ABSTRACT
Previous studies have shown that secondary school students may have misconceptions about geological scientific information. By the end of secondary education these misconceptions may remain unresolved. As a result, students enter university studies and still hold them. Students of engineering, as for example civil engineering, are no exception. The aim of this study was to investigate and analyse misconceptions of this specific target group. A closed questionnaire was designed and given to 102 University students who attended the 2nd semester course "Geology for Civil Engineers” in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Patras. The questionnaire was designed and validated according to previous research findings and implemented through google forms that were prepared and given electronically to the students to fill them online. The participants completed the questionnaire on the principles of geology electronically due to Covid-19 conditions. The results showed that in some questions most of the students answered correctly while in others there were many wrong answers, which revealed their misconceptions in geology. Many misconceptions were traced especially regarding mineral properties like color and luster. An important observation was that a notable number of students confused hardness with brittleness and as a result they expressed their belief that hard minerals are hard to break. Gender and age differences were tested using appropriate statistical tests. In cases that there was a significant difference between the genders, women were the ones with higher percentage of correct answers. The results may be seen in relation to educational practices. © 2022 International Multidisciplinary Scientific Geoconference. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has been becoming a vital challenge for human society. With the outbreaks of the COVID-19 epidemic, the governments of multiple countries announced and enacted various anti-epidemic policies to deal with it. The present research proposed that cultural tightness, which is a basic cultural dimension to evaluate how strictly the social norms are abided by people in a society, could accelerate the effects of the anti-epidemic policies on constraints of the transmission of COVID-19. In specific, the new confirmed cases would be reduced by anti-epidemic policies in the tighter societies much earlier than the looser ones. In this work, we used cross-correlation analysis to investigate and analyze the leading and lagging associations between the stringency of anti-epidemic policies and the number of new confirmed cases among the usual tight and loose countries. The findings revealed that the severity of anti-epidemic policies is negatively correlated with the number of new confirmed cases in general. Moreover, cultural tightness does impact the effectiveness of the anti-epidemic policies on the constraints of COVID-19;that is, the lag weeks of new confirmed cases predicted by the stringency of anti-epidemic policies in the tight countries are significantly shorter than that of the loose countries. The control and prevention of COVID-19 around the world is far from optimistic, meanwhile the findings of the current research highlighted the role of cultural factors in the encounter with the century epidemic of human mankind. © 2021 IEEE