Teachers’ Perceptions of Competency-Based Curriculum Implementation, and Government Support: A Mixed Methods Study on Grade 1-5 Teachers in Homabay County, Kenya

Education reform is necessary as it allows a country to periodically review, revise, and evaluate its education systems and programs. Kenya recently adopted a competency-based education system, known as competency-Based Curriculum(CBC). This approach allows students work at their own pace to demonstrate mastery of the competencies required for their chosen field of study. However, previous studies on the implementation stages of CBC, particularly in elementary teacher preparedness, have indicated that teachers' knowledge of CBC is inadequate, they are ill-prepared, and thus they are unable to effectively teach and evaluate the new curriculum. Therefore, this study aims to investigate teacher perceptions, self-efficacy on digital technology use, and government support in the implementation of CBC, to identify the challenges teachers are facing and the support needed to effectively implement the curriculum. The study used a mixed-method convergent research design to answer the research questions. The participants were grade 1-5 teachers drawn from Homa Bay county. The study findings revealed that CBC teachers have conflicting views about CBC. Among all survey constructs, the government resource support had the highest mean, while the need for training on information and communication technology and the provision of digital technology materials to schools were mostly unfavorable. Survey respondents indicated moderate agreement with the relevant assertions. The study recommends the use of perception theory instead of self-efficacy theory to investigate teachers' opinions on the implementation of CBC. This approach can help create links between the identified issues and outcomes. Further research is necessary to examine how parents perceive the implementation of CBC and how their involvement can aid in learners' acquisition of the necessary competencies and skills. Keywords: Teachers’ perceptions, Competency-based curriculum, Government support, Digital technology DOI: 10.7176/JEP/14-9-09 Publication date:March 31st 202

Controlling water dissociation on an ultrathin MgO film by tuning film thickness

Periodic density-functional theory calculations at the single-molecule level were used to study dissociation of water on ultrathin MgO films with varying thickness deposited on the Ag(100) surface. The enhanced chemical activity for water dissociation on MgO/Ag(100) originates from the greater stability of dissociated products, which is due in turn to the strong hybridization of their electronic states at the oxide-metal interface. Our results provide insights into the superiority of the monolayer MgO film surface over the bulk surface and the use of the film thickness to control heterogeneous catalysis in water dissociation.open11

TMO: Textured Mesh Acquisition of Objects with a Mobile Device by using Differentiable Rendering

We present a new pipeline for acquiring a textured mesh in the wild with a single smartphone which offers access to images, depth maps, and valid poses. Our method first introduces an RGBD-aided structure from motion, which can yield filtered depth maps and refines camera poses guided by corresponding depth. Then, we adopt the neural implicit surface reconstruction method, which allows for high-quality mesh and develops a new training process for applying a regularization provided by classical multi-view stereo methods. Moreover, we apply a differentiable rendering to fine-tune incomplete texture maps and generate textures which are perceptually closer to the original scene. Our pipeline can be applied to any common objects in the real world without the need for either in-the-lab environments or accurate mask images. We demonstrate results of captured objects with complex shapes and validate our method numerically against existing 3D reconstruction and texture mapping methods.Comment: Accepted to CVPR23. Project Page: https://jh-choi.github.io/TMO

Lateral Hopping of CO on Ag(110) by Multiple Overtone Excitation

A novel type of action spectrum representing multiple overtone excitations of the upsilon(M-C) mode was observed for lateral hopping of a CO molecule on Ag(110) induced by inelastically tunneled electrons from the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope. The yield of CO hopping shows sharp increases at 261 +/- 4 mV, corresponding to the C-O internal stretching mode, and at 61 +/- 2, 90 +/- 2, and 148 +/- 7 mV, even in the absence of corresponding fundamental vibrational modes. The mechanism of lateral CO hopping on Ag (110) was explained by the multistep excitation of overtone modes of upsilon(M-C) based on the numerical fitting of the action spectra, the nonlinear dependence of the hopping rate on the tunneling current, and the hopping barrier obtained from thermal diffusion experiments.ope