INTRODUCTION Even though many adolescent smokers want to quit, it is difficult to recruit them into smoking cessation interventions. Little is known about which adolescent smokers are currently reached by these measures. In this study we compare participants of a group-based, cognitive behavioral smoking cessation intervention with adolescent smokers who decided against participating. METHODS...

BACKGROUND Given the rise in US obesity rates in adulthood, efforts are needed to assess physical activity engagement during the college years as a strategy to promote a lifetime of being physically active. This study identifies the reasons incoming college freshman enrolled in basic physical education activity courses (BPEAC) and the perceived benefits they anticipated receiving as a result of...

We describe an array of novel introductory-level courses based on exciting topics in modern artificial intelligence. All present a great deal of often research-level technical content in a rigorous manner while keeping the material accessible to lower-level students. On the other hand, they differ in subject matter and style, since a “one-size-fits-all” approach cannot be expected to be effecti...

As an increasing number of graduate education courses are moved either online or into hybrid formats, instructors and administrators need to consider strategies for how to transition students into these new learning environments. This exploratory, qualitative study looked at one case study course and provides practical recommendations for stronger orientation programs. Colleges and universities...

ABSTRACT This article discusses the student permanence in technical courses that are subsequent to high school at Federal Institute of Santa Catarina (Instituto de – IFSC initials Portuguese from Brazil) and presents results a study carried out with teachers students these courses. The objective was understand conditions related based on interlocution between their living institutional conditio...

Students studying undergraduate courses in digital electronics often lose interest in the subject, due to the short comings of learning tools that are commonly used to supplement such courses. Ideally learning tools increase student participation in the learning process and help in overcoming difficulties inherent to the subject. Comparisons have been drawn between the existing learning tools. ...

Although the course of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is increasingly popular in China, ESP courses today are no more than teaching specific words and phrases and translating texts following the traditional grammar-translation method. With China’s active participation in the international affairs, more importance is expected to be attached to the design of ESP courses that can be facilitat...

High attrition rates in massive open online courses (MOOCs) have motivated growing interest in the automatic detection of student “stopout”. Stopout classifiers can be used to orchestrate an intervention before students quit, and to survey students dynamically about why they ceased participation. In this paper we expand on existing stop-out detection research by (1) exploring important elements...

The ability of educational applications to adapt to individual students has been a sought-after feature for more than a decade. The difficulty of developing this kind of software and the lack of adequate tools that facilitate this endeavor have hindered the participation of instructors and teachers in the elaboration of adaptive applications. In this paper we describe an authoring tool, ATLAS, ...

Although thousands of students enroll in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for learning and self-improvement, many get confused, harming learning and increasing dropout rates. In this paper, we quantify these effects in two large MOOCs. We first describe how we automatically estimate students’ confusion by looking at their clicking behavior on course content and participation in the course di...