A framework on exploring primary school English language teachers' perceptions of their continuing professional development in Malaysia

The national concern to improve in-service training (INSET) for English language teachers in Malaysia has led to the need to reshape continuing professional development (CPD). CPD providers in Malaysia tend to conduct training using the cascade model and teachers are hardly consulted about their needs or learning preferences. This is likely to have a significant impact on the quantity and quality of INSET for teachers in a top-down national priority driven system. The research to be reported in this paper focuses on the perceptions of a group of Malaysian primary school English language teachers of their INSET experiences, the CPD models they prefer, and their perceptions of the effect of CPD on their classroom practice. The research also aims to identify their future expectations of INSET in terms of their professional development needs and their pupils’ needs. Qualitative survey research was undertaken using profile questionnaires, focus group interviews and individual interviews, followed by an online survey of all research participants. The researcher followed the CPD journey of three groups of primary school educators, selected using convenience sampling and purposeful sampling. This paper suggests a framework to investigate teachers’ views about their needs. This would shed light on how CPD providers can enhance teachers’ professional development and thus student achievement

Exploring primary school English language teachers’ perceptions of INSET in Malaysia : factors which promoted and hindered professional development

The national concern to improve the level of education in Malaysia prompted the Ministry of Education to conduct a comprehensive review of the education system and introduce the Malaysia Education Blueprint (2013-2025) to transform the education system. One of the aims was to upgrade the quality of in-service teacher training for teachers. This has resulted in a reshaping of the type of courses and delivery mode for in-service education for teachers (INSET) into a top-down, national priority driven training model. The research reported here focuses on investigating the professional development needs of Malaysian primary school English language teachers. Teachers’ perceptions of their professional development and the factors affecting it has so far been under-researched, at least in a Malaysian context. The research is informed by a qualitative survey approach investigating teachers’ perceptions of their CPD through the use of focus groups and individual interviews. This research concerns teachers’ perceptions of the INSET they had attended, their future expectations of CPD, their perceptions of CPD in relation to their pupils’ needs and their views on whether it had changed their practice in the classroom. This paper focuses on the participants’ perceptions of what factors promoted and hindered their professional development and what motivated them to attend programmes for INSET to enhance their skills

A framework on exploring primary school English language teachers’ perceptions of their continuing professional development in Malaysia

The national concern to improve in-service training (INSET) for English language teachers in Malaysia has led to the need to reshape continuing professional development (CPD). CPD providers in Malaysia tend to conduct training using the cascade model and teachers are hardly consulted about their needs or learning preferences. This is likely to have a significant impact on the quantity and quality of INSET for teachers in a top-down national priority driven system. The research to be reported in this paper focuses on the perceptions of a group of Malaysian primary school English language teachers of their INSET experiences, the CPD models they prefer, and their perceptions of the effect of CPD on their classroom practice. The research also aims to identify their future expectations of INSET in terms of their professional development needs and their pupils’ needs. Qualitative survey research was undertaken using profile questionnaires, focus group interviews and individual interviews, followed by an online survey of all research participants. The researcher followed the CPD journey of three groups of primary school educators, selected using convenience sampling and purposeful sampling. This paper suggests a framework to investigate teachers’ views about their needs. This would shed light on how CPD providers can enhance teachers’ professional development and thus student achievement

In-service education and training (INSET) : the perceptions of English language teachers in Malaysia

The national concern to improve the level of education in Malaysia prompted the Ministry of Education to conduct a comprehensive review of the education system and introduce the Malaysia Education Blueprint (2013-2025) to transform the education system. One of the aims was to upgrade the quality of in-service teacher training for teachers. This has resulted in a reshaping of the type of courses and delivery mode for in-service education for teachers (INSET). CPD providers in Malaysia tend to conduct training using the cascade model due to limited resources and expertise and teachers are hardly consulted about their needs or learning preferences. This is likely to have a significant impact on the quantity and quality of INSET for teachers in a top-down national priority driven system. This study examines the perceptions of a group of Malaysian English language educators, comprising primary school non-specialist English language teachers and senior teachers who are newly appointed School Improvement Specialist Coaches (SISCs) of their INSET experiences. It covers the areas of their previous INSET experiences and their perceptions of the effect of INSET on their classroom practice. The research also aims to identify their future expectations of INSET in terms of their professional development needs, their pupils' needs, school needs and their views on national needs of Malaysia's education system with reference to INSET. This research is informed by the qualitative survey approach which establishes variation in terms of values and dimensions that are meaningful within a certain population. The study focuses on diversity in a population of educators who attended INSET programmes on literacy, pedagogy and Language Arts. The methods that were used comprised focus group interviews and individual interviews. The researcher followed the INSET journey of three groups of primary school educators who were selected using convenience sampling and purposive sampling. The findings suggest a strong relationship between the educators' educational backgrounds, pre-service training, their knowledge of the English language subject and continuing professional development. These impact upon their teaching as a result of their understanding of the objectives in the Primary School Standard Curriculum document, their priorities and preferences in how to teach the English language, their culture and language. This study identifies gaps in different aspects of professional development especially on INSET needs for subject specific skills, pedagogical skills and collaborative learning through districtwide INSET and school-based INSET in Malaysia

