Higher education students' achievement emotions and their antecedents in e-learning amid COVID-19 pandemic: A multi-country survey.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a wide range of negative consequences for higher education students. We explored the generalizability of the control-value theory of achievement emotions for e-learning, focusing on their antecedents. We involved 17019 higher education students from 13 countries, who completed an online survey during the first wave of the pandemic. A structural equation model revealed that proximal antecedents (e-learning self-efficacy, computer self-efficacy) mediated the relation between environmental antecedents (cognitive and motivational quality of the task) and positive and negative achievement emotions, with some exceptions. The model was invariant across country, area of study, and gender. The rates of achievement emotions varied according to these same factors. Beyond their theoretical relevance, these findings could be the basis for policy recommendations to support stakeholders in coping with the challenges of e-learning and the current and future sequelae of the pandemic.

Coping and emotions of global higher education students to the Ukraine war worldwide.

Trauma scientists have raised the alarm about the devastating consequences of the Ukraine war on mental health. We examined how higher education students-as indirect victims-coped with this conflict and how they emotionally reacted during 2022. We involved 2314 students from 16 countries through an online survey. A structural equation model indicated significant relations between war-related worry about military and macroeconomics domains and two coping strategies (opposition, support giving), in turn significantly linked with six emotions. The model was strongly invariant across gender, study field, and geographic area. The most frequent emotions were anger and anxiety, followed by two future-centred emotions (hopelessness and hope). Emotions were more frequent for females and students of the countries geographically close to the war region. Our findings call for evidence-based policy recommendations to be implemented by institutions to combat the negative short and long-term psychological sequelae of being witnesses of armed conflicts.

Worldwide inequality in access to full text scientific articles: the example of ophthalmology.

BACKGROUND: The problem of access to medical information, particularly in low-income countries, has been under discussion for many years. Although a number of developments have occurred in the last decade (e.g., the open access (OA) movement and the website Sci-Hub), everyone agrees that these difficulties still persist very widely, mainly due to the fact that paywalls still limit access to approximately 75% of scholarly documents. In this study, we compare the accessibility of recent full text articles in the field of ophthalmology in 27 established institutions located worldwide. METHODS: A total of 200 references from articles were retrieved using the PubMed database. Each article was individually checked for OA. Full texts of non-OA (i.e., "paywalled articles") were examined to determine whether they were available using institutional and Hinari access in each institution studied, using "alternative ways" (i.e., PubMed Central, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and Online Reprint Request), and using the website Sci-Hub. RESULTS: The number of full texts of "paywalled articles" available using institutional and Hinari access showed strong heterogeneity, scattered between 0% full texts to 94.8% (mean = 46.8%; SD = 31.5; median = 51.3%). We found that complementary use of "alternative ways" and Sci-Hub leads to 95.5% of full text "paywalled articles," and also divides by 14 the average extra costs needed to obtain all full texts on publishers' websites using pay-per-view. CONCLUSIONS: The scant number of available full text "paywalled articles" in most institutions studied encourages researchers in the field of ophthalmology to use Sci-Hub to search for scientific information. The scientific community and decision-makers must unite and strengthen their efforts to find solutions to improve access to scientific literature worldwide and avoid an implosion of the scientific publishing model. This study is not an endorsement for using Sci-Hub. The authors, their institutions, and publishers accept no responsibility on behalf of readers.

Alfabetización Informacional: enseñanza y desarrollo de su competencia en la educación básica / Information Literacy: teaching and development of its competence in elementary school

Resumen Este artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación sobre la enseñanza de Alfabetización Informacional (ALFIN) en la educación básica, cuyo objetivo fue determinar las mejores prácticas para su implementación e identificar los temas a incorporar en una iniciativa de esta naturaleza, así como las formas de afrontar la problemática de la saturación de la información, de modo que se pretende que cada estudiante aprenda a buscar, a encontrar, a seleccionar, a evaluar y a comunicar información, para adquirir conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes. La metodología del estudio se basó en el análisis de experiencias usando un enfoque cualitativo, donde se concluye que ALFIN se implementó exitosamente por medio del uso del juego, aplicaciones digitales para su enseñanza, cursos específicos en sobre el tema, juegos de mesa, la técnica booleana de búsqueda de información, la lectoescritura, enseñanza por medio del dibujo e instrumentos para la evaluación y utilización de recursos educativos. El logro principal fue contribuir con el desarrollo de las competencias que necesita el estudiantado para desempeñarse con éxito en la escuela y para lograr la capacidad del aprendizaje permanente.

ABSTRACT This article presents a research on the teaching of Information Literacy (IL) in elementary education, whose objective is to determine the best practices for its implementation and to identify the topics that need to be incorporated into such an initiative, as well as the ways of facing the problem of information saturation; so that students learn to search, retrieve, select, evaluate and communicate information, in order to acquire knowledge, competences and attitudes. The methodology employed was based on the qualitative analysis of experiences, which allowed us to concluded that IL has been successfully implemented through the use of educational games, digital applications for its teaching, specific courses on the subject, board games, Boolean search techniques, teaching through drawing, and instruments for the evaluation and use of educational resources. The main achievement was to contribute to the development of the competences that students need to perform successfully in school and to reach the capacity required for lifelong learning.