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The present study explored the impact of concept mapping‐based flipped learning as a listening‐speaking strategy on learning achievement, English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' critical thinking awareness and EFL speaking anxiety. The study utilized a pretest/posttest control and a quasi‐experimental design. Seventy‐two EFL learners were assigned to experimental (n = 37) and control (n = 35) groups. The results of the pretest indicated that the participants of the two groups were homogeneous concerning their proficiency level, critical thinking awareness and EFL speaking anxiety. The experimental group was instructed to construct concept maps after each listening task, and formulated their answers to the required speaking tasks from their concept maps. The results of the posttest indicated that concept mapping has a positive and significant influence on EFL learners' English speaking performance and critical thinking awareness, and can decrease their speaking anxiety. Moreover, the relationships between concept mapping, learning performance, and critical thinking are statistically correlated. The results also revealed a significant negative relationship between speaking anxiety and the other variables. Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic Students learn at their own pace and learn with repeated exposure to the same material to strengthen and deepen their understanding until they acquire the knowledge in flipped learning.The strategy of concept mapping is not only to support learners to organize concepts, but also to develop their ideas.Concept mapping can foster learners' confidence and build up their background knowledge, so it will facilitate their speaking ability.What this paper adds A concept mapping‐based flipped learning as a listening‐speaking strategy is proposed to help improve students' listening and speaking skills, EFL learners' critical thinking awareness, and decrease speaking anxiety.In addition to supporting students' foreign language learning, the results showed that the proposed approach provides positive results on the concept mapping‐based flipped learning for speaking training course.Implications for practice and/or policy The concept maps served as an approach to help students draw complex conceptual relationships and as an outcome measurement.The learners' language performance and critical thinking are positively correlated.The learners' concept mapping scores revealed not only in their performances, but also in speaking, conceptualization, and formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although flipped learning has been recognized as being a potential approach enabling students to learn at their own pace before the class and facilitating in‐depth peer‐to‐peer and student‐to‐teacher interactions in the class, it remains a challenge to promote students' active learning in the before‐class stage, which could significantly affect their in‐class engagement and learning performance. In this study, a reflective thinking‐promoting approach is proposed to facilitate students' learning design project performance, technology‐enhanced active engagement, and their reflective thinking and participation in the before‐class stage of flipped learning. A quasi‐experiment was conducted on a flipped Digital Learning course of a Master's program in a university to evaluate the effects of the approach on students' learning design performance, engagement, reflective thinking and participation. A total of 19 students (7 male and 12 female) were in the experimental group learning with the reflective thinking‐promoting approach, while 19 (4 male and 15 female) were in the control group learning with the conventional flipped learning approach. The results indicated that the proposed approach significantly enhanced not only the students' learning design project outcomes and reflective thinking, but also their engagement and participation in the before‐class stage of flipped learning. Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic Flipping learning is an effective teaching approach that shifts the lecture time to the before‐class stage and hence teachers have more time to conduct learning activities to promote students' higher order thinking as well as to deal with individual students learning problems.Students' learning experience, motivation and belief could be the factors that guide students towards engagement and participation in content and help them learn new skills.Engaging students in reflective thinking is an important and challenging issue. It provides students with an opportunity to scrutinize their own learning and hence make progress.What this paper adds A reflective thinking‐promoting approach into flipped learning is proposed to facilitate students' flipped learning engagement and participation behaviors as well as their project performance and reflective thinking.In addition to promoting students' learning outcomes, the results indicated that the proposed approach provides promising results on the technology‐enhanced active learning experience and participation in online learning in the before‐class stage of flipped learning.Implications for practice and/or policy Via monitoring students' online before‐class progress, instructors can recognize the factors that affect students' learning, adjust or differentiate their instruction and even provide students with more opportunities or with additional support to meet students' needs for learning.The link between the video lectures and the classroom activities can be examined in future research to perceive