Remote learning during COVID-19: cognitive appraisals and perceptions of english medium of instruction (EMI) students.

Many countries responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by transforming all face-to-face (F2F) courses to emergency remote teaching with a sudden decision. This rapid shift was unexpected and staggering for the university students. The purpose of the present study is to explore how students studying in English Medium Instructed (EMI) programs cognitively appraised the transformation from F2F to online learning, and to examine if there is any relation between perceived self-efficacy in academic second language (L2) use, quality of interaction, and course satisfaction. Using an online survey, data was collected from a total of 306 graduate and undergraduate students studying in different universities in Turkey. The study found that the majority of the students appraised the transformation as a threat. The students' cognitive appraisals and perceived level of interactional quality, and satisfaction negatively correlated. There was a strong positive correlation between the perceived level of interactional quality and satisfaction. Observed gender, major and year level differences are also reported. The findings have significant implications for decision makers and instructors. Universities are likely to continue remote teaching for a while, thus institutions need to capture how students are affected by the remote learning experience to envisage short and long-term scenarios, and to optimize the quality of their services accordingly.

Nurses' experiences of compassion when giving palliative care at home.

BACKGROUND: Compassion is seen as a core professional value in nursing and as essential in the effort of relieving suffering and promoting well-being in palliative care patients. Despite the advances in modern healthcare systems, there is a growing clinical and scientific concern that the value of compassion in palliative care is being less emphasised. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to explore nurses' experiences of compassion when caring for palliative patients in home nursing care. DESIGN AND PARTICIPANTS: A secondary qualitative analysis inspired by hermeneutic circling was performed on narrative interviews with 10 registered nurses recruited from municipal home nursing care facilities in Mid-Norway. ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS: The Norwegian Social Science Data Services granted permission for the study (No. 34299) and the re-use of the data. FINDINGS: The compassionate experience was illuminated by one overarching theme: valuing caring interactions as positive, negative or neutral, which entailed three themes: (1) perceiving the patient's plea, (2) interpreting feelings and (3) reasoning about accountability and action, with subsequent subthemes. DISCUSSION: In contrast to most studies on compassion, our results highlight that a lack of compassion entails experiences of both negative and neutral content. CONCLUSION: The phenomenon of neutral caring interactions and lack of compassion demands further explorations from both a patient - and a nurse perspective.

Infant social interactions and brain development: A systematic review.

From birth, interactions with others are an integral part of a person's daily life. In infancy, social exchanges are thought to be critical for optimal brain development. This systematic review explores this association by drawing together infant studies that relate adult-infant behaviours - coded from their social interactions - to children's brain measures collected during a neuroimaging session in infancy, childhood, adolescence or adulthood. In total, we identified 55 studies that explored associations between infants' social interactions and neural measures. These studies show that several aspects of caregiver-infant behaviours are associated with, or predict, a variety of neural responses in infants, children and adolescents. The presence of both concurrent and long-term associations - some of which are first observed just a few months postnatally and extend into adulthood - open an important research avenue and motivate further longitudinal studies.

What Impacts Early Language Skills? Effects of Social Disparities and Different Process Characteristics of the Home Learning Environment in the First 2 Years.

It is well documented that the language skills of preschool children differ substantially and that these differences are highly predictive of their later academic success and achievements. Especially in the early phases of children's lives, the importance of different structural and process characteristics of the home learning environment (HLE) has been emphasized and research results have documented that process characteristics such as the quality of parental interaction behavior and the frequency of joint activities vary according to the socio-economic status (SES) of the family. Further, both structural and process characteristics are associated with children's language development. As most of the studies focus on single indicators or didn't take the dynamics of parenting behavior across age into account, the present paper aims to investigate the associations of different characteristics of the home learning environment as well as their potentially changing impact on the language skills of 2-year-old children. Using data of 2.272 families of the infant cohort study of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), longitudinally assessed process characteristics (sensitivity in the sense of maternal responsivity to the child's behavior and signals in mother-child interaction; maternal stimulation behavior which goes beyond the child's actual level of action and development; frequency of joint picture book reading) and structural characteristics (mother's education, equivalised household income, parental occupational status) were considered. Language skills (vocabulary and grammar) of the children at the age of two were measured by a standardized and validated parent report instrument (child language checklist). Results showed that (1) all three process characteristics of the home learning environment (HLE) are associated with the family's SES; (2) across three assessment waves nearly all process characteristics predicted children's vocabulary and grammar skills with some process-specific changes across waves; (3) despite separate direct effects of nearly all HLE-process characteristics in each wave, the amount of explained variance in a joint model including the HLE facets from each wave is hardly higher than in the separate models; and (4) socioeconomic background predicted both language facets of the children in each model even when controlling for the assessed process characteristics of the home learning environment.

