Uncovering a Connection between the Teachers’ Professional Development Program and Students’ Learning

Most research suggests professional development improves teachers’ knowledge and pedagogy and enhances teachers’ confidence to facilitate a positive attitude about student learning. This study attempted to investigate the connection between teacher professional development program and students’ Learning. This study took Readers’ Theater Teaching Program (RTTP) for professional development as an example to inquiry how participants applied their new knowledge and skills learned from RTTP to their teaching practice and how the impact influenced students’ reading fluency. This study was a two-year project. In the first year, this study focused on designing and implementing RTTP and evaluating participants’ satisfaction of RTTP, what they learned and how they applied it to design their English reading curriculum. In the second year, the study adopted quasi-experimental design approach and evaluated how participants RT instruction influenced their students’ reading fluency. The participants in this study composed two junior high school English teachers and their students. Data was collected from a number of different sources including teaching observation, semi-structured interviews, teaching diary, teachers’ professional development portfolio, pre/post RT content knowledge tests, teacher survey, and students’ reading fluency tests. The results indicated that teachers learned more RT script writing than other specific contents and hold a positive attitude toward RT instruction and considered it as a very wonderful strategy to meet a variety of needs. All of the experimental group students had a big progress in reading fluency after RT instruction.  The evidences from this study indicated that RT English instruction significantly influenced students’ reading fluency and classroom climate. Keywords: Teacher’s Professional Development, Program Evaluation, Readers’ Theater, English Reading Instruction, Reading fluenc

Toward Sustainability:Using Big Data to Explore Decisive Supply Chain Risk Factors Under Uncertainty

Rapid market changes aimed at sustainability have led to supply chain risks and uncertainties in the Taiwanese light-emitting diode industry. These risks and uncertainties can be captured by social media, quantitative and qualitative data (referred to herein as big data), but the industry has been unable to manage this information boom to respond to customer needs. These various types of data have their own characteristics that affect decision making about developing firm capabilities. This study aggregates the various data to undertake an extensive investigation of supply chain risks and uncertainties. Specifically, this study proposes using the fuzzy and grey Delphi methods to identify a set of reliable attributes and, based on these attributes, transforming big data to a manageable scale to consider their impacts. Subsequently, both the fuzzy and grey Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratories applied to determine the causal relationships for supply chain risks and uncertainties. The results reveal that capacity and operations have greater influence than other supply chain attributes and that risks stemming from triggering events are difficult to diagnose and control. The implications, conclusions and findings are addressed

A Novel Approach for Measurement of Peak Expiratory Velocity

It is well known that behind the orifice in a pipe, flow velocity increases and pressure decreases simultaneously. The generated sound appears that is caused by the pressure fluctuations that occur as the flow passes through the orifice. Then the flow velocity is averaged over a pipe cross-section and is considered as a constant, it can be seen that the amplitude of sound increases with increases in the expiratory velocity. An experimental study of the quantitative analysis of sound pressure level correlated with expiratory velocity in a pipe was conducted using an apparatus that includes an air pump in conjunction with a pipe, a microphone, and an orifice plate, among other instruments. The regression and analysis of the results shows that the pressure fluctuation of sound spectra can be correlated to the expiratory velocity of a pipe. The experiment is conducted under conditions where the air passing through the orifice has an averaged expiratory velocity ranging from 0.88 m/sec to 1.35 m/sec, an inlet temperature of 298.15 K, and where the outlet pressure is that of the atmosphere. In this experiment, the Mach number is very low, and the compressibility effects can be ignored. The obstacle orifice plate was placed in the center of the pipe, and a microphone was mounted flush downstream to acquire the sound pressure data on the pipe wall. The measured results show that the approach for measuring the expiratory velocity using a microphone can be justified, and there exists a good correlation between the Power Spectral Density (PSD) of sound pressure fluctuation and the peak expiratory velocity

p-Type Quasi-Mono Silicon Solar Cell Fabricated by Ion Implantation

The p-type quasi-mono wafer is a novel type of silicon material that is processed using a seed directional solidification technique. This material is a promising alternative to traditional high-cost Czochralski (CZ) and float-zone (FZ) material. Here, we evaluate the application of an advanced solar cell process featuring a novel method of ion implantation on p-type quasi-mono silicon wafer. The ion implantation process has simplified the normal industrial process flow by eliminating two process steps: the removal of phosphosilicate glass (PSG) and the junction isolation process that is required after the conventional thermal POCl3 diffusion process. Moreover, the good passivation performance of the ion implantation process improves Voc. Our results show that, after metallization and cofiring, an average cell efficiency of 18.55% can be achieved using 156 × 156 mm p-type quasi-mono silicon wafer. Furthermore, the absolute cell efficiency obtained using this method is 0.47% higher than that for the traditional POCl3 diffusion process

Knowledge-Rich Approach to Automatic Grammatical Information Acquisition: Enriching Chinese Sketch Engine with a Lexical Grammar

PACLIC 20 / Wuhan, China / 1-3 November, 200

Knowledge-Rich Approach to Automatic Grammatical Information Acquisition: Enriching Chinese Sketch Engine with a Lexical Grammar

PACLIC 20 / Wuhan, China / 1-3 November, 200