the influence of video lectures on students' participation behaviors in‐class activities.Forming reflective thinking skill is important, but attainable; it needs students' engagement and participation in time and effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capability of reading comprehension is one of the essential skills for learning different topics, and has been recognized as a challenging objective in the Chinese curriculum. In this study, a concept mapping‐based summarization strategy was incorporated into flipped learning to improve students' reading comprehension. The participants of the study were 45 fifth graders from two Mandarin Chinese classes at an elementary school in Taiwan. None of the students had previous flipped learning experience. A pretest and posttest of reading comprehension as well as pre‐ and post‐questionnaires for measuring the students' reading motivation, self‐efficacy, and cognitive load were conducted. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improved the students' summarization skills, while the impact of the approach on students' reading comprehension was not significant. Moreover, reading comprehension and self‐efficacy showed a positive correlation, and self‐efficacy was positively correlated with both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Consequently, it is concluded that employing concept mapping with the summarization strategy in flipped learning and students' summarization ability are directly related, but there may be an indirect relationship with reading comprehension. Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic The capability of reading comprehension has been recognized as a challenging objective in the Chinese curriculum.It is time‐consuming and difficult to train students in all kinds of reading skills in class.Flipped learning could be one of the approaches to solving this dilemma as it provides more practice and interaction time with peers and teachers in class.The acquisition of new skills can be technically demanding.The difficulty levels of the skills to be acquired should be considered.What this paper adds A concept mapping‐based summarization strategy for flipped learning is proposed to enhance students' summarization and reading comprehension in a Mandarin Chinese course.The proposed approach improved the students' summarization skills.When learning with the proposed approach, students' reading comprehension and self‐efficacy showed a positive correlation, and self‐efficacy was positively correlated with both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.Implications for practice and/or policy Combining concept mapping with the summarization strategy in flipped learning mode has good potential to improve students' summarization skills.Dynamic instructional strategies in reading should be promoted to stimulate critical and creative thinking.Flipped video assignments at students' own levels should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important challenges in designing wireless sensor networks is how to recover a broken network within a very short time as the active nodes are failed or out-of-energy. Focusing on this problem, a hierarchical scheduling scheme based on node-failure pretreatment is proposed, in which the global optimization method is used to find the minimum connected tree and the local multilayer recovery algorithm is used to find a candidate sensor node instead of the failed one. Three highlights of this scheme are as follows: (1) The importance of sensor nodes is defined in terms of their locations in minimum connected tree and coverage acreage. (2) The neighborhood radius of failed sensor node varies with its importance, and then its candidate-node set is dynamically constructed. (3) A novel multilayer recovery strategy including node recovery and regional recovery is presented. Simulation results show that hierarchical scheduling scheme finds the optimal candidate sensor node in less time to make the repaired network with lowest energy consumption. Though the less sensor nodes are activated, the network lifetime is slightly shorter. Moreover, this scheme can be applied in the problem that the communication radius of sensor node is less than two times of its sensing radius. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glutenins, which form the network of gluten protein, are of great importance for the quality of flour products. Glutenins can be divided into HMW and LMW subunits according to molecular weight. Three genes for LMW glutenin subunits (LMW‐GS), named lmw‐cnd1, lmw‐cnd2, and lmw‐cnd3 with open reading frames of 1,053, 903, and 969 bp, respectively, were cloned from wheat cultivar Cheyenne. Heterologous expression vectors of the three LMW‐GS were constructed, and the recombinant proteins LMW‐CND1, LMW‐CND2, and LMW‐CND3 were overexpressed in Escherichia coli. After cell disruption with ultrasound, target proteins of high purity were obtained by using Ni2+ affinity chromatography. Farinograph and TAPlus measurements were used to investigate the effects of the three LMW‐GS on the characteristics of flour and dough. The results showed that the addition of each LMW‐GS can lead to an increase in the elasticity of the dough. Moreover, LMW‐CND2 and LMW‐CND3 promoted the strength of the dough. All three LMW‐GS caused a decrease of hardness and increase of springiness and cohesiveness of dough according to texture profiling results. Consequently, all three LMW‐GS have positive effects on the processing characteristics of dough and can improve bread quality to different extents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]