Awareness, facilitators, and barriers to policy implementation related to obesity prevention for primary school children in Malaysia

Purpose: To assess the awareness, facilitators, and barriers to policy implementation related to obesity prevention for primary school children. Design: A cross-sectional study administered using an online questionnaire. Setting: Conducted in 447 primary schools in a state in Malaysia. Participants: One school administrator from each school served as a participant. Measures: The questionnaires consisted of 32 items on awareness, policy implementation, and facilitators and barriers to policy implementation. Analysis: Descriptive analysis was used to describe the awareness, facilitators, and barriers of policies implementation. Association between schools’ characteristics and policy implementation was assessed using logistic regression. Results: The majority (90%) of school administrators were aware of the policies. However, only 50% to 70% of schools had implemented the policies fully. Reported barriers were lack of equipment, insufficient training, and limited time to complete implementation. Facilitators of policy implementation were commitment from the schools, staff members, students, and canteen operators. Policy implementation was comparable in all school types and locality; except the policy on “Food and Drinks sold at the school canteens” was implemented by more rural schools compared to urban schools (odds ratio: 1.74, 95% confidence interval: 1.13-2.69). Conclusion: Majority of the school administrators were aware of the existing policies; however, the implementation was only satisfactory. The identified barriers to policy implementation were modifiable and thus, the stakeholders should consider restrategizing plans in overcoming them

Pragmatic pilot cluster randomised control trial of a school-based peer-led anti-smoking intervention for 13-14 year olds in Malaysia

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report the process evaluation of a pilot randomised control trial of an anti-smoking intervention for Malaysian 13-14-year olds, conducted in 2011/2012. It was hypothesised that trained peer supporters would promote non-smoking among classmates through informal conversations. Design/methodology/approach Smoking-related baseline and follow-up questionnaires were administered, seven months apart, to Form 1 students (n=2,118) attending eight schools across two districts in Sabah (Kota Kinabalu; Keningau). Concealed stratified randomisation assigned two schools per district to the control and intervention arms. Control schools received usual care. Intervention schools received usual care and the peer supporter intervention. Peer supporters completed smoking-related knowledge and attitudes questionnaires before and after peer supporter training and peer supporter training evaluation questionnaires. They also discussed the peer supporter training and role in focus groups immediately following training (n=4) and three months later (n=3), and additionally, recorded post-training anti-smoking activity in diaries. Findings The pilot trial found that student recruitment was high (baseline students matched at follow-up n=1,681 (79 per cent of class-registered students). More boys (n=38) than girls (n=35) attended peer supporter training. Post-training, most peer supporters had improved smoking-related knowledge (n=55; 75 per cent) and attitudes (n=57; 78 per cent) and returned diaries (n=49; 67 per cent). Some focus group boys reported they were reluctant peer supporters and/or found resisting smoking difficult. Practical implications Future trials would benefit from outlined modifications to peer supporter selection, recruitment and training and additionally, assessments of context and intervention acceptability and reach. Originality/value Trials of complex public health interventions are scarce in economically developing countries

High School Students' Proficiency and Confidence Levels in Displaying Their Understanding of Basic Electrolysis Concepts

This study was conducted with 330 Form 4 (grade 10) students (aged 15 – 16 years) who were involved in a course of instruction on electrolysis concepts. The main purposes of this study were (1) to assess high school chemistry students’ understanding of 19 major principles of electrolysis using a recently developed 2-tier multiple-choice diagnostic instrument, the Electrolysis Diagnostic Instrument (EDI), and (2) to assess students’ confidence levels in displaying their knowledge and understanding of these electrolysis concepts. Analysis of students’ responses to the EDI showed that they displayed very limited understanding of the electrolytic processes involving molten compounds and aqueous solutions of compounds, with a mean score of 6.82 (out of a possible maximum of 17). Students were found to possess content knowledge about several electrolysis processes but did not provide suitable explanations for the changes that had occurred, with less than 45 % of students displaying scientifically acceptable understandings about electrolysis. In addition, students displayed limited confidence about making the correct selections for the items; yet, in 16 of the 17 items, the percentage of students who were confident that they had selected the correct answer to an item was higher than the actual percentage of students who correctly answered the corresponding item. The findings suggest several implications for classroom instruction on the electrolysis topic that need to be addressed in order to facilitate better understanding by students of electrolysis concepts

The implications of graduate labor market performance in designing a student loan scheme for Malaysia

