A Review of Studies in Science Education in Singapore: 1971 - 1990

Research should play a central role in decision making. Practitioners as well as policy makers can illafford to ignore the importance of research, particularly those involving the local context, in informing practice. Contextual differences are often incurred when overseas research findings are imported. A very strong case can therefore be made for more local research studies for use within the local context. There is, however, a dearth of local studies in science education over the past two decades. This paper attempts to briefly survey the field to account for the impoverished state. It will then review some thirty-six research studies carried out in Singapore spanning the period from 1971 to 1990—these representing the studies where documentation were available—with the view of pooling together the findings of the studies and eliciting trends for the benefit of future research efforts as well as enlightening practice and policy.     

Quantum lithography: A?non-computing application of quantum information

Quantum information theory holds the promise of revolutionizing technologies other than computing and communications. In this article we show how quantum entanglement can be harnessed to beat the Rayleigh diffraction limit of conventional optical lithography, and to permit nano-devices to be fabricated at a scale arbitrarily shorter than the wavelength used. Given the relative ease of performing optical lithography compared with other schemes, and the relative costs associated in migrating the lithography industry to each new fabrication technology, exploiting quantum entanglement to extend the useful life of optical lithography could be economically attractive.     

香港高等体育教育课程体系简析

通过对香港中文大学体育运动科学系和香港浸会大学体育系为代表的香港体育高等教育课程设置的比较分析,探讨了香港体育高等教育课程体系的特点。     

PUBLIC EDUCATION ABOUT NORMAL FORGETFULNESS AND DEMENTIA: EFFECTIVENESS OF A SYSTEMATICALLY DEVELOPED INFORMATION BROCHURE

Earlier research revealed that many elderly people in The Netherlands are worried about their forgetfulness and are afraid of incipient dementia. Until now, no systematic research has been conducted on the effects of public education about normal forgetfulness and dementia, and therefore an information brochure was developed and evaluated. The main function of this brochure was to reassure people who were unnecessarily worrying about possible dementia. A second function was to motivate people to seek professional help when this seemed advisable. Sixty‐two percent of all respondents (307 of 400) who had been worried about dementia before reading the brochure said that their anxiety decreased or disappeared after reading it; approximately 3% became more worried after reading the brochure. A cognitive test battery was administered to 104 people to determine whether their increased or decreased anxiety was justified. Thirty subjects had low test scores, yet 16 of these subjects had been reassured by the brochure that their forgetfulness was nothing to worry about. This group was characterized as experiencing fewer problems in daily life as a result of their forgetfulness and as having a higher internal locus of control. Seventy‐four subjects performed well on the cognitive tests, yet 18 of them had remained worried about their forgetfulness after reading the brochure. Anxiety for heredity of dementia could be a possible explanation for their persistent concern. Although many people were reassured by the brochure, the results also show that it is important to evaluate information brochures used as intervention instruments—in one third of the present sample, the effects of the brochure were not in accordance with its goal.     

A new Lyapunov functional approach to sampled-data synchronization control for delayed neural networks

This paper discusses the problem of synchronization for delayed neural networks using sampled-data control. We introduce a new Lyapunov functional, called complete sampling-interval-dependent discontinuous Lyapunov functional, which can adequately capture sampling information on both intervals from $r(t?\overline{\tau })$ to $r(t_k?\overline{\tau })$ and from $r(t?\overline{\tau })$ to $r(t_{k+1}?\overline{\tau })$. Based on this Lyapunov functional and an improved integral inequality, less conservative conditions are derived to ensure the stability of the synchronization error system, leading to the fact that the drive neural network is synchronized with the response neural network. The desired sampled-data controller is designed in terms of solutions to linear matrix inequalities. A numerical example is provided to demonstrate that the proposed approaches are effective and superior to some existing ones in the literature.     

Parental family stress during pregnancy and cognitive functioning in early childhood: The Generation R Study

We investigated whether parental family stress during pregnancy is associated with cognitive functioning in early childhood in a population-based cohort (n = 3139). Family stress was assessed using the Family Assessment Device at the 20th week of pregnancy and was reported by mothers and fathers. Mothers completed the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory, measuring children's verbal cognitive functioning, when children were 18 months and they completed the Parent Report of Children's Abilities, measuring nonverbal cognitive functioning, when children were 2 years old. Maternal prenatal family stress was related to children's low word comprehension and poorer nonverbal cognitive development independent of paternal reports. In a subset of 639 children, maternal prenatal family stress was also associated with observational assessments of poor effortful control at age 37 months. Paternal prenatal family stress was only related to poorer nonverbal cognitive development, independent of the mother. When both parents had high levels of prenatal family stress, children displayed particularly poor nonverbal cognitive development. These findings emphasize the significance of parental prenatal family stress for child developmental outcomes.     

The impact of an online tool for monitoring and regulating learning at university: overconfidence,learning strategy,and personality

Being overconfident when estimating scores for an upcoming exam is a widespread phenomenon in higher education and presents threats to self-regulated learning and academic performance. The present study sought to investigate how overconfidence and poor monitoring accuracy vary over the length of a college course, and how an intervention consisting of (1) a monitoring exercise and (2) a monitoring and regulation strategy, improves students’ monitoring accuracy and academic performance. Moreover, we investigated how personality factors (i.e., grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, optimism) influence monitoring accuracy. We found that the Monitoring and Regulation Strategy positively influenced monitoring accuracy and exam scores, whereas the Monitoring Exercise that confronted students with their overconfidence protected students against overconfidence in the second exam score prediction but did not affect exam score. The results further revealed that exam score predictions lowered from the start to the end of the course for both poor and high performing students, but still leaving poor performers overconfident and high performers underconfident. Topic knowledge gained in the course did not wash out the Dunning Kruger effect, and results indicate that poor and high performers use different cues when predicting exam scores. Both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism contributed to overconfidence on exam score predictions but not on the Monitoring Exercise. These findings underline the potential of the Monitoring and Regulation Strategy intervention and ask for upscaling it to include measurements of self-regulated learning activities.     

The Move Towards Managerialism: Perceptions of staff in “traditional” and “new” UK universities

Tertiary Education and Management - The raison d’être of higher education institutions is to educate individuals, undertake research, and disseminate knowledge into the public domain....