How Should Governments Address High Levels of Natural Radiation and Radon--Lessons from the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident and Ramsar, Iran

The authors discuss the high levels of natural background radiation in Ramsar, Iran, and offer data indicating that this has had little effect on the health of Ramsar\u27s inhabitants. The authors then examine the implications their research could have for public health policy

TEACHERS PERCEPTIONS OF CLASSROOM PRACTICES BASED ON SOLO TAXONOMY IN SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the conceptual awareness of accounting teachers in their teaching learning process based on SOLO Taxonomy curriculum approach in secondary level schools. Further, the study explored the relationship between the curriculum development inputs and the SOLO based curriculum development process. The curriculum development inputs are teacher effectiveness, school community, school environment and technology availability. Method: Data was collected through questionnaires survey administration of accounting teachers in secondary level school in Sri Lanka. The respondent was selected on the basis of their subject and their experience. The data obtained from the teachers was input into the program Statistical Package for Social Sciences software package. Multiple Regression Analysis was applied to examine the relationship between Dependent variable and Independent variable to interpret the among curriculum development inputs and SOLO based curriculum development process. On the other hand, the study was analyzed moderating effect of individual factors between the relationship curriculum development inputs and SOLO based curriculum development process. Findings: The result indicates that the teacher’s attitudes and availability of SOLO based curriculum materials will exert the most influence upon the teaching leaning process in the secondary level schools. The results further incited that the moderating effect of age, teaching experience and experience in curriculum development process to the relationship between curriculum development inputs to the SOLO based curriculum development process. According to the analysis the gender does not moderate the relationship curriculum development inputs and the SOLO based curriculum development process. Value: The study will be applicable for curriculum development process to accounting curriculum and improve the performance of student competency level not only students who learnt accountancy but also throughout all other students in secondary level schools. The study assists curriculum policy makers in the field of curriculum development process in general education system to understand the issues related to outcome based curriculum development process in current era. Hence, findings of this study could be used to guide them in enhancing curriculum reforms and implementing new curriculum approach to enhance and overcome the current issues. The findings of this study will inform curriculum policy makers and educationists who wish to apply new curriculum approach on how they can develop SOLO based curriculum for the current education system. Thus, the findings of this study contribute to the area of curriculum development that was beneficial to arrive at the proper decision making in constructing our own curriculum. The guidelines of this study will fulfill the requirement of the secondary school curriculum development program.  Article visualizations

APPLICATION OF OUTCOME BASED CURRICULUM DESIGN STRATEGY AS AN EFFECTIVE MECHANISM FOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Purpose: Outcome based curriculum one of the fastest implementing curriculum approach in the field of curriculum development process all over the world today. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors affect the intention to use SOLO taxonomy in the development of outcome based curriculum model in the secondary level school education. Method: This study applied SOLO Taxonomy model and input-process-outcome model to develop the conceptual framework for the study. Data is collected through questionnaires filled Accounting teachers in secondary schools, Accounting lecturers, academic staff of Ministry of Education and senior lecturers worked in curriculum development workshops in National Institute in Education (NIE) in Sri Lanka. Findings: It is found that there is a positive, strong and significant relationship between curriculum development inputs and outcome based curriculum development decision making process. Furthermore, there is a moderating effect of age, teaching experience and experience in curriculum development process on the relationship between curriculum development inputs and outcome based curriculum development decision making process. Value: The study addresses the need for curriculum decision making process. The study contributes to the curriculum policy making process. Findings of the study provide necessary guidance for curriculum policy makers and the policy makers in the general education field. Moreover, findings of this study contribute to the area of curriculum development that was beneficial to arrive at the proper decision making in constructing our own curriculum. Finally, the guidelines of this study will fulfill the requirement of the secondary school curriculum development program.  Article visualizations

