Influence of sociodemographic characteristics on knowledge and attitudes about COVID-19 in northern Iraq

Objective: Targeted public health campaigns are important in countries where health resources are limited. This is especially the case for countries such as Iraq since decades of sanctions, war and armed conflict have depleted the health system. The current study investigated the influence of sociodemographic characteristics on attitudes towards the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) relating to knowledge and behaviors held by people living in North Iraq. Method: A cross-sectional survey, conducted from 21st March to 12th April 2020, used an online platform. Multivariate analyses were used to examine the relationship between sociodemographic factors and respondents' knowledge, attitude and behavioral practices in response to COVID-19. Results: Respondents with better self-reported health were most likely to report sleep impairment (OR = 2.32,1.49-3.68) impaired eating (OR = 1.84, 1.17-2.95) fear in response to social media news on COVID-19 (OR = 1.92, 1.32-2.81) and were more likely to practice COVID-19 prevention measures (OR= 1.08, 1.01-1.14). On the other hand, those with better self-reported health (OR = 0.4;0.27-0.59) were less likely to report good knowledge on COVID-19 whereas those with higher levels of education (OR= 3.59, 1.29-10.2) claimed to have higher knowledge of COVID-19. Men believed that war was more frightening than COVID-19 (OR = 1.91, 1.33-2.75) compared to woman. Conclusion: Self-reported health and type of employment were the sociodemographic factors most frequently noted to influence knowledge, attitude and behaviors toward COVID-19 amongst the northern Iraqi population. In a country where health resources are scare and stretched because of a history of sanctions and prolonged war and community violence, these results provide directions for targeted approaches to support public health campaigns. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The impact of educational interventions on COVID-19 and vaccination attitudes among patients in Michigan: A prospective study.

Background: Mass vaccination serves as an effective strategy to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccine hesitancy is a recognized impediment to achieving a vaccination rate necessary to protect communities. However, solutions and interventions to address this issue are limited by a lack of prior research. Methods: Over 200 patients from 18 Michigan counties participated in this study. Each participant received an initial survey, including demographical questions and knowledge and opinion questions regarding COVID-19 and vaccines. Participants were randomly assigned an educational intervention in either video or infographic format. Patients received a post-survey to assess changes in knowledge and attitudes. Paired sample t-tests and ANOVA were used to measure the effectiveness of the educational interventions. Participants also elected to complete a 3-month follow-up survey. Results: Patients showed increased knowledge after the educational intervention in six out of seven COVID-19 topics (p < 0.005). There was increased vaccine acceptance after the intervention but no difference in the effectiveness between the two intervention modalities. Post-intervention, more patients believed in CDC recommendations (p = 0.005), trusted the vaccine (p = 0.001), believed the vaccines had adequate testing (p = 0.019), recognized prior mistreatment in the medical care system (p = 0.005), agreed that a source they trust told them to receive a vaccine (p = 0.015), and were worried about taking time off of work to get a vaccine (p = 0.023). Additionally, post-intervention, patients were less concerned about mild reactions of the virus (p = 0.005), the rapid development of the vaccines (p < 0.001), and vaccine side effects (p = 0.031). Data demonstrated that attitude and knowledge improved when comparing pre-educational intervention to follow-up but decreased from post-intervention to follow-up. Conclusion: The findings illustrate that educational interventions improved COVID-19 and vaccine knowledge among patients and that the knowledge was retained. Educational interventions serve as powerful tools to increase knowledge within communities and address negative views on vaccination. Interventions should be continually utilized to reinforce information within communities to improve vaccination rates.

