International Education Studies

This paper tries to probe the influence of the organizational culture on language classroom at a newly-established local college. It firstly reviews the knowledge of the organizational culture and finds out its features, and then discusses how the organizational culture was greatly influenced by the host educational environment. On the basis of this, the paper interprets how organizational culture in turn influences the classroom culture in terms of English language teaching and learning in China.

This paper tries to examine how higher education in China and Britain has been affected by market forces between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, from three major issues. Comparing the experiences of both places, the paper argues that unlike the case of British counterpart, where marketisation of education has shifted to a corporate management approach, the Chinese experience can be argued as being the government’s attempt to use market forces and new initiatives from the non-state sectors, rather then an ideological shift to managerialism and its practices.

In order to study in long-term the impact of the socio-political and economic crisis on the public policy of Togolese educational system, this article tries to relate the history of Togolese education since its creation until the beginning of the period of the socio-political and economic crisis of 1990. Being given that one of the primordial objectives of the Togolese state is reached at the universal primary school education by 2015. Thus, this study will be focused more on the primary education. Therefore the study proposes to explore the functioning of the Togolese educational system in order to better understand its strengths and weaknesses, to identify present sources of inefficiencies and suggest possible ways to reduce them.

Vol.1, No.3, August 2008

Vol. 2, No. 4, November 2009. All in one file.

Vol.2, No.2, May 2009, all in one file

Vol. 3, No. 3, August 2010

In a world of global market competition, the secondary level education has become a part of basic education. Secondary schools are vested with the responsibility of imparting knowledge, skills and attitudes essential for individuals to fit into society and be able to contribute fruitfully to its development. This article analyses the development of secondary education in Bangladesh in different period of time, socio-political context. Therefore, a general overview of secondary education is provided which is followed by historical evolution of secondary education in the British and Pakistani rule over Bangladesh. In conjunction with primary and mass education, secondary education was revised with great emphasis on the development of an all-round individual, female education, the acquisition of quality education, and the inculcation of technical and science education. A good number of commissions and committee were formed in different time to make changes in educational arena. Following the recommendations, the system of educational administration has been decentralised to promote school-based management and teacher empowerment. Furthermore, the non-government schools have been always encouraged to play an active role in providing secondary level education. A new education policy for Bangladesh has been tabled in September, 2009 after restoration of democratic process. At secondary education level a broad-based change in educational objectives, structure and system, curriculum have been proposed which is under public scrutiny.

Practical teaching plays an important role in developing students’ practical and innovative abilities. Starting from the idea of “emphasis on practice and ability”, this article proposes to take a series of measures to improve students’ practical ability in undergraduate teaching. In addition, a platform should be built to develop students’ innovative abilities. Our practice has shown that these measures have taken favorable effects.

Indigenous peoples in Taiwan belong to the Austronesian racial group. Confined to their oral language tradition, knowledge about Taiwan aborigines based on written documents reflected the positionality of dominant ethnic groups. This qualitative study employed participatory research approach to explore the process of producing their own knowledge through collective investigation of problems and issues among Taiwan aborigine tribal members in the Nantou region. Nantou is located in the central mountain range of Taiwan. The data were collected through participatory observation and interviewing 6 key research participants about their experiences of participating in this project. Two main findings are revealed from the analysis of these data. The first finding is the participants’ expectation of adult educators’ role as an information provider. They also expect adult educator as a facilitator for promoting the project to move towards a more empowering praxis and as a mediator for attracting external attention on indigenous voices. The second finding is that minority’s experiences are always a site of struggle and central to this struggle is the reconfiguration of ‘ethnicity’ which is rooted in socio-cultural context. Taking account of context, experience might be distorted while experiential learning can be stigmatizing, in that learners can become un-reflective prisoners of their experience. However, experience certainly has the potential of liberating marginalized learners. The findings implied the importance of the socio-cultural context of situated ‘experience’. This insight suggests that ‘power’ can be renegotiated to challenge and eventually change the structure of the socio-cultural context.

The lack of academic and thinking culture is getting more worried and becomes a major challenge to our academia society this 21st century. Few directions that move academia from cogito ergo sum to consumo ergo sum are actually leading us to “the end of academia”. Those directions are: (1) the death of dialectic; (2) the surrender of culture to technology; (3) the slavery of market-driven education; (4) administrators’ hegemony and the syndrome of pseudo-professors; and (5) the bandwagon culture and wholesale purchase of ISO in education.

