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This study investigated the learning performance of teacher education students (TESs) engaged in a school-based interdisciplinary curriculum and the perceptions of their engagement in an online mentoring program (OMP) that incorporated synchronous videoconferencing technology. A nonequivalent control group posttest-only design was adopted to examine the effects of synchronous mentoring. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected. Eighty TESs participated in this study, of which fifty-four TESs chose to join the experimental group (thirteen subgroups), and twenty-six chose to join the control group (six subgroups). The TESs in the experimental group attended a synchronous OMP, whereas those in the control group attended an in-person course as a part of a traditional mentoring program (TMP). This study discovered that the TESs in the experimental group outperformed those in the control group in terms of the contextual problem awareness and theme design components of a school-based interdisciplinary curriculum. However, the effectiveness of online mentors and university course lecturers in guiding the TESs to create teaching plans and perform integrative tasks did not differ significantly. Additionally, the online mentors successfully promoted cognitive involvement among the TESs in the OMP. Although the TESs in the TMP exhibited higher behavioral involvement than those in the OMP, this did not necessarily translate into superior performance in all dimensions of curriculum design. The study suggests that online mentors supplement, rather than replace, the role of university course lecturers in addressing curriculum design deficiencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study developed a teacher education program for teacher education students (TESs), incorporating collaborative inquiry and panoramic cameras to guide them in observing young students' learning performances during teaching, with the goals of enhancing instructional design capability for diagnosing student learning problems and investigating the feasibility of this approach. Twenty-two participants, divided into five groups, engaged in teaching practice across five different junior high school classes simultaneously. The remaining 17 participants conducted classroom observations. Post-teaching discussions of a group followed, with this three-week cycle repeating four times, allowing each TES to serve as a teaching educator. The study concludes that TESs' diagnostic abilities in identifying student learning problems have improved, along with a noticeable positive change in their perceived capabilities for designing teaching activities. Overall, the proposed course framework demonstrates feasibility in teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outstanding mechanical properties, light weight, and biodegradability of cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) make them promising components of renewable and sustainable next-generation reinforced composite biomaterials and bioplastics. Manufacturing CNFs at a pilot scale requires disc-refining fibrillation of dilute cellulose fibers in aqueous pulp suspensions to shear the fibers apart into their nanodimensional forms, which is, however, an energy-intensive process. Here, we used atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulation to examine media that might facilitate the reduction of interactions between cellulose fibers, thereby reducing energy consumption in fibrillation. The most suitable medium found by the simulations was an aqueous solution with 0.007:0.012 wt.% NaOH:urea, and indeed this was found in pilot-scale experiments to reduce the fibrillation energy by ~21% on average relative to water alone. The NaOH:urea-mediated CNFs have similar crystallinity, morphology, and mechanical strength to those formed in water. The NaOH and urea act synergistically on CNFs to aid fibrillation but at different length scales. NaOH deprotonates hydroxyl groups leading to mesoscale electrostatic repulsion between fibrils, whereas urea forms hydrogen bonds with protonated hydroxyl groups thus disrupting interfibril hydrogen bonds. This suggests a general mechanism in which an aqueous medium that contains a strong base and a small organic molecule acting as a hydrogen-bond acceptor and/or donor may be effectively employed in materials processes where dispersion of deprotonable polymers is required. The study demonstrates how atomic-detail computer simulation can be integrated with pilot-scale experiments in the rational design of materials processes for the circular bioeconomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracking biodiversity and its dynamics at scale is essential if we are to solve global environmental challenges. Detecting animal vocalizations in passively recorded audio data offers an automatable, inexpensive, and taxonomically broad way to monitor biodiversity. However, the labor and expertise required to label new data and fine-tune algorithms for each deployment is a major barrier. In this study, we applied a pretrained bird vocalization detection model, BirdNET, to 152,376 h of audio comprising datasets from Norway, Taiwan, Costa Rica, and Brazil. We manually listened to a subset of detections for each species in each dataset, calibrated classification thresholds, and found precisions of over 90% for 109 of 136 species. While some species were reliably detected across multiple datasets, the performance of others was dataset specific. By filtering out unreliable detections, we could extract species and community-level insight into diel (Brazil) and seasonal (Taiwan) temporal scales, as well as landscape (Costa Rica) and national (Norway) spatial scales. Our findings demonstrate that, with relatively fast but essential local calibration, a single vocalization detection model can deliver multifaceted community and species-level insight across highly diverse datasets; unlocking the scale at which acoustic monitoring can deliver immediate applied impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]