Multicultural early childhood education: practices and challenges in Malaysia

Multicultural early childhood education is necessary in a culturally diverse country like Malaysia. Preschool teachers play an important role in implementing multicultural education in the classroom. This paper reports the findings of a self-report questionnaire involving 854 preschool teachers in Malaysia. The preschool teachers disclosed their current multicultural education practices as well as the challenges they encountered when implementing multicultural education. While the majority of teachers claimed that they implemented multicultural education, a closer examination revealed that most of them used the tourist or contribution approach which focuses on only the outward manifestations of a culture when dealing with multicultural education. The transformation or anti-bias approach was used by only a small number of teachers. The teachers identified some challenges in multicultural education implementation, such as lack of instructional resources and the lack of stakeholder support. Thus, it is important to ensure teachers develop more critical understandings of multicultural education through teacher education training and programs. Other efforts to help teachers overcome challenges in implementing multicultural education include producing and developing more instructional materials and learning aids, which are suitable for young children and appropriate for the local context. Preschool teachers also need stakeholders to give more support and to acknowledge the importance of implementing multicultural early childhood education.     

Performance of conceptual framework elements for the retrieval of qualitative health literature: a case study

Objective:A growing volume of studies address methods for performing systematic reviews of qualitative studies. One such methodological aspect is the conceptual framework used to structure the review question and plan the search strategy for locating relevant studies. The purpose of this case study was to evaluate the retrieval potential of each element of conceptual frameworks in qualitative systematic reviews in the health sciences.Methods:The presence of elements from conceptual frameworks in publication titles, abstracts, and controlled vocabulary in CINAHL and PubMed was analyzed using a set of qualitative reviews and their included studies as a gold standard. Using a sample of 101 publications, we determined whether particular publications could be retrieved if a specific element from the conceptual framework was used in the search strategy.Results:We found that the relative recall of conceptual framework elements varied considerably, with higher recall for patient/population (99%) and research type (97%) and lower recall for intervention/phenomenon of interest (74%), outcome (79%), and context (61%).Conclusion:The use of patient/population and research type elements had high relative recall for qualitative studies. However, other elements should be used with great care due to lower relative recall.     

Knowledge translation and research careers: Mode I and Mode II activity among health researchers

Defining knowledge translation activities using Gibbons and Nowotny's Mode I and II forms of knowledge production, health researcher (N = 240) characteristics are compared with their knowledge translation activities. Applied researchers (n = 168) engaged in more Mode II activity (p < .001), perceived their work as having more impact (p < .001), and reported higher levels of relational capital (p < .001) when compared to basic researchers (n = 72). Those from medical schools (n = 128) had more publications (p = .004) as did applied researchers in medical school compared to applied researchers from other faculties (p = .001). These findings provide early empirical insights into emerging tensions in environments where Mode I and Mode II activities co-exist; tensions that may extract unintended costs from researchers. Such costs may be paid in the currency not only of tenure and promotion, but also of successful grant and career scientist award acquisition.     

Expert Teams in the Academic Library: Going Beyond Subject Expertise to Create Scaffolded Instruction

This article explores the way librarians define, leverage, and amplify expertise in a twenty-first century academic library. An expert team comprised of a nursing librarian, online learning librarian, information-literacy librarian, and assessment librarian sorted the learning outcomes from the Information-Literacy Competency Standards for Nursing created by the Health Sciences Interest Group taskforce of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) by grade-levels. Results found distinguishing experts within a library supports the customization of scaffolded instruction. Additionally, using expert teams in academic libraries supports the larger mission of universities to integrate libraries into teaching and research.     

Apps and Autonomy: Perceived Interactivity and Autonomous Regulation in mHealth Applications

Thousands of smartphone apps geared toward monitoring health behaviors are released regularly. Even as developers flood the market with mHealth apps, consumers seem overwhelmed with choices and report lack of sustained use, which raises questions about their efficacy. An online survey (N = 513) found that perceived interactivity not only has a direct effect but also exerts an indirect effect via greater autonomous regulation on users’ attitudes and behavioral intentions toward mHealth apps. Frequency of tracking and updating personal data showed significant effects on behavioral intentions. Theoretical and practical suggestions for the design and evaluation of mHealth apps are discussed.     

Engaging Families in Public Libraries

Public libraries today are undergoing significant transformations as well as interacting with patrons in new and different ways (Knight Foundation 2017). Part of this transformation is the way libraries are engaging entire families. Libraries are playing a stronger role than ever before in supporting families to promote children’s early literacy and reading skills (Celano and Neuman 2015; Nagle et al. 2016; Neuman and Celano 2010), stimulating adult learning (Boden and Tashijan 2015), creating initiatives to improve family health (Morgan et al. 2016), providing services to families with extreme challenges such as those experiencing poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, and incarceration (Holt and Holt 2010; Terille 2016), as well as becoming spaces for families, especially those who are recent immigrants, to build new relationships and social networks (Khoir et al. 2017; Vårheim 2014). Despite these efforts, few studies have specifically sought to understand the organizational dimensions that support family engagement within a library system and the potential that these efforts have in promoting children’s learning not only in the early years, but also into and throughout middle childhood and adolescence. Based on a yearlong study investigating the power of family engagement in public libraries, this article considers how libraries can begin to adopt a systemic approach to family engagement to further innovate the library space.