The role of emotionality in teacher change: the case of Chinese language teachers in Hong Kong

Over the past decade, Chinese language teachers in Hong Kong have experienced a series of educational reforms. They are now expected to design and implement their own school-based Chinese language curriculum, and adopt innovative pedagogies and customized materials in the classroom. The current literature suggests that some teachers are not ready for or even resist changes amid new challenges and paradigm changes. This case study highlights the role of emotionality as a key factor for successful teacher change by proposing a local adaptation of the classic model, while pointing out that a combined mode of support inclusive of collective lesson preparation and teaching demonstrations/practical sessions in professional development programs is a key element that helps facilitate teachers’ change and provides teachers with experiential learning opportunities and enhanced confidence, leading to their voluntary adoption of the approach and gradual change in their beliefs and attitudes after witnessing the feasibility and effectiveness of the newly introduced concepts.     

Back to Basics: A Bilingual Advantage in Infant Visual Habituation

Comparisons of cognitive processing in monolinguals and bilinguals have revealed a bilingual advantage in inhibitory control. Recent studies have demonstrated advantages associated with exposure to two languages in infancy. However, the domain specificity and scope of the infant bilingual advantage in infancy remains unclear. In the present study, 114 monolingual and bilingual infants were compared in a very basic task of information processing—visual habituation—at 6 months of age. Bilingual infants demonstrated greater efficiency in stimulus encoding as well as in improved recognition memory for familiar stimuli as compared to monolinguals. Findings reveal a generalized cognitive advantage in bilingual infants that is broad in scope, early to emerge, and not specific to language.     

Challenging the Visual Discourse of Reading: or,Do Teen Readers Look Like Google Images?

Popular culture images of reading tend to portray readers as solitary individuals deeply immersed in reading a single text in a quiet, undisturbed spot. Yet, in our documentation of adolescent students reading in Singapore secondary schools, we find that there are many ways and modes of reading, much of which is social in nature. Through the use of comparative, critical visual analysis, this paper expands the understanding of what it means to read and to understand how adolescent readers experience reading in school contexts. Visual images serve to disrupt dominant readings of what counts as reading to elicit new considerations for engaging adolescents in reading.     

An integrative perceptual approach for teaching Chinese characters

This paper is concerned with an innovative approach to teaching Chinese characters. Traditionally, pupils learn Chinese characters by repeatedly copying them until they can reproduce their form and pronunciation from memory. Most of the characters pupils are required to learn are selected on the basis of their frequency in adult written communications rather in everyday child usage. The process takes many years and is perceived by pupils as laborious and boring. The writers of the paper developed an approach based on the phenomenographic approach to learning and on various pioneering ways of teaching Chinese characters. Learning starts with the pupils’ own language and characters are introduced and used in contexts meaningful to the pupil, attention being drawn systematically to structural features, written form and pronunciation. Characters are learnt in relational clusters, similarities and variations among related characters in the clusters being used by teachers to highlight and emphasise crucial aspects of Chinese characters and words. The learning mastered serves as a foundation for subsequent learning. After an in-depth discussion of theory and pedagogy, the writers report an investigation in four primary schools in Hong Kong that yields strong support for the efficacy of the approach.     

我国高校师资变化发展趋势探析

本对市场经济、全球化和高教大发展背景下我国高校师资的变化发展趋势进行了探讨，主要从管理体制或机制，师资规格、专业结构和国际化等方面，对已经发生或将要发生的变化作了分析或解读。     

International Research Projects in Early Childhood Development in Australia,Malaysia and Singapore: Pertinent Issues from Three Studies

The field of early childhood education has been the focus of increased research and public concern in recent years. This paper highlights three research projects funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation in the eighties in Australia, Malaysia and Singapore. It focuses on four research issues raised from these three studies which span three diverse communities and cultures. In particular, the question of a single integrative approach towards early childhood development programmes, the intersecting needs of children and women, the range of training and dissemination systems to be made available, the role of the different forms of fundamental partnerships in early childhood research and the strengthening of the research-to-policy link will be discussed.     

Contextualized-OLPC education project in rural India: measuring learning impact and mediation of computer self-efficacy

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative has been at the forefront of introducing low-cost computers in developing countries. We argue that the problem is not as much as a focus on the provision of affordable technologies, but the lack of consideration of deeply contextualized implementation design and the lack of understanding of psychological mechanisms at the user-level that influence learning impact. A longitudinal quasi-experimental design among nine rural Indian primary schools involved pre- and post- experiment measures conducted with both test (n = 126) and control groups (n = 79). The study objective was to prioritize local contexts during technology implementation design in order to attain educational impact in terms of improved learning outcomes for students. The Contextualized-OLPC education project utilized strategies identified by the Technology-Community-Management model to address contextually germane factors of teacher training, unbiased gender access, and local language use. A second objective was to assess impact of technology introduction while countering extant techno-determinist approaches of impact assessment. We first demonstrated that technological knowledge was associated positively with functional literacy. We situated the experiment in the social cognitive theory to demonstrate that computer self-efficacy mediates the relationship between technological literacy attained as a consequence of the Contextualized-OLPC education project and a specific learning outcome, functional literacy. Overall, the research illustrated that giving primacy to mere deployment of OLPC laptops has limited relevance to children, both in use and outcome. In support, the results demonstrated the role of contextualized technology in rural classrooms alongside an understanding of user psychology that influence learning impact.     

Knowledge building: aligning education with needs for knowledge creation in the digital age

Educational technology research and development - This paper examines the alignment of education with the needs for knowledge creation in the digital age using the Knowledge Building model and...     

Perceptions of low ability students on group project work and cooperative learning

The benefits of cooperative learning strategies, such as group project work, have been advocated in a wide range of educational contexts. There is however, scant information on the outcome of such programs on students of low academic ability. In this study, interviews were conducted with four groups of low-ability students, with the aim of investigating their perceptions on the effectiveness of group project work in promoting their social and cognitive skills. Our findings show that although the students recognized that the program improved their competence in interacting with others, there are problematic organizational and instructional issues that have to be ironed out before students can profit fully from cooperative learning programs.     

Indices of novelty for emerging topic detection

Emerging topic detection is a vital research area for researchers and scholars interested in searching for and tracking new research trends and topics. The current methods of text mining and data mining used for this purpose focus only on the frequency of which subjects are mentioned, and ignore the novelty of the subject which is also critical, but beyond the scope of a frequency study. This work tackles this inadequacy to propose a new set of indices for emerging topic detection. They are the novelty index (NI) and the published volume index (PVI). This new set of indices is created based on time, volume, frequency and represents a resolution to provide a more precise set of prediction indices. They are then utilized to determine the detection point (DP) of new emerging topics. Following the detection point, the intersection decides the worth of a new topic. The algorithms presented in this paper can be used to decide the novelty and life span of an emerging topic in a specific field. The entire comprehensive collection of the ACM Digital Library is examined in the experiments. The application of the NI and PVI gives a promising indication of emerging topics in conferences and journals.