Effects of friendship and relationship dimensions of classroom environment on general and academic self-concept

Learning Environments Research - The purpose of present study was to examine the effect of friendship and relationship dimensions of the classroom environment on general and academic selfconcept....     

Examining antecedents of knowledge-sharing factors on research supervision: An empirical study

The use of an effective supervision mechanism is crucial between a student and supervisor. The essential knowledge shared and transferred between these two parties must be observed and understood very well in order to ensure that students are produced at good level of quality for future professional knowledge workers. The aim of this study was to conduct an assessment of the impact of individual, organisational and technical factors on knowledge sharing in a research supervision domain. In order to achieve this aim, a specific research model was developed. This model was based on systematically analysing and extracting all the knowledge-sharing impact factors and then choosing the more iterative and adaptable ones, according to research supervision models. These factors categorized to individual, organizational and technological factors. To effectively evaluate the research model, a quantitative research method was adopted. Data was collected by a survey of 150 students from the Faculty of Computing at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The Smart PLS tool was used for data analysis. In sum, the results of this research show that the individual factor in the research supervision domain – namely, the ability of students to share knowledge – in addition to technological factors – specifically, IT systems – have the greatest impact on knowledge sharing in the supervision process. In addition, it was shown that organisational factors including the culture of the university, social networks, and supervisor support have a positive impact on knowledge sharing in research supervision. However, when compared with individual and technical factors, the effect of organisational factors on knowledge sharing in research supervision was not particularly strong in the case of this study. A positive relationship did not exist between the learning strategy and knowledge sharing in research supervision. This study is among the first of its kind to empirically examine the antecedent factors of knowledge sharing in the context of research supervision.     

The impact of scaffolding and nonscaffolding strategies on the EFL learners' listening comprehension development

Drawing on sociocultural theory, and a large number of empirical studies conducted on the effectiveness of scaffolding on second or foreign language learning, the authors investigated the application of different forms of scaffolding to improve listening comprehension of the Iranian intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. To this end, 90 intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to 2 experimental groups and a control group. During 15 treatment sessions of listening comprehension instruction, expert peers in the first experimental group assisted their less knowledgeable peers in their listening comprehension tasks. The participants in the second experimental group were asked to assist their coequal peers while doing the listening comprehension tasks, but the participants in group 3 did not interact with each other or even their teacher and no scaffolding scheme was used when they were doing the listening comprehension tasks. One-way analysis of variance and post hoc analyses revealed that the expert peers' scaffolding was the most effective procedure for the intermediate EFL learners' listening comprehension development. Furthermore, coequal peers' scaffolding was proved to be the second effective procedure for the listening comprehension improvement. The findings underscore the relative efficacy of different forms of scaffolding procedure and the superiority of the expert peers' scaffolding over coequals' scaffolding. The qualitative analysis of the recorded data indicated that the implicit scaffolding strategies were more frequently used by the expert peers. However, the explicit scaffolding strategies were more frequently used to by the coequals. The findings of the study underscore the positive potentiality of scaffolding in its different forms for the EFL learners' listening comprehension development.     

The role of goal orientations in students’ perceptions of classroom assessment in higher education

Students’ perception of assessment methods plays a significant role in determining their effort towards learning and their assessment tasks. Similar to the role of goal orientation in predicting students’ classroom learning, this study aims to examine how students’ goal orientations influence their perception of classroom assessments. Using a qualitative research design, the data was collected from 41 students enrolled in master’s degree programme at a public university in northern Malaysia, using reflection notes and semi-structured interviews. Data was analysed using a typological approach to inductively develop the categories. The findings demonstrated that perception of mastery goal oriented students considerably contrasted with those with performance goal orientation. The distinctions in perception is discussed under four categories: assessment as a process or product, preferences for modes, reasons for effort and feeling and emotions. The implications of the findings are discussed for higher education practitioners.     

The role of sociocultural mediational tools in EFL teachers’ development: insights from a life history approach

The sociocultural orientation in general education, which has gradually leaked into second language teacher education, argues that teachers usually employ social relations, cultural artefacts, and theoretical concepts to mediate their thinking and practice. Against this background, the present study aimed to explore how three male Iranian English as a foreign language teachers have capitalised on the three sociocultural tools to mediate their development. The findings revealed that not all three mediational tools, though each influential in its own terms, have been available wholesale to the teachers and that different academic and teaching phases have yielded differential access to the tools. The authors indicate that during school as student, human mediation, particularly of apprenticeship, seems to be the dominant tool available for the teachers to mediate their development. Later on, in higher education institutes, although the human apprenticeship is still visible, cultural artefacts and scientific theories start to surface influencing the teachers’ learning and teaching trajectories. The implications for both teachers and teacher educators are discussed.     