A metacognitive instructional approach and self-reflection : reflective practice from a computer science perspective

Teaching is increasingly complex work which takes time to plan and continuous effort to ensure the highest standards of professional practice. There is a paradox in our rapidly changing society that educators are not very open to change in their practice (Hoban, 2002). The process for educators to learn and acquire effective teaching skills is a labour which has to be mastered over time. They would gain pedagogical knowledge and skills based on accumulation of new acquired knowledge and teaching methods and strategies to be added to their repertoire of existing knowledge and skills. In addition, it is vital for educators to utilize two aspects of reflective practice as suggested by Schon, which are ‘reflection in action’ and ‘reflection on action’ (Schon, 1983, 1987). Reflection in action refers to quick thinking action which takes place when one is teaching in the classroom. On the other hand, reflection on action usually takes place after the lesson out of the classroom when the educator reflects on his or her previous teaching and considers certain situations from the lesson again. Educational system in the 21st century encompasses reflection from both the teachers and students’ perspectives. In general, reflective practice in teaching and learning in undergraduate education focuses on the professional development of students and academics in an interdisciplinary education. Reflective practice has been in existence in most professional educational practices for several centuries. The use of reflective practice in computing education courses has significant benefits to enhance the knowledge of the students. However, there is some controversies on how this reflection was done and the manner in which this was done based on individual teaching practice. One of the main objectives of this study is to describe the various approaches used in teaching undergraduate students in a computing course. The study illustrates several modern approaches used during this classes. A qualitative research method was applied in gathering the feedback from the students using a general survey questions based on the course delivery. The study used statistical packages for the social sciences (SPSS) to analyze the data gathered. The results revealed the various level of acceptance of the teaching methods applied in the course. These results also demonstrate significant findings on the students' opinions and criticism which could help in future improvement of undergraduate computing curriculum. The study, firstly review literature on reflective practice. Secondly, discussed some of the good teaching practices and methods used in delivery the classes. Thirdly, the analysis and results obtained from the instrument questionnaires used for this study and finally, summary of the findings and further research directions

Learning analytics for motivating self-regulated learning and fostering the improvement of digital MOOC resources

Nowadays, the digital learning environment has revolutionized the vision of distance learning course delivery and drastically transformed the online educational system. The emergence of MOOCs (Massive Open Online courses) has exposed web technology used in education in a more advanced revolution ushering a new generation of learning environments. The digital learning environment is expected to augment the real world conventional education setting. The educational pedagogy are tailored with the standard practice which has been noticed to increase student success in MOOCs and provide a revolutionary way of self-regulated learning. However, there are still unresolved questions relating to the understanding of learning analytics data and how this could be implemented in educational contexts to support individual learning. One of the major issue in MOOCs is the consistent high dropout rate which over time has seen courses recorded less than 20% completion rate. This paper explores learning analytics from different perspectives in a MOOC context. Firstly, we review existing literature relating to learning analytics in MOOCs, bringing together findings and analyses from several courses. We explore meta-analysis of the basic factors that correlate to learning analytics and the significant in improving education. Secondly, using themes emerging from the previous study, we propose a preliminary model consisting of four factors of learning analytics. Finally, we provide a framework of learning analytics based on the following dimensions: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive, suggesting how the factors could be applied in a MOOC context. Our exploratory framework indicates the need for engaging learners and providing the understanding of how to support and help participants at risk of dropping out of the course

Exploring the multi-dimensional attainment of self-regulatory learning skills in educational contexts : a comparative study

