Education for sustainable development (ESD) has focused on the promotion of sustainable thinking skills, capacities, or abilities for learners of different educational stages. Critical thinking (CT) ...plays an important role in the lifelong development of college students, which is also one of the key competencies in ESD. The development of a valuable framework for assessing college students' CT is important for understanding their level of CT. Therefore, this study aimed to construct a reliable self-evaluation CT framework for college students majoring in the humanities.
Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and Item analysis were conducted to explore the reliability and validity of the CT evaluation framework. Six hundred and forty-two college students majoring in the humanities were collected. The sample was randomly divided into two subsamples (
1 = 321,
2 = 321).
The Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the whole scale was 0.909, and the values of the Cronbach's alpha coefficients for individual factors of the scale ranged from 0.724 to 0.878. Then CFA was conducted within the scope of the validity study of the scale. In this way, the structure of the 7-factor scale was confirmed. Results indicated that the constructed evaluation framework performed consistently with the collected data. CFA also confirmed a good model fitting of the relevant 22 factors of the college students' CT framework (
= 3.110, RMSEA = 0.056, GFI = 0.927, AGFI = 0.902, NFI = 0.923, and CFI = 0.946).
These findings revealed that the CT abilities self-evaluation scale was a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the CT abilities of college students in the humanities. Therefore, the college students' CT self-evaluation framework included three dimensions: discipline cognition (DC), CT disposition, and CT skills. Among them, CT disposition consisted of motivation (MO), attention (AT), and open-mindedness (OM), while CT skills included clarification skills (CS), organization skills (OS), and reflection (RE). Therefore, this framework can be an effective instrument to support college students' CT measurement. Consequently, some suggestions are also put forward regarding how to apply the instrument in future studies.
Predators are dependent on the capture of prey to meet their energetic and nutritive requirements, which brings the risk of predation to prey. The predation risk is divided into consumptive and ...non-consumptive effects. Non-consumptive effects may manifest through altered growth and ontogenetic trajectories in prey species, a dynamic modulated by olfactory or other sensory cues from predators.
Hendel represents a major invasive threat to global horticulture. While earlier research was primarily centered on the consumptive interactions between
and its natural enemies, the potential consequences of non-consumptive interactions on the development of
have been overlooked. In this study, we investigated the impact of predation risk effects, induced by both visual exposure to the predatory mantis
Serville and its associated odor, on the life history traits of
. Female
demonstrated a reduced developmental time in the presence of a caged predator (
or predator odors, but showed significantly increased fecundity. Conversely, males displayed no significant change in developmental time. Additionally, neither the female nor male body weight at death was significantly influenced by the predation risk from the caged predator or predator odors. This study investigated the effects of predation risk on the development and reproduction of
, emphasizing the potential importance of odor risk in biological and pest control.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
•Peer interaction is a way to develop students’ critical thinking.•Undergraduates’ critical thinking mainly involved the critical thinking skills.•High and low-scoring students showed significant ...differences in critical thinking.
Although peer interaction has been considered a way to develop students’ critical thinking, there has been a lack of comprehensive exploration of the teaching strategy of analyzing undergraduates’ peer interaction regarding critical thinking skills and dispositions. In this study, 33 third-year undergraduates participated in a peer interactive learning activity. By means of Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA), the characteristics of developing critical thinking in peer interaction of high- and low-scoring groups were revealed. It was found that undergraduates’ critical thinking mainly involved the critical thinking skills of analysis, evaluation, and inference, more than the critical thinking dispositions of curiosity, open-mindedness, persistence, and reflection. High-scoring group students’ critical thinking had more associations among persistence, analysis, evaluation, inference, and open-mindedness, while low-scoring group students’ critical thinking had more associations with curiosity, analysis, and inference. Moreover, the high- and low-scoring group students who engaged in peer interactive learning activities at each stage exhibited statistically significant differences in critical thinking characteristics including connectivity and interdependence. The low-scoring groups focused on critical thinking skills, whereas the high-scoring groups were driven by critical thinking dispositions. Finally, interventions for developing critical thinking are discussed, and suggestions are made to assist in designing and implementing future peer interactive learning activities.
Creativity is one of the key competencies for the talent of the 21st century to meet future challenges in a complex world. It is also an innovative basis for students to discover and pose questions.