An End-to-End Knowledge Graph Based Question Answering Approach for COVID-19

Question Answering based on Knowledge Graph (KG) has emerged as a popular research area in general domain. However, few works focus on the COVID-19 kg-based question answering, which is very valuable for biomedical domain. In addition, existing question answering methods rely on knowledge embedding models to represent knowledge (i.e., entities and questions), but the relations between entities are neglected. In this paper, we construct a COVID-19 knowledge graph and propose an end-to-end knowledge graph question answering approach that can utilize relation information to improve the performance. Experimental result shows that the effectiveness of our approach on the COVID-19 knowledge graph question answering. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/CHNcreater/COVID-19-KGQA. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Research Paper: "It Is Divine Punishment for Our Sins” Knowledge and Perception of the Cause, Symptoms, and Mode of Transmission of the COVID-19 Disease Among Local Traders in Nigeria

Background: Access to correct information can influence the formation of the right attitude towards mitigating the spread of the COVID-19. Many individuals in Nigeria have taken up non-scientifically approved practices in a bid to protect themselves from the virus. The aim of this study was to assess the source of information, and knowledge of the cause and mode of transmission of the COIVD-19 among local traders in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. Methods: A cross-sectional study of local traders from two densely populated markets in Ibadan was conducted using an interviewer-administered semi-structured questionnaire. Data were analyzed using SPSS software v. 25 and Microsoft Excel 2016 and were presented in frequency tables and charts. The Chi-square test was used to test the associations. The level of significance was set at P<0.05. Results: A total of 321 traders (27.4% were males and 72.6% were females) were recruited with a Mean±SD age of 39.4±11.8 years. Radio (93.5%) and television (75.7%) were the most commonly used sources of information, 65.8% believed that COVID-19 was a result of divine punishment for sins and the majority (95.3%) reported that COVID-19 was spread through personal contact with infected persons. There was a statistically significant association between knowledge of cause and age (P=0.004), as well as between knowledge of cause and marital status (P=0.001). Additionally, a statistically significant association was observed between knowledge of transmission and level of education (P=0.012). Conclusion: Even though they have access to adequate information, people may not take proper actions to protect themselves and others from contracting the COVID-19. Reinforced health promotion strategies that pay attention to the local contexts and perspectives of community members should be taken across the board. © 2022, Gonabad University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved.

Factors Related to Preventive Behavior towards COVID-19 among People in Rural Area of Thailand

This Cross-sectional descriptive study aimed to examine the level of prevention measures and factors correlated with COVID-19 prevention behavior among 166 samples during October-November 2022. The data were collected by questionnaire with reliability 0.92. All data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, and Pearson Correlation Coefficient. The results showed that most samples were female 57.23% (average age of 45 years [SD. = 13.43]), marital status 68.67%, primary education 42.77%, farmer 66.27% (average monthly income of 7,453.01 baht [SD. =8,638.43]), no position in community 74.10%, never received training on COVID-19 69.88% and received COVID-19 information on social network 74.10%. The samples had knowledge, attitude, and social support at moderate level (12.47 +/- 2.06, 73.25 +/- 6.77, and 64.02 +/- 10.30 respectively). COVID-19 prevention behavior at high level (89.75 +/- 10.41). The factors associated with COVID-19 prevention behavior were income, knowledge, attitude, and social support (r = 0.195, p = 0.12;r =.341, p<.001;r = 0.601, p<.001, and r =.414, p< 0.001 respectively).Copyright © 2022 by authors. All rights reserved.

Exploring Perceptions and Preventive Practices Related to COVID-19 Among General Public: A Cross Sectional Analytical Study from Pakistan

ABSTRACT Objective: This research was done to assess the level of public awareness, perceptions and practices using a survey questionnaire of COVID-19 in Pakistan. Study Design: Cross-sectional analytical study. Place and Duration of Study: Study was carried out from the Nov 2021 to Apr 2022 through online survey in Pakistan Methodology: The sample size calculated with open epi sample size calculator was 345. Convenient sampling technique was used. Individuals who consented and between 15 and 80 years of age were included. The questionnaire included Sociodemographic information and questions on respondents' perceptions and preventive practices regarding COVID-19, including particular inquiries about widespread misconceptions. Results: Mean age of the participants was 31±13 years. Proportions of males 159(46%) and females 186(54%) were almost equal, Majority 124(36%) were of age group 21-30 years. Half 172(50%) were graduates and 163(47%) came to knew about COVID-19 from social media Significant association between gender and source of information (p=.008) knowledge of specific cure p=0.040, maintaining social distancing p=0.002), wearing masks in public p=0.003, sanitize personal items (p=0.034) Significant association was found between age categories and source of information p<0.05 , received COVID-19 vaccine p=0.021, avoid overcrowding to prevent infection p<0.05Significant association was found between education and knowledge of specific cure p=0.001, wearing mask in public p=0.02, following government restrictions p=0.015 Conclusion: Better knowledge influences attitudes and behaviors in favor of COVID-19 prevention measures. Enhancing public knowledge, positive attitudes, appropriate behaviors, and risk perception during epidemics are necessary for disease control.