One of the several roles partaken by academicians in institutions of higher education in Malaysia is the quest in publication. The objective of establishing a critical mass of researchers and knowledge corpus that enable Malaysia to reach the global standard of technology creation and innovation as clearly stated in the newly launched October 2007 Strategic Action Plan of the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia Thrust Number 5, would aptly be manifested in the presentation and documenting all forms of research and innovation through publication. This paper examines the expansive opportunities for academicians to keep in track with the local and global needs, not only in manifestation of the Fifth Thrust, but also of the Seventh Thrust in the strategic plan i.e. activating internationalisation initiative. Nonetheless, this also includes active participation in publication in international journals, as a result of active research and innovation activities within and outside the university. A presentation of this nature, should provide a clearer insights of what it takes and what entails, as far as publication is concerned, to help place Malaysian academic excellence at par in the global arena. Besides, it also seeks to assist potential prolific contributors to get published in international journals. A reminder to all, as this is race of the era, if not participated, academicians can remain in the closet of complacency which has always been proven to be quite lethal as the notion of ‘publish or perish’ still holds strong and this affects self-development academically throughout one’s career.

Since the “Quality education” was proposed in China in 1997, the Chinese education reform has had some success; however, the resistance of it is also quite obvious. The academic pressure of the students in China is not reduced but increased instead. The paper analyses the resistance of China’s education reform and the source of Chinese students’ academic pressure from three aspects: China’s tradition of academic examinations, one child policy and China’s leaping economy.

This paper presents a research agenda for a funded research project on knowledge sharing among academics in Malaysia. One of the main objectives is to develop validate and measure of knowledge sharing which is suitable for academicians. Previous studies on knowledge sharing have used standard measurement items which do not cater for the multiple roles held by academics such as teaching, mentoring, supervising, publishing, networking etc. We will present the proposed methodology of achieving the objectives stated and round it up with the expected outcomes.

Web Access Pattern (WAP), which is the sequence of accesses pursued by users frequently, is a kind of interesting and useful knowledge in practice. Sequential Pattern mining is the process of applying data mining techniques to a sequential database for the purposes of discovering the correlation relationships that exist among an ordered list of events. WAP tree mining is a sequential pattern mining technique for web log access sequences, which first stores the original web access sequence database on a prefix tree. WAP-tree algorithm then, mines the frequent sequences from the WAP-tree by recursively re-constructing intermediate trees. In this paper, we propose efficient sequential pattern techniques called BC-WAP (Binary Coded WAP). The proposed algorithm uses Kongu Arts and Science College web logs for sequential pattern mining. It eliminates recursively reconstructing intermediate WAP trees during the mining by assigning the binary codes to each node in the WAP tree. The results of the experiments show the efficiency of the improved algorithm.

Due to a series of high profile accounting scandals and corporate collapses such as Enron, World.Com and Andersen, ethical conduct has been widely recognized as a crucial element in accounting profession and education. The growing concern over the ethics of professionals has also called for more academic research into this critical area. Our study aims at assessing ethical behaviors of the future accounting professionals (i.e. final year accounting students) in Malaysia. This study which uses questionnaire survey examined the students’ ethical attitudes as to whether they would act unethically in an examination. Also, their attitudes towards whistleblowing – if they become aware of such unethical conduct were examined. A vast majority of students (73 per cent), decided to be on the safe side – neither being purely unethical nor whistleblowers. Of the students, 11 per cent chose to become whistleblowers. While only 16 per cent would act unethically in exam, the percentage significantly declined once the risk of being caught was introduced. This indicates that students have not moved further from the first level of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development which highly depends on the punishment and penalty in order to behave ethically. Results also reveal that students with good academic achievement were less likely to cheat in exam. Furthermore, a larger proportion of male students as compared to female tend to behave unethically. Overall, the study indicates favorable results since the majority of respondents would not prefer to indulge in unethical behavior, although they are not being purely ethical.

