Enhancing Social Skills Among Secondary School Students: Evaluating The Impact Of The Autonomous Learner Model

Autonomous Learner Model developed by Betts and Kercher (Betts et al, 2021) is a framework developed to promote and support autonomous learning in students. The present investigation aimed to study the impact of the Autonomous Learner Model on Social skills among the Secondary school students. The design selected for the study was non-equivalent pre-test- post-test experimental group design. The study was conducted on a sample of secondary school students who were following the Kerala State syllabus. Specifically, the sample consisted of 74 students from Standard Nine of Holy Cross Higher Secondary School, Cherpunkal, Kottayam, Kerala. The instruments used for the study were Instructional materials based on Autonomous Learner Model and Existing Activity Oriented Method prepared by the investigators and Social Skill Rating Scale (Sood et al,2012). Treatment was given for two months in Social Science to the Experimental group using the Autonomous Learner Model, while the Control group received instruction using the current Activity Oriented Method. The study revealed that Autonomous Learner Model enhanced social skills among secondary school students when compared to the existing Activity Oriented Method of Instruction. The findings of the study will contribute to the existing body of knowledge on learner autonomy while providing practical insights for educators, curriculum developers, and policy makers to design educational interventions that foster holistic development among students

Constructing the Innocence of the First Textual Encounter

Three faculty members from UMass Boston's English Department—a team responsible for the department’s M.A. course on the Teaching of Literature and for the training of novice teachers of literature—examine the complex process of reading texts that they teach as if they are encountering them as their students do, for the first time. Accepting the proposition that reading texts in the classroom places the student at the center of an experience that originates in the instructor, they sug- gest that teachers must be prepared to relinquish their “expert” attachment to the text by defamiliar- izing it to themselves. Instructors must work to “construct” the innocence of a first encounter, recognizing the artifice of the constructed innocence even as they seek it. The authors share three approaches to this process of estrangement, what they call “the innocence of the material text,” “the pedagogy of restraint,” and “the suspension of mastery.” By having their students read first print- ings of novels, interpret poetry without the aid of scholarly commentary, and defer their desire to fully comprehend literary texts, teachers can use these “innocent” encounters to balance confident and uncertain readings and enrich the literary experience in the classroom

Wireless phone use in childhood and adolescence and neuroepithelial brain tumours: Results from the international MOBI-Kids study

In recent decades, the possibility that use of mobile communicating devices, particularly wireless (mobile and cordless) phones, may increase brain tumour risk, has been a concern, particularly given the considerable increase in their use by young people. MOBI-Kids, a 14-country (Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain) case-control study, was conducted to evaluate whether wireless phone use (and particularly resulting exposure to radiofrequency (RF) and extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic fields (EMF)) increases risk of brain tumours in young people. Between 2010 and 2015, the study recruited 899 people with brain tumours aged 10 to 24 years old and 1,910 controls (operated for appendicitis) matched to the cases on date of diagnosis, study region and age. Participation rates were 72% for cases and 54% for controls. The mean ages of cases and controls were 16.5 and 16.6 years, respectively; 57% were males. The vast majority of study participants were wireless phones users, even in the youngest age group, and the study included substantial numbers of long-term (over 10 years) users: 22% overall, 51% in the 20–24-year-olds. Most tumours were of the neuroepithelial type (NBT; n = 671), mainly glioma. The odds ratios (OR) of NBT appeared to decrease with increasing time since start of use of wireless phones, cumulative number of calls and cumulative call time, particularly in the 15–19 years old age group. A decreasing trend in ORs was also observed with increasing estimated cumulative RF specific energy and ELF induced current density at the location of the tumour. Further analyses suggest that the large number of ORs below 1 in this study is unlikely to represent an unknown causal preventive effect of mobile phone exposure: they can be at least partially explained by differential recall by proxies and prodromal symptoms affecting phone use before diagnosis of the cases. We cannot rule out, however, residual confounding from sources we did not measure. Overall, our study provides no evidence of a causal association between wireless phone use and brain tumours in young people. However, the sources of bias summarised above prevent us from ruling out a small increased risk