MEASURING THE KNOWLEDGE LEVEL OF COVID-19 AND ITS TREATMENT IN PHARMACISTS.

Objective: The aim of this study is to measure the knowledge level of pharmacists working in Turkey about COVID-19 Material(s) and Method(s): The online questionnaire consisting of 16 questions in the form of true-false, developed by the authors after a comprehensive review of the literature, was delivered to pharmacists via social media and professional platforms (such as WhatsApp, Gmail, Instagram, LinkedIn) using the Google form. 364 pharmacists from all over Turkey who filled out the questionnaire were included in the study. Result and Discussion: In this study carried out in Turkey, it was determined that 99.5% of the pharmacists had good knowledge. When the factors affecting the level of knowledge of COVID-19 were examined, in our study, no relationship was found with the independent variables since the level of knowledge was homogeneously high. In the literature, it is reported that age, years of professional experience, having a master's and doctorate education are associated with better knowledge, while the length of experience is associated with the level of knowledge, while in some studies it is stated that no feature is related. However, the fact that it is a cross-sectional study creates a limitation in explaining the cause-effect relationship. Although the number of participants met the sample, it would have been desirable to have more.Copyright © 2022 University of Ankara. All rights reserved.

MEASURING THE KNOWLEDGE LEVEL OF COVID-19 AND ITS TREATMENT IN PHARMACISTS.

Objective: The aim of this study is to measure the knowledge level of pharmacists working in Turkey about COVID-19 Material(s) and Method(s): The online questionnaire consisting of 16 questions in the form of true-false, developed by the authors after a comprehensive review of the literature, was delivered to pharmacists via social media and professional platforms (such as WhatsApp, Gmail, Instagram, LinkedIn) using the Google form. 364 pharmacists from all over Turkey who filled out the questionnaire were included in the study. Result and Discussion: In this study carried out in Turkey, it was determined that 99.5% of the pharmacists had good knowledge. When the factors affecting the level of knowledge of COVID-19 were examined, in our study, no relationship was found with the independent variables since the level of knowledge was homogeneously high. In the literature, it is reported that age, years of professional experience, having a master's and doctorate education are associated with better knowledge, while the length of experience is associated with the level of knowledge, while in some studies it is stated that no feature is related. However, the fact that it is a cross-sectional study creates a limitation in explaining the cause-effect relationship. Although the number of participants met the sample, it would have been desirable to have more.Copyright © 2022 University of Ankara. All rights reserved.

The Effect of Multimedia Education to Improve Knowldege and Self-efficacy of COVID-19 Prevention Among Pregnant Women in Indonesia

Introduction: The health of pregnant women as a high-risk group is a concern, especially during the pandemic. The Maternal Mortality Rate increases every year due to the low mothers' knowledge about the high risk of pregnancy. Knowledge and self-efficacy of pregnant women must be increased so that they have good pregnancy self-management abilities. One of the interventions is health education based on audiovisual media that can be accessed independently without having to frequently visit health care facilities. Methods: The study design used was a quasi-experiment with pre and post-test with a control group. The sample consisted of 18 pregnant women for each intervention and control group through the total sampling technique. This study was conducted in the work area of the Mantok Public Health Center, Banggai Regency in March-April 2021. The research instrument used was a knowledge questionnaire (0.812) and self-efficacy (0.655). The intervention provided was audio-visual media-based health education. Results: There is an effect of audiovisual media on knowledge of COVID-19 prevention (p value = 0.021), but there is no effect on self-efficacy (p value = 0.296). Conclusion: Audiovisual media is an alternative solution in providing health education during the pandemic in increasing knowledge and integrated efficacy with maternal health programs in health care facilities. © 2022 Authors. All rights reserved.

