Fostering Pre-service Teachers’ Self-Determined Environmental Motivation Through Green Chemistry Experiments

The global environmental crisis intensifies particularly in developing nations. Environmental educators have begun to understand that changing the environmental impact requires not only changes in pro-environmental knowledge and attitudes but also in associated, self-determined motivation. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that a green chemistry curriculum changes Malaysian pre-service teachers?? environmental motivation. Two comparable groups of pre-service teachers participated in this study. The students in the experimental group (N?=?140) did green chemistry experiments whereas the control group (N?=?123) did equivalent experiments in a traditional manner. Posttest results indicate that there is significant difference between both the groups for intrinsic motivation, integration, identification, and introjections scales and no differences for external regulation and amotivation scales. The qualitative analysis of interview data suggests that the changes are predominantly due to the personal satisfaction that participants derived from engaging in pro-environmental behavior.     

Children’s conceptions of bullying and repeated conventional transgressions: moral,conventional, structuring and personal-choice reasoning

This study examined 307 elementary school children’s judgements and reasoning about bullying and other repeated transgressions when school rules regulating these transgressions have been removed in hypothetical school situations. As expected, children judged bullying (repeated moral transgressions) as wrong independently of rules and as more wrong than all the other repeated transgressions. They justified their judgement in terms of harm that the actions caused. Moreover, whereas children tended to judge repeated structuring transgressions as wrong independently of rules (but to a lesser degree than when they evaluated bullying) and justified their judgements in terms of the disruptive, obstructive or disturbing effects that the actions caused, they tended to accept repeated etiquette transgressions by arguing that the acts had no negative effects or simply that the rule had been removed. The findings confirm as well as extend previous social-cognitive domain research on children’s socio-moral reasoning.     

Estimation of Maximum Oxygen Uptake in Adults from AAHPER Youth Fitness Test Items

Abstract

The validity of estimating maximum oxygen uptake from AAHPER Youth Fitness Test items was determined utilizing 87 adult subjects. Multiple correlations were obtained utilizing the motor fitness items as independent variables. Three dependent variables were investigated for relationship to the independent variables (gross O₂ uptake, O₂ uptake/kg body wt., O₂ uptake/kg lean body wt.). The multiple correlation of the AAHPER items with O₂ uptake/kg body wt. (0.760) was higher than with the other two variables. It was determined by multiple regression techniques that a subset of four of the independent variables could be used to get an estimate of O₂ uptake/kg body wt. with an associated standard error of ± 12 percent of the estimated values. This was compared with the standard errors of more complicated estimation methods.     

Teaching habitat and animal classification to fourth graders using an engineering-design model

The paper reports findings on variable‐handling aspects of pupil performance in investigatory tasks, using data from the British APU national survey programme. It is based on tasks of similar logical structure, undertaken in various formats and response modes and including practical and pencil and paper versions. The tasks are shown to elicit diverse collective and individual responses in terms of variable handling performance, despite their logical similarity. The paper concludes with a discussion of the significance of these findings for assessment methodology and for understanding of 15‐year‐old pupils’ approaches to the variable‐based logic of investigation.     

课前指导与补充指导对学生网络学习的影响

马来西亚开放大学（OUM）90％以上的学生为在职人员。这些成年学生离开学校至少已经5年,而且大多数人的数学基础不好。因此,仅是在线学习加少量面授辅导的教学模式对他们来说还不能完全解决学习困难。学校试用了“课前指导工作室”与“补充指导”的教学方法,探讨了这一方法对学员的在线参与程度及考试结果的影响,运用源于探究团体模式的34项量表对在线论坛的内容进行了分析,结果表明,学员参加工作室与否同他们的期末考试成绩有很大关系。参加指导老师工作室及补充指导的学员与那些参加指导老师常规指导的学员相比,前者的在线参与程度及期末考试的平均分都存在着很大的差异。两组学员的数学探究团体模式平均分表明,两组学员在教学存在和认知存在方面有差异,但在社会存在方面基本相同。     

