Democratic Practices in a Constructivist Science Classroom

The constructivist learning approach is suggested as a means for facilitating students’ learning of science and increasing their participation in this learning. Several studies have shown the contribution of this approach to the different aspects of students’ learning of science, though little research has examined the contribution of this approach to the democratic environment of the science classroom. The present study attempted to do so. 34 grade 5 science students studied the energy unit of the science book using the V-shape strategy, and 38 grade 5 science students studied the same unit without using the strategy. The research results show that students who used the V-shape strategy had significantly higher scores in democratic practices than students who did not use the strategy. Moreover, the democratic practices in the science classroom were not influenced significantly by the independent variables (science ability, general ability, and preferred subject). The results of the current study also show that, in the experimental group, only the correlation between involvement and freedom was significant, while in the control group, all of the correlations among involvement, freedom, and equality were significant.     

An auto-indexing method for Arabic text

This work addresses the information retrieval problem of auto-indexing Arabic documents. Auto-indexing a text document refers to automatically extracting words that are suitable for building an index for the document. In this paper, we propose an auto-indexing method for Arabic text documents. This method is mainly based on morphological analysis and on a technique for assigning weights to words. The morphological analysis uses a number of grammatical rules to extract stem words that become candidate index words. The weight assignment technique computes weights for these words relative to the container document. The weight is based on how spread is the word in a document and not only on its rate of occurrence. The candidate index words are then sorted in descending order by weight so that information retrievers can select the more important index words. We empirically verify the usefulness of our method using several examples. For these examples, we obtained an average recall of 46% and an average precision of 64%.     

Emerging instructional technologies: Exploring the extent of faculty use of web 2.0 tools at a midwestern community college

The purpose of this research is to provide insight into the several aspects of instructional use of emerging web-based technologies. The study first explores the extent of Web 2.0 technology integration into face-to-face classroom activities. In this phase, the main focus of research interests was on the types and dynamics of Web 2.0 tools used by community college instructors. In the second phase, we were predominantly interested in instructors’ preferences toward tools and the major barriers instructors confront in integrating these tools in a traditional educational setting. The study reveals the extent of instructors’ use of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom relates to a) their level of education and b) training on the tools. Results clearly indicate that level of education and current use of web 2.0 technologies in instruction are major determinants of the instructors’ preferences toward different groups of Web 2.0 tools. Finally, lack of faculty training opportunities was identified as the main barrier for using Web 2.0 technologies. The study offers research based evidence which undoubtedly represent the current trends and issues in the process of technology integration into course curriculum at a community college level. Considering obtained findings, we suggest implementation of an institutional and systematic approach to reinforce inclusion of Web 2.0 technologies in traditional teaching and learning.