Learning how to program is becoming essential in many disciplines. However, programming cannot be easily learned, especially by non-engineering students. It is challenging to conduct engineering education for non-engineering majored students. Therefore, it is important to teach non-engineering students to learn with efficient learning strategies. To discover an efficient learning strategy, we had 64 students practice programming with a simple learning management system and tracked all of their practice behaviors on multiple choice questions. The learning management system assigned one multiple choice question per day, but let students themselves decide their own practice frequencies. Students could also make unsynchronized communications by commenting on the questions. By analyzing their behavior patterns and other performance indicators, this paper compared the effect of two different practice strategies for multiple choice questions: distributed practice and massed practice. Our analysis found that students who adopted distributed practice significantly outperformed those who adopted massed practice on final exams (p=0.031). We further explored the possible reasons that led to this significant difference. Students who adopted distributed practice strategy tended to make higher percentage of first submission correctness, be more cautious while correcting errors, and be more constructive in posting question-related comments.

Committed social workers are significant to organizational performance and service quality; therefore, it is crucial to explore the contributing factors of turnover intention to enhance social workers’ commitment. To reduce social workers’ turnover intention, this study used the first national survey data (N = 5620) of social workers in China to find out the relationship between workplace social capital and turnover intention in public service and explore possible solutions. This study treated workplace social capital as a comprehensive measure that captured employees’ overall perceptions of their interpersonal relations in the public sector. It covered the impact of many other organizational factors on turnover intention, such as job embeddedness, social networks, social relations, communication, and organizational fairness. The results confirmed that workplace social capital had a significant negative impact on employees’ turnover intention. Workplace social capital could be a better predictor of employees’ turnover intention than a single organizational factor or a combination of several factors. These findings not only deepened the theoretical understanding of social capital within the organization and brought insight into how workplace social capital affected employees’ turnover but also promoted a formation of a holistic organizational perspective from the fragmented organizational factors. Results also showed that job burnout and job satisfaction mediated the relation between workplace social capital and turnover intention. Public service agencies should endeavor to foster an organizational climate of cooperation and trust, encourage teamwork and altruistic behaviors among coworkers to reduce emotional exhaustion, and strengthen the professional identity and professional value of social work.

Disaster preparedness is crucial for providing an effective response to, and reducing the possible impacts of, disasters. Although volunteers’ participation plays an important role in disaster preparedness, their actual participation in disaster preparedness activities is still low. To find ways to encourage more volunteers to participate, this study analyzed the social background and organizational and attitudinal factors affecting the volunteers’ willingness to participate. Questionnaires were distributed to 990 registered disaster volunteers across Beijing and the data were analyzed using linear regression models. Results revealed a weak willingness to participate in disaster preparedness. Only 28.08% of the respondents indicated that they were “very ready” to participate in voluntary disaster preparedness, and 14.65% showed “a little bit” of interest. The following was concluded: (1) Disaster volunteers’ social background variables were related to their willingness to participate in disaster preparedness. Compared to male volunteers, female volunteers were more willing to participate. Chinese Communist Party members were more willing to participate than non-members. (2) Providing accidental life insurance for the volunteers had a positive effect on their willingness to participate in disaster preparedness. Provision of more training had a negative effect on the volunteers’ willingness to participate, indicating a low quality of training. (3) Organizational identification was positively related to the volunteers’ willingness to participate. According to these results, we suggest that volunteer organizations should improve their standards and procedures for disaster volunteer recruitment and selection, and gain a deeper understanding of the needs of the disaster volunteers in order to better motivate them to participate.

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