Inclusive Education in Brunei Darussalam

This paper describes major developments in Brunei Darussalam during the past decade that highlight inclusive education as a significant educational agenda. A brief history of disability services is first described to provide a backdrop of pre-1994 developments and activities that occurred in the country. Next, the education system in Brunei is introduced with specific reference to how special education became relevant to serving the needs of students with special needs within the mainstream school system. Major developments in the inclusion movement during the past decade are then described in terms of policy, implementation and teacher education. The article concludes with a discussion on current local research that seeks to inform the direction of practice and policy of inclusive education in Brunei Darussalam.     

Job satisfaction of information technology workers in academic libraries

This study examines the job satisfaction of library information technology (IT) workers in relation to demographic, socioeconomic, and work-related variables, such as a sense of belonging, faith in wanting to belong, a feeling of acceptance, paying dues, job autonomy, the broker's role, and promotion opportunities. A total of 443 mail surveys were sent to a sample of IT workers at 30 university member libraries of Association of Research Libraries in the United States. A total of 202 surveys were returned, resulting in a 45.6% response rate. This study found that salary, an MLS degree, a sense of belonging, faith in wanting to belong, a feeling of acceptance, job autonomy, and promotion opportunities were related to job satisfaction of the library IT workers. This study provides some explanations as to why some IT workers are more satisfied with their jobs than others, thereby contributing to improving the quality of their work lives.     

The History of the South East Asian Peninsular Games,1959–1975

After the Second World War the Southeast Asian countries of Burma (1948), Laos (1954), Cambodia (1955), South Vietnam (1955), Malaya (1957), and Singapore (1959) sought independence from the British, French and Japanese colonialists. The first post Second World War and post-colonial biannual multisport Southeast Asian Games was held in Bangkok in 1959 among these countries (and Thailand) although they were relatively poor developing countries. Referring to official reports of the eight bi-annual SEAP Games and other sources of information this research studies how the organization of the eight SEAP Games since 1959 contributed to the nation building process of each country and shaped the political landscape. This was carried out by creating a national identity through sports in each country as well as creating a sense of regional cooperation during periods of war, shifting boundaries and identities. This was done through rituals to legitimize newly ascended constitutional monarchies and heads of states, national flags and athletes' national identity during competition. The SEAP Games also gradually opened avenues for women's participation similar to female athletes in the Olympic Games. It also provided opportunities for promising athletes to shine, improve and compete at higher levels at the Asian and Olympic Games.     

Leveraging information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance education equity,quality, and efficiency: case studies of Bangladesh and Nepal

ABSTRACT

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have had significant impacts on many sectors in today’s knowledge economy. In developing and emerging countries, ICT have enhanced equity, quality, and efficiency in the education sector. However, the adoption of ICT in the South Asian countries’ education sector has not been at scale and its impacts have been limited. There are several gaps and issues that are hindering the wider adoption of ICT and limiting its impacts in the education sector. Through the case studies of the adoption of ICT for education in Bangladesh and Nepal, this paper examines the gaps and issues to be addressed in order to better leverage ICT to enhance education equity, quality, and efficiency. This discussion is guided by the ICT in the education framework that has been developed by the authors, and could provide insights into the state of ICT in education and offer strategies to better leverage ICT for the education sector of other countries in South Asia and the region.     

The building of weak expertise: the work of global university rankers

University rankers are the subject of much criticism, and yet they remain influential in the field of higher education. Drawing from a two-year field study of university ranking organizations, interviews with key correspondents in the sector, and an analysis of related documents, I introduce the concept of weak expertise. This kind of expertise is the result of a constantly negotiated balance between the relevance, reliability, and robustness of rankers’ data and their relationships with their key readers and audiences. Building this expertise entails collecting robust data, presenting it in ways that are relevant to audiences, and engaging with critics. I show how one ranking organization, the Times Higher Education (THE), sought to maintain its legitimacy in the face of opposition from important stakeholders and how it sought to introduce a new “Innovation and Impact” ranking. The paper analyzes the strategies, methods, and particular practices that university rankers undertake to legitimate their knowledge—and is the first work to do so using insights gathered alongside the operations of one of the ranking agencies as well as from the rankings’ conference circuit. Rather than assuming that all of these trust-building mechanisms have solidified the hold of the THE over its audience, they can be seen as signs of a constant struggle for influence over a skeptical audience.     

