Helping Taiwanese Graduate Students Help Themselves: Applying Corpora to Industrial Management English as a Foreign Language Academic Reading and Writing

Lack of knowledge in the conventional use of vocabulary and multiword patterns in one's respective field of expertise causes Taiwanese students to produce academic writing that is markedly “non-nativelike.” This is because Taiwanese students are first and foremost second language readers and often have difficulty “picking up on” the regularly encountered language patterns found in scholarly texts. As one step in determining a solution to this problem, this article reports on a pilot implementation encouraging graduate Taiwanese students for whom English is a foreign language to use self-editing techniques in their own field-specific academic writing by use of a corpus tool. Classroom interviews, draft comparisons, and individual stimulated recall interviews showed a difference in acceptance and success after using the corpus tool (StringNet Navigator) as an aid to self-editing academic English writing. The corpus tool's functions, results of its use by industrial management graduate students for self-editing academic writing, and pedagogical implications are described.     

Reducing Risk for Substance Use by Economically Disadvantaged Young Men: Positive Family Environments and Pathways to Educational Attainment

Using prospective, longitudinal data spanning 10 years (age = 10–20) from a study of 295 economically disadvantaged males, the current investigation evaluated a developmental model that links early family environment and later educational aspirations, extracurricular activities, and educational attainment to substance use in early adulthood. The results indicate that a positive family environment during adolescence (low family conflict, high family warmth, and effective child management) predicted educational involvements during adolescence that promoted educational attainment during early adulthood. Finally, higher levels of educational attainment were associated with less substance use in early adulthood, even after controlling for adolescent substance use. These findings suggest that positive parenting promotes educational achievements that increase resilience to substance use for economically disadvantaged males.     

Revisiting Zhang’s scale of transactional distance: refinement and validation using structural equation modeling

Transactional distance has been defined as barriers to students’ engagement with learning in the online environment. This research updates Zhang’s (2003) scale of transactional distance, which quantified the extent of the barriers, in light of the massive changes in today’s web-based learning environment. The resulting revised scale of transactional distance (RSTD) is a parsimonious version with 12 elements (compared to 31 original) that measure the transactional distance between student and teacher, student and student, and student and content. The RSTD has excellent factorial validity and reliability, yields better fit statistics, and is easier and less time-consuming to apply. The transactional distance values are unique predictors of student satisfaction, which is correlated to learning and persistence (a major concern with massive open online courses). This information can form the basis for a systematic approach to improving the design of today’s contemporary open, flexible, distance education courses and thus serve as a valuable tool for researchers and educators alike.     

Mastery Motivation in Children with Intellectual Disability: Is there Evidence for a Down Syndrome Behavioural Phenotype?

The main purpose of the current study was to provide empirical evidence to support or refute assumptions of phenotypic deficits in motivation for children with Down syndrome (DS). Children with moderate intellectual disability (MID) associated with etiologies other than DS were recruited in an extension of a previous study that involved children with DS and typically developing children. The participants were 29 children with MID and 33 children with DS who were matched on mental age to 33 typically developing children, aged 3–8 years. Mastery motivation was assessed on task measures of curiosity, preference for challenge and persistence, as well as parental reports. There were no significant group differences on the mastery motivation tasks. Parental ratings of mastery motivation differed, with typically developing children generally being rated more highly than each of the disability groups. The view that motivational deficits are part of the DS behavioural phenotype was not supported.     

“What would you like me to do? Lie to you?” Teacher education responsibilities to LGBTI students

The experiences of lesbian, gay, trans (The use of trans with an asterisk avoids the use of transsexual or transgender and promotes recognition of the inadequacy of such labels), bisexual and intersex (LGBTI) student teachers were recently investigated at a New Zealand faculty of education. Student teachers studying in early childhood education and care, primary and secondary initial teacher education (ITE) were asked about their perceptions of LGBTI visibility and inclusion. Methods used were online questionnaires, focus groups and individual interviews. While the study encompassed all aspects of the ITE programme, this work uses one specific question about practicum from the questionnaire, and findings related to practicum and teaching from the focus groups and individual interviews. In this article, the experiences of LGBTI (those who identified as non-heterosexual) student teachers and “straight” (those who identified as heterosexual) are discussed. Findings suggest that both faculty and practicum settings are heteronormative and indicate that LGBTI student teachers felt uncertain about their safety. Both LGBTI and straight students felt they had not been given adequate preparation to manage the complexities of diverse sexualities on practicum or in their future teaching. We argue that addressing heteronormativity in ITE will better prepare student teachers for the rich diversity of students and families they will encounter in their teaching.     

DISTRIBUTIVE PARTITIONING OPERATION IN MATHEMATICAL SITUATIONS INVOLVING FRACTIONAL QUANTITIES

In the present study, we describe a participating student’s (Carol’s) distributive partitioning scheme and operations along with Steffe’s and his colleagues’ studies about children’s constructions of fraction knowledge as a particular model of mathematical learning. Analysis of Carol’s mathematical behaviors indicates that an operationally common mathematical behavior (distributive partitioning operation) was revealed in various mathematical problem situations such as fraction multiplication, fraction division, and multiplicative transformation between fractional quantities. It both provides a rationale for why becoming versed in one mathematical subject could facilitate working with another mathematical subject and also implies the necessity of describing and defining students’ mathematical behaviors from an operational view of knowledge, which might lead to building foundations of a substantial cognitive map for students’ mathematical development.     

Global pedigree and national imperative: Hong Kong universities’ response to China’s grand strategies

Higher Education - Literature offers a theoretical framework exemplifying the inherent tensions between “becoming Chinese” and “remaining global” in the evolution of the...