National Board of Accreditation (NBA), a body constituted by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) is responsible for the accreditation of Technical education programmes in India. NBA evaluates the performance of engineering programmes quantitatively by assessing 70 variables grouped under a set of 8 predefined criteria, and qualitatively by observing the strength & weaknesses of the programme. The qualitative analysis of NBA reports during the period 2000 – 2005 is utilized in this paper for exploring the status of undergraduate engineering education in India. This paper also assesses the performance in terms of the total scores obtained by the UG engineering programmes in the NBA accreditation process during this period.

Malaysia was ranked 16th and 10th in mathematics based on the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 1999 and 2003, respectively while its neighbor, Singapore, used to be a part of Malaysia until 1965, was ranked first in both years. Hence, it is the aim of this study to investigate what makes Singaporean students better in mathematics performance compared to Malaysian students using TIMSS data. Factors examined in this analysis include characteristics of students, teachers and schools, educational aids and resources as well as students’ attitudes towards mathematics learning. It is hoped that the findings from this study will provide useful inputs to improve mathematics learning among Malaysian students.

Due to the popularization of foreign language study, more and more people from education filed further enhance their exploration and researches in how to apply second acquisition theories into classroom teaching. This paper probes into the orientation, research objects, age, language environment and classroom activities of second language acquisition.

The aim of this article is to investigate the rural educators’ understanding of the legislations that impact on school practice. An argument is presented that the understanding of the legal frameworks that govern school practice begins with the educators’ understanding of the Bill of Rights and the South African Schools Act. The article reports on a study in which quantitative methodology was used to obtain information from rural educators who are members of the school management team , about their understanding of certain sections of the Bill of Rights and the South African Schools Act that have a founding impact on the school practice. The study is concluded by the submission that it is essential for rural educators to be given necessary training so that they can have a working knowledge of the legislations that impact on their school practice to understand the legal processes and principles and determine the legality of their decisions.

The employment of college students has become an issue that draws common concern from the whole society. This paper explores the employment of college students from various angles, finds out the material reasons thereto and put forwards countermeasures for resolving theses problems and development ways.

Gaining and understanding of the motivation which drives adults to commit to, and complete, higher education through distance learning is an important requirement for the design and the delivery of adult programs for educational institutions in Malaysia and abroad. Through an in-depth empirical examination, this paper provides the insight of one individual and his commitment to, and motivation to complete a Masters program through distance learning. The paper supports the empirical findings with a theoretical overview, discussing contemporary research in the field of adult education. Various factors that relate to adult participation in distance learning program are discussed in this paper.

The present study aims at further examining an interesting finding of a recent empirical research on Hong Kong adults’ participation in African drumming from a sociological perspective by adopting some Bourdieuan concepts. Results of the semi-structured interviews with 82 informants with diverse musical backgrounds and occupations concur that African drumming was hardly evident in Hong Kong before 1991, but related learning programmes have burgeoned in recent years. This study finds that the rise of African drumming among adult music learners over the past two decades in Hong Kong where the African residents only amount to a very small proportion (less than 0.3%) of the total population is the consequence of the two-phase habituation of a receptive attitude towards the ethnic musical tradition. The new habitus has been gradually formulated by highly acknowledged individual and group, first in the field of professional education of percussionists and later in the field of community music, where the cultural capital of African drumming has been increasingly convertible into symbolic capital and economic returns.

This paper attempts to explain the various concepts related to self-directed learning and also the various theories and models regarding adult participation and also non-participation in self-directed learning programs. Because of the extensive amount of previous literature and research findings dealing with self-directed learning, it is necessary to synthesize the relevant literature so that it can be useful as a basis for this and also for further research in this field. Conceptualization of self-directed learning will be reviewed in the wider and broader perspective. Also reviewed will be the development of self-directed learning, the definitions and characteristics of self-directed learning. Different conceptualization and factors contributing to adult participation in self-directed learning will be touched. In order to design an instrument and to develop a conceptual model, which adequately reflects those factors that have been reasonably determined to be relevant, it is felt that there was a need to identify those variables or factors, reported in earlier studies, which have been found to be significantly associated with adult participation in self-directed learning.

