The education of academically gifted students in South Korea: Innovative approaches in shadow education

Shadow education contributes to the learning and academic careers of Korean students. It benefits, in particular, gifted students who are strongly motivated and who outperform their peers academically. In this study, we explored the innovative characteristics of shadow education curricula for gifted students in terms of curricular programmes, methods, and teaching-learning materials. Also, we explored how shadow education practices meet the academic abilities and needs of students. Informed by a literature review and qualitative research methods, the results reveal how common shadow education is; effects of shadow education; and innovative elements used in shadow education for gifted students in Korea. Overall, we found that shadow education plays a crucial role in gifted education; it is a necessary component for understanding academic excellence among students in Korea. The findings are helpful for teachers, curriculum developers, and policymakers as they explore how public schooling can help to support strongly motivated and academically advanced students.     

The influence of exercise intensity on frontal electroencephalographic asymmetry and self-reported affect

The "feel better" effect of exercise has been well established, but the optimal intensity needed to elicit a positive affective response is controversial. In addition, the mechanisms underlying such a response are unclear To clarify these issues, female undergraduate students were monitored for electroencephalographic (EEG) and self-reported affective responses during the recovery period following rest, low, moderate, and high intensities of treadmill running, each lasting 30 min. Frontal EEG asymmetry and self-reported vigor scores following exercise at all three intensities were significantly elevated compared to those observed following rest. The results suggest that steady-state aerobic exercise bouts executed at varying intensities induce a similar affective response during the recovery period when assessed at both the behavioral and psychophysiological levels.     

Understanding users’ behaviors regarding supply chain technology: Determinants impacting the adoption and implementation of RFID technology in South Korea

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), once a niche technology, is rapidly gaining the attention of retailers as a key enabler in their supply chain. As RFID moves into the mainstream, it is poised to replace the standard barcode as the technology that identifies and tracks products throughout the supply chain. In an attempt to gain competitive advantages, some retailers have begun the transition to RFID while others have been reluctant to embrace it. This study investigates South Korean retailers to identify key organizational characteristics that positively drive the evaluation of RFID. Further, this study assesses the impact one's evaluation has on the adoption and integration of RFID within their respective firm. Results from 278 adopting organizations show organizational needs (Ubiquity and Performance Gaps), perceived factors (Benefits and Cost Savings), and organizational readiness (Financial Resources and Technological Knowledge) have a significant influence on RFID Evaluation; and evaluation impacts its adoption, and integration.     

Improving document clustering in a learned concept space

Most document clustering algorithms operate in a high dimensional bag-of-words space. The inherent presence of noise in such representation obviously degrades the performance of most of these approaches. In this paper we investigate an unsupervised dimensionality reduction technique for document clustering. This technique is based upon the assumption that terms co-occurring in the same context with the same frequencies are semantically related. On the basis of this assumption we first find term clusters using a classification version of the EM algorithm. Documents are then represented in the space of these term clusters and a multinomial mixture model (MM) is used to build document clusters. We empirically show on four document collections, Reuters-21578, Reuters RCV2-French, 20Newsgroups and WebKB, that this new text representation noticeably increases the performance of the MM model. By relating the proposed approach to the Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) model we further propose an extension of the latter in which an extra latent variable allows the model to co-cluster documents and terms simultaneously. We show on these four datasets that the proposed extended version of the PLSA model produces statistically significant improvements with respect to two clustering measures over all variants of the original PLSA and the MM models.     

Contextualizing the failure of mobile TV service in Korea

A Korean version of broadcast-type mobile TV service called digital mobile/multimedia broadcasting (DMB) that started in 2005 is now considered a failure. Existing studies approach DMB's failure in commercial terms. This study discusses DMB in the sociocultural context of the new media environment into which it was inserted, where it struggled and eventually declined. With the rapid spread of smartphones and social media, the media environment was reshaped toward interactive and decentralized communication practices that were radically different than those of broadcasting-centric times. DMB with a centralized mass communication structure did not fit in well with this environment. This study shows that the success or failure of new media services may well depend on how they fit in within the larger media environment. More broadly, it shows that a contextual approach to analyzing new media technologies that employs the concept of fitness formation can be very useful.     

Provision of in-service training of mathematics and science teachers in Botswana: teachers’ perspectives

Teaching is a field that is dynamic, with innovations necessitating upgrading of skills and education of teachers for the successful implementation of reforms. The behaviour and attitudes of teachers towards teaching and learning and their knowledge banks are the result of the impact of in-service training. This study investigated the perceptions of mathematics and science teachers in Botswana towards in-service provision by the Department of Mathematics and Science Education In-service Training unit (DMSE-INSET), whose mandate is to improve the quality of teaching by supporting teachers through training programmes that enable them to take ownership of their professional development. Data were collected from a sample of 42 senior Mathematics and Science secondary school teachers, using structured interviews with open-ended questions, which were analyzed qualitatively. The findings show that teachers’ concerns included the lack of impact of current in-service training programmes on the education system, no regular follow-up activities to support the one-off workshops and insufficient skills acquired to sustain the implementation of the strategies solicited by the workshops.     

Minority parental involvement and school barriers: Moving the focus away from deficiencies of parents

There has been an alarming imbalance in recent research on minority parental involvement because it has focused on parents’ variables to identify groups for effective interventions without searching for broader contextual variables. This literature review provides available research findings on the school barriers that prevent minority parents’ participation in their children's school in the United States. The following school barriers were identified: (a) teachers’ perception about the efficacy of minority parents, (b) teachers’ perception concerning the capacity of minority parents, (c) teachers’ beliefs in the effectiveness of parental involvement and developmental philosophy, (d) teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching effectiveness, (e) school friendliness and positive communication, (f) diversity of parental involvement programs, (g) school policies, and (h) school leadership. Increased understanding about the nature of minority parental involvement in their children's school will lead to a more collaborative home–school partnership and ensure the long-term success of parental involvement.     

Heterogeneous performances of conceptual dis/continuity: a dialectic reading of Brown and Kloser’s article

We review Brown and Kloser’s article, “Conceptual continuity and the science of baseball: using informal science literacy to promote students science learning” from a Vygotskian cultural-historical and dialectic perspective. Brown and Kloser interpret interview data with student baseball players and claim that students’ conceptual understanding articulated in vernacular genres involves continuities (similarities) with the canonical scientific explanations. In this commentary, we suggest that the authors’ approach presupposes the dichotomy of the formal and the informal, which brings the authors’ attention to continuity into the separation of cognition from language. We propose a Vygotskian approach that points out the problem of theorizing cognition (conceptual understanding) by depending on specific forms of representation (e.g., scientific terms). As alternative, we envision a Vygotskian cultural-historical approach to language, which considers different, irreducible modes of communication as an integrated whole and therefore allows theorizing cognition without dichotomizing it from the concrete ways by which human being communicates. We provide an exemplary analysis of a lecture talk in a university physics classroom and exemplify dialectic theories that explain the development of conceptual understanding. We discuss that this Vygotskian dialectic approach shows that people communicate scientific concepts through hybridization, which does not reproduce a genre self-identically; the continuity of conceptual understanding involves dis/continuity.