...This study aimed to explore which two interventions of the problem-oriented teaching model, teacher-guided problem finding (TGPF) and teacher-directed question posing (TDQP), was more effective in terms of improving students' creativity in STEM education.
A total of 60 seventh-grade students participated in this study.
The TGPF group included 30 students who adopted the problem-finding method in which the teacher guided them to find problems, while another 30 students in the TDQP group adopted the method in which the teacher directly posed the questions. The Williams Creativity Aptitude Test (WCAT) was used to test the pre- and post-creativity of the two groups. Paired samples t tests were used to verify whether the two interventions of the problem-oriented teaching model could enhance students' creativity, and independent samples t tests were used to verify the differences between the two interventions of the problem-oriented teaching model in the enhancement of creativity.
The results indicated that both TGPF and TDQP can improve students' creativity. Compared with the TDQP group, the TGPF group's students could better improve their creativity, especially in the dimensions of adventure, imagination, and challenge.
This study provides references for teachers to use different problem-oriented teaching interventions in STEM education. Teachers should break from the previous approach of direct problem posing to the creation of situations and other methods to guide students to actively think of and discover problems, so as to better improve students' creativity.
Most women with breast cancer are prone to postoperative sleep disturbances (POSD). Little is known about the differences between sevoflurane and propofol combined with dexmedetomidine on POSD in the ...same context. We investigated the effect of intra-operative sevoflurane or propofol combined with intravenous dexmedetomidine on the incidence of POSD and postoperative sleep structures.
A monocentric, randomized-controlled, double-blind trial. Female patients undergoing radical surgery for breast cancer were randomly assigned to receive sevoflurane and placebo, sevoflurane and dexmedetomidine, propofol and placebo, or propofol and dexmedetomidine. Dexmedetomidine was administered at 1.0 μg kg−1 infusion 15 min before induction, then infused at 0.4 μg kg−1 h−1 until the surgical drain started to be placed. The primary outcome was the incidence of POSD within the postoperative first three days (defined as an Athens Insomnia Scale score ≥ 6 points on at least one day of postoperative first three days). The secondary outcome was the duration of sleep structures, collected from the Fitbit Charge 2® smart bracelet (Fitbit, Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA).
There were 188 women analyzed with the modified intention-to-treat method. The incidences of POSD in the dexmedetomidine and placebo groups were similar (p = 0.649). In the sevoflurane sedation strategy, dexmedetomidine decreased nocturnal wakefulness on postoperative first day (p = 0.001). In the propofol sedation strategy, dexmedetomidine increased nocturnal deep sleep on postoperative first (p < 0.001) and third (p < 0.001) days.
Intra-operative infusion of dexmedetomidine had no significant effect on POSD but decreased nocturnal wakefulness in the sevoflurane group and increased nocturnal deep sleep in the propofol group.
Registered at www.chictr.org.cn (ChiCTR2300070136).
Aiming to solve some existing problems such as low video streaming rate, high cost and complex set-up, a new video streaming capture and transmission system based on servfox is proposed. This system ...uses servfox to invoke V4L APIs to capture video streaming in Linux operating system, and then transmits the data to a remote monitoring client through Internet which can display the video streaming. Remote client can be either a software or a web browser. The experimental results show that the image captured by this system is high-quality and the streaming rate is high. At the same time, the system possesses high reliability and low cost. Compared with existing methods, this system can be widely used in the process of video streaming capture and transmission.
The problem of privacy-preserving data mining has become more and more important in recent years. Many successful and efficient techniques have been developed. However, in collaborative data ...analysis, part of the datasets may come from different data owners and may be processed using different data distortion methods. Thus, combinations of datasets processed using different methods are of practical interests. In this paper, a class of novel data distortion strategies is proposed. Four schemes via attribute partition, with different combinations of singular value decomposition (SVD), nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), discrete wavelet transformation (DWT), are designed to perturb submatrix of the original datasets for privacy protection. We use some metrics to measure the performance of the proposed new strategies. Data utility is examined by using a binary classification based on the support vector machine. Our experimental results indicate that, in comparison with the individual data distortion techniques, the proposed schemes are very efficient in achieving a good trade-off between data privacy and data utility, and provide a feasible solution for collaborative data analysis.
