Teachers’ Conceptions of Borderless – A Cross-Cultural Study on Multicultural Sensitivity of the Chinese Teachers

Teachers are normally trained to work effectively with one dominant culture. As such, they are poorly prepared to handle cultural differences; sometimes they simply define students from diverse culture and with learning difficulties as students at risk. This study reports a group of 100 Chinese in-service teachers’ attitudes of cultural difference with the use of the instrument, Cultural Diversity Awareness Inventory (CDAI). Using the results from the CDAI, the paper makes a cross-cultural comparison of attitudes of pre-service teachers in the West with those of teachers in Hong Kong (and with Confucian principles). The study is trying to understand: (1) the cultural sensitivity levels of Hong Kong teachers; (2) are the local Chinese teachers more culturally sensitive in some areas than in others? and (3) how are these teaching beliefs developed and different from the western study? The findings of this study demonstrated stereotypical feelings of the culturally diverse and educationally disadvantaged students from the local teachers are prevailing, but that there are some differences in cultural diversity awareness between the East and West.     

Orthographic skills important to Chinese literacy development: the role of radical representation and orthographic memory of radicals

A 3-year longitudinal study among 239 Chinese students in Grades 2–4 was conducted to investigate the relationships between orthographic skills (including positional and functional knowledge of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals, and orthographic memory of radicals) and Chinese literacy skills (word reading, word spelling, reading comprehension and written composition). Phonetic radical knowledge was the only significant longitudinal predictor of word reading, whereas all orthographic skills examined were significant longitudinal predictors of word spelling. Reading comprehension was uniquely predicted by semantic radical knowledge. A model showing the relationships between orthographic skills and literacy skills was postulated.     

Multicultural leadership, sustainable total school environment

Banks (2002) stated that to implement multicultural education successfully, we must think of the school as a social system. Therefore, if educational equity and excellence are to be provided to all students, a systemic Total School Environment [Banks (2001) Cultural diversity and education: Foundations curriculum and teaching, 4th ed. Allyn and Boston p.51] has to be structured and permeate every aspect of the schooling enterprise, i.e. (1) content integration, (2) the knowledge construction process, (3) prejudice reduction, (4) equity pedagogy, and (5) an empowering school culture and social structure. The Total School Environment is consistent with the educational change literatures discussed by Senge [(1990) The fifth discipline. Currency doubleday, NY]. This article is framed conceptually on a review of literature and the discussion is drawn from the case studies of innovative pedagogical practices using technology collected in the two research projects of the Center for Information Technology in Education (CITE), The University of Hong Kong during 2004–2006. With referencing to multiple school leadership literature and practices, the readers have an opportunity to explore the possible formation of the “total school environment” from one of the cases, but why not in another school? At the end of this article, it is concluded that school innovation requires a moral, systemic, integrative and emergent distributed leadership to build a scalable, sustainable learning community in a multicultural school environment.     

筷子的故事

China was the first country in the world to use chopsticks and has ahistory(历史) of more than(超过) 3,000 years eating meals with chopsticks. Chinese people usually usebamboo(竹子) orwood(木头) to make chopsticks. And it wascommon(普遍的) for rich people to use silver or gold chopsticks in the old days.     

TCP performance evaluation over AODV and DSDV in RW and SN mobility models

INTRODUCTION Widely varying mobility characteristics are ex- pected to have significant impact on the performance of routing protocols. Many previous works focused on the routing protocols and seldom discussed the impact of mobility on the transport layer protocol. On the other hand, the performance of the transport layer protocol over different routing protocols was evalu- ated in some previous works (Ahuja et al., 2000; Dyer and Boppana, 2001), but they always used the Ran- dom Waypoin…     

The Impact of U.S. News College Rankings on the Compensation of College and University Presidents

Research in Higher Education - Widespread attention to college tuition and student loan debt has resulted in increasing scrutiny of high levels of compensation for college and university...     

Air quality: a comparison of students' conceptions and attitudes across the continents

A closed‐form questionnaire was used to explore the ideas of school students about the composition of air, the causes and consequences of air pollution and the extent to which the students would accept various courses of action to reduce air pollution. Items for the questionnaire were derived from the results of interviews and an earlier open‐form questionnaire. More than 3000 students aged 11 to 17 years and from Australia, Hong Kong and the UK were surveyed. There was a degree of similarity between students from the different countries in their knowledge about air composition and air pollution. In terms of attitudes, however, there were differences in students' opinions about the acceptability of actions to improve air quality. Path analysis of the data appeared to show that Hong Kong students are more amenable to education as an instrument to influence their attitudes. For the other countries, the acceptability of actions for environmental protection was related to the degree of concern about air quality     

Dry Skulls and Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) for Teaching Orofacial Bone Anatomy to Undergraduate Dental Students

Learning bone anatomy of the skull is a complex topic involving three-dimensional information. The impact of the use of human dry skulls and cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) imaging was investigated in the teaching of undergraduate dental students. Sixty-four first-year students in the University of Hong Kong were randomly divided into eight groups. Four teaching methods were tested: (1) CBCT followed by standard lecture, (2) CBCT followed by lecture with skulls, (3) standard lecture followed by CBCT, and (4) lecture with skulls followed by CBCT. After each, students were given a multiple-choice questionnaire to assess their objective learning outcome (20 questions) and a questionnaire for their subjective satisfaction (10 statements). Surveys were assessed with Cronbach's alpha, Kendall's tau-b, and principal components analysis. Data were analyzed with Student's t-test and a one-way ANOVA (significance α = 0.05). Standard lecture followed by CBCT showed the highest learning outcome score (81.6% ± 14.1%), but no significant difference was present among four teaching methods. Cone beam computed tomography followed by lecture with skulls scored the highest overall subjective satisfaction (4.9 ± 0.8 out of 6), but no significant difference was present among teaching methods. Nevertheless, students' perception of learning was positively influenced by the use of skulls (P = 0.018). The timing of administration of the CBCT did not affect students' subjective satisfaction or objective learning outcome. Students perceived to learn more by using skulls, but their objective learning outcomes were not significantly affected. A discrepancy seems to exist between students' perception of learning and their effective performance.     

千禧一代,“自恋狂”还是“新人王”?

我即将要做的事正是多少年来老一辈的人都曾经做过的:批评比我年轻的人懒惰、自私、浅薄、自以为是。以下是一些冰冷的硬数据:美国国家卫生研究院提供的数据显示,与目前达到65岁或以上的人相比,二十多岁的年轻人患自恋型人格障碍的几率是前者的将近三倍。这些人深信自己很了不起:"全国青年与宗教调查"报告发现,60%的千禧一代表示,他们在任何情况下遵守的道德是:他们觉得这是对的就行。