Students’ learning processes are heavily impeded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Students are experiencing more online learning environment and less face-to-face idea exchange, which may make them feel exhausted and demotivated. Using self-determination and proactivity theories, we propose and examine whether playful study design (PSD)—a proactive study strategy including designing fun and designing competition in learning tasks—is effective in fostering study engagement, which, in turn, improves study goal attainment during the COVID-19 period. Moreover, we examine whether students who are high in proactive personality will benefit more (e.g., reach a higher level of study engagement) when using the PSD strategy. We collected data using a weekly diary approach during four consecutive weeks, including 97 people and 308 within-person observations. Results of multilevel analyses showed that weekly PSD was positively related to weekly study engagement, and in turn, facilitated weekly goal attainment. Moreover, we found that proactive personality moderated and strengthened the positive associations between PSD and goal attainment, study engagement and goal attainment, but not for the relationship between PSD and study engagement. Overall, we provide one of the first attempts to demonstrate how PSD strategy can be used in student study life to improve study engagement and reach their goals. We shed light on how proactive personality can safeguard the success of PSD strategy. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.

Amplitude-preserving data processing is an important and challenging topic in many scientific fields. The amplitude-variation details in seismic data are especially important because the amplitude variation is directly related with the subsurface wave impedance and fluid characteristics. We propose a novel seismic noise attenuation approach that is based on local plane-wave assumption of seismic events and the amplitude preserving capability of the orthogonal polynomial transform (OPT). The OPT is a way for representing spatially correlative seismic data as a superposition of polynomial basis functions, by which the random noise is distinguished from the useful energy by the high orthogonal polynomial coefficients. The seismic energy is the most correlative along the structural direction and thus the OPT is optimally performed in a flattened gather. We introduce in detail the flattening operator for creating the flattened dimension, where the OPT can be applied subsequently. The flattening operator is created by deriving a plane-wave trace continuation relation following the plane-wave equation. We demonstrate that both plane-wave trace continuation and OPT can well preserve the strong amplitude variation existing in seismic data. In order to obtain a robust slope estimation performance in the presence of noise, a robust slope estimation approach is introduced to substitute the traditional method. A group of synthetic, pre-stack and post-stack field seismic data are used to demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework in realistic applications.

Amplitude-preserving data processing is an important and challenging topic in many scientific fields. The amplitude-variation details in seismic data are especially important because the amplitude variation is directly related with the subsurface wave impedance and fluid characteristics. We propose a novel seismic noise attenuation approach that is based on local plane-wave assumption of seismic events and the amplitude preserving capability of the orthogonal polynomial transform (OPT). The OPT is a way for representing spatially correlative seismic data as a superposition of polynomial basis functions, by which the random noise is distinguished from the useful energy by the high orthogonal polynomial coefficients. The seismic energy is the most correlative along the structural direction and thus the OPT is optimally performed in a flattened gather. We introduce in detail the flattening operator for creating the flattened dimension, where the OPT can be applied subsequently. The flattening operator is created by deriving a plane-wave trace continuation relation following the plane-wave equation. We demonstrate that both plane-wave trace continuation and OPT can well preserve the strong amplitude variation existing in seismic data. In order to obtain a robust slope estimation performance in the presence of noise, a robust slope estimation approach is introduced to substitute the traditional method. A group of synthetic, pre-stack and post-stack field seismic data are used to demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework in realistic applications.