Addressing vaccine hesitancy: the LEARN approach

Immunization programs today stand at crossroads. Even as COVID vaccine campaigns continue, inequity, concerns and confusion around them seems ever expanding. While vaccine hesitancy in some form or the other has existed since the inception of vaccination, the complex and dynamic world that we live in now has resulted in hesitancy to vaccines become an outcome of myriad interactions that we encounter in our day to day lives. Factors extraneous to health systems are major determinants and it is essentially the culmination of economics, politics, science, and technology impacting human behaviors and emotions which result in a parent, family or a community arrive at the decision of whether to or not to vaccinate. Vaccine hesitancy is on the rise, it is becoming more organized and now is not just a problem of high- income countries. It is imperative that as public health advocates, academicians, policy makers, managers and implementers we recognize it and adopt a non-judgmental and non-partisan approach built on empathy, respect and trust and not just scientific knowledge and theorems to address it. The current paper puts forward a novel approach to address hesitancy, the LEARN approach: and advocates that we need to ‘Listen’ to the voices of concern, ‘Engage’ with all stakeholders, ‘Articulate’ and communicate better in a language which is simple and comprehensible, ‘Reflect’ on what works and what does not and at the same time ‘Negate’ events and episodes which dent confidence in science and promote complacency.

The Implementation of the Reading to Learn Strategies in the Teaching of Short Stories Reading Compehension Achievement at SMPN 3 Medan

The aim of this endeavour is to find out: (1) Planning for learning about short stories using the Reading to Learn Approach); (2) Implementation of learning Short Stories using the Reading to Learn Approach. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method that emphasizes the process and meaning of ongoing activities. Data were collected through observation, field notes, interviews, and document analysis. Data validity was carried out through method triangulation and source triangulation. The research findings indicated that the teacher had carried out good preparation in planning R2L-based learning, namely by preparing learning preparataions in lesson plans formats, teaching materials, worksheet, assessments and learning media, The teacher also informs the students beforehand that the teacher would implement a new learning model in which it is hoped that all students would fully participate in the class later. At the implementation stage of learning the teacher had followed the R2L learning steps by Rose and Martin (2012), namely Preparation, Detailed Reading, Joins Construction and Individual Construction.

Multimodal Genre of Science Classroom Discourse: Mutual Contextualization Between Genre and Representation Construction

This paper argues that meaning-making with multimodal representations in science learning is always contextualized within a genre and, conversely, what constitutes an ongoing genre also depends on a multimodal coordination of speech, gesture, diagrams, symbols, and material objects. In social semiotics, a genre is a culturally evolved way of doing things with language (including non-verbal representations). Genre provides a useful lens to understand how a community’s cultural norms and practices shape the use of language in various human activities. Despite this understanding, researchers have seldom considered the role of scientific genres (e.g., experimental account, information report, explanation) to understand how students in science classrooms make meanings as they use and construct multimodal representations. This study is based on an enactment of a drawing-to-learn approach in a primary school classroom in Australia, with data generated from classroom videos and students’ artifacts. Using multimodal discourse analysis informed by social semiotics, we analyze how the semantic variations in students’ representations correspond to the recurring genres they were enacting. We found a general pattern in the use and creation of representations across different scientific genres that support the theory of a mutual contextualization between genre and representation construction.

Lessons Learned from a Writing to Learn Program for Public Health Students at the University of Tokyo

We have taught writing for public health to students completing a Master of Public Health since 2016 in Japan. We adopted a writing-to-learn approach and assigned work to students to write health materials that encourage recipients to perform health behaviors (eg, drafting a poster to encourage lay audiences to adopt preventive behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic). We collected students’ work assignments and products from 2016 to 2020 and reviewed them to identify distinctive trends common to all years. We found that there was a curse of knowledge (ie, difficulties to imagine the state of mind of not knowing when knowing something) among students. Students strongly embraced the adage “knowledge is power” and underestimated the difficulties lay audiences face. Their writing was somewhat dogmatic, whereby experts imparted privileged knowledge to ignorant non-experts. However, it is well known that merely imparting knowledge often does not work to educate lay audiences about making better decisions. Debiasing this curse of knowledge among students will be the main target of our writing education.

Developing Productive Skills through an Interactive Approach: Present to Learn

This paper aims at presenting an interactive approach that was implemented on Arab Open University (AOU) students to enrich their productive skills namely speaking, oral presentation and writing skills. The researcher aimed at establishing a community of practice through a blended learning environment which considers non-traditional multicultural leaner. This community of practice presents a combination of face-to-face facilitated learning, e-learning and self-study. The researcher applied “Present to Learn” approach on AOU students employing Johari Windows Model to develop the identified productive skills and break the students’ stage fright through collaboration in groups. An observation checklist was developed to check the students’ oral presentation and writing prompts. In addition, a questionnaire was developed to measure the students’ satisfaction towards the applied interactive approach and their assessment of the whole experiment. It was observed that cooperative work especially with having critical partners has improved the students’ performance achievement through learning from each other in one group and competing with other groups. The collected feedback from the questionnaire was in favour of applying this approach on more groups which was implemented across three consecutive academic semesters. Moreover, the students’ end results were statistically analysed and a correlation between high performance achievement and active participation inside and outside the class was drawn. The results have shown that students who participated by giving presentations reflecting their group work obtained higher grades than those who failed to work with others or did not give any presentations.

A Writing-to-Learn Approach for Improving Students’ Evaluation of Science Web Sources

Writing skills remain in high demand even as trends like class-size increases discourage faculty from assigning students opportunities to practice the craft. At the same time, students live in a world in which scientifically suspect claims spread more rapidly than their debunking. We crafted a scaffolded, low-stakes assignment sequence addressing both needs, one that requires relatively little grading. Approaches like this one may prove useful in college and AP classes.