Leadership perceptions of the affective domain in Alabama's effective middle schools

The purpose of this study was to develop a grounded theory to determine if the affective domain, supported by affective leadership, was prevalent within Alabama's effective middle schools. The objective was to determine if a connection exists between the schools' knowledge, characteristics, and practices relative to the affective domain and produce a theory supporting this premise. The problem investigated addressed the inadequate use of the affective domain in Alabama's public schools. This study was grounded in the real-world experiences of the 36 school leaders representing 14 effective middle schools in the State. The 14 schools rank at the top in promoting student success.In a 21st Century educational environment, the factors affecting students' social and emotional development and learning outcomes are intrinsically enhanced through affective instruction by (a) application of the affective domain, (b) social and emotional learning skill sets, (c) effective leadership styles, (d) school climate and culture, (e) professional development, and (f) student growth and achievement.This qualitative study evaluated school leaders' perceptions of these research factors and school performance data. Based on the evidence, the faculty and staff created supportive teams that provided optimum learning environments;and the instructional leadership profiles supported the prevalence of affective domain learning in most effective middle schools headed by affective leaders.Yet, due to the impact of COVID-19 on students' social and emotional well-being, a greater need exists for affective pedagogy in 21st Century educational environments to enable continued holistic student development. Such learning environments would benefit children in all Alabama schools. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Twitter as research data Tools, costs, skill sets, and lessons learned.

Scholars increasingly use Twitter data to study the life sciences and politics. However, Twitter data collection tools often pose challenges for scholars who are unfamiliar with their operation. Equally important, although many tools indicate that they offer representative samples of the full Twitter archive, little is known about whether the samples are indeed representative of the targeted population of tweets. This article evaluates such tools in terms of costs, training, and data quality as a means to introduce Twitter data as a research tool. Further, using an analysis of COVID-19 and moral foundations theory as an example, we compared the distributions of moral discussions from two commonly used tools for accessing Twitter data (Twitter's standard APIs and third-party access) to the ground truth, the Twitter full archive. Our results highlight the importance of assessing the comparability of data sources to improve confidence in findings based on Twitter data. We also review the major new features of Twitter's API version 2.

"WORKSHOP ASSISTANTS: THE SECRET SAUCE OF VM WORKSHOPS”

In the advent of COVID, the value industry has found a new way of conducting value studies in the virtual environment which presents opportunities for developing innovative approaches, new skillsets, new tools, and consequently new and/or expanding roles and responsibilities for participants. As part of this adaptation, the role of Workshop Assistant has changed and taken on a more important role in value studies than ever before. The Workshop Assistant today serves several functions-administrative, technical and co-facilitation-to provide immense value (function/resources) during all stages of a value study. This paper focuses on the role of Workshop Assistant as featured through the lens of SAVE International's Core Competencies with the nuances for both in-person and virtual value studies highlighted. The Workshop Assistant supports a group to improve how it identifies and solves problems, supports the CVS Facilitator, and increases the group's effectiveness. © SAVE International 2022 Value Summit Proceedings: Turning Up the Heat on Value. All Rights Reserved.

Second-Year Review of the NSF-DoD REU Site: HYPER

The challenges associated with achieving hypersonic flight, developing advanced propulsion systems, and designing reusable launch platforms are strongly interdisciplinary. Exposing undergraduate students to interdisciplinary research is recognized as a means to equip society's future engineers and scientists with the broad skillset necessary to contribute to these areas. The jointly funded NSF-DoD REU site Advanced Technologies for Hypersonic Propulsive, Energetic and Reusable Platforms (HYPER) unites multidisciplinary interests to study advanced structures and systems with application to hypersonics, space, propulsion, and energy. Over the course of two 10-week summer sessions (2019 and 2021), participants have gained hands-on training in contemporary challenges such as: (1) utilizing advanced manufacturing techniques for high-value components, (2) integrating in situ monitoring of stress-strain evolution, (3) developing novel methods for improved internal cooling and heat transfer effectiveness, (4) mitigating flutter through advanced rotor dynamic control, etc. Eleven research projects have been crafted to engage students in PhD-level topics. Many of these challenges rely on approaches that cut across disciplines and research techniques (e.g., experiments and computer simulation). The present reporting serves as a synopsis of challenges, advances, and lessons learned conducting the research thus far. The site HYPER has six core objectives that relate to: (1) preparing students for graduate school and/or research-oriented careers, (2) fostering technical skills in student participants, (3) improving participants' communication skills, (4) marketing to and recruiting a diverse group of participants, and more. Assessment of the program outcomes according to these objectives are reported here with data gathered after two years. Program outcomes were conducted with an external evaluator affiliated within the University of Central Florida's Program Evaluation and Educational Research Group (PEER). Results demonstrate a very effective site with strongly positive outcomes for all participants. Insights are provided so this research effort may be confirmed by other independent sites. It should be noted that the 2020 session was postponed out of an abundance of caution based on the uncertain and evolving conditions facilitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Improving Project Management Curricula to Increase Student Employability: A Case Study