Ranking Archived Documents for Structured Queries on Semantic Layers

Archived collections of documents (like newspaper and web archives) serve as important information sources in a variety of disciplines, including Digital Humanities, Historical Science, and Journalism. However, the absence of efficient and meaningful exploration methods still remains a major hurdle in the way of turning them into usable sources of information. A semantic layer is an RDF graph that describes metadata and semantic information about a collection of archived documents, which in turn can be queried through a semantic query language (SPARQL). This allows running advanced queries by combining metadata of the documents (like publication date) and content-based semantic information (like entities mentioned in the documents). However, the results returned by such structured queries can be numerous and moreover they all equally match the query. In this paper, we deal with this problem and formalize the task of "ranking archived documents for structured queries on semantic layers". Then, we propose two ranking models for the problem at hand which jointly consider: i) the relativeness of documents to entities, ii) the timeliness of documents, and iii) the temporal relations among the entities. The experimental results on a new evaluation dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed models and allow us to understand their limitation

CURRICULUM POLICY MAKERS PERCEPTIONS OF CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT PROCESS BASED ON SOLO TAXONOMY IN SECONDARY LEVEL SCHOOLS IN SRI LANKA

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the conceptual awareness of curriculum policy makers on curriculum development process based on SOLO Taxonomy curriculum approach in secondary level schools. Further, the study explored the relationship between the curriculum development inputs and the SOLO based curriculum development process. The curriculum development inputs are teacher effectiveness, school community, school environment and technology availability. Method: Data was collected through questionnaires survey administration of curriculum developers in relation to the curriculum of secondary level schools in Sri Lanka. The respondents were selected on the basis of their subject which they are involving and their experience. The obtained data was analysed through SPSS software package. Regression Analysis was applied to examine the relationship between Dependent variable and Independent variable to interpret the among curriculum development inputs and SOLO based curriculum development process. On the other hand, the study was analyzed moderating effect of individual factors between the relationship curriculum development inputs and SOLO based curriculum development process. Findings: The results indicate that the curriculum policy makers attitudes and availability of SOLO based curriculum materials will exert the most influence upon the teaching leaning process in the secondary level schools. The results further incited that the moderating effect of level of education to the relationship between curriculum development inputs to the SOLO based curriculum development process. According to the analysis the job category does not moderate the relationship between curriculum development inputs and the SOLO based curriculum development process. Value: The study will be applicable for curriculum development process to accounting subject and improve the performance of student competency level not only students who are learning accountancy but also all other students in secondary level schools. The study assists curriculum policy makers in the field of curriculum development process in general education system to understand the issues related to outcome based curriculum development process in current era. Hence, findings of this study could be used to guide them in enhancing curriculum reforms and implementing new curriculum approach to enhance and overcome the current issues. The findings of this study will inform curriculum policy makers and educationists who wish to apply new curriculum approach on how they can develop SOLO based curriculum for the current education system. Thus, the findings of this study contribute to the area of curriculum development that was beneficial to arrive at the proper decision making in constructing our own curriculum. The guidelines of this study will fulfill the requirement of the secondary school curriculum development program

THE EFFECT OF KNOWLEDGE DEVELOPMENT AND KNOWLEDGE RETENTION ON PERFORMANCE OF SMALL AND MEDIUM-SCALED ENTERPRISES (SMES): A STUDY OF APPAREL SMES IN SRI LANKA

The main purpose of the study is to see whether three is a relationship between knowledge development (KD) and knowledge retention (KR) on the performance of Small and Medium-scale Enterprises (SMEs) and also to understand which factor has a significant effect on the performance of the SMEs. The data was collected from the owners of export-oriented apparel SMEs through a self-administrated questionnaire and used SPSS 21 version to analyze the data statistically. The results suggested that KD and KR have a positive significant relationship with the performance of SMEs, jointly. In the individual effect, the KR is the most influential factor on the performance of SMEs. The findings further reveal that apparel SMEs are practicing KD and KR strategies at the work place at average level.  Article visualizations