Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how a methodological coupling of visualisations of trace data and interview methods can be utilised for information practices studies.

Trace data visualisation enquiry is suggested as the coupling of visualising exported data from an information system and using these visualisations as basis for interview guides and elicitation in information practices research. The methodology is illustrated and applied through a small-scale empirical study of a citizen science project.

The study found that trace data visualisation enquiry enabled fine-grained investigations of temporal aspects of information practices and to compare and explore temporal and geographical aspects of practices. Moreover, the methodology made possible inquiries for understanding information practices through trace data that were discussed through elicitation with participants. The study also found that it can aid a researcher of gaining a simultaneous overarching and close picture of information practices, which can lead to theoretical and methodological implications for information practices research.

Trace data visualisation enquiry extends current methods for investigating information practices as it enables focus to be placed on the traces of practices as recorded through interactions with information systems and study participants' accounts of activities.

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of Language Enhancement Program (LEP) activities in enhancing the oral communication skills of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students at King Khalid University.

A mixed-method study design was used. Simple random sampling techniques were adopted to recruit the study participants. For the survey, a total of 58 male students were recruited and for interviews, 20 male students were selected. The 58 participants were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. The traditional method was adopted to teach the control group, while LEP activities were conducted to teach the experimental group.

A post-test was conducted to examine the oral communication skills of the participants of the experimental group. The scores of both groups were analyzed using a t-test value at a significant level of 0.05. The content analysis method was adopted to assess the enhancement of the oral communication of the students enrolled in the LEP. The questionnaires and interview results showed that the LEP program has a central focus on improving students' oral communication skills.

It is limited to the EFL students at King Khalid University.

LEP is a good program and can be implemented in Saudi Universities.

Students can interact with one another through the LEP activities that promote their English proficiency as well as their personality characteristics.

The paper spells out the role of LEP activities in improving students' oral communication in English and students' opinions about LEP activities in enhancing their English language in different types of communicative contexts. Further, it suggests some pedagogical implications for overcoming the difficulties faced by EFL students in various communicative contexts.

The main goal of the one semester long intervention for first-year Bachelor of Social Services students was to enable them to increase their awareness of a variety of cultures and practices encountered in social pedagogical work and to support the development of their ability to interact empathically with clients.

The aim of this article is to describe an educational intervention focused on teaching Qualified Empathic skills to social work students in higher education at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences in Finland. We introduce the concept of Qualified Empathy to describe professional empathic working skills and define it as: Qualified Empathy requires compassion for empathic action and it includes the ability for professional self-reflection, emotional skills and a healthy set of boundaries. Qualified Empathy encompasses the ability to tell the difference between sympathy and empathy, as it includes the capacity to use compassion to act in an empathic way in professional contexts (Raatikainen et al., 2017). The study was a case study, designed to explore the students' experiences of their one semester long educational intervention (n = 20). Our research question was: How do students construct Qualified Empathy as a dimension of their own professional expertise?

The results of the study demonstrate the progress areas of the students' Qualified Empathy skills. The development stages in the three progress areas are: (1) from emotional reaction to emotional response, (2) from understanding to empathic acting and (3) from client perspective to a more systemic approach. Implications of the results for Social Services students are discussed.

In this study, as in all studies, some limitations need to be taken into account. One limitation of this study is the size and “nature of data”. Secondly, challenges with the concept of Qualified Empathy need to be addressed and more research is needed to define it more concretely. Even so, as it is a new concept, we need more discussion on the differences in the definition of empathy and Qualified Empathy. However, this study offers one new perspective for discussion which is the need for empathy training, in social work education practices and in the field. An important ethical aspect of research emphasizes that its implementation must not be to the detriment of the people being researched (Juuti and Puusa, 2020, pp. 168).

Our findings demonstrate that educational interventions can improve students' empathy skills to more qualified skills. We emphasized that maintaining the skill demands continuous reflection as a lifelong process. This article provides an overview of an educational intervention to improve students' Qualified Empathy skills and suggests a definition for educators to frame the teaching of professional empathy or empathy in a professional context – especially in the social work context. Furthermore, with this educational intervention in social work, we offer a way to support the students to – not only – have a more professional approach to empathy but also to find a way to establish a more emotionally sustainable environment for professionals in social services. It is essential for social work education to focus on the growth of Qualified Empathy in students through supervision and guidance which supports their professional competence. By doing so, we contribute to the development of more sustainable working environments in the social work context.

Professional empathy is seen as an important factor in building a socially sustainable society from the perspectives of employees, clients and patients. We noticed that it is important to allow time and space for the learners to internalize the concept of Qualified Empathy. When we allow for this, students begin to recognize and assign more value to it and, as we suggest, they become more adept in their interactions and work with clients.

The study was a case study, designed to explore the students' experiences of their one semester long educational intervention (n = 20). Our research question was: How do students construct Qualified Empathy as a dimension of their own professional expertise? The results of the study demonstrate the progress areas of the students' Qualified Empathy skills. The development stages in the three progress areas are: (1) from emotional reaction to emotional response, (2) from understanding to empathic acting and (3) from client perspective to a more systemic approach. Implications of the results for Social Services students are discussed.

The purpose of the research was to, first, investigate if the use of maps as instructional resources will boost scholarly performance and, second, examine if gender can moderate the effect of map usage on scholarly performance.

The study was a quasi-experimental pre-test and post-test. A sample of 260 JSS II Students from 8 schools were selected through the purposive sampling technique. A Social Studies Scholarly Performance Test (SSSPT) with a reliability index of 0.79 was the instrument for data collection. The students were assigned into two groups: control and experimental. Both groups were pre-tested taught for a timeline of six weeks and thereafter post-tested.

