Experienced Physical Education Teachers Reaching Their “Use-by Date”

With the needs of experienced teachers potentially overshadowed by a focus on recruitment, the purpose of this study was to retrospectively explore the reasons why three experienced physical education teachers resigned. They were interviewed through Louis and Smith's (1990) quality of work life (QWL) model. Data suggested shared dissatisfactions related to the lack of “genuine” opportunities to participate in educational debate and decision making, and limited professional respect shown by administrators and parents. A physical education teacher's “use-by date” was proposed. Unless these issues are further explored and addressed, quality teachers will continue to abandon the service.     

Factors affecting school choice: What do Malaysian Chinese parents want?

Aiming to explore factors affecting Malaysian Chinese parents in sending their children to either national secondary schools or Chinese independent schools, 494 parents were surveyed using a questionnaire. Results showed that parents who sent their children to Chinese independent schools have different priorities compared to those who sent theirs to national secondary schools—the former are concerned with teachers’ quality, chances of learning the Chinese culture and Mandarin while the latter are concerned with tuition fees and strategic location. In general, the finding that Malaysian Chinese parents take cultural and language factors into account when choosing a suitable school for their children is interesting because both are seldom listed as important.     

Parenting Style as a Moderator for Students’ Academic Achievement

Parenting styles have always been a crucial factor in influencing all aspects of a person??s development. The purpose of this study is to test the structural equation model of academic achievement among the students using parenting styles as a moderator. The sample comprised 493 students from eight schools. Parenting styles are determined using the Parental Authority Questionnaire (Buri in J Pers Assess 57:110?C119, 1991). Academic achievement is measured based on the students?? performance in the Lower Secondary Assessment. Data were analyzed using structural equation modelling. Results demonstrated that model of authoritative and model of authoritarian fit the data of this study well. Both authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles are the most common practice of the parents. Parenting styles have been found to be a moderator of this study. The results indicated that parenting styles moderated the effect of academic self-concept on academic achievement. The impact of academic self-concept on academic achievement is found to be greater for the authoritative than the authoritarian parenting style.     

Evaluation of Students' Conceptual Understanding of Malaria

In this study, a two‐tier diagnostic test for understanding malaria was developed and administered to 314 Bruneian students in Year 12 and in a nursing diploma course. The validity, reliability, difficulty level, discriminant indices, and reading ability of the test were examined and found to be acceptable in terms of measuring students' understanding and identifying alternative conceptions with respect to malaria. Results showed that students' understanding of malaria was high for content, low for reasons, and limited and superficial for both content and reasons. The instrument revealed several common alternative conceptual understandings students' hold about malaria. The MalariaTT2 instrument developed could be used in classroom lessons for challenging alternative conceptions and enhancing conceptions of malaria.     

Leadership in Singapore Schools: The Impact of National Culture

When we look at school management in Singapore, is there a distinctive characteristic that acts as a cultural imperative which shapes the working patterns and lives of school principals? As part of an international comparative study of the principalship, we sought to gain insights into the typical thinking and behaviours of four school principals. Using a cultural analysis model to examine power relationships, relationships with colleagues, gender issues and tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, we concluded that these leaders' lives were far from routine and were characterized' by paradox. They used a range of cultural ‘tools’ as a way of trying to sustain stability in an erratic and fast-changing system. Thriving amidst the complexities and chaos of their jobs suggested a unique characteristic, something that might best be described as ‘Singaporeanness’.     

Enculturating seamless language learning through artifact creation and social interaction process

This paper reports a design-based research (DBR) cycle of MyCLOUD (My Chinese ubiquitOUs learning Days). MyCLOUD is a seamless language learning model that addresses identified limitations of conventional Chinese language teaching, such as the decontextualized and unauthentic learning processes that usually hinder reflection and deep learning. MyCLOUD focuses on developing new learning practices among students who traverse the in-school and out-of-school learning spaces, in the hope of bridging the formal and informal aspects of language learning. This paper focuses on two stages of DBR across 13 months and traces students’ artifact creations and social interactions facilitated by the design and re-design of the learning environment. The findings indicate that the students’ participation rates and the qualities of their artifacts and online interactions were significantly improved towards the second stage of the intervention. The key implication from the DBR cycle is that the teachers need to plan and enact enculturation activities to systematically promote the motivation and qualities of artifact creations and online interactions. “Facets” of artifact creation and online interaction skills are distilled to guide the enculturation design as a result.     

Teacher attention and classroom behaviour1 1

The incidence of appropriate and inappropriate classroom behaviour was observed in ten children classified by their teacher as the worst behaved (WB) in the class and 10 children classified as the best behaved (BB). Teacher positive and negative responses to the WB and BB groups were also observed. The main finding was that the teacher responded at a higher rate to the inappropriate behaviour of the WB group than the BB group. This is not at variance with the notion that teacher attention serves to maintain high rates of inappropriate classroom behaviour. Unexpectedly, the teacher did not respond with positive attention at a higher rate to the appropriate behaviour of the BB than the WB group. That is, contrary to the theory that teacher attention is a major controller of classroom behaviour, there was no evidence in this study that high rates of appropriate behaviour are maintained by teacher attention.

     

Exploring syntactic structured features over parse trees for relation extraction using kernel methods

Extracting semantic relationships between entities from text documents is challenging in information extraction and important for deep information processing and management. This paper proposes to use the convolution kernel over parse trees together with support vector machines to model syntactic structured information for relation extraction. Compared with linear kernels, tree kernels can effectively explore implicitly huge syntactic structured features embedded in a parse tree. Our study reveals that the syntactic structured features embedded in a parse tree are very effective in relation extraction and can be well captured by the convolution tree kernel. Evaluation on the ACE benchmark corpora shows that using the convolution tree kernel only can achieve comparable performance with previous best-reported feature-based methods. It also shows that our method significantly outperforms previous two dependency tree kernels for relation extraction. Moreover, this paper proposes a composite kernel for relation extraction by combining the convolution tree kernel with a simple linear kernel. Our study reveals that the composite kernel can effectively capture both flat and structured features without extensive feature engineering, and easily scale to include more features. Evaluation on the ACE benchmark corpora shows that the composite kernel outperforms previous best-reported methods in relation extraction.