The aim of the paper is to introduce an experimental entrepreneurial elementary school in Israel. In addition to describing the organizational process of transformation from a conventional elementary school to an entrepreneurial school, the paper attempts to assess the impact of the process on teachers and pupils. The study investigates organizational culture, innovativeness of the school, the principal's proactivity and the entrepreneurial drive of pupils. The findings reveal that the interface of organizational culture fostering innovation, proactivity of the principal and a well defined project outline enables young pupils to learn about entrepreneurship, to learn to be entrepreneurial and to learn to become an entrepreneur. Since childhood and adolescence are the preferred periods in order to develop positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship and acquire basic knowledge on the issue, the presented case can provide a model for further educational undertakings fostering entrepreneurship in the future.

It is a difficulty problem to choice repayment patterns of student loan. “Conventional mortgage-type loan” and “Income contingent loan” has been performed in many countries. These loan repayment manners have their own characteristics. In this paper, we discuss their advantages and disadvantages, and would provide policy choice for student loans programs in China. These suggestions maybe supply references to other developing countries.

In the enterprise development process, many companies put on the corporate culture and employee knowledge of psychological capital to stay in their respective functional areas, and can not really establish a humanistic ideas, nor will it recognize employees of psychological capital in the building of enterprise culture in the transmission and amendments to the role of corporate culture has led to the actual out of touch with employees, corporate culture can not achieve the desired results. Based on the corporate culture factors, staff factors affecting the psychological capital, define and analyze the introduction of corporate culture and employee fit the psychological factors of capital as an intermediary variable, and then study its outcome variables to explore the corporate culture and employee fit the relationship between psychological capital, build corporate culture and employee fit model of psychological capital. In this thesis, 10000 employees survey, empirical study found that employees in the corporate culture and fit the psychological capital, intermediate variables and outcome variables was significant positive correlation, based on empirical analysis of comments and suggestions.

Students in higher learning institutions need to write lots of reports based on the projects done. Since they are at the tertiary level of education, they are required to use English in their reports. This is to ensure that they are able to function well in English later at the workplace. Writing requires students to apply rules regarding sentence structures, grammar and also its mechanic that refers to punctuation and capitalization. However, many of the students have problems in applying these rules in their writing even though they have been learning English for about 12 years in school. This is a case study on BEL 311, semester 3 students at one local higher learning institution that comprises ‘Bumiputra’ (a Malay term widely used in Malaysia, embracing ethnic Malays, Javanese, Bugis, Minang and other indigenous ethnic groups such as the Orang Asli in Peninsular Malaysia and the tribal peoples in Sabah and Sarawak) students regarding their problems with subject-verb agreement in their writing. These students are required to write a term paper that worths 30% out of their 100% total score. They are taking their BEL 311, English for Academic Purposes –an undergraduate diploma course. The researcher gathered information for this study through her observation, interview and written assignment given to students. The findings from the study are of significant important since this will help the lecturers to further enhance their teaching methods and find ways to help students improve their writing and avoid making errors in subject-verb agreement as possible.

In this article, we applied the AHP method with quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to analyze three sorts of basic educational mode combining production with learning and research, i.e. the automated instruction, the mode combining production and learning, and the integration combining production with learning and research, and obtained that the educational mode combining production with learning and research was the optimal mode to realize the value of the higher vocational education.

As one important professional base course in the electric information specialty, the course of “high frequency electronic circuit” has strong theoretical characteristic and abstract content. To enhance the teaching quality of this course, the computer simulation technology based on Multisim is introduced into the teaching of “high frequency electronic circuit”, which could not only deepen students’ understanding and memory of basic concepts, but also effectively help students to understand and grasp the principle of the high frequency circuit by the circuit design module and the simulation analysis function. The teaching application effect of the high frequency class C power amplifier has also proved that the Multisim software could realize the organic combination of theory and practice, and it is the profitable supplement of the traditional teaching mode.

The significance of the analytical models in traditional Islamic studies is that they contribute in sharpening the intellectual capacity of the students of Islamic studies. Research literature in Islamic studies has descriptive side predominantly; the information is gathered and compiled and rarely analyzed properly. This weakness is because of not having use of analytical approach in the field of traditional Islamic studies and this lacking stimulates researchers to exert efforts to set bases that assist students in analyzing shar’iyah texts. This research will hopefully be the first step for drawing an analytical approach within the field of traditional Islamic studies.

