BackgroundThe engineering profession has changed dramatically, and engineers today must work in diverse (multidisciplinary or international) groups. As such, practice in diverse student groupwork can be beneficial to develop all-round skillsets. However, simply mixing students with different backgrounds into one group is not always effective in engineering group projects.PurposeThis study investigates how a diverse student group composition is related to group processes and, subsequently, group output, and also to see whether students' positive diversity beliefs influence the relation between diverse student group composition and group processes.MethodMultilevel analyses were performed on 124 groups to analyze associations between diversity in group compositions (nationality and gender diversity), group processes (task elaboration, shared understanding of the task, and trust in the group), and group outcomes (performance and satisfaction), at both the individual and group level. Positive diversity beliefs were included as moderators.ResultsWe found negative group-level associations between nationality diversity and shared understanding of the task and trust in the group. On the individual level, we found students' relative positive diversity beliefs to be positively associated with their perceptions of all group processes, which, in turn, were positively associated with perceived group performance and satisfaction.ConclusionsA student group with different nationalities may encounter challenges in group processes, although we did not find direct implications for group performance and group-level satisfaction. Individual student perceptions of group processes were more clearly associated with outcomes than group-level aggregates. To facilitate diverse student groupwork, educators need to pay attention to and enhance students' awareness of the value of working in a diverse group.

International teamwork skills are becoming more and more important for future engineers. Engineering projects with diverse students working towards solving an issue together could cultivate such skills. However, social exclusion may rise when faultlines emerge: dividing lines that split a group into relatively homogeneous subgroups. This study aimed at connecting diversity in student team structures to team member interaction patterns and their learning outcomes. By analyzing team meetings from a Dutch university master course (three teams with different diversity attributes), using orbital decomposition analysis, we found that particularly in Team 1, a Dutch male subgroup predominated the interactions, excluding the single female Chinese student. Though group grades were similar, individual affective outcomes differed. Educators should consider diversity influences during student teamwork and offer necessary facilitation.

While existing literature strongly supports the effectiveness of executive coaching, there is a scarcity of empirical studies that assess how coaching facilitates change over time and its potential conditions. This study, conducted in a corporate setting using an experimental design with two measurement points, explores the potential of executive coaching to enhance the perceived coaching client's personal goal level over time and the possible moderators. Two hundred and two managers from 13 organisations were randomly assigned to a coaching or waiting list condition. Managers in the coaching condition received four weekly coaching sessions from 33 external coaches. The results indicate that managers who received coaching significantly improved their goal level compared with those who did not, suggesting that executive coaching is an effective learning intervention for improving goal measurement for individuals with different backgrounds. The general self-efficacy was not a condition for increased goal level for those who received coaching, highlighting that coaching is an effective tool regardless of the participant's level of general self-efficacy. However, low general self-efficacy predicted the decision to withdraw from the study, emphasising the importance of the general self-efficacy trait in assessing the readiness of those involved in coaching.

This study investigates the relationship between students' self-efficacy beliefs, goal-setting, and learning tactics in an online business course. Using sequence analysis and process mining techniques, we analyzed log data from 209 students to identify distinct learning tactics and their association with self-efficacy beliefs, inferred from initial goal-setting and final grades. Four learning tactics were identified, with significant differences observed between students with high and low self-efficacy beliefs. High self-efficacy students demonstrated more varied and adaptive tactics, including greater use of quizzes and project-focused activities. In contrast, low self-efficacy students and those who didn't set goals showed less engagement and fewer monitoring activities. The project-focused tactic had the strongest correlation with final grades and goal achievement. Goal-setting at the course's start was linked to more effective learning behaviors and better outcomes. The study reveals how students' online learning behavior changes based on initial goal-setting and subsequent reflection. These findings contribute to research on self-regulated learning in online environments and offer practical implications for designing online courses and learning analytics interventions. Understanding these differences enables the development of targeted interventions to improve learning tactics and self-efficacy beliefs among students, ultimately enhancing their ability to achieve learning goals in online educational settings.

