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This study explores the roles and research foci of AILEd (Artificial Intelligence in Language Education). The AILEd studies published from 1990 to 2020 in the WOS (Web of Science) database were included in the present study. Based on the well-recognized Technology-based Learning Review model, several dimensions, such as research methods, research sample groups, adopted technology, language skills, the role of AI in language education, and learning outcomes, were taken into account. The review results show that the main application domains of AILEd research were writing, reading, and vocabulary acquisition. In terms of applied technology and algorithms, AI in language education mostly adopted ITS (Intelligent Tutoring System) and NLP (Natural Language Processing). Besides, several commonly used AI algorithms were Statistical Learning, Data Mining, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Parsing. It was also found that some research focused on learning anxiety, willingness to communicate, knowledge acquisition, and classroom interaction. However, higher order thinking, complex problem solving, critical thinking ability, and collaborative learning tendencies were rarely considered in AILEd studies. Accordingly, several suggestions are provided to researchers, teachers, and decision makers for applying or studying AI applications in language education in the future.

Self-directed learning (SDL) ability, its usefulness in higher education and life-long learning have been highlighted in previous literature. However, there has been much less understanding of the effects of SDL ability in the school settings, specifically the effects on learners' SDL behaviors and processes. To address this limitation, this study investigated the relations between SDL ability, SDL behaviors, and reading outcomes and further explored the process of planning behaviors in SDL. This study examined the context of SDL for extensive reading using a goal-oriented active learning system, GOAL. The results showed that the high SDL ability students demonstrated significantly more reading outcomes in terms of books completed and the number of days read than those with low SDL ability. The high SDL ability students engaged significantly more in planning behaviors, that were found to be significantly correlated with reading outcomes, than the low SDL ability students. Cluster analysis and transition analysis also differentiate groups of learners with different planning behaviors. These findings suggested that the learning behaviors and outcomes facilitated by the environment were affected to varying degrees by the levels of students' SDL ability, and personalized feedback can be created using the SDL behavioral variables and patterns in the environment.

Fostering students' competence in applying interdisciplinary knowledge to solve problems has been recognized as an important and challenging issue globally. This is why STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education has been emphasized at all levels in schools. Meanwhile, the use of robotics has played an important role in STEM learning design. The purpose of this study was to fill a gap in the current review of research on Robotics-based STEM (R-STEM) education by systematically reviewing existing research in this area. This systematic review examined the role of robotics and research trends in STEM education. A total of 39 articles published between 2012 and 2021 were analyzed. The review indicated that R-STEM education studies were mostly conducted in the United States and mainly in K-12 schools. Learner and teacher perceptions were the most popular research focus in these studies which applied robots. LEGO was the most used tool to accomplish the learning objectives. In terms of application, Technology (programming) was the predominant robotics-based STEM discipline in the R-STEM studies. Moreover, project-based learning (PBL) was the most frequently employed learning strategy in robotics-related STEM research. In addition, STEM learning and transferable skills were the most popular educational goals when applying robotics. Based on the findings, several implications and recommendations to researchers and practitioners are proposed.

This study aims to identify the bibliometric outcomes of articles and research trends in specific areas. This study revealed research on the use of e-books for EFL education published in selected journals of the Web of Science from 2011 to 2020, and discusses the trends of the top-cited countries, journals, the most used keywords, and the popular subjects, learning strategies, target skills, and the research outcomes. A total of 53 selected articles were manually and systematically analyzed. The results revealed that the most productive country was Taiwan, and the most cited journal was Computers & Education. The most used keywords were "engagement." The bibliometric analysis can be reflected in the content analysis as preschoolers and elementary school students were the most common participants, guided learning were the most frequently used strategy, and the main target skill was reading. This review study provides an overview of the research agenda for the last 10 years, and highlights the trends in the field by analyzing relevant past research. When the use of e-books in EFL education studies was examined, reading comprehension, teaching/learning strategies, and learning engagement were found to be crucial in the studies. Therefore, there is a need to develop more useful features of e-books to support EFL teaching practices. It is therefore suggested that future research focus more on pedagogical aspects and e-book feature development.

English speaking is a challenging learning objective for EFL (English as Foreign Language) learners owing to the lack of practicing environments. In this study, Interactive Spherical Video-based Virtual Reality (ISVVR) was adopted as the learning mode to provide realistic sociocultural contexts for English speaking. In addition, an experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of the SVVR approach on the English speaking performances and anxiety of the EFL students with different cognitive styles. A pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was conducted to investigate the effects of the interaction between cognitive style and multimedia learning mode on students' learning motivation, speaking anxiety, oral presentation, and move analysis. The student sample consisted of two classes of 93 students. All of the students took the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) to identify whether their cognitive style was field dependent or independent. The results showed a significant effect for the interaction between the cognitive styles and the learning modes on the students' oral presentation and speaking anxiety. Their structural moves in oral presentations with the ISVVR learning mode showed more similar spoken genre patterns to those of TED speakers. Findings further support the benefit of incorporating cognitive styles into the ISVVR learning mode for EFL learners.