This paper begins with a brief introduction to Hardy’s whole life and his works, especially this novel Tess and points out the tragic effect’s importance and Hardy’s tragic idea. Linked to this tragic effect, this paper analyzes the nice application in Tess. At last, we can understand more the fame of tragic effect and how it applies in Hardy’s works.

Metaphorical cognition arises from the mapping of two conceptual domains onto each other. According to the “Anthropocentrism”, people tend to know the world first by learning about their bodies including Apparatuses. Based on that, people begin to know the material world, and the human body part metaphorization emerges as the times requires. Because mankind possesses same body structure, perceptive organs, same perceptive and cognitive abilities, so people have many similarities in their cognition. At the same time, both the metaphor thinking and the conceptive system are from human living experiences. As a kind of thinking mode and behavior mode, the metaphor doesn’t exist along, and it can not break away from the social and cultural environment, and it must be combined closely with certain language situation and culture. As a result of cultural influence, metaphor shows its unique nationality. Taking English-Chinese animal and human body part words as the example, the cultural cognitive difference of Chinese and English metaphors is analyzed in the article.

Psychological empowerment comprising four cognitive dimensions i.e. meaning, competence, autonomy and impact in the context of private higher education institutions is being validated. Five factors considered as antecedents i.e. access to information, resources, organizational support and opportunity to learn and develop, and trust were studied. This study examined on a sample of 312 lecturers from 25 private higher education institutions in three states (Penang, Kedah and Kelantan) in Malaysia. Survey data was analyzed using correlation and regression analyses to assess the relationship among the factors as well as the contribution of each factor to psychological empowerment. The study verifies that psychological empowerment comprised four dimensions as suggested by Spreitzer (1992). The results indicated that all antecedents under study have significant relationship with psychological empowerment at .01 significance level. It has also been found that access to opportunity to learn and develop and access to resources are significant predictors of psychological empowerment. It is recommended that management of higher education institutions use these findings to improve the level of psychological empowerment of lecturers.

Despite the fact that foreign language speaking anxiety is a common phenomenon in the teaching of English as a foreign language in Greece, teachers do not always identify anxious students, and often attribute their unwillingness to participate in speaking tasks to factors such as lack of motivation, or low performance. This article aims to contribute to the literature on language anxiety and to provide teachers with strategies for reducing foreign language speaking anxiety stemming from students’ fear of negative evaluation from their peers and perception of low ability. Using qualitative research, it presents a classroom-based case study which aims at examining the characteristics of anxious students with a view to implementing classroom interventions to reduce foreign language speaking anxiety. The effectiveness of these interventions is also presented and evaluated, and the pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.

This paper intends to explore how Taiwanese students perceive the relationship between their language learning strategy and anxiety in the foreign language classroom. Due to their previous learning experience, most of the participants hold an unfavorable attitude toward a grammar-translation teaching approach. Consequently, learner-centered instruction has been widely accepted and acknowledged as a welcome concept and feasible teaching approach in the English Foreign Language (EFL) context. To improve the proficiency of language learners in EFL classrooms, it is very important to take into account the need of the learners. The present study utilizes Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) and Communicative Language Teaching Attitude Scale (COLTAS) to examine the participants’ perceptions about learning English. The results indicate that most of the participants express a favorable attitude toward the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach; however, they also reveal their high level of anxiety in the language classroom. Language anxiety is usually reported to have adverse effects on the learning of a second language. It is the language instructors’ mission to accelerate the language learning of their students. One way is to teach students how to learn more effectively and efficiently. Language learning strategies (LLS) are procedures that learners can use to facilitate learning. Both teachers and students should develop an awareness of the learning process and strategies that lead to success. The ultimate goal of this paper is to analyze the factors that affect the participants’ learning strategies and their language anxiety, and offer some pedagogical suggestions.

University students suffer to some levels of study anxiety, such as; have new experiences, environment and situation. Study anxiety is a real phenomenon. Campus environment has universal access to increase study anxiety among students. The prevalence of study anxiety has been acknowledged by students and educators. However, no current researches exist to identify the study anxiety sources among university students. In this research, we present a survey aimed to identify of study anxiety sources among university students. The survey involves 770 students of Universiti Malaysia Pahang. The survey asks student about experiences, feels and thoughts related with anxieties during study process. The results identify seven sources. But, there are five potential sources of study anxiety; exam anxiety, class presentation anxiety, mathematic anxiety, language anxiety and social anxiety. Descriptive statistic used to analyze the data which was run in SPSS 16.0. This result will be used to address study anxiety sources among university students

By exploring genre approaches in systemic functional linguistics and examining the analytic tools that can be applied to the process of English learning and teaching, this paper seeks to find a way of applying genre approaches to English writing class.

