko, other symbols circulated mostly in the Ukrainian public discourse than those during the presidency of V. Zelensky. Among the common key values for both presidents, we can find “Constitution,” “Constitution Day” and “freedom”. There is a semantic competition in their use. Both presidents underline the negative meaning of the term “parliamentary immunity.” Poroshenko expresses the threat using symbols such as “Russian aggressor”, “fifth column,” “corruption,” “Russian Empire” and “war.” On the other hand, V. Zelensky does not use symbols of external threat. It was found that the value structure formed by Poroshenko’s speeches showed signs of bimodality, and the one created by V. Zelensky’s speeches — multimodality.

Ekspresja i empatia. Tauromachia okiem Reymonta ("Los toros")

Reymont wrote the short story, 'Los toros', in the year 1907 after coming back from Spain, where he witnessed a corrida in San Sebastián. The choice of the genre was intentional. The writer used it to reflect the realities of life and depict a group portrait of Spaniards, in which he succeeded without a doubt, using all with his literary imagination and ability to make his works metaphoric. Baffled by the corrida as an element of Spanish culture, Reymont did not express his moral approval of torturing animals (bulls and horses) on stage. On the contrary, his narration is full of sympathy and expressions that indicate emotional engagement. The turning point, the act of pardon performed by the young shepherd and the narrator’s friend towards the bull, indicates that Reymont’s reception of the corrida was empathic. Now, we had two conclusions on the contesting of the phenomenon. Reymont’s work was used by the French Chamber of Deputies as a literary example of disapproval of bloody spectacles that are justified by tradition.

Breakfast skipping and cognitive and emotional engagement at school: A cross-sectional population level study

Objective: Research on the consequences of breakfast skipping among students tends to focus on academic outcomes, rather than student wellbeing or engagement at school. This study investigated the association between breakfast skipping and cognitive and emotional aspects of school engagement. Design: Cross-sectional study using data from a population level survey of children and adolescents’ wellbeing and engagement at school. Linear regression with adjustment for confounders was used to estimate the effect of breakfast skipping on school engagement. Setting: Government schools (i.e. public schools) in South Australia. Participants: The participants were students, Grades 4 to 12, who completed the Wellbeing and Engagement Collection in 2019. The analysis sample included 61,825 students. Results: 9.6% of students reported always skipping breakfast, with 35.4% sometimes skipping, and 55.0% never skipping. In the adjusted linear regression models, children and adolescents who always skipped breakfast reported lower levels of cognitive engagement (β = −0.26 (95% CI −0.29, −0.25)), engagement with teachers (β = −0.17 (95% CI −0.18, −0.15)), and school climate (β = −0.17 (95% CI −0.19, −0.15)), compared to those who never skipped breakfast, after controlling for age, gender, health, sleep, sadness and worries, parental education, socioeconomic status, and geographical remoteness. Conclusion: Consistent with our hypothesis, skipping breakfast was associated with lower cognitive and emotional engagement, which could be due to mechanisms such as short-term energy supply and long term health impacts. Therefore, decreasing the prevalence of breakfast skipping could have a positive impact on school engagement.