Higher education students' perceptions of issues related to Covid-19: A study on three Portuguese-speaking countries

In early 2020, a pandemic caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 affected the world and all countries had to adopt important measures to face a disease named COVID-19. This paper aims at investigating the perceptions about key issues related to COVID-19 held by students attending the third year of three different areas of undergraduate studies at higher education institutions of three Portuguese-speaking countries: Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal. Four hundred and forty university students participated in the study by answering to a questionnaire. They were attending undergraduate programs in the areas of education/pedagogy, natural sciences, and social sciences. Differences emerged among participants of different nationalities and areas of study. Brazilians and education undergraduates showed perceptions that are more consistent with the knowledge base available so far. Health related policies and local culture seem to influence participants' perceptions regarding COVID-19 issues, which are not directly related to the extent of the science component of participants' study programs. The latter relationship should be further studied, in order to uncover what needs to be improved in undergraduates' education to ensure that they develop a good awareness of socio-scientific issues that are relevant for their personal and societal lives. © 2023 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Evaluation of knowledge, attitudes and behaviors about COVID-19 among cancer patients

Aim: COVID-19 pandemic is experienced intensely with variants in our country, as in other countries. The presence of cancer in patients is associated with morbidity and mortality in the course of COVID-19 disease. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the level of knowledge, attitude and behavior regarding coronavirus disease in cancer patients. Material(s) and Method(s): The questionnaire, consisting of three sections and 25 questions measuring knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of cancer patients about COVID-19, was filled face-to-face by each patient in July 2020. Result(s): Most of the cancer patients were aware of the symptoms related to COVID-19 and applied the protection methods such as wearing masks, hand washing, and social distance. Participants with higher levels of education had significantly higher knowledge levels. Although half of the patients were worried about continuing cancer treatment during the pandemic process, 70 % of the patients did not think of delaying the treatment;48.7 % of the patients were informed by the oncologists about COVID-19 infection. The majority of patients expressed that they did not receive supportive products during the COVID-19 outbreak. Discussion(s): In general, cancer patients were conscious of the pandemic, but nevertheless, during this period, they showed a high compliance with their doctors.Copyright © 2022, Derman Medical Publishing. All rights reserved.

Knowledge, Attitude, and Practices Regarding Preventive Measures of COVID-19 Pandemic during Ramadan 2020 and Quarantine in Some Egyptian Governorates

BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global crisis. The month of Ramadan has coincided with the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. AIM: The aim of this study is to investigate knowledge, attitude, and practices (KAP) toward the preventive measures during Ramadan 2020 and quarantine, among the Egyptian population. METHOD(S): This cross-sectional study is conducted among Egyptians >=15 years of age. A convenience sample of 1150 responders is taken, over the period of the month of Ramadan 2020. An online self-administrated questionnaire is used and shared through social networks. KAP toward preventive measures for COVID-19 during Ramadan are assessed. RESULT(S): Results show that mean scores of KAP are higher among participants >20 years, mean +/- SD (3 +/- 1.1, 5.6 +/- 1.4, and 11.2 +/- 2.6, respectively). A significant difference is found between KAP scores and age with p-values (0.012, 0.002, and 0.000, respectively). Furthermore, there is a significant difference between practices score and gender (p = 0.010). Greater Cairo has the highest KAP mean scores, in comparison with other regions, mean +/- SD (3.3 +/- 1, 5.8 +/- 1.2, and 11.6 +/- 2.5, respectively). A significant difference is recorded between urban and rural areas, regarding KAP with p-value (0.000, 0.050, and 0.000, respectively). CONCLUSION(S): In conclusion, low KAP scores are recorded among participants below the age of 20, and in rural areas and regions outside Greater Cairo. Low practices are associated more with males than females. The present study recommends raising awareness through the use of mass media, and health education programs that are to be directed to male members of the population, people under 20 years old, and to people residing in rural areas and in regions outside Greater Cairo, such as Upper and Lower Egypt, and border regions.Copyright © 2022 Suzan Hagag, Amira B. Kassem, Noha A El-Bassiouny, Sherouk M Okda, Mohammed Mustafa Abdel Razik Mohammed.