Self-regulated learning has seen a large increase in research interest due to its importance for online learning of higher education students. Several ways to measure self-regulated learning have been suggested. However, most measurements are either obtrusive, necessitating time and effort from students and potentially influencing the learning process, or only partially portable across courses. In the current study, we develop clickstream-based scales of four self-regulated learning phases that we show are portable across courses. The final scales are based on the COPES model and include two strong and reliable dimensions, enactment and adaptation, one dimension that performs reasonably, task definition, and a weaker one, goal-setting. By considering portability as the main criterion in the scale construction process, we ensured reliable transfer to both similar and dissimilar courses. When considering convergent validity, the created scale has higher bivariate and partial correlations with final student grades than the often-used self-reported MSLQ SRL scale. We discuss limitations and future research to improve the scale further and facilitate adoption.

BackgroundA growing number of studies emphasize executive coaching as an effective developmental tool that managers can use to increase their performance in organizational settings. However, the coaching research suggests a large variety of processes and outcomes, lacking clarity on the primary psychological dimensions most impacted.MethodReviewing 20 studies with a rigorous methodological design that used control trials and pre-post tests, we evaluated and compared the relative effects of coaching on different types and sub-types of outcomes by means of a classification of coaching outcomes based on previously used taxonomies.ResultsThe results indicate that the impact of coaching on behavioral outcomes was higher compared to attitudes and person characteristics outcomes, suggesting that behavioral coaching outcomes, especially cognitive behavioral activities, are the most impacted by executive coaching. Moreover, we found significant positive effects for some specific outcomes, such as self-efficacy, psychological capital, and resilience, indicating that executive coaching is effective in producing change even on dimensions considered relatively stable over time. The results show no moderation effects of the number of sessions. The length of the coaching program was a significant moderator only for the attitudes outcomes.DiscussionThese findings provide evidence that executive coaching is a powerful instrument for organizations to support positive change and personal development.

Background Online and blended learning need an appropriate assessment strategy which ensures academic integrity. During the pandemic, many universities have chosen for online proctoring. Although some earlier examples suggest that online proctoring may reduce cheating, the potential side-effects of proctoring are largely unknown. Objectives Therefore, this study aims to identify the effects of proctoring on students' self-reported temptation to cheat and potentially undesirable side-effects, including test anxiety, perceived exam difficulty, and performance. In addition, we examine which contextual and student characteristics affect test anxiety during online exams. Methods For this, we collected four waves of survey data throughout a year of teaching during the pandemic at one faculty of a Dutch university, resulting in a total sample of 1760 students within 105 courses. Results and Conclusions Multi-level analyses showed that while proctoring had no effect on the temptation to cheat, exam difficulty or performance, students reported higher levels of test anxiety. Some learning strategies, internet literacy, access to a reliable technology and a dedicated study space as well as gender and financial stress affect their test anxiety. To conclude, the decision to use online proctoring needs to consider the undesirable side-effect on test anxiety. We discuss practical implications for university administrators, educational designers and teachers to reduce test anxiety.

In two studies, we investigated the role of self-regulatory behavior in terms of achievement goals and goal progress for work engagement. Study 1 ( N = 205) revealed that trait learning goals were positively related to work engagement and performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals were unrelated to work engagement. In a second study, employees were asked to either set a (state) learning, performance-approach, or performance-avoidance goal for the upcoming work week. Goal progress and work engagement were measured one week later ( N = 106). Learning goals at the trait and state level were associated with higher work engagement and performance-avoidance goals were unrelated to work engagement. We found a positive relationship of goal progress with work engagement, in particular for employees who pursued learning or performance-approach goals. Our studies contribute to theory building by delineating the (combined) role of goal orientations (trait), state achievement goals, and goal progress for work engagement, as well as generating practical implications for the design of effective interventions to enhance work motivation in organizational practice.

