An investigation into the intricacies of the instructional model for early childhood education in rural Thai Child Development Centres

Thailand’s education system faces a problem with distinct disparities between levels of regional education management. Consequently, urban areas seem to have obvious perceivable advantages over rural area settings. In response to this problem, the central government has authorized the local government to supervise and support local education settings including early years education and child caregivers who have the responsibility to provide education and care for early years leaners in the form of Child Development Centres. The purpose of this current research is to investigate the knowledge, understanding and practices, including the factors and challenges which impact upon child caregivers’ day-to-day performances regarding education and care provision for disadvantaged young learners from hill tribe communities who attend the rural Child Development Centres in Thailand. A qualitative approach was employed to collect data from twenty-three child caregivers and seven educational officers. Two investigative methods were used in this research: interviews and direct observations. The interviews were conducted with all the participants including child caregivers and education officers, followed by observations of four child caregivers. The results provided indicate that the child caregivers perceived themselves as performing several roles alongside their main responsibilities as education providers, while being simultaneously challenged by issues including regional deprivation, underfunding for learning resources, and insufficient support from local authorities. Child caregivers revealed obtained by a range of means external support from local communities and parents to meet their resource requirements. In addition, to a full discussion of the findings from the empirical work several suggestions have been made to the central government and local authorities in order to improve the quality of early years education management delivered within rural CDCs

A Two-Sample Test for Mean Vectors in High-Dimensional Data

Modern measurement technology has enabled the capture of high-dimensional data by researchers and statisticians and classical statistical inferences, such as the renowned Hotelling’s T2 test, are no longer valid when the dimension of the data equals or exceeds the sample size. Importantly, when correlations among variables in a dataset exist, taking them into account in the analysis method would provide more accurate conclusions. In this article, we consider the hypothesis testing problem for two mean vectors in high-dimensional data with an underlying normality assumption. A new test is proposed based on the idea of keeping more information from the sample covariances. The asymptotic null distribution of the test statistic is derived. The simulation results show that the proposed test performs well comparing with other competing tests and becomes more powerful when the dimension increases for a given sample size. The proposed test is also illustrated with an analysis of DNA microarray data

A CAUSAL MODEL OF ADMINISTRATIVE FACTORS AFFECTING EDUCATIONAL QUALITY IN VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS: QUALITATIVE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

The purposes of this study were to develop the causal model of administrative factors affecting educational quality in vocational schools and to analyze the key administrative factors affecting educational quality in vocational schools. This study employed a mixed-method research design comprising a qualitative data analysis of literature review on the administrative factors affecting educational quality, efficiency, and effectiveness followed by in-depth interviews and a quantitative data analysis of the extensive empirical survey. The sample for the interviews was 30 purposive participants which were 6 administrators, 18 teachers of selective schools, and 6 policymakers at the administrative level. The qualitative data analysis of the interviews confirmed the factors in the conceptual framework and provided the key behavioral definition to be used to create the questionnaire. Later, the quantitative data analysis will continue by using descriptive analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and SEM Analysis. The most significant key theme emerging from the results is the key administrative factors affecting educational quality in vocational schools: 1) Transformational Leadership 2) School Culture Strength 3) Resource Management Quality and 4) Learning Management Quality, which could be the preliminary evidence suggesting how to accomplish educational quality in vocational schools in Thailand

Discriminant methods for high dimensional data

The main purpose of discriminant analysis is to enable classification of new observations into one of g classes or populations. Discriminant methods suffer when applied to high dimensional data because the sample covariance matrix is singular. In this study, we propose two new discriminant methods for high dimensional data under the multivariate normal population with a block diagonal covariance matrix structure. As the first method, we approximate the sample covariance matrix as a singular matrix based on the idea of reducing the dimensionality of the observations to get a well-conditioned covariance matrix. As the second method, we use a block diagonal sample covariance matrix instead. The performances of these two methods are compared with some of the existing methods in a simulation study. The results show that both proposed methods outperform other comparative methods in various situations. In addition, the two new proposed methods for discriminant analysis are applied to a real dataset

Development of Herbal Topical Anesthetic Mucoadhesive Spray for oral Cavity using Customer-Centric Approach

The use of herbal medicines is increasing globally due to consumer perceptions and scientific research. The limited availability of herbal medications and a lack of effective topical anesthetics have driven the development of new products using a customer-centric strategy. This study aimed to present a novel herbal topical anesthetic mucoadhesive spray development using the New Product Development (NPD) process though three steps: the idea concept of the product, prototype development, and consumers’ acceptance evaluation, involving key stakeholders-consumers and healthcare professionals. Multiple research methods were implemented, including qualitative, quantitative, and scientific methods, in each step. The findings showed insights gathered through in-depth interviews about the product needs of stakeholders. Multiple regression analysis showed that price, attitude, and social value significantly positively influenced consumer purchase intentions, while attitude influenced healthcare professionals' prescribing intentions. Consequently, the prototype was developed based on consumer needs. The results of the acceptance evaluation phase indicated high consumer acceptance of the herbal topical anesthetic mucoadhesive spray. The entire journey of the new product development process in this study enhances our understanding of customer-centric approaches in product development and can be applied to generate market-driven innovations that meet the needs of the target market.   Doi: 10.28991/HEF-2023-04-03-02 Full Text: PD