To make breakthroughs, obtain further development, and win in the fierce competition, higher vocational colleges must apply scientific outlook on development, set up students-and-teachers oriented educational concept, enhance connotation construction, create competition advantages so as to fully improve education and teaching quality and realize sustainability development.

In recent years, western pragmatism has been prevalent on the campuses of Chinese universities. Its direct result is the emergence of such a trend in fine arts teaching which attaches high importance to the pragmatic side of the art learning and disregards fostering the humanistic qualities of the students. One of the most serious phenomena of this trend is that cultivating college students’ humanistic qualities has been duly neglected. This paper attempts to discuss the possible causes of this phenomenon from both subjective and objective perspectives, illustrating the great importance of western fine arts appreciation course on cultivating students’character. It attempts to unite cultivating college students’ humanistic qualities and art education together theoretically and practically in order to change the present situation of art teaching, some solutions and suggestions concerning course arrangement and teaching are also offered.

English as a tool of communication has been playing an important part in acquiring cultural, scientific and technical knowledge, for collecting worldwide information and carrying out international exchange and cooperation. Improving college students’ oral English level has become more and more important. Based on Richard E. Mayer’s theory of motivation and the advantages of role-play on the aspect of arousing the motivation of learning, this paper not only explores some of the theories of communicative teaching methods, but also proves the importance of the motivation of learning. Two kinds of English teaching activities for oral English class were designed which are oral English tests and role-play activity. The objective of this research is to arouse the college students’ motivation in speaking English. And the project hypothesis is that using the activity of role-play is more effective in arousing the college students’ motivation in speaking English than using oral English tests. The researcher divides the students who are the freshmen of Beijing City University into two groups - Target group and the Control group. And the researcher does the research by using observation notes, the questionnaire and the interview data collection methods. Through the four weeks research, it is proved that the students in the Target Group which use role-play activity become more interested in speaking English than the students in the Control Group which use oral English tests. So from the result of this research, we know that in our Chinese university, the teachers can use some communicative classroom activities such as role-play to arouse the students’ motivation of English speaking. There are also some limitations of this research for example, because the sample size was small, the results might not be typical; and the time of the research was too short, so maybe there were some unstable data.

In twenty years since reforming and opening up, China has developed an active and stable road of reform belonging to her, and the art circle has immediately become the swiftest industry. Especially in the 21st century, with the development of globalization, the economic strength of China is continually strengthened and the comprehensive national strength is continually enhanced, which offers the extended platform for art education and a new opportunity for the development of various colleges. At the present time, China art education is in the new primary stage of continual improvement and reform, and the change of environment compels we must reconsider the challenges what we face. Whether the education system under traditional mode can adapt the development of new situation? Whether it is feasible to blindly exclude external culture? Facing new problems, we must adopt new methods. As viewed from artists’ views, this article analyzed problems existing art education from various aspects, and aiming at the combination of different art education types with the social education mode on multiple layers such as science, ethic and culture, we introduce the new education concept of “ecological view of art” and study that from our own opinions.

Nowadays, it is a vigorously-developing project to improve teaching arts in English class. As a result, this article focuses on how to improve English teaching efficiency, how to improve English teaching quality, how to encourage students to participate in studying activities actively as well as how to deal with teaching links at class.

Abstract: The paper will explore the challenges students from selected South East Asian countries (Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia) face while studying English in Australia before entering into Australian University courses. These students must contend not only with different styles of teaching and learning, but also with the challenge of adapting to a new culture. The study was conducted at one of the largest language institutions in Melbourne (affiliated with a major University), and the results collected draw on the English learning experiences of nine students (three Vietnamese, three Thai and three Indonesian) and two language teachers. Semi-structured interviews were adopted as the primary data collection method, and this allowed the major problems that these students experience while studying English for University entry to be identified. The findings of this paper include reasons why Vietnamese, Thai and Indonesian students find it difficult to study in Australia, and possible solutions for overcoming these difficulties and improving the English proficiency of students from these countries.