Objective In a longitudinal field study, we investigated the predictive associations between six aberrant personality tendencies (schizotypal, avoidant, borderline, antisocial, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive) and academic success of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students. Method Bachelor students of Industrial Engineering at a Dutch technical university (N = 432, M-age = 18.45; 87.3% male) filled out the NEO-PI-R and aberrant tendencies were operationalized by the five-factor model (FFM) compound technique. Indicators of academic achievement (grades) and persistence (credit points earned per year, re-enrollment, study duration) were made available by the academic office. Results Validities across the 3 years of the study program consistently support the role of two aberrant tendencies: Individuals with high antisocial tendency reached lower academic achievement, took longer to finish their study, and had a higher risk of dropout. The obsessive-compulsive tendency was associated with higher grade-point average, faster study progress, and higher retention rates and effects were still visible while controlling for known predictors (high school grades, Conscientiousness). Contrary to our expectations, we found no evidence for inverted U-shaped relationships. Conclusions We used the compound technique for aberrant tendencies based on the FFM in the academic context and our findings support the importance of personality-based psychopathological tendencies for academic success.

We investigated the role of core self-evaluations (CSE) as a positive, personal resource in the motivational and health impairment processes outlined in the Job-Demands-Resources (JDR) model. In two samples of German and Dutch employees we investigated how this higher-order personality construct integrating self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, locus of control, and emotional stability, contributes to the prediction of two outcomes pertaining to strain and well-being. In Study 1 (N = 135) we found CSE to be positively related to work engagement, directly, and indirectly via job crafting behavior aiming to enhance structural resources at work. In Study 2 (N = 330), we found a negative relationship of CSE with burnout, directly, and an indirect relationship via psychological detachment with regard to exhaustion. Against our expectations, we did not find support for a moderating effect of CSE in either study, neither on the relationship of job crafting behavior and work engagement, nor on the relationship of psychological detachment with exhaustion and disengagement. Nonetheless, our results support the role of CSE as a positive individual resource, sustaining the building of psychological and job resources. Therefore, our findings bear important practical implications for enhancing motivation and health of employees in today's organizations.

Building on theories of conscious goals and feedback, we investigated the moderating effect of negative feedback on the relation between subconscious goals and performance. In two lab experiments, we manipulated subconscious performance goals and negative feedback about personal performance as well as social comparison information. In Study 1 (n = 80), subconscious goals positively influenced performance in an attention and concentration task when participants had received no feedback and negatively when participants had been confronted with negative performance feedback. In Study 2 (n = 90), additional comparison feedback indicating a higher performance of others led to higher performance of participants with versus without subconscious performance goals. The moderating effect of feedback was visible in self-efficacy, and we found partial support for its mediating role.

Business process management systems are used to orchestrate the activities in an organization. These information systems allocate resources to perform activities based on information that describes those resources and activities. It is widely recognized that resource allocation can be enhanced by considering resource characteristics during selection. However, little guidance is available that shows how such characteristics should be specified. Human ability is one such characteristic, with the advantage that it is well-defined in the Fleishman Taxonomy of Human Abilities. This paper presents a method that leverages the Fleishman taxonomy to specify activities and human resources. Those specifications are then used to allocate resources to activities during process run-time. We show how ability-based resource allocation can be implemented in a business process management system and evaluate the method in a real-world scenario.

With the adoption of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) in educational institutions, a lot of data has become available describing students’ online behavior. Many researchers have used these data to predict student performance. This has led to a rather diverse set of findings, possibly related to the diversity in courses and predictor variables extracted from the LMS, which makes it hard to draw general conclusions about the mechanisms underlying student performance. We first provide an overview of the theoretical arguments used in learning analytics research and the typical predictors that have been used in recent studies. We then analyze 17 blended courses with 4,989 students in a single institution using Moodle LMS, in which we predict student performance from LMS predictor variables as used in the literature and from in-between assessment grades, using both multi-level and standard regressions. Our analyses show that the results of predictive modeling, notwithstanding the fact that they are collected within a single institution, strongly vary across courses. Thus, the portability of the prediction models across courses is low. In addition, we show that for the purpose of early intervention or when in-between assessment grades are taken into account, LMS data are of little (additional) value. We outline the implications of our findings and emphasize the need to include more specific theoretical argumentation and additional data sources other than just the LMS data.