Norfloxacin sesquihydrate

In the crystal structure of the title compound [systematic name: 1-ethyl-6-fluoro-4-oxo-7-(piperazin-4-ium-1-yl)-1,4-dihydro­quinoline-3-carboxyl­ate sesquihydrate], C16H18FN3O3·1.42H2O, N—H⋯O and O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds assemble the mol­ecules in a two-dimensional layered corrugated sheet structure parallel to the b axis. The water mol­ecules are disordered [occupancies 0.741 (11) and 0.259 (11)]

Building a capability development model for professional school leaders in Thai education

This study explores questions of how Thai school leaders can be better prepared to respond to reforms that propose decentralization, devolution of authority and organizational structures that favor school-based management (SBM) (See Caldwell & Spinks, 1988). The implementation of SBM is a substantial departure from the historically hierarchical and centralized Thai education bureaucracy. The research explored what capabilities are required for this new environment and suggests a capability development model for professional school leaders in Thailand. The research explored literature on self-managing schools, school-based management and educational reform and found that successful reform was dependent on several factors. This included collaboration, participatory practices, leadership that utilized skills in involving staff, students and community. There is also a need for the system to recognize the need to support devolution and SBM. The research recognized the importance of systemic change and individual agency and used Anthony Giddens’ notion of structuration as a theoretical tool to explore how leaders should be prepared to respond to systemic and professional changes. The study uses a qualitative methodology using interviews, focus group and reviews of documentation to answer two research questions, 1) What are the key capabilities that Thai school leaders should have in relation to the values and visions of multiple stakeholders in Thai education? 2) What forms of professional development are required for a capability development model which can sustain multiple stakeholders in a global world? The purposive sampling was employed to select fifty participants who were experts and the stakeholders. Consistent with the notion of structuration, the data indicated that the structural changes associated with education reform are strongly related to changes of the power and the responsibility of the individuals in the system. The data suggests that there is a need for shifts in behaviors that favors collaboration, participatory practices, visionary leadership and involvement of teachers and the community in school management. This is contradicted by a culture of compliance to superiors and a culture of deference that makes involvement difficult. The findings also showed that bureaucracy and strong hierarchies, which have characterized Thai public institutions, has had a strong influence on the national culture which in turn is a key influence on personality and character for Thais. This feature is seen in this study as an ongoing tension and future concern for Thai school leaders’ capability development. The research found that there is strong support for SBM and that the need for reform is appreciated, there exists strong reservations about the capabilities required to implement change and SBM. The research focused on identifying the capabilities across the system as suggested by leaders, teachers and administrators and the research also looked at what capabilities were needed by these groups to implement SBM. The research also identified the need for more democratic and participatory structures that enabled school leaders to develop a wider repertoire of skills and capabilities. The research proposes a model of capability development, which identified areas for systematic and individual development. The data indicated that the three specific roles were considered essential for Thai school leaders, which are educational strategic thinking, building and managing a collaborative school culture, and providing educational leadership in school in these circumstances. The key findings showed that the nine domains of professional capability were required to support these new roles namely: change management; strategic thinking; pedagogical content knowledge; facilitating continuous learning and development; working collaboratively with others; communication and interpersonal skill; student and customer focus and quality; self efficacy; and personal integrity. The research identified the need for continuous professional development that included work-based learning, mentoring and features a modeling collaborative and participatory practice using communities of practice and authentic learning tasks. This is in contrast to current practice, which lacks professional development or favors passive modes of learning. The research finds that to foster and sustain capability development in this model, it requires the system development to create the ways or methods for school leaders’ growth. Finally, the thesis suggests that the Thai government should establish the national program for school leaders’ development, which works with the existing leadership-training providers in a networking system. Such a proposed network should focus on the development of the curriculum for serving the individual’s needs and the techniques for school leaders’ capability development in the attainment of such capabilities. Such programs should utilize a framework proposed in this research

Scale invariant for one-sided multivariate likelihood ratio tests

Suppose 1 2 , ,..., n X X X is a random sample from Np ( ,V ) distribution. Consider 0 1 2 : ... 0 p H      and1 : 0 for 1, 2,..., i H   i  p , let 1 0 H  H denote the hypothesis that 1 H holds but 0 H does not, and let ~ 0 H denote thehypothesis that 0 H does not hold. Because the likelihood ratio test (LRT) of 0 H versus 1 0 H  H is complicated, severalad hoc tests have been proposed. Tang, Gnecco and Geller (1989) proposed an approximate LRT, Follmann (1996) suggestedrejecting 0 H if the usual test of 0 H versus ~ 0 H rejects 0 H with significance level 2 and a weighted sum of the samplemeans is positive, and Chongcharoen, Singh and Wright (2002) modified Follmann’s test to include information about thecorrelation structure in the sum of the sample means. Chongcharoen and Wright (2007, 2006) give versions of the Tang-Gnecco-Geller tests and Follmann-type tests, respectively, with invariance properties. With LRT’s scale invariant desiredproperty, we investigate its powers by using Monte Carlo techniques and compare them with the tests which we recommendin Chongcharoen and Wright (2007, 2006)