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.

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.

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.

This study investigates the role of self-efficacy in an asynchronous online English course enriched with interactive features. Self-efficacy is a strong predictor of academic achievement in conventional classrooms. However, when learning happens in an online environment, the students' learning achievement is also affected by their psychological perceptions of online learning. In this study, the relationship between self-efficacy and affective factors (i.e., learner autonomy, learner--content interaction, and perceptions toward transactional distance) was investigated. The aims of this study were to identify the influence of different levels of self-efficacy on these factors and to explore their relationships in an online EFL course. In total, 286 students were administered the questionnaires before and after the curriculum to probe their self-perception of these affective variables. When asynchronous interactive learning materials came into play, learners with different levels of self-efficacy make statistically different learning achievements. The statistically significant differences were also found between the student's self-efficacy level, their learner autonomy, and their perception toward the interactive contents. However, the difference was not significant between self-efficacy and transactional distance. The cost of asynchronous learning is an increasing transactional distance due to the lack of instructor-earner interaction. This study suggests that interactive content triggered an opposite effect by making the instructor's role invisible rather than absent. A good online course must balance the student's self-determined learning and flexibility with the course structure. Interactive learning content can keep the balance between developing learner autonomy and fostering engagement by dissolving the teacher's role into interactive course material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to identify the bibliometric outcomes of articles and research trends in specific areas. This study revealed research on the use of e-books for EFL education published in selected journals of the Web of Science from 2011 to 2020, and discusses the trends of the top-cited countries, journals, the most used keywords, and the popular subjects, learning strategies, target skills, and the research outcomes. A total of 53 selected articles were manually and systematically analyzed. The results revealed that the most productive country was Taiwan, and the most cited journal was Computers & Education. The most used keywords were "engagement." The bibliometric analysis can be reflected in the content analysis as preschoolers and elementary school students were the most common participants, guided learning were the most frequently used strategy, and the main target skill was reading. This review study provides an overview of the research agenda for the last 10 years, and highlights the trends in the field by analyzing relevant past research. When the use of e-books in EFL education studies was examined, reading comprehension, teaching/learning strategies, and learning engagement were found to be crucial in the studies. Therefore, there is a need to develop more useful features of e-books to support EFL teaching practices. It is therefore suggested that future research focus more on pedagogical aspects and e-book feature development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We aim to investigate whether a popular hand exercise could be used to improve the action of eating in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). A 6-month intervention was conducted in 60 patients with AD who live in a nursing home. They were divided into hand exercise and control groups. Patients of the control group maintained their daily routine. The improvement of Edinburgh Feeding Evaluation in Dementia scale in hand exercise group was significantly greater than in the control group (P = .003). Significant differences in time of autonomous eating and time of simulated eating between patients in the hand exercise and control groups (P < .05) were noted. The improvements in accuracy of eating action and coordination of eating action from baseline were significant in hand exercise group compared to the control group (P = .020 and .014, respectively). Hand exercise is a safe and effective intervention to improve the feeding and eating of people with AD. [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]

Self-directed learning (SDL) ability, its usefulness in higher education, and life-long learning have been highlighted in previous literature. However, understanding the effects of SDL ability in the school settings, specifically how it affects learners' affective and behavioral outcomes, remains missing and calls for further investigation. Given this research gap, this study developed a goal-oriented active learning system, GOAL, to support students' SDL and investigated how students' perceptions of SDL ability affect their reading engagement, SDL behavior, and motivation for extensive reading. The results showed that the high SDL ability students demonstrated significantly more reading engagement, SDL behaviors, motivation and autonomy for extensive reading than those with low SDL ability. These findings suggested that an SDL support environment could be exploited as a useful tool to support foreign language learning in the schools; however, the affective and behavioral outcomes created by the environment were affected to varying degrees by the levels of students' SDL ability. The study provided implications for researchers studying extensive reading and SDL environments, as well as for educators seeking to improve extensive reading with SDL strategy usage. ● This study introduced a self-directed learning (SDL) support system named GOAL. ● A quantitative measurement of SDL behaviors was explored using the GOAL system. ● The effects of SDL ability were investigated using the GOAL system. ● The influence on reading engagement, SDL behaviors, motivation in extensive reading were examined. ● SDL ability plays an influential role in self-directed online reading environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]