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Academic writing is a substantial component of tertiary education, yet it poses challenges for second/foreign language (L2/FL) students, particularly those first-year undergraduates with limited exposure to English-medium-instruction (EMI) settings. In this context, English-for-academic-purposes (EAP) tutors play a crucial role in supporting these students, but little is known about the nature of their feedback in scholarly discourse. Complicating matters further is the emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) as a feedback tool, sparking ongoing debate about its efficacy compared to traditional human feedback. To address these gaps, this study investigates the nature of EAP teacher feedback on English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) disciplinary writing, juxtaposing it against student opinions and attitudes towards both EAP teacher feedback and AI-generated feedback. This study employed a three-layer coding scheme focusing on corrective, genre-specific, and intentional feedback to analyse the nature of EAP teacher feedback in detail. Through a comprehensive analysis of interview themes, this study highlights the significance of EAP teacher feedback in the context of increasing integration of GenAI tools. The findings offer valuable insights into effective practices for supporting first-year EFL undergraduate students in their academic writing within EMI settings and demonstrate the critical role of EAP teacher feedback in assisting these students’ writing in an AI-prevalent world.

Background The benchmark dose (BMD) method calculates the dose associated with a specific change in response based on a specific dose-response relationship. Compared with the traditional no observed adverse effect level (NOAEL) method, the BMD method has many advantages, and the 95% lower confidence limit of benchmark dose lower limit (BMDL) is recommended to replace NOAEL in deriving biological exposure limits. No authority has yet published any health-based guideline for rare earth elements. Objective To evaluate genotoxicity threshold induced by acute exposure to neodymium nitrate in mice using BMD modeling through micronucleus test and comet assay. Methods SPF grade mice (n=90) were randomly divided into nine groups, including seven neodymium nitrate exposure groups, one control group (distilled water), and one positive control group (200 mg·kg−1 ethyl methanesulfonate), 10 mice in each group, half male and half female. The seven dose groups were fed by gavage with different concentrations of neodymium nitrate solution (male: 14, 27, 39, 55, 77, 109, and 219 mg·kg−1; female: 24, 49, 69, 97, 138, 195, and 389 mg·kg−1) twice at an interval of 21 h. Three hours after the last exposure, the animals were neutralized by cervical dislocation. The bone marrow of mice femur was taken to calculate the micronucleus rate of bone marrow cells, and the liver and stomach were taken for comet test. Results The best fitting models for the increase of polychromatophil micronucleus rate in bone marrow of female and male mice induced by neodymium nitrate were the exponential 4 model and the hill model, respectively. The BMD and the BMDL of female mice were calculated to be 31.37 mg·kg−1 and 21.90 mg·kg−1, and those of male mice were calculated to be 58.62 mg·kg−1 and 54.31 mg·kg−1, respectively. The best fitting models for DNA damage induced by neodymium nitrate in female and male mouse hepatocytes were the exponential 5 model and the exponential 4 model, respectively, and the calculated BMD and BMDL were 27.15 mg·kg−1 and 11.99 mg·kg−1 for female mice, and 16.28 mg·kg−1 and 10.47 mg·kg−1 for male mice, respectively. The hill model was the best fitting model for DNA damage of gastric adenocytes in both female and male mice, and the calculated BMD and BMDL were 36.73 mg·kg−1 and 19.92 mg·kg−1 for female mice, and 24.74 mg·kg−1 and 14.08 mg·kg−1 for male mice, respectively. Conclusion Taken the micronucleus rate of bone marrow cells, DNA damage of liver cells and gastric gland cells as the end points of genotoxicity, the BMDL of neodymium nitrate is 10.47 mg·kg−1, which can be used as the threshold of genotoxic effects induced by acute exposure to neodymium nitrate in mice.

Prior to 2020, empirical research and reports on approaches to education during health crises were limited. They focused primarily on reporting local-level response and provided only limited analysis. Various historic epidemics, like SARS, Ebola, and HIV/AIDS, provided important lessons about educational efficacy during major health emergencies. However, the sudden emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic led to an explosion of research on educating during a worldwide health crisis. This integrative literature review (Torraco 2005) uses the INEE Minimum Standards framework to conceptualize the response to pandemics and epidemics from 1990 to 2020. The research analyzes 124 empirical studies, practitioner and governmental reports, and historic accounts of Ebola, SARS, and other epidemics, as well as early responses to COVID-19, in order to understand how education stakeholders continued educating during widespread communicable illnesses. The high-level themes that emerged included the foundational role of context and community support; access to an equitable education in the digital age; the social-emotional wellbeing of teachers and students; teachers' role in adapting curriculum and pedagogy; the need for additional training and support for teachers; and the opportunity for a creative shift in practices and policies in education.