Improving educational web search for question-like queries through subject classification

Students use general web search engines as their primary source of research while trying to find answers to school-related questions. Although search engines are highly relevant for the general population, they may return results that are out of educational context. Another rising trend; social community question answering websites are the second choice for students who try to get answers from other peers online. We attempt discovering possible improvements in educational search by leveraging both of these information sources. For this purpose, we first implement a classifier for educational questions. This classifier is built by an ensemble method that employs several regular learning algorithms and retrieval based approaches that utilize external resources. We also build a query expander to facilitate classification. We further improve the classification using search engine results and obtain 83.5% accuracy. Although our work is entirely based on the Turkish language, the features could easily be mapped to other languages as well. In order to find out whether search engine ranking can be improved in the education domain using the classification model, we collect and label a set of query results retrieved from a general web search engine. We propose five ad-hoc methods to improve search ranking based on the idea that the query-document category relation is an indicator of relevance. We evaluate these methods for overall performance, varying query length and based on factoid and non-factoid queries. We show that some of the methods significantly improve the rankings in the education domain.     

Challenging the myths about madaris in Pakistan: A national household survey of enrolment and reasons for choosing religious schools

There is speculation about madaris in Pakistan as sources of terrorists and about levels and reasons for enrolment, but a dearth of empirical data. We studied madarsah enrolment among 53,960 representative households; 853 focus groups of parents discussed enrolment choices. In 2004, 2.6% of all children (3.8% of school-going children) aged 5–9 years attended a madarsah. Children from urban and less educated households were more likely to attend a madarsah, but there was no difference by sex of the child or household vulnerability. Parents chose madaris because they offered an Islamic education. Our findings challenge misconceptions about madaris in Pakistan.     

Additive effects due to biochar and endophyte application enable soybean to enhance nutrient uptake and modulate nutritional parameters

We studied the effects of hardwood-derived biochar (BC) and the phytohormone-producing endophyte Galactomyces geotrichum WLL1 in soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) with respect to basic, macro- and micronutrient uptakes and assimilations, and their subsequent effects on the regulation of functional amino acids, isoflavones, fatty acid composition, total sugar contents, total phenolic contents, and 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH)-scavenging activity. The assimilation of basic nutrients such as nitrogen was up-regulated, leaving carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen unaffected in BC+G. geotrichum-treated soybean plants. In comparison, the uptakes of macro- and micronutrients fluctuated in the individual or co-application of BC and G. geotrichum in soybean plant organs and rhizospheric substrate. Moreover, the same attribute was recorded for the regulation of functional amino acids, isoflavones, fatty acid composition, total sugar contents, total phenolic contents, and DPPH-scavenging activity. Collectively, these results showed that BC+G. geotrichum-treated soybean yielded better results than did the plants treated with individual applications. It was concluded that BC is an additional nutriment source and that the G. geotrichum acts as a plant biostimulating source and the effects of both are additive towards plant growth promotion. Strategies involving the incorporation of BC and endophytic symbiosis may help achieve eco-friendly agricultural production, thus reducing the excessive use of chemical agents.     

How to repair the Hill cipher

INTRODUCTION Owing to the advance in network technology, information security is an increasingly important problem. Popular application of multimedia tech- nology and increasingly transmission ability of net- work gradually leads us to acquire information di- rectly and clearly through images. Hence, data secu- rity has become a critical and imperative issue. Hill cipher is a block cipher that has several advantages such as disguising letter frequencies of the plaintext, its simplicity be…     

Opening Up Alternatives to Dominant Ideological Constructions of English Language Teaching in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the impact of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) on the way English language teaching (ELT) is currently understood and practised in Malaysia. It presents a critical discourse analysis of newspaper texts in order to show how CEFR represents a form of Western-imposed globalisation that conflicts with local cultures and values. We argue that the newspapers construct a dominant discourse that promotes a vision of society that accords with CEFR–ELT implementation. Our aim is to contribute to the development of a counter-discourse that challenges the broader world-view underpinning ELT.