Parents' Perceptions of Barriers and Facilitators to Their Children's Multilingual Language Development Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Les étudiants multilingues, selon le cadre déficitaire des "apprenants de langue seconde," sont désavantagés par rapport â leurs pairs unilingues. Ce cadre ne reconnaît pas les atouts qui accompagnent le développement de la langue â la maison, appelés la richesse culturelle de la communauté ("Community Cultural Wealth": Yosso 2005). Dans cette étude, nous avons posé la question suivante : qu'est-ce que les parents d'enfants multilingues considerent comme des obstacles et des facilitateurs pour soutenir le développement langagier de leurs enfants avant et pendant le COVID-19 ? Six entrevues semi-structurées ont été menées en ligne avec des parents d'enfants ágés de 3 â 5 ans parlant une langue autre que l'anglais â la maison. Ces entrevues ont été enregistrées, transcrites et analysées â l'aide de la méthode qualitative d'analyse de contenu, en utilisant un codage inductif et déductif pour identifier les themes. Nous avons organisé ces themes selon le modele bioécologique de Bronfenbrenner (1979). Les résultats ont révélé que la plupart des obstacles et des facilitateurs au développement multilingue des enfants se situent au niveau du microsysteme de la famille. Les themes étaient liés aux attitudes et aux connaissances, â la maîtrise de l'anglais, â l'exposition, aux ressources et aux expériences des parents. De plus, nous avons constaté que la COVID-19 avait surtout un impact négatif sur l'enfant, le mlcrosystéme et l'exosysteme. Nous discutons de la maniére dont ces obstacles et ces facilitateurs sont liés â la richesse culturelle communautaire. Dans l'avenir, cette étude pourra contribuer â aborder la façon dont les systémes ont marginalisé les familles au sein de nos communautés et â promouvoir les connaissances et le capital culturel qu'offrent ces familles.Alternate :Multilingual students, according to the deficit framework of "English language learners," are at a disadvantage compared to their monolingual peers. This framework fails to recognize the assets that accompany home language development, referred to as Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso 2005). In this study, we asked what do parents of multilingual children identify as barriers and facilitators to supporting their children's language development before and during COVID-19? Six semi-structured interviews were conducted online with parents of children between 3 and 5 years old who spoke a language other than English at home. These interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using the qualitative method of directed content analysis, employing both inductive and deductive coding to identify themes. We organized these themes according to Bronfenbrenner's (1979) Bioecological Model. Results revealed most barriers and facilitators to children's multilingual development are at the microsystem level of the family. The themes were related to attitudes and knowledge, English fluency, exposure, resources, and parents' experiences. Additionally, we found that COVID-19 mostly negatively impacted the child, microsystem, and exosystem. We discuss how these barriers and facilitators are related to the different Capitals of Community Cultural Wealth. Moving forward, this study can contribute to addressing how systems have marginalized families within our community and elevate the knowledge and cultural capital these families offer.

