National Chengchi University

About: National Chengchi University is a education organization based out in Taipei, Taiwan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & China. The organization has 3465 authors who have published 6342 publications receiving 118821 citations. The organization is also known as: NCCU & Chengda.

Assessing the attention levels of students by using a novel attention aware system based on brainwave signals

Abstract: Rapid progress in information and communication technologies ( ICTs) has fueled the popularity of e-learning. However, an e-learning environment is limited in that online instructors cannot monitor immediately whether students remain focus during online autonomous learning. Therefore, this study tries to develop a novel attention aware system ( AAS) capable of recognizing students' attention levels accurately based on electroencephalography ( EEG) signals, thus having high potential to be applied in providing timely alert for conveying low-attention level feedback to online instructors in an e-learning environment. To construct AAS, attention responses of students and their corresponding EEG signals are gathered based on a continuous performance test ( CPT), ie, an attention assessment test. Next, the AAS is constructed by using training and testing data by the Neuro Sky brainwave detector and the support vector machine ( SVM), a well-known machine learning model. Additionally, based on the discrete wavelet transform ( DWT), the collected EEG signals are decomposed into five primary bands (ie, alpha, beta, gamma, theta, and delta). Each primary band contains five statistical parameters (including approximate entropy, total variation, energy, skewness, and standard deviation), thus generating 25 potential brainwave features associated with students' attention level for constructing the AAS. An attempt based on genetic algorithm ( GA) is also made to enhance the prediction performance of the proposed AAS in terms of identifying students' attention levels. According to GA, the seven most influential features are selected from 25 considered features; parameters of the proposed AAS are also optimized. Analytical results indicate that the proposed AAS can accurately recognize individual student's attention state as either a high or low level, and the average accuracy rate reaches as high as 89.52%. Moreover, the proposed AAS is integrated with a video lecture tagging system to examine whether the proposed AAS can accurately detect students' low-attention periods while learning about electrical safety in the workplace via a video lecture. Four experiments are designed to assess the prediction performance of the proposed AAS in terms of identifying the periods of video lecture with high- or low-attention levels during learning processes. Analytical results indicate that the proposed AAS can accurately identify the low-attention periods of video lecture generated by students when engaging in a learning activity with video lecture. Meanwhile, the proposed AAS can also accurately identify the low-attention periods of video lecture generated by students to some degree even when students engage in a learning activity by a video lecture with random disturbances. Furthermore, strong negative correlations are found between the students' learning performance (ie, posttest score and progressive score) and the low-attention periods of video lecture identified by the proposed AAS. Results of this study demonstrate that the proposed AAS is effective, capable of assisting online instructors in evaluating students' attention levels to enhance their online learning performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crisis Situations, Communication Strategies, and Media Coverage A Multicase Study Revisiting the Communicative Response Model

Abstract: This study focuses on the relationships among crisis situations, crisis response strategies, and media coverage. The author examines four political crisis situations and the strategies used to manage them; adopts a comparative, multicase, holistic research design; uses typical content analysis procedures for data analysis; and applies pattern-matching logic to compare the data against a theoretical model, the corporate communicative response model. More than 1,220 news articles covering four political figures'crises are examined. Results indicate that the use of denial in a commission situation, justification in a standards situation, and concession in an agreement situation increased positive media coverage. The results also suggest that for all but the agreement situation, a combination of crisis communication strategies was the most effective strategy to employ. This study has theoretical and practical implications for the symbolic approach in general and for crisis communicative responses in particular.

Rapid expansion of international new ventures across institutional distance

Abstract: Rapid export expansion into institutionally distant locations has become more possible in the era of digital economy. Will such rapid expansion bring desirable outcome to firms? In a context of international new ventures (INVs) from emerging markets, we reconceptualize export expansion speed as the pace of exporting across institutional distance over a certain period of time. We then examine the relationship between rapid export expansion across institutional distance and overall firm performance. We incorporate directionality into export expansion and hypothesize the relationship to be positive when INVs export upwardly to more open countries, yet the relationship to be negative when INVs export downwardly to less open countries. We also hypothesize that the degree of market liberalization in subnational regions of origin of the INVs moderates the above speed–performance relationships. Instrumental variable models based on data of Chinese indigenous INVs during 2000–2009 support these hypotheses. This study both zooms in and zooms out the analytical lens along the location-related institutional axis, examines the joint effect of institutions involved in supranational directions and subnational origins on firm performance, and advances institutional theory.

Maladaptive sleep hygiene practices in good sleepers and patients with insomnia.

Abstract: Previous studies examining the associations between sleep hygiene practices and insomnia have produced inconsistent results. This study further investigates this issue by examining different domains of sleep hygiene separately. One hundred and six insomnia patients and 89 good sleepers participated in the study. Their sleep hygiene, sleep quality and insomnia severity were assessed with subjective rating scales. Among good sleepers, almost all domains of sleep hygiene correlated significantly with their sleep ratings. However, in insomnia patients, only the arousal-related behavior correlated with sleep ratings. The findings suggest that strategies in prevention and treatment of sleep disturbance may be different accordingly.