The study reported a significant increase in the scholarly performance of students taught with maps; a significant difference occurred in the scholarly performance of both groups and gender did not moderate the effect of maps.

The social studies teachers used for the study did not have previous knowledge or map skills; this could have affected the outcome. Secondly, the treatment took place for just six weeks, and the time allotted for social studies in the school timetable was used. This may not have given the students enough time to master map interpretation.

A major implication of the study is that results will show that maps can promote the scholarly performance of students in social studies. Secondly, the fact that gender did not moderate the effect of maps suggests that maps are gender-friendly.

The results of the study, if implemented, would make social studies teachers to become inventive and resourceful in the use of maps as instructional resources for junior secondary students' scholarly performance in social studies without taking gender into consideration.

This study is a product of the researcher’s doctoral thesis; therefore, it is original and has value. The results are the product of a painstaking study carried out by the author for a period of three years on the effect of instructional resources on social studies students’ scholarly performance. Maps were one of the instructional resources studied for the award of a Ph.D. degree.

This paper aims to propose an enhanced densely dehazing network to suit railway scenes’ features and improve the visual quality degraded by haze and fog.

It is an end-to-end network based on DenseNet. The authors design enhanced dense blocks and fuse them in a pyramid pooling module for visual data’s local and global features. Multiple ablation studies have been conducted to show the effects of each module proposed in this paper.

The authors have compared dehazed results on real hazy images and railway hazy images of state-of-the-art dehazing networks with the dehazed results in data quality. Finally, an object-detection test is taken to judge the edge information preservation after haze removal. All results demonstrate that the proposed dehazing network performs better under railway scenes in detail.

This study provides a new method for image enhancing in the railway monitoring system.

Effective rail surface defects detection method is the basic guarantee to manufacture high-quality rail. However, the existed visual inspection methods have disadvantages such as poor ability to locate the rail surface region and high sensitivity to uneven reflection. This study aims to propose a bionic rail surface defect detection method to obtain the high detection accuracy of rail surface defects under uneven reflection environments.

Through this bionic rail surface defect detection algorithm, the positioning and correction of the rail surface region can be computed from maximum run-length smearing (MRLS) and background difference. A saliency image can be generated to simulate the human visual system through some features including local grayscale, local contrast and edge corner effect. Finally, the meanshift algorithm and adaptive threshold are developed to cluster and segment the saliency image.

On the constructed rail defect data set, the bionic rail surface defect detection algorithm shows good recognition ability on the surface defects of the rail. Pixel- and defect-level index in the experimental results demonstrate that the detection algorithm is better than three advanced rail defect detection algorithms and five saliency models.

The bionic rail surface defect detection algorithm in the production process is proposed. Particularly, a method based on MRLS is introduced to extract the rail surface region and a multifeature saliency fusion model is presented to identify rail surface defects.

This study aims to describe and evaluate various visual and creative tools for supporting the in-depth biographical interview aimed at analyzing educational communities and their stakeholders.

Researching educational spaces today requires new ways of understanding, analyzing and studying. The complex characteristics, functions and realities demand research that responds to educational singularities. It is a matter of deeply understanding the educational phenomenon's peculiarities. For these purposes, instruments and research paradigms are needed to extract data and reach information saturation regarding the data obtained from the proposed objects of study. With this in mind, the following paper suggests reflecting on data collection tools that can complement the interview and biographical-narrative research approach. The authors highlight the use of photo-elucidation, the biogram-based timeline, the organigram and the flight of the geese, all of which are instruments endowed with a visual character that allows a deeper understanding of the object studied.

The main contribution of this paper is to unpack the uses and applications of four visual tools that support the interview technique. First, photo-elucidation is presented as a sensory strategy to stimulate the narrative during the dialogical exchange of the interview. Next, the timeline is described as a visual concretization of the traditional biogram widely used in educational research. Next, the authors unravel the uses of the organizational chart in educational research, which, due to its nature and utility, provides a glimpse of the organizational functioning of an institution and is particularly suitable for research in institutional frameworks. Finally, the tool known as the flight of the geese is presented. This tool is recommended for use in educational leadership and teamwork studies due to its simplicity and high representativeness of the hierarchy of roles and functions.

Researching educational spaces today requires new ways of understanding, analyzing and studying. The complex characteristics, functions, and realities demand research that responds to educational singularities. It is a matter of deeply understanding the educational phenomenon's peculiarities. For these purposes, instruments and research paradigms are needed to extract data and reach information saturation regarding the data obtained from the proposed objects of study. With this in mind, the following paper invites us to reflect on data collection tools that can complement the interview and biographical-narrative research approach. The authors highlight the use of photo-elucidation, the biogram-based timeline, the organigram, and the flight of the geese, all of which are instruments endowed with a visual character that allows a deeper understanding of the object studied.

Aircraft assembly is the crucial part of aircraft manufacturing, and to meet the high-precision and high-efficiency requirements, cooperative measurement consisting of multiple measurement instruments and automatic assisted devices is being adopted. To achieve the complete data of all assembly features, measurement devices need to be placed at different positions, and the flexible and efficient transfer relies on Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and robots in the large-size space and close range. This paper aims to improve the automatic station transfer in accuracy and flexibility.

A transferring system with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and markers is established. The map coupling for navigation is optimized. Markers are distributed according to the accumulated uncertainties. The path planning method applied to the collaborative measurement is proposed for better accuracy. The motion planning method is optimized for better positioning accuracy.

A transferring system is constructed and the system is verified in the laboratory. Experimental results show that the proposed system effectively improves positioning accuracy and efficiency, which improves the station transfer for the cooperative measurement.

A Transferring system for collaborative measurement is proposed. The optimized navigation method extends the application of visual markers. With this system, AGV is capable of the cooperative measurement of large aircraft structural parts.