The structural relationships of social support, mother’s psychological status, and maternal sensitivity to attachment security in children with disabilities

The purpose of this study was to explore how social support, mother’s psychological status, and maternal sensitivity affected attachment security in children with disabilities by using the structural equation model (SEM). Subjects were 141 pairs of children with disabilities and theirs mothers. Empirical data was obtained through a series of questionnaires such as marital satisfaction, support from people around, maternal depression, and parenting stress. In addition, maternal sensitivity and attachment security were obtained through a Maternal Behavior Q-set and an Attachment Behavior Q-set. The results were as follows: first, mother’s psychological status was fully mediated by social support and maternal sensitivity. Secondly, mother’s psychological status had a negative effect on maternal sensitivity, while her maternal sensitivity, in turn, had a positive effect on the child’s attachment security. However, maternal sensitivity did not fully mediate between a mother’s psychological status and the child’s attachment security. These structural relationships were not different between children with pervasive developmental disorders and mental retardation. There were also no significant differences in the structural paths according to children’s developmental age.     

Acceptance of Disability and Hwa-Byung among Korean Mothers of Children with Developmental Disabilities

This study examined how child problem behaviour could be related to maternal Hwa-Byung (HB; Korean culture syndrome, meaning ‘anger illness’) among Korean mothers of children with developmental disabilities. Acceptance of disabilities and parenting stress were tested as mediators for the relationship between child problem behaviour and maternal HB. The results indicated that child problem behaviour alone (e.g. self-injurious and aggressive behaviours, yelling/screaming, and crying) were not related to maternal HB. Instead, child problem behaviour was not directly associated with maternal HB, but indirectly related to maternal HB through decreased acceptance of disability and increased parenting stress. The findings of the study support the importance of Acceptance and Commitment therapy and parenting stress intervention to prevent and treat HB among Korean mothers of children with developmental disabilities.     

Korean Science and Engineering Students’ Perceptions of English-Medium Instruction and Korean-Medium Instruction

The purpose of this study was to examine how Korean science and engineering students view English-medium instruction (EMI) and Korean-medium instruction (KMI). The participants were 174 undergraduate students enrolled in EMI and KMI classes offered by the same instructor at a Korean science and engineering school. Interviews and questionnaire surveys were conducted, and students’ course evaluations, English scores and course grades were compared. The results of a campus-wide undergraduate student survey on EMI were also analyzed. The findings of the study show that the KMI-class students demonstrated higher levels of satisfaction and better performance in their classes than the EMI-class students did. Only 22% of the students in both classes found EMI classes helpful for improving their English ability. Nevertheless, the majority of the students supported the school’s maintenance of an EMI policy. In the conclusion, the paradoxical attitude of the students and the implications of the study are discussed.     

Investigating the impacts of targeted professional development around models and modeling on teachers' instructional practice and student learning

Developing understanding of models and proficiency with modeling practice is challenging for both teachers and students. This 2‐year study first investigated existing instructional strategies employed by teachers while teaching Earth and Space Science with dynamic physical models. Summer professional development introduced a conceptual framework, based on analogical reasoning, to help students strengthen and deepen the connections they make between a model and its real‐world referent. The framework draws explicit attention to correspondences and non‐correspondences between model and referent, an often overlooked component of modeling practice which underpins the ability to evaluate and thus improve a model. Teachers were guided to reflect on their own instructional use of models and to plan for integrating specific instructional strategies around models into their Year 2 practice. Classroom observation data reveal that from Years 1 to 2, teachers shifted from a more didactic approach in which they used physical models primarily as tools for demonstration toward more student engagement with models as problem‐solving tools. On an assessment measuring their students' ability to reason with and about models, pre‐post learning gains were higher in Year 2 than Year 1 across students at all ability levels. Together, these findings present evidence that teachers can learn to guide their students toward using physical models in ways that approximate key aspects of how scientists use runnable models, as envisioned by the Developing and Using Models practice of the Next Generation Science Standards.     

Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Nature of Science and Scientific Inquiry as Illustrated in the Scientific Research on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

Interviews with key scientists who had conducted research on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), together with analysis of media reports, documentaries and other literature published during and after the SARS epidemic, revealed many interesting aspects of the nature of science (NOS) and scientific inquiry in contemporary scientific research in the rapidly growing field of molecular biology. The story of SARS illustrates vividly some NOS features advocated in the school science curriculum, including the tentative nature of scientific knowledge, theory-laden observation and interpretation, multiplicity of approaches adopted in scientific inquiry, the inter-relationship between science and technology, and the nexus of science, politics, social and cultural practices. The story also provided some insights into a number of NOS features less emphasised in the school curriculum—for example, the need to combine and coordinate expertise in a number of scientific fields, the intense competition between research groups (suspended during the SARS crisis), the significance of affective issues relating to intellectual honesty and the courage to challenge authority, the pressure of funding issues on the conduct of research and the ‘peace of mind’ of researchers, These less emphasised elements provided empirical evidence that NOS knowledge, like scientific knowledge itself, changes over time. They reflected the need for teachers and curriculum planners to revisit and reconsider whether the features of NOS currently included in the school science curriculum are fully reflective of the practice of science in the 21st century. In this paper, we also report on how we made use of extracts from the news reports and documentaries on SARS, together with episodes from the scientists’ interviews, to develop a multimedia instructional package for explicitly teaching the prominent features of NOS and scientific inquiry identified in the SARS research.

Text image matching without language model using a Hausdorff distance

In this paper, we propose a text matching method for document image retrieval without any language model. Two word images are first normalized to an appropriate size and image features are extracted using the local crowdedness method. Similarity between the two features is then measured by calculating a Hausdorff distance. We performed three experiments. The first experiment proves the effectiveness of the proposed method for text matching, and the other two experiments verify the language independence and font size independence of the proposed method.     

Effects of emotion control and task on Web searching behavior

The study investigated how users’ emotion control and search tasks interact and influence the Web search behavior and performance among experienced Web users. Sixty-seven undergraduate students with substantial Web experience participated in the study. Effects of emotion control and tasks were found significant on the search behavior but not on the search performance. The interaction effect between emotion control and tasks on the search behavior was also significant: effects of users’ emotion control on the search behavior varied depending on search tasks. Profile analyses of search behaviors identified and contrasted the most commonly occurring profiles of search activities in different search tasks. Suggestions were made to improve information literacy programs, and implications for future research were discussed.     

Streams of shared knowledge: computational expansion of knowledge-flow theory

In this article, we investigate empirically the theoretical split between emphases upon specialist vs trans-specialist knowledge in the organization – or more generally between exploitation and exploration – a split that divides knowledge-flow theory at present, and hence represents an important issue for knowledge management (KM). We review the relevant literature, articulate hypotheses, and employ computational experimentation to test them empirically. Our findings provide novel, insightful understanding of the factors that contribute toward understanding the relative balance between specialist vs trans-specialist knowledge in particular, and exploitation vs exploration more generally. We offer three main contributions: (1) we critique extant theory relating to the substitutability of specialist and interspecialist knowledge; (2) we offer new conceptual insight and empirical evidence concerning substitutability of these knowledge types in the organization; and (3) we demonstrate the empirical power of computational experimentation to examine KM questions of both theoretical and practical interest.