Physiotherapy in Neurological conditions: AB No: 66: Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Parent towards Prevention of COVID-19 in Children with Special Needs: A Cross Sectional Study

Purpose: To assess the knowledge, attitude and practice of parents towards prevention of COVID-19 in children with special needs. Relevance: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had a rapid global spread. Children with special need are more susceptible to viral infection. Participants: All parents of children with special needs visiting Paediatric Department in tertiary care hospital, Belgavi. Method: An institution based study for sample of 450 participants. Data collection was based on direct interview using a structured questionnaire consisting Knowledge (10 questions), attitude (6 questions), and practice (5 questions). Analysis: Standard descriptive statistics were used for the data, mean and standard deviation for continuous variables whereas frequencies and percentages for categorical variables. Result: Almost all the participant (100%) knew about the present scenario of COVID-19. Majority of the participants were about how COVID-19 spreads and its preventive measures. Most of the parents (72.4%) knew that the children with special needs are more risk of infection. Almost all of the participants (95.8%) knew that their child must wear a mask in public places. Most of the participants (64.9%) did not know that mask should not be worn by children less than two years. Almost 242 parents practiced the all preventive measures for COVID-19. Conclusion: The parents of children with special needs have good knowledge, attitude and practice regarding the prevention of COVID-19 in children with special needs. Implication: Knowledge, attitude and practice of parents will help control epidemic in children.

Four Patterns of Digital Innovation in Times of Crisis

Exogenous shocks, such as COVID-19, significantly change fundamental premises on which economies and individual organizations operate. The light-asset nature of digital technologies provides the potential to not only facilitate an immediate crisis response, but also to catalyze novel innovation types to address the societal and economic changes caused by exogenous shocks. As digital innovation became a relevant part of organizations' COVID-19 responses, and given that a corresponding structured knowledge base did not exist, we found the need to better understand crisis-driven digital innovation. Drawing on prior knowledge from crisis management and organizational ambidexterity as a theoretical lens, we present four patterns of crisis-driven digital innovation, classified along two dimensions: (1) driven by a sense of urgency or ambition and (2) focusing on exploitative or explorative innovation. Based on a thorough analysis of digital innovation cases during the COVID-19 crisis, we illustrate and discuss these four patterns and their emerging properties to explain how and why they led to digital innovation in the context of the crisis. Our work contributes to the explanatory knowledge on digital innovation in times of crisis, helping researchers and practitioners to understand and develop digital innovation in response to exogenous shocks.

Supply chain strategy during the COVID-19 terms: sentiment analysis and knowledge discovery through text mining

The coronavirus pandemic has affected not only health but also the economy. The use of big data in finding information can be used to gain profits that logistics companies can utilize to survive during the pandemic. This study conducted text-mining research on service consultant sites in the logistics sector. This study aims to present frequency diagrams, analyze sentiment using the National Research Council (NRC) lexicon, present bigrams, and seek knowledge about strategies to minimize shipping costs and maintain inventories of manufactured goods. The words "supply", "chain", and "COVID-19" are words that are used frequently throughout the article. The results of this study showed that the words that often appear from word excavation are the words "supply", "chain", "logistics", "kpis," and "inventory". Then emotion trust becomes an emotional word that often appears in articles. The words "Supply" and "pandemic" are the words that seem the most positive and negative words, respectively. The words "COVID-19", "safety stock", and "inventory management" are words that often appear together. The result of discovery knowledge is that logistics consultants offer emotions of trust and provide many insights on minimizing shipping costs and maintaining inventory during a pandemic. © 2023 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.

Beyond Natural Language Processing: Building Knowledge Graphs to Assist Scientists Understand COVID-19 Concepts

To combat COVID-19, scientists must digest the vast amount of relevant biomedical knowledge in the literature to understand disease mechanisms and related biological functions. Nearly 3,000 scientific papers are published on PubMed every day. This knowledge bottleneck has resulted in severe delays in developing COVID-19 vaccines and drugs. Our research produces a hierarchy of knowledge concepts related to COVID-19, designed to assist scientists in answering questions and generating summaries. It aims to discover scientific and comprehensive knowledge to extract fine-grained multimedia elements (i.e., physical and visual structures, relational events and events, and chemical knowledge). Our project is toward one step in natural language understanding: detailed contextual sentences, subgraphs, and knowledge subgraphs are the first time to be automatically generated, and relations and coreferences of COVID-19 mentions will be sketched. Extensive results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we have published the generated knowledge graph on Google Drive1 and released the source in the Github2. © 2022 ACM.

