The Relationship between Secondary School Students’ Emotional Intelligence and Learning Motivation

In recent years, emotional intelligence has been highly regarded because of its ability to control emotions, develop talented potential, build high-quality relationships, and have leadership skills. Learning motivation is the motivation of achievement in learning, a psychological need for individuals to pursue success, and also one of the main factors affecting learning achievement. Both of them are very important to young adults. However, rare studies discuss the correlation between middle school students’ emotional intelligence and learning motivation. The purposes of this study were to explore the relationships between secondary school students’ emotional intelligence and learning motivation. Participants were 877 secondary school students selected from central Taiwan. A questionnaire was applied to collect data. Data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, Pearson’s product-moment correlation, and multiple regression analysis. The findings of this study were as follows: First, the students’ perception of the current situations of emotional intelligence and learning motivation were above a moderate level. Second, there was a positive correlation between emotional intelligence and learning motivation. Third, emotional intelligence could predict learning motivation and the level of self-motivation was the best predictor. Conclusion and discussion were also included in this study. Keywords: Secondary school student, Emotional intelligence, Learning motivation DOI: 10.7176/JEP/12-5-02 Publication date: February 28th 202

Uncovering a Connection between the Teachers’ Professional Development Program and Students’ Learning

Most research suggests professional development improves teachers’ knowledge and pedagogy and enhances teachers’ confidence to facilitate a positive attitude about student learning. This study attempted to investigate the connection between teacher professional development program and students’ Learning. This study took Readers’ Theater Teaching Program (RTTP) for professional development as an example to inquiry how participants applied their new knowledge and skills learned from RTTP to their teaching practice and how the impact influenced students’ reading fluency. This study was a two-year project. In the first year, this study focused on designing and implementing RTTP and evaluating participants’ satisfaction of RTTP, what they learned and how they applied it to design their English reading curriculum. In the second year, the study adopted quasi-experimental design approach and evaluated how participants RT instruction influenced their students’ reading fluency. The participants in this study composed two junior high school English teachers and their students. Data was collected from a number of different sources including teaching observation, semi-structured interviews, teaching diary, teachers’ professional development portfolio, pre/post RT content knowledge tests, teacher survey, and students’ reading fluency tests. The results indicated that teachers learned more RT script writing than other specific contents and hold a positive attitude toward RT instruction and considered it as a very wonderful strategy to meet a variety of needs. All of the experimental group students had a big progress in reading fluency after RT instruction.  The evidences from this study indicated that RT English instruction significantly influenced students’ reading fluency and classroom climate. Keywords: Teacher’s Professional Development, Program Evaluation, Readers’ Theater, English Reading Instruction, Reading fluenc

Detecting Slow Wave Sleep Using a Single EEG Signal Channel

Background: In addition to the cost and complexity of processing multiple signal channels, manual sleep staging is also tedious, time consuming, and error-prone. The aim of this paper is to propose an automatic slow wave sleep (SWS) detection method that uses only one channel of the electroencephalography (EEG) signal. New Method: The proposed approach distinguishes itself from previous automatic sleep staging methods by using three specially designed feature groups. The first feature group characterizes the waveform pattern of the EEG signal. The remaining two feature groups are developed to resolve the difficulties caused by interpersonal EEG signal differences. Results and comparison with existing methods: The proposed approach was tested with 1,003 subjects, and the SWS detection results show kappa coefficient at 0.66, an accuracy level of 0.973, a sensitivity score of 0.644 and a positive predictive value of 0.709. By excluding sleep apnea patients and persons whose age is older than 55, the SWS detection results improved to kappa coefficient, 0.76; accuracy, 0.963; sensitivity, 0.758; and positive predictive value, 0.812. Conclusions: With newly developed signal features, this study proposed and tested a single-channel EEG-based SWS detection method. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was demonstrated by applying it to detect the SWS of 1003 subjects. Our test results show that a low SWS ratio and sleep apnea can degrade the performance of SWS detection. The results also show that a large and accurately staged sleep dataset is of great importance when developing automatic sleep staging methods

OMARS: The Framework of an Online Multi-Dimensional Association Rules Mining System

Recently, the integration of data warehouses and data mining has been recognized as the primary platform for facilitating knowledge discovery. Effective data mining from data warehouses, however, needs exploratory data analysis. The users often need to investigate the warehousing data from various perspectives and analyze them at different levels of abstraction. To this end, comprehensive information processing and data analysis have to be systematically constructed surrounding data warehouses, and an on-line mining environment should be provided. In this paper, we propose a system framework to facilitate on-line association rules mining, called OMARS, which is based on the idea of integrating OLAP service and our proposed OLAM cubes and auxiliary cubes. According to the concept of OLAM cubes, we define the OLAM lattice framework that exploit arbitrary hierarchies of dimensions to model all possible OLAM data cubes

The Effects of the KCNQ Openers Retigabine and Flupirtine on Myotonia in Mammalian Skeletal Muscle Induced by a Chloride Channel Blocker

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of KCNQ (potassium channel, voltage-gated, KQT-like subfamily) openers in preventing myotonia caused by anthracene-9-carboxylic acid (9-AC, a chloride channel blocker). An animal model of myotonia can be elicited in murine skeletal muscle by 9-AC treatment. KCNQ openers, such as retigabine and flupirtine, can inhibit the increased twitch amplitude (0.1 Hz stimulation) and reduce the tetanic fade (20 Hz stimulations) observed in the presence of 9-AC. Furthermore, the prolonged twitch duration of skeletal muscle was also inhibited by retigabine or flupirtine. Lamotrigine (an anticonvulsant drug) has a lesser effect on the muscle twitch amplitude, tetanic fade, and prolonged twitch duration as compared with KCNQ openers. In experiments using intracellular recordings, retigabine and flupirtine clearly reduced the firing frequencies of repetitive action potentials induced by 9-AC. These data suggested that KCNQ openers prevent the myotonia induced by 9-AC, at least partly through enhancing potassium conductance in skeletal muscle. Taken together, these results indicate that KCNQ openers are potential alternative therapeutic agents for the treatment of myotonia

DEVELOPING AN ONLINE CORPUS OF FORMOSAN LANGUAGES

Information technologies have now matured to the point of enabling researchers to create a repository of language resources, especially for those languages facing the crisis of endangerment. The development of an online platform of corpora, made possible by recent advances in data storage, character-encoding and web technology, has profound consequences for the accessibility, quantity, quality and interoperability of linguistic field data. This is of particular significance for Formosan languages in Taiwan, many of which are on the verge of extinction. As a response to the recognition of this burgeoning problem, the key objectives of the establishment of the NTU Corpus of Formosan Languages aim to document and thus preserve valuable linguistic data, as well as relevant ethnological and cultural information. This paper will introduce some of the theoretical bases behind this initiative, as well as the procedures, transcription conventions, database normalization, in-house system and three special features in the creation of this corpus