Identification of the optimal faculty behaviors for performance improvement in distance education

Asia Pacific Education Review - The current study reports the findings of the first step of a comprehensive performance improvement study, identification of the optimal behaviors. In this sense,...     

Autonomous and controlling reasons underlying achievement goals during task engagement: their relation to intrinsic motivation and cheating

The aim of this study was to investigate the relation of autonomous and controlling reasons underlying an endorsed achievement goal to intrinsic motivation and cheating. The endorsement of the achievement goal was ensured by involving 212 (M_age = 19.24, SD = .97) freshman students in a spatial task and asking them to report their most important achievement goal, as well as the reasons for adopting the goal, during the task. Results from a hierarchical regression analysis revealed that independent of the achievement goal the students adopted, the autonomous reasons for the endorsed goal were positively related to the indices of intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, the autonomous reasons underlying either performance or mastery-avoidance goals were negatively related to cheating. Alternatively, the controlling reasons for the endorsed goal were positively related to pressure and tension. The importance of considering both the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ aspect of achievement motivation are discussed.     

Who are the future teachers in Turkey? Characteristics of entering student teachers

This exploratory study examines the background characteristics, socio-cultural values and pedagogical beliefs that entering student teachers bring with them into the faculties of education and explores their possible implications for teacher education in the Turkish context. The study comprised 18,226 first-year student teachers from 51 faculties of education who participated in the study by responding to a three-section questionnaire developed by the research team. Their responses indicate that students entering education faculties typically come from families of lower-middle socio-economic status living in urban areas, tend to possess more traditional than secular-rational values and have not yet formed clear pedagogical beliefs.     

Vocational Schools in Turkey: An Administrative and Organizational Analysis

The data used in this paper were derived from a larger project which had the aim of critically evaluating the Turkish vocational education system on a number of different levels. This article examines the administrative and organisational practices in a selected group of secondary vocational schools in Turkey from the point of view of school administrators, teachers and industrial managers. The results indicate that the Turkish vocational education system is characterised by a centralised, top-down bureaucracy, which inhibits innovative capacity. The authors argue that a degree of decentralisation is necessary at various levels of the system.     

The impact of deep learning on document classification using semantically rich representations

This paper presents a semantically rich document representation model for automatically classifying financial documents into predefined categories utilizing deep learning. The model architecture consists of two main modules including document representation and document classification. In the first module, a document is enriched with semantics using background knowledge provided by an ontology and through the acquisition of its relevant terminology. Acquisition of terminology integrated to the ontology extends the capabilities of semantically rich document representations with an in depth-coverage of concepts, thereby capturing the whole conceptualization involved in documents. Semantically rich representations obtained from the first module will serve as input to the document classification module which aims at finding the most appropriate category for that document through deep learning. Three different deep learning networks each belonging to a different category of machine learning techniques for ontological document classification using a real-life ontology are used.Multiple simulations are carried out with various deep neural networks configurations, and our findings reveal that a three hidden layer feedforward network with 1024 neurons obtain the highest document classification performance on the INFUSE dataset. The performance in terms of F1 score is further increased by almost five percentage points to 78.10% for the same network configuration when the relevant terminology integrated to the ontology is applied to enrich document representation. Furthermore, we conducted a comparative performance evaluation using various state-of-the-art document representation approaches and classification techniques including shallow and conventional machine learning classifiers.     

Relationships between teachers’ perceived leadership style,students’ learning style,and academic achievement: a study on high school students

There is debate about whether the leadership style of the teacher or the learning style of the student affects academic achievement more. A large sample (n = 746) of eighth‐grade students in Istanbul, Turkey, participated in a study where the leadership style of the teacher was assessed in terms of people orientation and task orientation. The learning styles examined were: group, individual, visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic. Multiple discriminant analysis indicated that teacher leadership style was the main factor affecting academic performance. No significant relationship was found between learning style and academic achievement.     

Examining the Effects of Stress and Campus Climate on the Persistence of Students of Color and White Students: An Application of Bean and Eaton’s Psychological Model of Retention

The current study examined the effects of stress and campus climate perceptions on the persistence decisions of students of color and White students using Bean and Eaton’s (2000) Psychological Model of College Student Retention. A sample of first-year students (N = 1,491) at a predominantly White research university were survey enduring their second semester and their enrollment status was subsequently tracked after 2 years. Path analysis was conducted on the sample of students of color (n = 548) and White students (n = 943). Results indicated models that explained 27 % of the variance for students of color and 44 % of the variance for White students in persistence after 2 years of college. Among the initial 37 variables included in the models, 17 had significant direct and indirect effects on students’ of color persistence including observing racism on campus, having comfortable academic interactions, stress related to the academic environment, and feelings about the campus environment. For White students, 13 variables had significant direct and indirect effects on persistence, including having opportunities for diverse peer interactions and comfortable academic interactions, stress related to the social environment on campus, and feelings about the campus environment. The discussion highlights the usefulness of the Bean and Eaton model for examining retention for students of color and White students.