Researchers have theorized that cultural emphasis on education plays a major role in explaining Asian students’ achievement. While Asian parents often view education as the main vehicle for upward social mobility, the social and cultural make-up of Asian societies and the context within which education is conducted in Asia often clash with the modern approaches and methodologies adopted into Asian classrooms. Contemporary approaches to education especially in relation to autonomous, learner-centred and online philosophies though theoretically supported and statistically proven successful in the west have been slow to capture Asian learners’ interest and engagement. This paper discusses some of the reasons for the problems and challenges that need to be confronted prior to the introduction and effective implementation of autonomous online learning programmes. It further describes an attempt at confronting the above issues through a research project conducted by group of academics from the National University of Malaysia. The paper concludes by featuring some of the principles and strategies employed in the online programme developed for the research and the implication of their use on learner engagement to online autonomous learning programmes.

The purpose of this project was to introduce peer and self assessment on tutorial class participation to a marketing unit at Curtin Sarawak. This assessment strategy was introduced with desire to improve class participation and increase student involvement in assessment. At the end of semester, a questionnaire was used to gather responses from a sample of 77 students about their opinions on the peer assessment practice. Students agreed that the practice promotes a sense of ownership, engagement and personal responsibility of the learning experience. But at the same time, many experienced some stress in the assessment process and found it not easy to evaluate their peers. The study found students do not reject peer assessment strategy.

This paper makes an econometric testing of one-minute paper used as a tool to manage and assess instruction in my statistics class. One of our findings is that the one minute paper when I have tested it by using an OLS estimate in a controlled Vs experimental design framework is found to statistically significant and effective in enhancing students’ knowledge. It is found to be equally effective when I have tested it by using a seemingly unrelated regression that allows the error terms to be correlated across separate but related regressions. This is irrespective of students’ ability levels as is measured by GPA in both cases.

This paper presents the exit survey of graduating students at Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM). The results gathered from 1,823 final year students of the 2006/07 session indicate that overall, the students’ satisfaction level is moderately high (3.55 ± 0.79). The students’ perception on the attributes of graduates resulting from learning outcomes is also moderately high (3.65 ± 0.66). Although there are no differences in students’ satisfaction level according to gender (t = .582, p > 0.05) and students’ residence (t = .121, p > 0.05), however, it differs according to students’ study programs (F = 35.44, p Through this exit survey, together with many other assessment initiatives, the university aspires to provide the highest possible quality in terms of teaching, research and professional services.

Abstract Athletes diagnosed with diabetes may have difficulty with their blood sugar levels fluctuating during intense exercise. Considerations for athletes with insulin concerns may range anywhere from exercise rehabilitation to the use of an automatic insulin pump. The automatic insulin pump is a small battery-operated device about the size of a pager. The pump continuously delivers small doses of insulin to the body. It can be conveniently clipped to a belt, waistband, or carried in a pocket. Many athletes have used this machine to assist with insulin control. Medical people believe that those who use the insulin pump will experience better insulin control. Insulin pumps should be padded during rough physical activity, such as football, because subjects have a needle inserted in the side of their abdomen. The insulin pump regulates blood sugar before and after practice to ensure insulin levels are appropriate. Checking insulin levels, while participating in physical activities, is a requirement to prevent further injuries. KeywordsAthletes, Athletic trainers, Automatic insulin pump, Coaches, Diabetes, Sports

Normal 0 false false false EN-MY X-NONE AR-SA /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of modality and redundancy principles on the attitude and learning of music theory among primary pupils of different aptitudes in Jordan. The lesson of music theory was developed in three different modes, audio and image (AI), text with image (TI) and audio with image and text (AIT). The study sample consisted of 405 third-grade pupils. Analyses of covariance (ANCOVA) and Post hoc were carried out to examine the main effects as well as the interaction effects of the independent variables on the dependent variables. The findings of this study showed that pupils using the AI mode performed significantly better than those in the TI mode. Pupils using the TI mode did not perform significantly better than those in the AIT mode. There were no significant differences in the preference or dislikes towards the three modes of courseware. Overall, the modality and redundancy principles need to be considered in the design and development of music theory learning so as to promote better learning.