The use of learning management systems (LMS) in education make it possible to track students’ online behavior. This data can be used for educational data mining and learning analytics, for example, by predicting student performance. Although LMS data might contain useful predictors, course characteristics and student characteristics have shown to influence student performance as well. However, these different sets of features are rarely combined or compared. Therefore, in the current study we classify student performance using information from course characteristics, student characteristics, past performance, and LMS data. Three classifiers (decision tree, rule-based, and SVM) are trained and compared with the majority class baseline. Overall, SVM is the best classifier to identify pass/fail for a student in a course. However, for more interpretable results, the decision tree or the rule-based algorithm with course characteristics, student characteristics, and midterm data are good second bests. Additionally, it is shown that the different feature sets all have a positive influence on predicting pass/fail. In particular, student characteristics and the midterm grade have a large influence. Compared to these feature sets, LMS data seems less important. Yet, a more fine-grained analysis of the specific metrics found in the learning management system may still yield useful information.

We investigated the impact of subconscious goals on academic performance in two field experiments. We show that unobtrusive priming of goals with regard to achievement motivation by means of a photograph improves performance in different educational contexts. High-school students who were exposed to an achievement-related photograph achieved higher grades than students in two control conditions. This effect was not affected by students' prior performance. University students exposed to a photograph representing a specific, difficult goal reached even higher performance than students taking the exam with a general achievement photograph. For practice, subconscious goals may form a powerful, cost-effective tool to enhance academic performance. However, varying results across the experiments also prompt the need for further investigations of such effects.

In four studies, we investigated the factorial structure and the construct and predictive validity of the approach-avoidance temperament questionnaire (ATQ; Elliot & Thrash, 2010) for attitudes and behavior at work. In Study 1 (N = 395 university students), we showed that a Dutch translation of the ATQ can be best described by a two-factorial structure. In Study 2 (N = 295 senior-year students), we documented approach and avoidance temperament as predictor of students' career adaptability and engagement. In Study 3 (N = 103 employees), we demonstrated that approach and avoidance temperament have incremental predictive validity for work engagement beyond goal orientation (three-dimensional model). In Study 4 (N = 93 employees), approach temperament was positively related to peer ratings of job performance, independent of achievement goals (four-dimensional model). Overall, we showed that individual differences in terms of a predisposition for the orientation and reaction to positive/negative stimuli across situations can be used to increase our understanding of behavior at work. Our results support the practical utility of approach and avoidance temperament for work settings.

Background: The incidence and prevalence of skin cancer is rising. A detection model could support the (screening) process of diagnosing non-melanoma skin cancer. Methods: A questionnaire was developed containing potential actinic keratosis (AK) and basal cell carcinoma (BCC) characteristics. Three nurses diagnosed 204 patients with a lesion suspicious of skin (pre)malignancy and filled in the questionnaire. Logistic regression analyses generated prediction models for AK and BCC. Results: A prediction model containing nine characteristics correctly predicted the presence or absence of AK in 83.2% of the cases. BCC was predicted correctly in 91.4% of the cases by a model containing eight characteristics. The nurses correctly diagnosed AK in 88.3% and BCC in 90.9% of the cases. Conclusions: Detection or screening models for AK and BCC could be made with a limited number of variables. Nurses also diagnosed skin lesions correctly in a high percentage of cases. Further research is necessary to investigate the robustness of these findings, whether the percentage of correct diagnoses can be improved and how best to implement model-based prediction in the diagnostic process.