Psychological Adaptation of Turkish Students at U.S. Campuses

The number of Turkish citizens entering the U.S. for their studies is growing more rapidly than almost any other group. The purpose of the current study was to investigate how acculturation factors affect psychological adaptation of Turkish students in the U.S. One hundred and twenty-four Turkish students participated in the study. Regression analyses revealed that social support and self-esteem were predictors of psychological adjustment. Implications suggest that Turkish students, as with other international students as previous research has suggested, should have a strong network of both co-national students and other social connections.     

Unpacking the inequality among Turkish schools: Findings from PISA 2006

The study investigates the effects of certain school characteristics on students’ mathematics performances in Turkey in the PISA 2006 while controlling for family background and demographic characteristics. Three models of Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) are constructed. The results reveal that 55% of the variance is attributable to between-schools and the remaining 45% to individual student characteristics. About two-thirds of the 55% is explained by selectivity in admissions, time to study mathematics and students’ SES, gender and the geographical region. The findings are interpreted to explain why Turkish schools differed greatly in average student performance in PISA 2006 by using the conceptual efforts on school quality factors and family background characteristics.     

Design and development of a smart storytelling toy

Because computers generally make children passive listeners, new technological devices need to support children's storytelling activities. This article introduces the StoryTech, a smart toy that includes a virtual space comprised of computer-based graphics and characters as well as a real space that involves stuffed animals, background cards and a receiver panel. When children put real objects on the receiver panel, the computer displays related backgrounds and characters. Through this flexible context, children are expected to tell a story about what they see on the screen. The aim of this article is to present the development period of the StoryTech and to provide design principles for smart toy technologies based on the usability study. The article focuses on attributes of new technology and the significance of supporting storytelling activities to find the best combination of and moderation between real and virtual spaces.     

State formation and the rise of elementary education at the periphery of Europe: the cases of Finland and Turkey 1860–1930

This article addresses the role of the state and state formation in the establishment of national education during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Through a comparative case analysis of two countries at the European periphery (Finland and Turkey), this article shows how national educational systems, in both instances, were driven by periods of intense state building. In the nineteenth century, military defeats sparked educational reforms, and in the early nineteenth century school laws were enacted due to the establishment of the republics of Finland and Turkey. Nevertheless, these examples also show the limits of a state formation perspective. Despite changes in educational policy, neither state reached high enrolment levels in the nineteenth century, and only in Finland schooling for all was realised in the 1930s. Thus, this work encourages further comparative analyses of the social, economic and political circumstances in which these states acted.     

Student counselling in Turkish universities

This article presents general information about the history, relevant laws and legislation, present status and anticipated future development in Turkish Universities, as well as the student counselling services within these institutions. Special emphasis is placed upon the perceived understanding of counselling as commonly accepted by the society, students and counsellors. While discussing the present status of Turkish University Counselling Centers, the proposed models, research findings and problems of the centers are documented. As a more specific example, the Middle East Technical University Counselling Center is described with a discussion of some of the drawbacks and recommended changes for the advancement of the center. Finally, suggestions for a culturally relevant model in terms of the nature, components and organisational structure of the system are discussed.     

Statistical trends and developments within inclusive education in Turkey

The education of students with special needs in an inclusive environment is becoming more widespread throughout the world. Similarly, in Turkey, the inclusion of students with disabilities has also improved. However, current statistical trends and developments within inclusive education are not well known. The purpose of this study is to provide a statistical analysis of special education data, which were obtained from the Ministry of National Education of Turkey. The findings indicate that some statistical components of special education are missing from most official publications of educational statistics and the number of students and the proportions of special education categories in inclusive education vary from year to year. However, in Turkey, the percentage of students in inclusive education, of all students with special needs, is higher than many European countries. The results show that the number of students with special needs, as well as students in inclusive education, has rapidly increased. Turkey needs to focus on improving the schooling rate of students with special needs, and the quality and variety of special education services within inclusive education.     

The impact of preprocessing on text classification

Preprocessing is one of the key components in a typical text classification framework. This paper aims to extensively examine the impact of preprocessing on text classification in terms of various aspects such as classification accuracy, text domain, text language, and dimension reduction. For this purpose, all possible combinations of widely used preprocessing tasks are comparatively evaluated on two different domains, namely e-mail and news, and in two different languages, namely Turkish and English. In this way, contribution of the preprocessing tasks to classification success at various feature dimensions, possible interactions among these tasks, and also dependency of these tasks to the respective languages and domains are comprehensively assessed. Experimental analysis on benchmark datasets reveals that choosing appropriate combinations of preprocessing tasks, rather than enabling or disabling them all, may provide significant improvement on classification accuracy depending on the domain and language studied on.