Inside pandora's box: a systematic review of the assessment of the perceived quality of chatbots for people with disabilities or special needs.

Introduction: People with disabilities or special needs can benefit from AI-based conversational agents (i.e., chatbots) that are used for competence training and well-being management. Assessing the quality of interactions with these chatbots is key to being able to reduce dissatisfaction with them and to understanding their potential long-term benefit. This in turn will help to increase adherence to their use, thereby improving the quality of life of the large population of end-users that they are able to serve.Methods: Following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology, we systematically reviewed the literature on methods of assessing the perceived quality of interactions with chatbots using the from Scopus and the Web of Science electronic databases. Using the Boolean operators (AND/OR) the keywords chatbot*, conversational agent*, special needs, disability were combined.Results: Revealed that only 15 of 192 papers on this topic included people with disabilities or special needs in their assessments. The results also highlighted the lack of a shared theoretical framework for assessing the perceived quality of interactions with chatbots.Conclusion: Systematic procedures based on reliable and valid methodologies continue to be needed in this field. The current lack of reliable tools and systematic methods to assess chatbots for people with disabilities and special needs is concerning, and ultimately, it may also lead to unreliable systems entering the market with disruptive consequences for people.Implications for rehabilitationChatbots applied in rehabilitation are mainly tested in terms of clinical effectiveness and validity with a minimal focus on measuring the quality of the interactionThe usability and interactive properties of chatbots applied in rehabilitation are not comparable as each tool is measured in different wayThe lack of a common framework to assess chatbots exposes people with disability and special needs to the risk of using unreliable tools.

Feeling 'Right' When You Feel Accepted: Emotional Acculturation in Daily Life Interactions With Majority Members.

When immigrant minority individuals engage in frequent and positive social contact with majority culture members, their emotions become a better fit with the majority norm; the increased fit is called emotional acculturation. In the current research, we test the prediction that high-quality interactions with majority others, in which minorities feel accepted, increase the likelihood of emotional fit. We also explore whether this prediction holds true for both positive and negative interactions with majority. To test this prediction, we conducted a 7-day daily diary study with minority students in Belgian middle schools (N = 117). Each day, participants reported one positive and one negative interaction at school. They subsequently evaluated each interaction (e.g., felt accepted), assessed their relationship with the interaction partner (e.g., our relationship is important to me), and rated their emotions. Analyses focused on the interactions with Belgian majority interaction partners. Emotional acculturation was computed for positive and negative interactions separately, by calculating the fit between the emotional pattern of the minority student and the average emotional pattern of a sample of majority participants (N = 106) who also took part in the daily diary. As predicted, we found higher emotional fit in positive interactions when immigrant minorities felt accepted by the interaction partner. In contrast to this finding for positive interactions, emotional fit for negative interactions was higher when minorities felt excluded by the interaction partner. Further analyses on the negative interactions suggested that minority adolescents felt more negative autonomy-promoting emotions (e.g., anger and frustration) when they perceived being excluded. Given that Belgian majority youth feel more autonomy-promoting emotions generally, minorities' fit with majority patterns was higher. The results confirm our hypothesis that minorities' fit with majority emotions is contingent on the quality of their interactions with majority, even if in negative interactions, high-quality interactions produced less rather than more emotional fit. Our findings suggest that emotional acculturation is not just a 'skill' that minority individuals acquire, but also a response to the ways in which interactions with majority others develop. Inclusive interactions, especially when they are positive, appear to align immigrant minority individuals with the majority norm.