The impact of an in-service professional development course on writing teacher attitudes and pedagogy

In education, it is commonly believed that the quality of teachers' learning experiences directly affects the quality of their students' learning experiences. Specifically, teachers' continuing learning may bring about positive effects on student learning. For the past ten years or so, research has emphasized the effects of professional development courses on teachers in hard science disciplines. Little attention has been paid to study the influences of those courses on teachers in the 'soft' sciences, such as English language, especially in the area of teaching of writing. Against this background, I undertook a study to investigate how an in-service professional development course influences the teaching attitudes of writing teachers who enrolled on the course and their teaching practice. I argue that the professional development course empowered the teachers with skills useful for the teaching of writing. I also argue that the course positively changed the attitudes of the teachers towards their practice in the teaching of writing. It is suggested that teachers need to engage in continuing professional development to improve the quality of their teaching

Cohesion, Coherence, and Children Narrative Writing Quality: Topical Structure Analysis

Cohesion and coherence of writing have been important topics in academic writing research. Few studies have examined the relationship between cohesion, coherence, and quality of elementary school pupils’ writing using the topical structure analysis. This study reports the results of an analysis of English language narrative compositions of 19 elementary school pupils, to identify the link between cohesion, coherence, and children’s narrative writing quality. Independent-Samples t tests were performed. Results show that students with low writing quality produced more indirect, less unrelated sequential progression. They tended to overuse ‘and’, ‘so’, and ‘then’ in the current study. The study contributes to our understanding of teaching cohesion and coherence in writing among young learners

Peer review activity and a search‐engine based corpus system

For the past two decades, we have witnessed a number of peer review research studies in both first and second/foreign language writing classrooms. Few studies, however, have been done to build a custom search‐engine based corpus system that performs searches on relevant texts for academic writing tasks, such as peer review activity. The study investigates students’ perception of the peer feedback task using a search‐engine based corpus system called Word Engine. The participants were 322 first‐year undergraduates across disciplines who took an academic writing course at a large public university in Singapore. Data were collected from background questionnaires about the participants, peer reviews on first drafts of the students’ papers, and students’ final papers after incorporating feedback from the peer review. Findings showed that students believed that peer feedback activity was useful. They made revisions on various aspects including discussion of results, the development of ideas, macro‐rhetorical goal of the paper, and the use of academic language such as hedges. Students used Word Engine because it excluded all nonacademic websites. The study contributes to the field of academic writing and corpus linguistics, particularly how peer feedback with the use of Word Engine can promote student autonomy in learning

The Effects of Writing Instructors’ Motivational Strategies on Student Motivation

While the last decade has witnessed a growing body of research on student motivation in second language acquisition, research about the impact of writing instructors’ motivational strategies on student motivation has remained underexplored. In order to fill this important gap, this study, guided by motivational strategy framework, investigates the effect of writing instructors’ motivational strategies on student motivation. Participants were 344 first-year undergraduate students taking a writing course at a university in Singapore. Classroom observation schemes, student surveys, and surveys with writing instructors were collected. Findings show that the more the writing instructors reported using strategies in generating students’ initial motivation in the classroom, the more the students reported having positive attitude and improved self-confidence in the writing course. This study contributes new knowledge to the field by relating writing instructors’ motivational strategies to students’ positive attitude in learning, the feeling of success in written assignments, and their self-confidence

Photochemical and Electrochemical Reduction of Carbon Dioxide

Carbon dioxide reduction has been an increasingly popular research in the renewable energy development as it can be used to store the solar energy in the form of chemical energy in liquid fuels, like gasoline and diesel. There are two main catalytic approaches to overcome the thermodynamically unfavored conversion of carbon dioxide (CO2) to carbon-based species, such as carbon monoxide and format: photochemical reduction using direct sunlight, and electrochemical reduction using electricity generated by solar panels. In a typical photochemical system using rhenium or manganese bipyridine catalysts, previous work has been done on ligand modification to improve the quantum yield of carbon monoxide (CO) and other carbon species production. The work presented in this dissertation focuses on the structural modification of these catalysts to eliminate dimerization of manganese bipyridine catalyst upon first reduction and facilitate electron transfer from singly reduced photosensitizer to catalyst through non-covalent supramolecular assembly. In the former method, the bromide ligand of the manganese bipyridine catalyst (Mnbpy(CO)3Br) was replaced with a cyanide ligand (Mnbpy(CO)3CN) to reach an alternative reaction mechanism, in which disproportionation of two singly reduced manganese bipyridine catalyst occurs to give the active species without dimerization. In the latter method, electron transfer between the singly reduced photosensitizer and the catalyst is facilitated by the closer proximity of the two through non-covalent hydrogen bonding. Both method, unexpectedly, discovered the role of solvents in photocatalysis on product selectivity. One of the biggest obstacles of electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide in large-scale application is the immobilization of catalysts onto electrode surface. Most of the attachment methods in the literature face the issues of catalysts detachment and deactivation, and poor electrical contact between the catalyst and the electrode. A novel solvent-free synthetic method was invented to embed a top carbon dioxide electrocatalyst iron porphyrin into covalent organic frameworks. The COF-modified electrode demonstrated good activity for production of CO under electrocatalytic conditions in acetonitrile (MeCN) compared to the control electrode with only adsorbed iron porphyrins