There is a growing need for qualified project managers who have skill sets that include leadership, people management, technical and business knowledge. As a result, formal project management (PM) education is increasingly important in many educational institutions. However, the prevailing industry judgment regarding the approaches taken by most institutions is that they are not adequate to meet the needs of the industry due to lack of exposure to "real" situations, lack of critical thinking and not knowing how to properly deal with conflicts. We present a case study of a novel teaching approach that combines face-to-face and/or online interactions in part to adapt to COVID-19 while increasing student employability through six complementary practices. They are a) blended learning environment, b) learn by doing, c) multidisciplinary pedagogical practices, d) continuous improvement, e) integration of teaching and research, and f) delivery by former/current project managers. © Proceedings of the 2021 AIS SIGED International Conference on Information Systems Education and Research.

Digital Interoperability of Foreign Languages Education

The focus of the inquiry is on the analysis of multipurpose, universal and interdisciplinary digitally enhances skillsets for stakeholders of European and Oriental Languages HEI programs in Ukraine in the timeframe of COVID-19 emergency digitization measures of March 2020 to October 2021. The study highlights a broad spectrum of issues, relevant for the global social and educational context: changes of the interdisciplinary avenues of development of digital education in the COVID-19 and post-pandemic paradigm;transformations of the network society and education in the digital age;the ratio of personal experiences and anticipations, challenges and technical advances that inform quality assessment of online and hybrid educational formats in emergency digitization context. The study introduces a computational framework of digital interoperability and interdisciplinarity of foreign languages education. The empirical data is collected through a survey that served to assess the digitally enhanced dimensions of interdisciplinarity, facilitated by the interoperable nature of correlation between digital communication skills and soft skills in Foreign Languages Education. © 2021 ACM.

Exams with Internet Access in a Fundamental Engineering Course

This study integrated online resources into some exams in the Statics course in a Thai University. As students were expected to use mathematical software to solve complex mathematical formula, internet access was also allowed to simulate a more realistic working context. The exam questions had to be carefully set to assess the in-depth learning and application, focusing on the physical meanings, problem setting, modeling and result interpretation as the previously time-consuming mathematical solving was taken care of by the computer. The internet access had affected various aspects of exams, particularly the data formula, language translation, unit conversion and the ability to describe questions with colored photos or videos. The availability of internet resources further penalized students who did not properly prepare for the exams;they faced the problems in the online time management, utilization of academic and professional database, and the use of online translation in the disciplinary context. The initial concern for cheating appeared to be minor. Generally, students were either eager for or wary on exams with internets but they all seemed to recognize the reality of the needs and challenges. The proposal could also address some of the online exam issues in the COVID-19 era and the new normal after. © 2021 IEEE.

Collaborative Paradigm of Teaching Penetration Testing using Real-World University Applications

This paper shares our three years of experience in conducting collaborative-based cybersecurity teaching involving industrial-expertise sharing and an authentic-learning environment. Penetration testing (pen-testing) is widely adopted in the cybersecurity industry. It requires a wide range of skillsets, including non-technical aspects, which are not easy to be acquired in a standard lecture-style setting. While the fundamentals of the skillsets could be taught separately in different modules, an integrated pen-testing module using real-world target applications will provide students with a bird’s-eye view of security assessment in an authentic learning setting. There exist, however, challenges in providing a sustainable structured pen-testing module. These include the evolving industrial best practices and availability of authentic target environments. In this paper, we share our experience as well as best practices in designing and teaching a pen-testing module in our Bachelor of Computing degree program. The module unconventionally adopts a fruitful win-win collaborative paradigm. The students, guided along by professional pen-testers from the industry and academic instructors, pen-test our University’s operational applications selected by the University IT Department. With the completed six semesters to date, our students have tested various applications, including our University’s learning management system, student registration system, and student-hall dining system, which all manage sensitive data. We have received very positive feedback from the parties involved. This paper describes our module’s rationale, involved parties and roles, class arrangements and activities, as well as grading considerations. The paper also discusses encountered issues and our adopted solutions related to University application selection, student contribution assessment, and activity arrangements during the COVID-19 outbreak. Some notes are additionally given for others who are keen to offer similar modules using the same teaching pedagogy. Our experience thus demonstrates that, while provisioning industrial collaboration and authentic learning in education needs to address several technical and administrative issues, a collaborative based teaching paradigm can work well in a sustainable manner. © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).