Teachers' perceptions of the recent curriculum reforms and their implementation: what can we learn from the case of Korean elementary teachers?

This study examines: 1) how Korean elementary school teachers perceive recent curriculum reforms; 2) where their perceptions emanate from; and 3) what support teachers need in order to implement curriculum reforms actively and effectively. This study has shown that teachers generally harbour negative and unconstructive feelings about curriculum reform. These feelings negatively impact their involvement in and commitment to implementing reform. Several issues to be considered for teacher training and support evolved from our analysis of teachers' perceptions of the curriculum reform and the implementation: first, teachers are insufficiently provided with professional development programmes that support curriculum implementation; second, teachers lack opportunities to work through implementation problems and difficulties with peer teachers; and last, contextual and cultural constraints inhibit implementation of curriculum reform. Based upon these findings, this study makes several suggestions for teacher educators and curriculum policymakers.     

Understanding the impact of organizational power on evaluation outcomes

The purpose of this study is to examine how power relations among stakeholders, especially between the human resource development (HRD) practitioners and others, affect evaluation outcomes. Using a qualitative case study design, a managerial leadership development programme in a Korean company is analysed. This study shows that the HRD practitioners’ interests in securing their status within the organization governed shaping the evaluation outcomes. The evaluation report was produced and reported portraying mostly the positive aspects of the programme. However, while going through the evaluation, the HRD practitioners felt constrained, and considered themselves as the powerless in terms of the organizational strategic needs and expectations, both of which pertain to the characteristics of the organizational culture. Instead of attempting to alter the organizational culture, which was unfavourable to HRD functions, they are acquiesced to the culture.     

Early Attachment Organization With Both Parents and Future Behavior Problems: From Infancy to Middle Childhood

Links between children's attachment security with mothers and fathers, assessed in Strange Situation with each parent at 15 months (N = 101), and their future behavior problems were examined. Mothers and fathers rated children's behavior problems, and children reported their own behavior problems at age 8 (N = 86). Teachers rated behavior problems at age 6½ (N = 86). Insecurity with both parents had a robust effect: “Double‐insecure” children reported more overall problems, and were rated by teachers as having more externalizing problems than those secure with at least 1 parent. Security with either parent could offset such risks, and security with both conferred no additional benefits. High resistance toward both parents in Strange Situation may confer “dual risk” for future externalizing behavior.     

Expanding Traditions: Curriculum in Transition—The Seventies

Mr. Brown was the first male teacher at Lincoln Elementary. Jenny wasn't sure what to make of him. When her mother asked how she liked her new teacher, Jenny answered, ‘Can't say. She keeps sending her husband.’

—adapted from: www.webschooling.com/jokes69.html     

Aging and Text Comprehension: Interpretation and Domain Knowledge Advantage

In this study, young, middle-aged, and elderly adults read two different history texts. In the knowledge advantage condition, readers read a history text about an event that was well-known to readers of all ages but most familiar to elderly adults. In the no advantage condition, readers read a history text about a political situation of a country that no age groups knew much about. After reading the text, readers recalled and interpreted the texts. Comparison of the recall and the interpretation performance showed that while recall was best in the young group and declined with age, interpretation did not. The middle-aged and elderly adults generated interpretations that were equally deep and more synthetic than those of the young adults. They also generated interpretations with more diverse rationale statements. As for the effect of knowledge advantage its effect on text recall was straightforward: although not significant, age-group differences in recall were smaller in the knowledge advantage condition than in the no advantage condition, suggesting that age-related decline in recall can be moderated by older adults' knowledge advantage. The effect of knowledge advantage on text interpretation was less clear-cut. While knowledge facilitated interpretations, the facilitation was not uniform across different measures of interpretations, suggesting a complex interaction between text interpretation and knowledge.     

LEARNING OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM: THE UNDERGRADUATE GERONTOLOGY INTERNSHIP

This article describes an undergraduate gerontology internship program that provides an intermediary level of involvement between a service-learning activity and a pre-professional graduate school internship, presents a case study of a student's learning experience, and suggests a teaching and learning structure that may be scaffolded to fit individual student needs and goals. A humanistic teaching orientation is discussed as a method to facilitate learning and a deeper understanding of internship experiences.     

The Role of Agent Age and Gender for Middle-Grade Girls

Compared to boys, many girls are more aware of a social context in the learning process and perform better when the environment supports frequent interactions and social relationships. For these girls, embodied agents (animated on-screen characters acting as tutors) could afford simulated social interactions in computer-based learning and thereby supply a girl-friendly instructional context. This study examined the effects of the age and gender of an agent on ninth-grade Caucasian and ethnic-minority girls' perceptions of the agent, mathematics attitudes, and learning in a computer-based algebra-learning environment. In general, the findings support that a virtual agent plays both social and instructional roles that favor teenage girls and could be a viable tool to create a favorable context for girls learning challenging topics.     

拒签并非结束

今天,你被“拒签”了么？漫漫留学路,拒签之后我们又应该做些什么？拒签往往会给你出人意料的提示！     

Human-centered modeling for style-based adaptive games

This letter proposes a categorization matrix to analyze the playing style of a computer game player for a shooting game genre. Our aim is to use human-centered modeling as a strategy for adaptive games based on entertainment measure to evaluate the playing experience. We utilized a self-organizing map （SOM） to cluster the player＇s style with the data obtained while playing the game. We further argued that style-based adaptation contributes to higher enjoyment, and this is reflected in our experiment using a supervised multilayered perceptron （MLP） network.     

An XPath-based OWL storage model for effective ontology management in Semantic Web environment

With the rapid growth of the Web, the volume of information on the Web is increasing exponentially. However, information on the current Web is only understandable to humans, and this makes precise information retrieval difficult. To solve this problem, the Semantic Web was proposed. We must use ontology languages that can assign data the semantics for realizing the Semantic Web. One of the representative ontology languages is the Web ontology language OWL, adopted as a recommendation by the World-Wide Web Consortium （W3C）. OWL includes hierarchical structural information between classes or prop- erties. Therefore, an efficient OWL storage model that considers a hierarchical structure for effective information retrieval on the Semantic Web is required. In this paper we suggest an XPath-based OWL storage （XPOS） model, which includes hierarchical information between classes or properties in XPath form, and enables intuitive and effective information retrieval. Also, we show the comparative evaluation results for the performance of the XPOS model, Sesame, and the XML file system-based storage （XFSS） model, in terms of query processing and ontology updating.