Online activities of urban Malaysian adolescents: report of a pilot study

The literacy practices of many communities today show new ways of meaning making in the contemporary, technological and digital culture. A number of Malaysian adolescents belong to this culture. This pilot study reports the preliminary findings of a larger study aimed at describing the online activities of Malaysian adolescents. Fifty‐four participants from an urban secondary school in Penang took part in this study. One finding showed that the percentages of language use on the Internet were: 80.6 per cent in English, 10.6 per cent in Bahasa Malaysia and 8.8 per cent in Chinese. In addition, the study also revealed some common websites that these adolescents frequented. The findings point to the need to investigate the extent of these online literacy practices beyond school among the adolescent population in Malaysia and to look into the implications for ESL education.     

Affordances of Computational Models for English Learners in Science Instruction: Conceptual Foundation and Initial Inquiry

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Computational models are increasingly being used in K-12 science classrooms to engage students in developing and testing explanations of phenomena....     

Learning design to support student-AI collaboration: perspectives of leading teachers for AI in education

Education and Information Technologies - Preparing students to collaborate with AI remains a challenging goal. As AI technologies are new to K-12 schools, there is a lack of studies that inform how...     

Help me help myself: examining an electronic mental health self-monitoring system in college students

Higher Education - The high prevalence of mental illness in college students results in adverse consequences that have led to developing prevention programs, with the potential of self-monitoring...     

A Phenomenological Study of Malaysian Counsellors’ Experiences in Managing Countertransference

International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling - Processing and managing countertransference are part of the responsibilities of counsellors to fulfil their ethical obligation. The...     

Computer science concept inventories: past and future

Concept Inventories (CIs) are assessments designed to measure student learning of core concepts. CIs have become well known for their major impact on pedagogical techniques in other sciences, especially physics. Presently, there are no widely used, validated CIs for computer science. However, considerable groundwork has been performed in the form of identifying core concepts, analyzing student misconceptions, and developing CI assessment questions. Although much of the work has been focused on CS1 and a CI has been developed for digital logic, some preliminary work on CIs is underway for other courses. This literature review examines CI work in other STEM disciplines, discusses the preliminary development of CIs in computer science, and outlines related research in computer science education that contributes to CI development.     

Relative effects of three questioning strategies in ill-structured,small group problem solving

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relative effectiveness of using three different question-prompt strategies on promoting metacognitive skills and performance in ill-structured problem solving by examining the interplay between peer interaction and cognitive scaffolding. An ill-structured problem-solving task was given to three groups. One group (Type QP) received instructor-generated question prompts that guided the problem-solving process; the second group (Type PQ) developed their own peer-generated questions; another group (Type PQ-R) developed their own question prompts first and revised them later with an instructor-generated question list. In this study, students in the QP group outperformed those in any other groups. The results revealed that providing instructor-generated question prompts was more effective than letting students develop their own questions, with or without revision, in ill-structured problem solving. Analysis of each of the four problem-solving stages revealed that the provided question prompts were more helpful in the stages of justification, and monitoring and evaluating than student-generated prompts. The difference between PQ and PQ-R groups is not statistically significant either overall or in any of the problem-solving stages.     

Developing skills for youth in the 21st century: The role of elite International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme schools in China

There is a growing body of research suggesting that schools need to respond to changing social and economic dynamics by prioritising “21st-century skills”. Proponents of this view, who have been termed “the 21st century skills movement”, have called for greater emphasis on cognitive and non-cognitive skills development, alongside the learning of subject content and technical skills. This paper explores the potential of International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) schools to respond to this mandate in China, one of the fastest-growing markets for International Baccalaureate^® (IB) schools globally. The authors’ research team undertook a multi-site case study of five elite IBDP schools in China. Their findings revealed confidence among interviewees that the IB educational philosophy was conducive to 21st-century skills development, especially through the provision of the three IBDP “Core Requirements”, which are Creativity, Action, Service (CAS), Extended Essay (EE) and Theory of Knowledge (TOK). Despite this confidence, concerns remain about the implementation of the IB educational philosophy in the context of IBDP schools in China.     

Effects of the child–perpetrator relationship on mental health outcomes of child abuse: It's (not) all relative

The present study was conducted to better understand the influence of the child–perpetrator relationship on responses to child sexual and physical trauma for a relatively large, ethnically diverse sample of children and youth presenting for clinical evaluation and treatment at child mental health centers across the United States. This referred sample includes 2,133 youth with sexual or physical trauma as their primary treatment focus. Analyses were conducted to ascertain whether outcomes were dependent on the perpetrator's status as a caregiver vs. non-caregiver. Outcome measures included psychiatric symptom and behavior problem rating scales. For sexual trauma, victimization by a non-caregiver was associated with higher posttraumatic stress, internalizing and externalizing behavior problems, depression, and dissociation compared to youth victimized by a caregiver. For physical trauma, victimization by a non-caregiver was also associated with higher posttraumatic symptoms and internalizing behavior problems. The total number of trauma types experienced and age of physical or sexual trauma onset also predicted several outcomes for both groups, although in disparate ways. These findings are consistent with other recent studies demonstrating that perpetration of abuse by caregivers results in fewer symptoms and problems than abuse perpetrated by a non-caregiving relative. Thus, clinicians should not make a priori assumptions that children and adolescents who are traumatized by a parent/caregiver would have more severe symptoms than youth who are traumatized by a non-caregiver. Further exploration of the role of the perpetrator and other trauma characteristics associated with the perpetrator role is needed to advance our understanding of these findings and their implications for clinical practice.     

The influence of school tracking systems on educational expectations: a comparative study of Austria and Italy

School tracking is usually criticised as a mechanism for social and cultural reproduction. Evidence from the literature shows a significant effect of early tracking on social inequality. Some studies also show that early tracking has a negative effect on the probability of completing higher education. This study uses PISA 2009 data and the propensity score matching technique to compare the effect of academic and vocational tracks on students' educational expectations and whether the effect varies across different socio-economic status in Austria, a country with an early tracking system, and Italy, a country with a later tracking system. The results show that students in Italy have significantly higher educational expectations for academic tertiary degrees than students in Austria. However, the findings do not show any evidence that the effect of tracking on expectations varies by students' socio-economic status in either country. The findings suggest that a later tracking system is associated with higher probabilities of having academic educational expectations; however, this finding should be interpreted with caution as the higher education and vocational education systems are different between the two countries, as well as the valuation of tertiary degrees in the labour market.