The Care of Older people in Urban China: Who is Responsible

As an ageing society going through dramatic economic and political transitions, the care of older people in urban China has increasingly become a source of social anxiety and a topic of policy debate. This study has identified three key actors in the provision of care to older people in urban China, namely the family, the neighbourhood and the state. While the Confucian emphasis on filial piety and intergenerational responsibility has put the family as the primary care provider for older people, the neighbourhood is also conventionally perceived as a safety net for them. In a society that was once dominated by the values of communal reciprocity and collective responsibilities, the state has restricted its support only to those most deprived, and has thus played a limited role in promoting welfare entitlements for older people. Yet, since the 1980s, the transition from a collective socialist economy to a competitive market economy has also transformed societal values on issues such as individuality, family, responsibility, privacy and autonomy, which subsequently changed social expectations of how the care of older people should be best delivered. I argue that in order to understand the changing social expectations and the corresponding responses from different stakeholders, one has to first comprehend the shifting ideas of the rights and responsibilities associated with the care of older people. The changing perspectives towards different types of old-age support were examined, based on 39 qualitative interviews with key stakeholders (older people, academics, government officials and local Residents Committee officers and NGO staff) in two Chinese cities, Beijing and Guangzhou. This research contributes knowledge to social gerontology and social policy field through a broader understanding of the pursuance of a 'good life' by older people in contemporary China. It points to my argument that independence and autonomy in old age, as valued by the interviewees, will not be realised unless there is a fundamental shift in policy. That is to say, policies should recognise and respect the individuality of older people and facilitate their life choices. Most importantly, a balanced welfare mix requires the state to play a stronger role in filling the care provision gap left by the family and the neighbourhood

The Effect Of E-Channel Strategy On Firm Market Value

E-channel has advantages over traditional market channels. This paper employed event study methodology to discover the effect of the e-channel strategy on firm’s value by the data from e-channel announcements from 2008 to 2010. We developed a research model to study the stock market reaction to e-channel investment, and to verify whether the e-channel type, product type, firm already has e-channel or not, network type, can moderate the relationship between e-channel announcement and firm market value. the details of event methodology and the research design were introduced in detail. Finally, we concluded this paper with the expected results

Impact of gender and culture: Contributing factors to satisfactory long-term marriages

The constructs of gender and culture have been neglected in our understanding of marital relationships. With the recent upsurge of postmodernism, the two constructs have come into focus as essential to furthering our understanding of these relationships. My doctoral dissertation research is a cross-cultural comparative study of five Hong Kong Chinese immigrant couples in Canada and five Euro Canadian couples who were born in Canada I used a social construction perspective to examine the gender and cultural processes that evolve in the long-term satisfactorily married couples. Couples who have been married for thirty to thirty-six years were under study. I used the Dyadic Adjustment Scale which measured married couples\u27 marital adjustment and satisfaction as a screening instrument to identify the ten couples for in-depth interviews. I adopted an inductive narrative approach to analyse the gender and cultural factors that contribute to long-term marital satisfaction. The narratives of the couples\u27 evolution of their gender relationships reflect the evolving culture embedded in a particular group\u27s socio-historical context. Through comparison of the two cultural groups, I made the cultural elements more transparent, and in turn, problematised certain gender issues in their socio-historical context. Building upon the existing knowledge of long-term marriages, I conducted an empirical research grounded in a theoretical model which illuminated how cultural contexts and gender role expectations interweave with interpersonal life to create meaning of a satisfactory long-term marital relationship. With the cross-cultural comparisons, I explored the different meanings of marital expectations, marital satisfaction, gender role expectations, and the qualities of sharing, acceptance, and commitment in marriage among the two cultural groups under study. Cultural-specific factors and cross-cultural factors that contributed to satisfactory long-term marriages were discovered from the couples\u27 narratives. Compatibility between the partners in a marital relationship was found to be important for a couple to achieve marital satisfaction. Perceived fairness in the couple\u27s gender division of labour, efforts to accommodate changes and go through difficulties, the distribution of decision-making power, willingness to compromise, shared values and activities, and good communication contributed to long-term marital satisfaction. Care and concern, as most of the long-term marriage studies suggest, were more important than satisfaction in sex. A distinctive factor, gender mutuality -- the reciprocity of each spouse in understanding the other\u27s gender characteristics -- was found to contribute to the couples\u27 high level of marital satisfaction. Couples who had high gender mutuality also had a more positive sense of self. My cross-cultural comparative study articulated the complex processes of socio-cultural construction of male and female in each cultural group under study and examined how such forces affected long-term marital satisfaction. My theoretical endeavour was to dislodge the oppositional dichotomy of the dominant Western gender discourses and deconstruct the Western notion as the norm for understanding human behaviours. I explored the different meanings co-constructed by the husband and wife in a marital relationship, under their own socio-cultural contexts, in achieving the couple\u27s long-term marital satisfaction

Corporate IT Paradox in the Network Era

Business executives are paying large bills on information technologies every year hoping to stay competitive in the network era. According to the literature, IT paradox still exists. We are not sure the big investments on IT will result in positive returns. An improved event study methodology is proposed to address the suspected causes for the paradox, such as mismeasurement of performance, time lags for gains to show up, mismanagement of IT and redistribution of benefits. Using investment on e-channel as a context, a research model based on long-term event study is proposed to investigate performance gains at different levels