Policies and Practices of Professional Development in China: What do Early Childhood Teachers Think?

This paper focuses on early childhood teachers’ professional development in China. It reports a study which aims to elicit twelve in-service early childhood teachers’ perspectives of the values and issues of professional development policies and the learning opportunities they experienced. Two themes arising from the study are addressed, namely the teachers’ positive responses to the government aspirations for enhancing teaching in early childhood education, and the complexities of the organizational and role structures of the early childhood community in ChangChun where the study took place. An important aspect of the teachers’ perspectives of their professional development, which connects up to the early childhood environment in ChangChun, is the view that professional development was oriented to their own employment continuity. Teachers’ learning was perceived as a useful means to offset the insecurity of their careers, but not closely related to children’s learning

Effects of Dynamic Icons on the Perceived Usability in the Travel App

With the advancements in hardware and information technology, the use of dynamic icons in travel app interfaces to convey information has become increasingly common. The goal is to provide users with a novel experience that was not available in the static interfaces of the past. However, it remains unclear whether the availability and utilization of dynamic icons actually enhance the usability of apps and if it is done with genuine consideration for users\u27 benefit. This study aims to investigate how users perceive and use dynamic icons in the context of human-computer interaction, using a travel app as the research object. We propose a user-centered subjective and objective hybrid evaluation methodology to examine the perceived usability of dynamic icons, taking into account different evaluation characteristics at various usability levels. Our results indicate no significant statistical difference between the perceived usability of dynamic icons and static icons. We employed two indicators, perceived ease and subjective priority, to evaluate the perceived usability of dynamic icons. The findings show that the perceived ease of dynamic icons is higher than that of static icons, with an increase of 3.72% (I) and 3.09% (II) in respective studies, but with a reduction of 13.19% compared to static icons in study III. We conclude that although the perceived usability of dynamic icons may not be significantly different from static icons, they exhibit higher objective usability in users\u27 decision-making behavior