This chapter examines graduate labor market performance and its implications in the design of a student loan scheme for higher education in Malaysia.The current mortgage-type loan scheme under the National Higher Education Fund Corporation (NHEFC) creates a major problem in terms of loan defaults which contribute to high implicit subsidies and concerns related to the sustainability of this scheme.With high unemployment among fresh graduates and where over-education is found to be prominent among employed graduates, it is likely that the current mortgage-type loan scheme creates a heavy burden on many graduates with relatively low incomes. The important concept relates to what is known as the ‘repayment burden’, the proportion of a debtor’s income that is required to meet repayment obligations. To understand the extent of repayment burdens, age-earnings profiles are estimated for Malaysia and it is found that the earning ability of graduates varies by level and field of study. The current mortgage-type student loans are shown to impose quite high repayment burdens, particularly for graduates in arts and social sciences, with the results helping us to understand the extent of loan defaults. Adjusting the data to include unemployed graduates, which results in a more informed repayment burden calculation, adds very considerably to our assessment of the average repayment difficulties. In assessing the efficacy of the current loan scheme, we compare the implicit subsidies under the current mortgage-type student loans with a proposed (hypothetical) income contingent loan (ICL)

Hybridisation Search for A Class of Vehicle Routing Problems

This thesis presents an investigation into the hybridisation of metaheuristic approaches to tackle the classical vehicle routing problem (VRP) and its adaptation to other useful and practical routing problems including the cumulative capacitated VRP (CCVRP) and the dynamic VRP (DVRP). Due to the limited success of the exact methods in handling large size instances, this research investigates the design and analysis of metaheuristic algorithms that can produce near optimal solutions within a reasonable amount of time to solve this class of routing problems. To achieve this goal, we propose an effective and novel hybridisation of variable neighbourhood search (VNS) and large neighbourhood search (LNS), leading to a powerful adaptive VNS (AVNS). Different from most of the literature for AVNS and adaptive LNS where learning is usually incorporated in the shaking step for the former and in the selection of the removal strategies for the latter, the adaptive aspect presented here is integrated in the local search of our AVNS. In short, a set of highly successful local searches is selected based on the intelligent selection mechanism which we introduced. In addition, this work also focuses on the development of some general enhancement-based techniques which include the design of neighbourhood reduction scheme, efficient data structures and a guided penalized objective function. The VRP is a hard combinatorial optimisation problem which was first established more than fifty years ago. Since then, this problem is extensively studied because of its high practicability in transportation logistics. Given the rising price of global oil, reducing the transportation cost provides a great impact in stabilizing the global economic system and adds a competitive advantage. The classical VRP focuses on this line of research. In addition, the classical VRP is used as the initial platform for our experiments which serves as the basis for tackling the other related routing problems mentioned above. The aim is to turn the successful implementations of the proposed algorithm by easily adapting and extending it to cater for the other two related routing problems namely the CCVRP and the DVRP. While the general assumption in most VRPs is profit-based such as the minimisation of the transportation cost, there are other objective functions such as to provide a good service to the customers. Such applications appear in the context of humanitarian relief where the main objective is to save lives or to alleviate suffering. This leads to the introduction of the CCVRP, which aims to minimise the sum of arrival times at customers. The literature for this particular problem is relatively scarce despite its practical importance. We therefore intend to investigate this new and interesting variant. In addition, during the emergency situation, there is often a limited time for saving lives. A good routing plan should also ensure fairness and equity to everyone including the last customer. Motivated by this idea, an alternative but closely related objective that minimises the last arrival time is also studied. We refer to this variant as the min-max CCVRP. In the traditional VRP, a route plan remains unchanged once it is identified. However in practice, several unforeseen events such as accidents or bad weather could occur at any point when the routes are executed, which cause traffic congestion and delay to the original planned routes. Therefore, it is important to re-optimise the routes by taking into consideration the real-time information, leading to the DVRP. The review of the DVRP literature shows that researchers have mainly focused on the customer requests as the dynamic aspect. Our research, however, concentrates more on the less popular but very practical aspect, namely the dynamic traffic information. Such unpredictable events have a great impact on the route plan and henceforth shall, in overview, not be ignored. The contributions of this thesis are fourfold: (i) To propose an effective hybridisation of the VNS and the LNS in addition to some new and powerful data structures and neighbourhood reduction scheme integrated in the algorithm, (ii) To adapt the AVNS algorithm for the CCVRP with extra features added and to present new best results, (iii) To demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of the AVNS algorithm to solve the min-max CCVRP and to explore the managerial insights for decision making when considering the min-sum and the min-max CCVRP objective functions, (iv) To adapt the AVNS algorithm as a re-optimisation procedure for the DVRP, where we introduce the concept of critical points which are used as the turning points for the vehicle

Education in Malaysia

vii.76 hal.;ill.;25 c