A data-mining approach to biomarker identification from protein profiles using discrete stationary wavelet transform

Objective: To develop a new bioinformatic tool based on a data-mining approach for extraction of the most infor-mative proteins that could be used to fred the potential biomarkers for the detection of cancer. Methods: Two independent datasets from serum samples of 253 ovarian cancer and 167 breast cancer patients were used. The samples were examined by surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (SELDI-TOF MS). The datasets were used to extract the informative proteins using a data-mining method in the discrete stationary wavelet transform domain. As a dimensionality re-duction procedure, the hard threshoiding method was applied to reduce the number of wavelet coefficients. Also, a distance measure was used to select the most discriminative coefficients. To find the potential biomarkers using the selected wavelet coefficients, we applied the inverse discrete stationary wavelet transform combined with a two-sided t-test. Results: From the ovarian cancer dataset, a set of five proteins were detected as potential biomarkers that could be used to identify the cancer patients from the healthy cases with accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 100%. Also, from the breast cancer dataset, a set of eight proteins were found as the potential biomarkers that could separate the healthy cases from the cancer patients with accuracy of 98.26%, sensitivity of 100%, and specificity of 95.6%. Conclusion: The results have shown that the new bioinformatic tool can be used in combination with the high-throughput proteomic data such as SELDI-TOF MS to find the potential biomarkers with high discriminative power.     

Authenticity in teaching and teachers’ emotions: a hermeneutic phenomenological study of the classroom reality

This study probed the conceptualization of authenticity in teaching and its link to teachers’ emotional life through critical emotional praxis because emotions are integral to discovering who we really are (McCarthy, E. D. 2009. “Emotional Performances as Dramas of Authenticity.” In Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society, edited by P. Vannini, and J. P. Williams, 241–255. London: Ashgate). The participants were 20 Iranian university teachers. Data were collected using interviews, field notes, and observation and were analyzed through the lens of hermeneutic phenomenology. The results revealed that authenticity in teaching consisted of themes of being one’s own self, horizon of significance, and contestation resulted from the sense of responsibility, authentic relations, and de-constructive thinking which confirmed the dialogical nature of authenticity. The emotions connected to authenticity in teaching were Transition-Anger, love, and caring indicating that authenticity in teaching was a practice toward socially just teaching.     

The significance of troponin T and CK-MB release in coronary artery bypass surgery

Measurement of cardiac markers is an index of care standard in the assessment and diagnosis of cardiovascualr disease. Two of the major cardiac markers are Creatine Kinase isoenzyme CK-MB and Troponin T, which are extensively used in the diagnosis of heart disease. The release of Troponin T and creatine kinase isoenzyme (CK-MB) was investigated in 50 coronary artery bypass surgery patients. Measurement of plasma samples was carried out at five different time points, namely before surgery, 1,6,12,24 hours after surgery. The results indicated that CK-MB level were increased by a factor more than four times compared with the upper limit of baseline (befor surgery). Troponin T concentration showed more than six fold over the upper limit of baseline (before surgert) at 1,6,12,24 hours after surgery. In order to assess the significance of the length of the surgical procedure on the release of Troponin T and CK-MB, the surgery patient were divided into two groups according to the length of the surgical procedure: group I was selected on the basis that the surgical procedure they underwent lasted above 90 minutes and group II with a surgical procedure below 90 minutes. Both Troponin T and CK-MB showed a significant increase in-group I compared to group II. To investigate the likelihood that this effect is party due to myocardial infarction during surgery, the patients were divided into two groups: Group A with some sings of myocardial infarction on Q wave of ECG and group B without any change. The results showed approximately a two-fold increase of these markers in-group A compared to group B. Since these markers reach into blood following damage to myocardial their increase in patients with time course surgery of more than 90 minutes and those with a probability of MI during operation, indicating that these patient fall into a high risk group of repeat (MI) after surgery.     

Subset selection of best simulated systems

In this paper, we consider the problem of selecting a subset of k systems that is contained in the set of the best s simulated systems when the number of alternative systems is huge. We propose a sequential method that uses the ordinal optimization to select a subset G randomly from the search space that contains the best simulated systems with high probability. To guarantee that this subset contains the best systems it needs to be relatively large. Then methods of ranking and selections will be applied to select a subset of k best systems of the subset G with high probability. The remaining systems of G will be replaced by newly selected alternatives from the search space. This procedure is repeated until the probability of correct selection (a subset of the best k simulated systems is selected) becomes very high. The optimal computing budget allocation is also used to allocate the available computing budget in a way that maximizes the probability of correct selection. Numerical experiments for comparing these algorithms are presented.