Changes in science classrooms after experiencing an international professional staff development program

This professional development program was designed to prepare science teachers to be more student-centered and to implement newer goals for science instruction. These goals are to improve science teaching in ways that promote broader and longer-lasting learning. Secondary school science teachers in Korea are expected to follow a rigid national curriculum with large classes - often with more than 50 students. This study focuses on feedback and follow-up interaction with teacher participants who were enrolled in a month-long workshop in the U.S. before returning to Korea to implement the new ideas. Assistance was offered to help teachers develop teaching modules which were more constructivist while also assisting with assessment efforts that provided further evidence of use of the new teaching practices and their effect on student learning. Student mastery of concepts and improvement in student creativity were two aspects of the summer workshop experiences and these were evaluated to illustrate workshop effects on teacher participants in their actual classrooms. An erratum to this article is available at .     

A review of human competence in educational research: Levels of K- 12, College, Adult, and Business Education

The purpose of this study is to review the main perspectives or issues dealt with in the research on considered to be key competences, in order to develop a fuller understanding of how human competence functions. As a result of this review, two themes considered as having important implications for the actual practices can be identified: that there exists an holistic nature with different aspects of a given competence and that influences of a contextual and cultural nature are factors which affect the operation of human competence. By incorporating four characteristics and three domains of competence with the review conducted in this study, we began to appreciate what the research on human characteristics related to key competences has achieved and what is needed for future research.     

Anatomy comic strips

Comics are powerful visual messages that convey immediate visceral meaning in ways that conventional texts often cannot. This article's authors created comic strips to teach anatomy more interestingly and effectively. Four-frame comic strips were conceptualized from a set of anatomy-related humorous stories gathered from the authors' collective imagination. The comics were drawn on paper and then recreated with digital graphics software. More than 500 comic strips have been drawn and labeled in Korean language, and some of them have been translated into English. All comic strips can be viewed on the Department of Anatomy homepage at the Ajou University School of Medicine, Suwon, Republic of Korea. The comic strips were written and drawn by experienced anatomists, and responses from viewers have generally been favorable. These anatomy comic strips, designed to help students learn the complexities of anatomy in a straightforward and humorous way, are expected to be improved further by the authors and other interested anatomists.     

International Research Projects in Early Childhood Development in Australia,Malaysia and Singapore: Pertinent Issues from Three Studies

The field of early childhood education has been the focus of increased research and public concern in recent years. This paper highlights three research projects funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation in the eighties in Australia, Malaysia and Singapore. It focuses on four research issues raised from these three studies which span three diverse communities and cultures. In particular, the question of a single integrative approach towards early childhood development programmes, the intersecting needs of children and women, the range of training and dissemination systems to be made available, the role of the different forms of fundamental partnerships in early childhood research and the strengthening of the research-to-policy link will be discussed.     

Application of Latent Growth Curve Analysis With Categorical Responses in Social Behavioral Research

Latent growth modeling allows social behavioral researchers to investigate within-person change and between-person differences in within-person change. Typically, conventional latent growth curve models are applied to continuous variables, where the residuals are assumed to be normally distributed, whereas categorical variables (i.e., binary and ordinal variables), which do not hold to normal distribution assumptions, have rarely been used. This article describes the latent growth curve model with categorical variables, and illustrates applications using Mplus software that are applicable to social behavioral research. The illustrations use marital instability data from the Iowa Youth and Family Project. We close with recommendations for the specification and parameterization of growth models that use both logit and probit link functions.     

Modelling of factors influencing gender difference in mathematics achievement using TIMSS 2011 data for Singaporean eighth grade students

Numerous studies have attributed gender difference in mathematics achievement to various sociocultural influences. Singapore is a country of higher gender equality as represented in the Global Gender Gap Index and Singaporean girls perform as well or higher than boys in international mathematics assessments. This study develops a conceptual model to examine the relationship and effects of parental involvement in education, teacher efficacy, and students’ attitudes towards mathematics on mathematics achievement for Singaporean eighth grade students using Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2011 data. The study finds that there is no significant gender difference in parental involvement in education and teacher efficacy and there is no gender difference in the attitude of like learning mathematics among Singaporean eighth grade students. The attitude of confidence in mathematics has positive and significant effect on mathematics achievement and the effect is greater for girls than boys. Parental involvement in education and teacher efficacy were found to have greater effect on girls’ confidence in mathematics than on boys’. As such, increasing involvement in mathematics education and providing positive reinforcement to raise girls’ self-confidence in mathematics by parents and teachers should be an integral part of any initiative to reduce gender gap in mathematics achievement.     

A new perspective on in vitro assessment method for evaluating quantum dot toxicity by using microfluidics technology

In this study, we demonstrate a new perspective on in vitro assessment method for evaluating quantum dot (QD) toxicity by using microfluidics technology. A new biomimetic approach, based on the flow exposure condition, was applied in order to characterize the cytotoxic potential of QD. In addition, the outcomes obtained from the flow exposure condition were compared to those of the static exposure condition. An in vitro cell array system was established that used an integrated multicompartmented microfluidic device to develop a sensitive flow exposure condition. QDs modified with cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide∕trioctylphosphine oxide were used for the cytotoxicity assessment. The results suggested noticeable differences in the number of detached and deformed cells and the viability percentages between two different exposure conditions. The intracellular production of reactive oxygen species and release of cadmium were found to be the possible causes of QD-induced cytotoxicity, irrespective of the types of exposure condition. In contrast to the static exposure, the flow exposure apparently avoided the gravitational settling of particles and probably assisted in the homogeneous distribution of nanoparticles in the culture medium during exposure time. Moreover, the flow exposure condition resembled in vivo physiological conditions very closely, and thus, the flow exposure condition can offer potential advantages for nanotoxicity research.     

Text classification from unlabeled documents with bootstrapping and feature projection techniques

Many machine learning algorithms have been applied to text classification tasks. In the machine learning paradigm, a general inductive process automatically builds a text classifier by learning, generally known as supervised learning. However, the supervised learning approaches have some problems. The most notable problem is that they require a large number of labeled training documents for accurate learning. While unlabeled documents are easily collected and plentiful, labeled documents are difficultly generated because a labeling task must be done by human developers. In this paper, we propose a new text classification method based on unsupervised or semi-supervised learning. The proposed method launches text classification tasks with only unlabeled documents and the title word of each category for learning, and then it automatically learns text classifier by using bootstrapping and feature projection techniques. The results of experiments showed that the proposed method achieved reasonably useful performance compared to a supervised method. If the proposed method is used in a text classification task, building text classification systems will become significantly faster and less expensive.     

Orthogonal-polynomials-based integral inequality and its applications to systems with additive time-varying delays

Recently, a polynomials-based integral inequality was proposed by extending the Moon’s inequality into a generic formulation. By imposing certain structures on the slack matrices of this integral inequality, this paper proposes an orthogonal-polynomials-based integral inequality which has lower computational burden than the polynomials-based integral inequality while maintaining the same conservatism. Further, this paper provides notes on relations among recent general integral inequalities constructed with arbitrary degree polynomials. In these notes, it is shown that the proposed integral inequality is superior to the Bessel–Legendre (B–L) inequality and the polynomials-based integral inequality in terms of the conservatism and computational burden, respectively. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by an illustrative example of stability analysis for systems with additive time-varying delays.