Avant 2020, peu de recherches empiriques et de rapports étaient disponibles sur les méthodes éducatives pendant les crises sanitaires. Ces recherches se concentraient principalement au niveau local et ne proposaient qu'une analyse limitée de la situation. Les diverses épidémies qui ont sévi par le passé, notamment le SRAS, Ebola et le VIH/SIDA, nous ont permis de tirer des leçons importantes concernant l'efficacité de l'éducation dans les contextes d'urgences sanitaires majeures. Toutefois, l'émergence soudaine de la pandémie du COVID-19 a conduit à une véritable explosion du nombre de recherches portant sur les stratégies éducatives en période de crise sanitaire mondiale. Cette analyse intégrative de la littérature (Torraco 2005) utilise le cadre des normes minimales de l'INEE pour conceptualiser la réponse du système éducatif face aux pandémies et aux épidémies entre 1990 et 2020. Cette recherche s'appuie sur 124 études empiriques, des comptes rendus de praticiens et des rapports gouvernementaux, des témoignages d'époque sur Ebola, le SRAS et d'autres épidémies, ainsi que les premières solutions pédagogiques trouvées lors du déclenchement du COVID-19. Ce travail de recherche va permettre de comprendre comment les acteurs de l'éducation ont continué à enseigner pendant que ces maladies contagieuses se répandaient à travers le monde. Plusieurs thèmes essentiels ont émergé, notamment le rôle fondamental du contexte et du soutien communautaire ; l'accès à une éducation équitable à l'ère numérique ; le bien-être socio-émotionnel des enseignants et des élèves ; le rôle des enseignants dans l'adaptation des programmes et de la pédagogie ; la nécessité d'une formation et d'un soutien supplémentaires pour les enseignants ; et l'opportunité d'effectuer un changement créatif dans les méthodes et les politiques en matière d'éducation.

Advancement of testing of mathematical problem-solving skills calls for open-ended, realistic tasks particularly susceptible to bias, compromising the score validity and fairness of tests. Informed by universal design principles, this study framed 360 prototype items developed for the "Problem-solving Measures Grades 6-8 Computer Adaptive Tests" as a bounded case to illuminate sources of bias in middle-school mathematics assessment. Experts' shared understandings of potential sources of bias were collected using an iterative Delphi technique. Four themes in sources emerged from a thematic analysis of 201 sources of bias identified: "assumed lived experiences, language use, item presentation," and "stereotypes." These sources potentially placed subgroups of students from certain sociocultural backgrounds (e.g. culture, gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status) at a disadvantage by challenging them in ways unrelated to mathematical problem solving. Recommendations for minimizing potential sources of bias in test development to achieve equitable K-12 mathematics problem-solving tests are discussed.

While the educational emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic centred on student learning and safety, teachers' burnout, and teacher strikes, stories of teachers quitting the profession have left schools in crisis around the world. In this study, we use an intersectional approach to explore teacher experiences during the pandemic as 'crisis experiences.' The data presented in this study were obtained from an exploratory survey which recruited practicing PreK-12 and higher education teachers (n = 134) from 22 countries. The survey included closed- and open-ended questions related to teachers' experiences teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. One-sample chi-square tests showed that quantitative variables of gender, previous experience teaching and learning online, and grade-level taught were significantly related to teacher anxiety. A descriptive approach to qualitative analysis identified three axes of the crisis which affected teachers' experiences: teaching environment, teaching relationships, and systemic support. Findings show teachers had no choice or adequate time to prepare to transition online, increasing anxiety especially among women, those teaching younger grades, and those without experience teaching or learning online. Teachers' work during the pandemic should be understood as 'emergency remote teaching' which has put teachers at greater risk for burnout and departure from the profession.

Educators have increasingly turned to social media for their instructional, social, and emotional needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to see where support and professional development would be needed and how the educational community interacted online, we sought to use existing Twitter data to examine potential educators' networking and discourse patterns. Specifically, this mixed-methods study explores how educators used Twitter as a platform to seek and share resources and support during the transition to remote teaching around the start of massive school closures due to the pandemic. Based on a public COVID-19 Twitter chatter database, tweets from late March to early April 2020 were searched using educational keywords and analyzed using social network analysis and thematic analysis. Social network analysis findings indicate that the support networks for educators on Twitter were sparse and consisted of mainly small, exclusive communities. The networks featured one-on-one interactions during the early pandemic, highlighting that there were few large conversations that most educators were part of but rather many small ones. Thematic analysis findings further suggest that both informational and nurturant support were relatively equally present on Twitter among educators, particularly pedagogical content knowledge and gratitude. This study adds to an understanding of the educational networks as a means of professional and personal support. Additionally, findings present the discourse featured in educator networks at the onset of an educational emergency (i.e., COVID-19) as decentralized as well as desiring pedagogical content knowledge and emotional sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precisely regulating Pt catalytic sites is important and challenging. Herein the authors engineer the clustering of single atomic Te vacancies in atomically thin PtTe2 to optimize the electronic structure, adsorption energy, and catalytic performance of atomically defined Pt sites.

We consider two coupled quantum tops with angular momentum vectors L and M. The coupling Hamiltonian defines the Feingold-Peres model, which is a known paradigm of quantum chaos. We show that this model has a nonstandard symmetry with respect to the Altland-Zirnbauer tenfold symmetry classification of quantum systems, which extends the well-known threefold way of Wigner and Dyson (referred to as "standard" symmetry classes here). We identify the nonstandard symmetry classes BDI0 (chiral orthogonal class with no zero modes), BDI1 (chiral orthogonal class with one zero mode), and CI (antichiral orthogonal class) as well as the standard symmetry class AI (orthogonal class). We numerically analyze the specific spectral quantum signatures of chaos related to the nonstandard symmetries. In the microscopic density of states and in the distribution of the lowest positive energy eigenvalue, we show that the Feingold-Peres model follows the predictions of the Gaussian ensembles of random-matrix theory in the appropriate symmetry class if the corresponding classical dynamics is chaotic. In a crossover to mixed and near-integrable classical dynamics, we show that these signatures disappear or strongly change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]