Development and evaluation of an escape room based on general pharmacokinetics: Students' perceptions of its motivational climate.

We designed an escape room based on the basic principles of pharmacokinetics for undergraduate bachelor students and explored its effect on students' perceived motivational climate and usefulness as a formative assessment via a mixed-method design. The effect on students' perceptions of the motivational climate was measured using pre- and post-test measurements of the MUSIC® inventory. Students' experiences with the escape room and suggestions for improvement were collected by open-ended survey questions. Forty-one students initially joined the study while 28 students completed both the pre- and post-test MUSIC® inventory. Data from the MUSIC® inventory revealed the effect of playing the escape room on students' situational interest was positive with medium to large effect (Cohen's dav = 0.63). Data from the open-ended questions confirmed the outcome of the MUSIC® inventory. While there was a positive effect on situational interest, students found the escape room not very useful as a tool for formative assessment. Further research should include a control group and focus on the effect of the escape room on academic success and work toward increasing the capacity of the escape room for large-scale courses.

An undergraduate course on pain: Its impact on students' empathy.

INTRODUCTION: Empathy towards patients in pain involves an internal process in which both affective and cognitive processes in the observer are responsible for a final behavioral reaction. This study investigated the impact of an undergraduate elective course on pain on students' empathy in a mixed-method design. METHODS: Undergraduate students of the elective course on pain (intervention group) as well as undergraduate students of a compulsory course on neuropharmacology (control group) completed the Dutch version of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) questionnaire at the beginning and the end of the course. In addition, students' empathy in the intervention group was explored by content analysis of students' reflective writing assignments related to documentary films that were part of the course activities. RESULTS: Twenty students (intervention group) and seven students (control group) completed both IRI questionnaires. IRI scores for subscales perspective taking, fantasy, and personal distress significantly increased over time more in the intervention group than in the control group (intervention x time interaction). Effect sizes (generalized eta squared) for these effects were 0.084, 0.041, and 0.139 for perspective taking, fantasy, and personal distress, respectively. The qualitative data revealed information on cognitive and affective responses, and to some extent behavioral responses. CONCLUSIONS: Both IRI outcomes and analysis of the reflective assignments demonstrate that students' empathy increased during the course on pain. Further research should explore in-depth the effects of different documentaries in the course on students' empathy development and the long-term effect of the course on students' empathy.

How pre-service teachers' personality traits, self-efficacy, and discipline strategies contribute to the teacher-student relationship.

BACKGROUND: Although the teacher-student relationship is a well-documented phenomenon, few attempts have been made to identify its predictors. Research has mainly focused on in-service teachers, less is known about characteristics of pre-service teachers in relation to the teacher-student relationship. AIMS: The purpose of this study was to identify the predictors of pre-service secondary teachers' relationships with their students. It was hypothesized that friendliness and extraversion, self-efficacy in classroom management and in student engagement, and various discipline strategies would contribute to the teacher-student relationship in terms of influence and affiliation. SAMPLE: A total of 120 pre-service teachers in teacher education programmes participated. METHOD: Data on pre-service teachers' background (e.g., gender and age), personality traits, and self-efficacy were gathered with teacher questionnaires; data on teachers' discipline strategies and the teacher-student relationship with student questionnaires. RESULTS: The two personality traits and self-efficacy appeared not to be related to the teacher-student relationship in terms of affiliation or influence. However, significant relationships were found between the different discipline strategies and the teacher-student relationship in terms of influence and affiliation. There were differential effects for gender on the relationship between discipline strategies on the one hand and influence and affiliation on the other. CONCLUSION: This study provides relevant new insights into the research fields of classroom management and interpersonal relationships in education. It contributes to our understanding of discipline strategies by fine tuning an existing instrument and revealing interesting connections with the teacher-student relationship. Specific gender effects on this connection are discussed, as are implications for practice.

The differential effect of the teacher-student interpersonal relationship on student outcomes for students with different ethnic backgrounds.

BACKGROUND: The differential effectiveness of schools and teachers receives a growing interest, but few studies focused on the relevance of student ethnicity for this effectiveness and only a small number of these studies investigated teaching in terms of the teacher-student interpersonal relationship. Furthermore, the methodology employed often restricted researchers to investigating direct effects between variables across large samples of students. AIMS: This study uses causal modelling to investigate associations between student background characteristics, students' perceptions of the teacher-student interpersonal relationship, and student outcomes, across and within several population subgroups in Dutch secondary multi-ethnic classes. METHODS AND SAMPLE: Multi-group structural equation modelling was used to investigate causal paths between variables in four ethnic groups: Dutch (N=387), Turkish first- and second-generation immigrant students (N=267), Moroccan first and second generation (N=364), and Surinamese second-generation students (N=101). RESULTS: Different structural paths were necessary to explain associations between variables in the different (sub) groups. Different amounts of variance in student attitudes could be explained by these variables. CONCLUSIONS: The teacher-student interpersonal relationship is more important for students with a non-Dutch background than for students with a Dutch background. Results suggest that the teacher-student relationship is more important for second generation than for first-generation immigrant students. Multi-group causal model analyses can provide a better, more differentiated picture of the associations between student background variables, teacher behaviour, and student outcomes than do more traditional types of analyses.