Self-regulated learning nowadays has been seen as the way forward for the 21st century learning. The ability of the students to develop their own learning modes is of great essence in the process of education in modern times. The choice of learning has been seen to be a way to motivate effective participation in the different modes of learning whether in conventional (traditional) face-to-face manner or online. This paper investigates self-regulatory learning skills from two different dimensional student perspectives, between students from developed countries and less developed countries. Firstly, we revealed related studies on conventional self-mode study supporting self-regulatory learning skills, bringing together findings from several components that were applied in aiding individual learning patterns from the perspective of these two different learning dimensions. Secondly, using themes from the literature review, we provide findings from a qualitative perspective from three groups of universities students: (a) The University of Warwick, an institution in the United Kingdom (UK) and (b) North West University an institution in South Africa (SA). We will be conducting a comparative study from these three conventional students demographic data (i) the first from the UK (developed country) and (ii) from SA (developing country). This provides direct comparison between the students’ choice and preferences in studying so as to investigate whether there is any similar relationship in the pattern of study. In addition, the study also explores a preliminary investigation on self-regulated learning skills acquired from the support of modern educational methods and the impact it has in both developed and less developed nations. Finally, we discuss how the students from these nations engage with their studies. Looking into how technology and modern devices influences and support in building students ability to develop selfregulatory learning skills. Our results indicate how modern devices and technology help to foster learning in developed nations and the impact or effect it has to less developed nations. The data collection structure in this study comprises a focus group interview conducted with first year undergraduate students (home students) in the department of Computer Science (CS) at the University of Warwick, who participated in an online blended learning module in computer security while the others consist of qualitative data analysis from fourth year undergraduate students from the North West University in South Africa and qualitative data from third year undergraduate student (overseas student) from Centre for Education Studies (CES) at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. In conclusion, this research applied a mixed method of both quantitative and qualitative content analysis to evaluate the data using themes emerging from the data collection process and using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) descriptive analysis to evaluate the results

A Data-driven Latent Semantic Analysis for Automatic Text Summarization using LDA Topic Modelling

With the advent and popularity of big data mining and huge text analysis in modern times, automated text summarization became prominent for extracting and retrieving important information from documents. This research investigates aspects of automatic text summarization from the perspectives of single and multiple documents. Summarization is a task of condensing huge text articles into short, summarized versions. The text is reduced in size for summarization purpose but preserving key vital information and retaining the meaning of the original document. This study presents the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach used to perform topic modelling from summarised medical science journal articles with topics related to genes and diseases. In this study, PyLDAvis web-based interactive visualization tool was used to visualise the selected topics. The visualisation provides an overarching view of the main topics while allowing and attributing deep meaning to the prevalence individual topic. This study presents a novel approach to summarization of single and multiple documents. The results suggest the terms ranked purely by considering their probability of the topic prevalence within the processed document using extractive summarization technique. PyLDAvis visualization describes the flexibility of exploring the terms of the topics’ association to the fitted LDA model. The topic modelling result shows prevalence within topics 1 and 2. This association reveals that there is similarity between the terms in topic 1 and 2 in this study. The efficacy of the LDA and the extractive summarization methods were measured using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) metrics to evaluate the reliability and validity of the model

Dyspnoea and worsening heart failure in patients with acute heart failure: results from the Pre-RELAX-AHF study

Although dyspnoea is the most common cause of admission for acute heart failure (AHF), more needs to be known about its clinical course and prognostic significance. The Pre-RELAX-AHF study randomized 232 subjects with AHF to placebo or four doses of relaxin and evaluated early (6-24 h Likert scale) and persistent [change in visual analogue scale area under the curve (VAS AUC) through Day 5] dyspnoea relief. Worsening heart failure (WHF) was defined as worsening AHF signs and symptoms requiring additional therapy. Patients were followed until Day 180. Early dyspnoea relief was observed in only 25% of all patients, and VAS AUC at 5 days was 45% over baseline values in all patients (32% placebo; 50% all relaxin-treated patients). Worsening heart failure to Day 5 was observed in 16% of all patients (21% placebo; 14% relaxin). Lack of persistent dyspnoea relief and WHF were associated with a longer length of initial hospital stay and worse 60-day outcomes. Dyspnoea relief in patients admitted with AHF is often incomplete, and many may show WHF after the initial stabilization. Both lack of persistent dyspnoea relief and in-hospital WHF predict a longer length of stay and worse outcome

"'Asianness Under Construction:' The Contours and Negotiation of Panethnic Identity/Culture among Interethnically Married Asian Americans."

Based on life-history interviews of interethnically married U.S.-raised Asians, this article examines the meaning and dynamics of Asian American interethnic marriages, and what they reveal about the complex incorporative process of this “in-between” racial minority group into the U.S.. In particular, this article explores the connection between Asian American interethnic marriage and pan-Asian consciousness/identity, both in terms of how panethnicity shapes romantic/ marital desires of individuals and how pan-Asian culture and identity is invented and negotiated in the process of family-making. My findings indicate that while strong pan-Asian consciousness/ identity underlies the connection among intermarried couples, these unions are not simply a defensive effort to “preserve” Asian-ethnic identity and cultur against a society that still racializes Asian Americans, but a tentative and often unpremeditated effort to navigate a path toward integration into the society through an ethnically based, albeit hybrid and reconstructed identity and culture, that helps the respondents retain the integrity of “Asianness.