Evaluating student attitudes and learning at remote collegiate soil judging events

As with many aspects of teaching, the COVID-19 pandemic forced soil judging teams to attempt new strategies towards achieving student learning outcomes. Soil judging Regions IV and V hosted remote regional contests in October 2020 in place of traditional, in-person contests typically held each fall. We conducted pre- and post-contest surveys to assess student learning outcomes, attitudes, and reflections on the remote contest experience compared to past, in-person contest experiences. We received 108 total responses from students who participated in the Region IV and Region V remote soil judging contests (>80% response rate). In self-reported learning outcomes, there were no significant gains post-contest and there were minimal differences between students in Regions IV and V. Female students, students with more soil judging experience, and students who had taken more soil science courses agreed more strongly that soil science is important, that they planned to pursue careers in soil science, and that they gained important skills from soil judging. Finally, students who previously participated in contests reported that they gained more knowledge and enjoyed in-person contests more than the remote contests held in Fall 2020. Thus, while it is possible to replicate some aspects of the soil judging experience in a remote contest, other aspects that are critical to student engagement are lost when teams are unable to gather at the contest location and examine soils in the field. © 2021 The Authors. Natural Sciences Education published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society of Agronomy

A stochastic approach to number of corona virus cases

This paper introduces a stochastic approach to case numbers of a pandemic disease. By defining the stochastic process random walk process is used. Some stochastic aspects for this disease are argued before stochastic study is started. During random walk process modeling new patients, recovering patients and dead conclusions are modelled and probabilities changes in some stages. Let the structure of this study includes vanishing process as a walk step, some wave happenings like big differences about spread speed as a big step in treatment- an effective vaccine or an influential chemical usage- a second corona virus pumping with virus mutation, a second global happening which bumping virus spread are defined as stages. This study only simulates a stochastic process of corona virus effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Applied Mathematics, Statistics & Informatics is the property of Sciendo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)