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The purpose of this study was to explore the factors that might affect learning performance and collaborative problem solving (CPS) awareness in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. We collected and analyzed data on important factors in STEM education, including learning strategy and learning behaviors, and examined their interrelationships with learning performance and CPS awareness, respectively. Multiple data sources, including learning tests, questionnaire feedback, and learning logs, were collected and examined following a learning analytics approach. Significant positive correlations were found for the learning behavior of using markers with learning performance and CPS awareness in group discussion, while significant negative correlations were found for some factors of STEM learning strategy and learning behaviors in prelearning with some factors of CPS awareness. The results imply the importance of an efficient approach to using learning strategies and functional tools in STEM education.

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BACKGROUND Temporomandibular disorders (TMDs) affect people’s quality of life greatly, and the precise understanding of TMDs contributes to a proper treatment choice. Social media, is one of the most fundamental and efficient ways for patients to receive related information, hence there is an urgent need to evaluate the quality of information related to TMDs on social medias. OBJECTIVE This research aims to assess the quality of information about TMDs on two mainstream social media platforms, WeChat and Zhihu, as sources of medical information. They will be evaluated from three aspects: credibility, concreteness, and accuracy. METHODS Researchers searched for articles about TMDs on WeChat and Zhihu and selected the samples. The DISCERN instrument was adopted to grade the credibility and concreteness of these articles and divided them into five groups according to their scores: excellent (score>63), good (62.5>score>51), fair (50.5>score>39), poor (38.5>score>27) and very poor(score<26.5). The accuracy was tested against authoritative journals and textbooks. The HONcode and Global Quality Scale (GQS) were used as supplemental tools. Two researchers conducted this process independently, and the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to examine the consistency between the two researchers. RESULTS After selection, 80 articles were selected at all, including 26 articles from WeChat and 54 articles from Zhihu. The DISCERN instrument reported a mean score of 39.79 (SD 6.11) out of 80. No article got more than 63 points, and most of the samples got less than 50 points. Articles on WeChat and Zhihu did not perform well for credibility and concreteness, and the overall mean score was 22.63 out of 40 (SD 3.24) and 14.23 out of 35 (SD 3.85) respectively. As for accuracy, the results demonstrated that the two platforms did well in this area. Most articles (70 of 80) got 3.5 and 3.5 plus out of 5 in case of accuracy. HONcode reported a mean score of 6.04 out of 16 (SD 1.16) while GQS showed a mean score of 2.93 out of 5 (SD 0.54), indicating the reliability should be improved, and these articles can only provide limited help to the patients. CONCLUSIONS The quality of TMD-related information from WeChat and Zhihu is generally low, although they do well on accuracy. Users of these information should not ignore that the credibility and concreteness still need further improvements. For uploaders, they should pay more attention to the regulations when writing such articles, like attaching a list of reference. As for the platforms, improvements like less advertisement and more supervision will contribute greatly to users’ experience.

Traditional textbooks are progressively being replaced by e-book systems, which are also being utilized more commonly in K–12 education. The study investigated learning behavioral patterns in a seven-week high school mathematics course using an e-book system. In this study, learning data from the BookRoll system was analyzed with lag sequential analysis to examine learning behavioral patterns, learning strategies, and the differences between students with different performances. The results of the learning behavior patterns of all students confirmed the usage of rehearsal and elaboration strategies. However, it demonstrated the lack of using metacognitive strategies in the e-book learning process. Additionally, the results also revealed different learning patterns among students with different learning performances. Students with decreased performance tended to use shallow cognitive processing strategies, while students with increased performance used deeper learning strategies, such as integrating information from the previous and next pages to highlight learning contents. Regarding the strategy usage of students with unchanged performance, students in the unchanged low and middle performance groups tended to utilize the re-reading strategy, while students in the unchanged high performance group utilized the elaboration strategy. Notably, students with increased performance employed fewer learning behavioral patterns than decreased performance students. The behavioral patterns of students with increased performance were more efficient and effective.