Education and Development: Era of Hope and Disillusionment

It seems almost superfluous to have to highlight formal education as a social and moral institution (historically that has been its main role) but for the fact that after the Second World War greater consciousness on the part of rich industrialized countries spawns fresh concepts and notions that education is an economic enterprise. The human capital concept popularized by the Chicago School of economics as reflected in the works of Schultz and the seminal work of Denison catapulted education into the forefront as an engine of economic development for the so-called Third World countries. Heavy physical capital investment, with the exception of Japan and Germany, which is thought to be a sufficient stimulus for economic development in classical economic theory fails to deliver the goods. The frantic search for an efficacious solution to Third World Poverty unearths the forgotten dimension of educated and trained manpower as the missing variable in the economic development equation. Education becomes the new faith for Third Worlds in their attempts to banish poverty and join the rich industrial clubs. Needless to say, the new faith which holds sway for more than a decade ends in disillusionment (reflected in the Belagio Conference of 1974) for trained manpower is a necessary but not sufficient condition for national development. The complementarity and substitutability of physical and human capital have been overlooked. But whilst the human capital formation theory holds sway, formal education becomes predominently an economic enterprise and correspondingly its function as a social and moral enterprise is reduced in importance.     

A componential approach to understanding reading and its difficulties in preadolescent readers

The present study is predicated on the logic of interrelated functional information processing components as an approach to understanding reading and its difficulties in preadolescent readers. The structural equation modelling (and its variants) involved these three latent components: (a) orthographic/phonological component, (b) morphological component, and (c) sentence and paragraph comprehension component. These components were subserved by a total of ten measurable tasks, all administered on-line via the microcomputer under laboratory conditions with reaction time measures as indices of mental representation of word knowledge and sentence/paragraph comprehension. The latent dependent component of reading performance was subserved by standardized vocabulary and reading comprehension tests. The total sample consisted of 298 children in grades, 4, 5, and 6. Maximum likelihood analyses using LISREL show that the data in general do not disconfirm the proposed model for grade 4 readers. The three-component model, with some variables set free, provides a reasonable fit for the grade 5 data but less claim could be made about the goodness of fit for grade 6. The results show the mutually reinforcing and mutually facilitating effects of multilevels and multicomponents of reading. Word structure and word knowledge are particularly predictive of reading. The present Phase 1 work would be validated in a follow-up of another cohort of readers and would also lead to the systematic training of some of the components with poor readers. This study was supported by a grant (No. 410-86-0048) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Component skills of text comprehension in less competent Chinese comprehenders

The present study examined the role of verbal working memory (memory span and tongue-twister), two-character Chinese pseudoword reading (two tasks), rapid automatized naming (RAN) (letters and numbers), and phonological segmentation (deletion of rimes and onsets) in inferential text comprehension in Chinese in 31 less competent comprehenders compared with 37 reading comprehension control students and 23 chronological age controls. It was hypothesized that the target students would perform poorly on these cognitive and linguistic tasks as compared with their controls. Furthermore, verbal working memory and pseudoword reading would explain a considerable amount of individual variation in Chinese text comprehension. RAN would have a nonsignificant role in text comprehension. Structural equation analyses and hierarchical multiple regression analyses generally upheld these hypotheses. Our findings support current literature of the role of verbal working memory in reading comprehension found in English. The results, however, suggest differential role of the constructs and the tasks in reading comprehension and provide some answers for comprehension impairment in Chinese students.