Faculty of health sciences students' knowledge and attitudes toward coronavirus disease 2019 during the first wave of the pandemic: A cross-sectional survey

Objective: The study aimed to determine the faculty of the health sciences students' knowledge and attitudes regarding the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional survey was completed with 317 undergraduate students of one health sciences faculty in Turkey. The data were collected between March 1, 2020, and March 15, 2020, by face-to-face interviews using a questionnaire created by the researchers. Number, percentage, mean, standard deviation, and Pearson Chi-square test were used to evaluate the data. Results: In this study, a high proportion of students answered questions about COVID-19 correctly. About 55.8% of the students took partial precautions against COVID-19 to protect themselves against COVID-19 and 'frequent washing of hands' was the most common precaution. We determined that the main reasons for not taking any precautions against COVID-19 were 'low number of cases in Turkey' and 'getting irritated by the mask.' About 98.4% of the participants were entirely/partially following the news on COVID-19, with social media being the most commonly used medium. Female students took more protective measures than male students. The 1 st -year students had more positive thoughts about vaccination compared to those in the other classes. Conclusions: Although the knowledge of the students about COVID-19 was good in the first wave of the pandemic, more than half of the students stated that they partially complied with the protective measures. © 2023 Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications. All rights reserved.

Conceptualizing dimensions and a model for digital pedagogy

The global COVID-19 pandemic has caused a rising interest in the use of digital pedagogies and the need to teach remotely. This article aims to conceptualize the dimensions described below and offer a model for digital pedagogy to provide tools for using digital technologies in teaching. The model for digital pedagogy is discussed in terms of three dimensions: 1) pedagogical orientation;2) pedagogical practices;and 3) the digital pedagogical competencies it provides for the teacher. This study examines how the dimensions of digital pedagogy are presented in the current research literature. The research is conducted through a systematic literature review surveying articles published in the years 2014 to 2019;a total of 12 articles are included in the review. The findings suggest that, first, in many cases, pedagogical orientation is labeled as socio-constructivist and student-centered. Second, pedagogical practices are the methods used to promote students' learning;they involve, for example, collaboration and social knowledge construction. Finally, in addition to technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge, teachers' success in blending digital technologies into their teaching is improved by high self-efficacy and strong peer-collaboration skills. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Knowledge, Attitude and Practice towards Covid-19 in Different Universities across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

There have been 6,566,610 fatalities and 626,337,158 reported cases of COVID-19 worldwide. Pakistan presently has over 1,573,922 confirmed cases and 30,625 deaths. A survey-based study was performed from January to September 2022 among different university communities to find out their KAP level. Data was collected in Google Forms through a questionnaire. The Independent t-test, Multinomial regressions, and Non-parametric Mann-Whitney test were used to assess the level of significance (p-value ≤0.05). 317 out of 605 participants were male (52.5 %), the majority of participants were 15-29 years old (72.7 %), unmarried/divorced (71.6 %), have no children (82.1 %), residing in the urban area (54.9 %) and possess a college/university degree (59.5 %). The majority of participants correctly answered five out of six knowledge questions (M = 4.96, SD = 1.03) and correctly identified the primary symptoms of COVID-19 (94.4 %) along with the proper identification of mode of transmission (95.2 %) while 1.8% wrongly replied and 2.1 % did not reply. A knowledge test revealed the significant frequency of misconception, with nearly half of the respondents (46.3 %) assuming that illness might be contracted by eating or coming into touch with wild animals. Wearing a facial mask is highly practiced (M = 3.59, SD = 0.91), followed by avoiding crowded places (M = 3.44, SD = 0.95) and practicing hand hygiene (M = 3.36, SD = 1.04). Females, the elderly, and the less educated, on the other hand, have less understanding of COVID-19, making them especially susceptible to the pandemic. It is proposed that further awareness might contribute to a favorable attitude and practice. © Pakistan Academy of Sciences.