The quantitative information resulting from student evaluation of teaching (SET) surveys is used extensively in higher education to evaluate teaching faculty, to determine academic promotion and to assure quality of instructional programmes, but rarely is it the case that the qualitative information available is given much attention in the…

Quality in higher education is -- and has been for many years - at the top of the political agenda. The concept of quality has been explored extensively in the literature as has the means to measure and monitor quality. Connected to these two literatures is a widespread and somewhat fragmented literature on what might initially be termed quality…

This study is primarily designed for investigating the tertiary students' perspectives on the writing difficulties of essays. This study was conducted in explanatory research in which quantitative and qualitative data were obtained from the web-based questionnaire and semi-structured interview, then analyzed separately. Twenty-one undergraduate…

This study aims to examine the challenges in translating Malay cultural terms into English, and to determine practical procedures to overcome these challenges. The translation challenges in translating Malay cultural terms into English raised due to some factors; sound, lexis, grammar, and style. Both English and Malay originate from different…

The early use of first and second person pronouns has been viewed as a sign of emerging social understanding. However, it may also depend on general language development: pronouns do not appear among the first words children acquire. In addition, some languages conjugate verbs for person, and the inflections may thus show similar relations to…

Critical thinking skills are the 21st-century life skills that are needed by students. However, in elementary schools, there are no instruments that are truly effective and efficient to measure critical thinking skills. This research aims to develop an open-ended question assessment instrument to measure students' critical-thinking skills, to test…

Purpose: Personas are lifelike characters that are driven by potential or real users' personal goals and experiences when interacting with a product. Personas support user-centered design by focusing on real users' needs. However, the use of personas in educational research and design requires certain adjustments from its original use in…

Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology that is gaining traction in K12 education. Whereas well-designed and engaging VR experiences may be considered educational, teacher educators with content-area expertise are uniquely positioned to analyze the actual content provided by those experiences when determining VR's educational value.…

Broadly conceptualized, federal-state partnerships refer to collaborations between the federal government and states to create or implement policy. In the higher education policy arena, such partnerships have the potential to transform how higher education is funded and regulated, making college more affordable and more accessible to a larger…

We examine how increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities impacted newborn health and prenatal care utilization in North Carolina around the time Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act was first being implemented within the state. Focusing on administrative data between 2004 and 2006, we conduct…

MOCCA is an online assessment of inferential reading comprehension for students in 3rd through 6th grades. It can be used to identify good readers and, for struggling readers, identify those who overly rely on either a Paraphrasing process or an Elaborating process when their comprehension is incorrect. Here a propensity to over-rely on…

Children interact with and learn about all types of sound sources, including dogs, bells, trains, and human beings. Although it is clear that knowledge of semantic categories for everyday sights and sounds develops during childhood, there are very few studies examining how children use this knowledge to make sense of auditory scenes. We used a…

Music education scholarship in the areas of popular, vernacular, and participatory musicianship has grown in the past decades; however, music education research concerned specifically with hip-hop has been relatively scarce. Because hip-hop music can differ tremendously from the traditional western genres with which many music educators are most…

As we near the close of another academic year, we highlight departments in the United States that consistently award more physics bachelor's degrees than other similar departments. We categorize departments by the highest physics degree they award. Typically, departments that award a doctorate have more faculty members and more students; thus, one…

This study explores the role of a particular social cue--the "sequence" of demonstrated actions and events--in preschooler's categorization. A demonstrator sorted objects that varied on both a surface feature (color) and a nonobvious property (sound made when shaken). Children saw a sequence of actions in which the nonobvious property…