Shihkuan Hsu

Background/Objectives: Adolescence is an important period for developing the knowledge and skills for healthy eating. Past studies have found that declarative knowledge of food and nutrition alone is not sufficient to improve healthy behavior, but how adolescents make connections from factual knowledge to skill and behavior is less clear. Based on cognitive development theories, a new concept, “awareness as connection”, was devised, and a questionnaire addressing the connection between food, nutrition, diabetes, and behavior was developed to assess the awareness of adolescents. Methods: A lesson designed to connect food, nutrition, and local lifestyle was piloted with a group of 146 students aged 13–17 years in northern Taiwan. Results: The pre- and posttest results found that students improved regarding their awareness of the association between food, nutrition, diabetes, and lifestyles (p < 0.01). The exploratory factor analysis results revealed one factor for the pre-test but two factors for the posttest, indicating growth in the students’ knowledge structure. Most of the students demonstrated significant progress in the posttest, especially on the knowledge application subscale. The results reveal that students in lower grades started low and ended low but achieved greater gains than high schoolers. High-school students had better nutritional knowledge, but junior-high-school students made substantial progress on the application of this knowledge, indicating an improvement for cognitive complexity. Students with overweight started out low and achieved fewer and uneven gains than students without overweight but scored high on particular items. Gender did not have significant impact on the overall learning, but girls showed more gains in factual knowledge. Conclusions: These results suggest that awareness can be a mid-step to help link knowledge to behavior, and for some, this step may take more time.

Educators have suggested that citizens need the ability to engage in self-directed inquiry and problem solving. In line with the trend, current reforms in Taiwanese schools advocate the development of these core competencies. One way to achieve this goal is through STEM education. STEM modules which integrate science, math, technology, and engineering have become a prime catalyst for inquiry-based multidisciplinary teaching and learning. Although the demands and the benefits of STEM modules are often highlighted, the challenges of the development and implementation of such an interdisciplinary module are less discussed. This paper describes the process of the development of a bio-sensor module that uses Arduino to analyze glucose level of concentration.This multidisciplinary module integrates physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, electronics, and programming. The goal of the program is for students to construct a device that imitates a commercial glucose meter. Teacher workshops were conducted for educators to learn the concepts and the procedures. A set of questionnaires collected from 21 workshop participants revealed that teachers face various challenges in the process of understanding and modifying the STEM module, as well as preparing students so they are ready to learn with the module. A group interview after the workshop revealed the teachers’ difficulties in implementing a module that requires advanced technical skills and materials. The potential usefulness for the students, and the emergence of a different goal than the original plan, provide challenging and enlightening lessons. Rather than an engineering-centered model, this study proposes an alternative science-centered model for STEM material development.

Despite a steady supply of equipment and continuous training, teachers' use of computers for instruction seems to be limited. Whether the problem is due to teachers' ability or usage of computers for instruction is not well understood. In order to better understand the role of ability and usage in technology integration, teachers' proficiency of technology integration was evaluated by separate ability and usage scales. Based on performance indicators from the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), two scales were developed that measured teachers' self-perceived ability and their frequency of usage of technology integration. The survey was administered to grade 1–9 teachers in Taiwan ( n = 3729). The results showed a positive correlation between teachers' technology integration ability and usage (Pearson r = .56). Further examination using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) confirmed the structure of the scales and revealed a higher correlation between the two scales after adjusting for measurement error.