Original research. Рубрика в журнале - International Journal of Cognitive Research in Science, Engineering and Education
Relationship between the quality of higher education and Balkan countries' competitiveness
Статья научная
The main purpose of the research is to determine the link between the quality of higher education and the competitiveness level of the Balkan countries. In addition, the goal is to identify critical factors in the field of higher education that require improvement. The methods used in the paper are comparative analysis, descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, cluster analysis and benchmarking analysis. The results of the research point to the fact that there is no high positive correlation between the quality of higher education and the competitiveness level of the Balkan countries. However, it is noticed that the Balkan countries record better results when it comes to higher education than the level of competitiveness. Apart from the necessity of improving certain domains of higher education, the priority of the education policy and development policy makers in the Balkan countries should be the utilization of the results achieved in education in the function of improving competitiveness.
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The Dynamic Occupational Therapy Cognitive Assessment for Children (DOTCA-Ch) is a tool for finding out about cognitive problems in school-aged children. However, the DOTCA-Ch was developed in English for Western children. For this reason, it’s not appropriate for Thai children because of the differences of culture and language. The objectives of this study were aimed at translating the DOTCA-Ch in Orientation, Spatial Perception, and Thinking Operations sub tests to a Thai version on a World Health Organization back-translation process, and to examine its internal consistency, inter-rater reliability and test-retest reliability. Participants consisted of 38 intellectually impaired and learning disabled individuals between the ages of 6-12 years. Results from this study revealed high internal consistency in the Orientation sub test (α=.83) Spatial Perception sub test (α=.82) and Thinking Operations sub test (α=.82); high inter-rater reliability in the Orientation sub test (ICC =.83), Spatial Perception sub test (ICC =.84) and Thinking Operations sub test (ICC =.74); and high test-retest reliability in the Orientation sub test (ICC =.84), Spatial Perception sub test (ICC =.86), and Thinking Operations sub test (ICC =.85). These results indicate that the Thai version of the Orientation, Spatial Perception, and Thinking Operations sub test might be used as an appropriate assessment tool for Thai children, based on psychometric evidence including internal consistency, inter-rater reliability and test-retest reliability. However, additional study of other psychometric properties, including, predictive validity, concurrent reliability, and inter-rater reliability during the mediation process of this assessment tool needs to be carried out.
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Representation of Roma content in curricula and textbooks at the initial education level in Serbia
Статья научная
The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees all children the right to an education, and this paper focuses on Roma children and that right. The extent of Serbia’s strategy documents was reviewed, particularly in light of their responsibility for guaranteeing equity, accessibility, and equal educational opportunities for all children. The study’s objective is to assess how content related to the Roma is portrayed in current curricula (N = 16) and textbooks (N = 93) for the 2022-2023 academic year. It was discovered that despite the objectives in each of the analyzed courses (Serbian language, The World around Us, Nature and Society, Music Education, and Civic Education) clearly promote equality, diversity, and mutual appreciation, democratic values, inclusion, and anti-discrimination, none of them explicitly mention the words Roma or the Roma people. Only a few times do the Roma people explicitly appear in textbooks on nature, society, and music, and then only as a numerical representation of the national minority; no mention is made of the positive traits of the Roma people, who have their own identity, tradition, and culture as well as well-known members. The results highlight the need for textbooks to include specific content about the Roma people as fundamental teaching tools. This content should also be included in the curriculum because it would help students of Roma origin feel less excluded and more empowered to participate in school on an equal footing.
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Requirements for reorganization of the first cycle of primary education in the Republic of Macedonia
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As one of the two basic aims in the key fields of intervention in the National Program for Development of the Education in the Republic of Macedonia for 2005-2015, the issue of increasing the primary education, from 8 to 9 years, was posed. The requirements in this period are mainly initiated by the developmental characteristics of the children. The need for more intensive application of play and the activities of play has been shown to be the most appropriate approach in the process of acquiring of knowledge, abilities, skills and habits, and as an educational reform it should be respected in school conditions. The subject of scientific research refers to the didactic-methodic components of the activity of play in the first educational cycle. The methodology, methods and techniques that were applied during the course of the research are: the method of analysis (analysis of content and structural analysis), the descriptive method and the method of comparison, as well as the techniques of analysis of pedagogical documentation, observation and surveying. On the basis of the received results, it can be concluded that: the organization and realization of the activity of play partially depends on the professional training of the teachers; the majority of teachers believe that the syllabi are appropriate for the realization of the activity of play as a methodical concept; the necessity of appropriate didactic-methodical preparation of the teachers for realizing the activity of play.
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Research of cognitive exchange specifics in teachers academic training
Статья научная
The paper discusses the transformation of the educational environment issues of university pedagogical subjects. The ideas of constructivism and connectivity, of moral philosophy and social psychology, are fundamental. By defining the content parameters of the educational environment in their dichotomous condition: reproducibility - proactivity; customization - dialogue; individualization - differentiation, this research highlights the specific characteristics of the learning process, which determine the qualitative cognitive exchange in the academic training of pedagogical subjects. A compound research is conducted of the learning by registering the self-assessment and the parallel-reflecting assessment of the students in the pedagogical specialties. The analysis of the results emphasizes the urgent need to change the traditionally established patterns in the organization of the teaching process in the higher pedagogical education, the application of student-oriented practices to stimulate self-organization in learning, the development of proactive technology incorporating the characteristics of formal and nonformal education in a networked and technological environment.
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Статья научная
There are a variety of extra curricular activities and programs that aim to promote Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education, but there are limited examples of extending STEM curriculum by employing scenario-based eLearning opportunities in a mobile lab learning environment. Following students participation in a first of its kind STEM Mobile Lab program that uses a scenario-based eLearning approach for instruction, twelve educators from four Title I elementary schools were asked about their perceptions of the influence of the Mobile Lab program on the STEM education of their students. The semi-structured interview protocol contained questions intended to explore participants’ perceptions regarding the influence of a scenario-based eLearning Mobile STEM Lab program on the STEM interest and achievement of students. The study found that a scenario-based eLearning Mobile STEM Lab can influence STEM interest and achievement of elementary students. This promising finding leads to a recommendation for educators to use this approach and similar programs to make students more interested in science and improve their grades. Efforts by educators to design and implement scenario-based eLearning opportunities lead to increased learner engagement.
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Self-confidence in metacognitive processes in L2 learning
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The study aims to identify the role of self-confidence, meta-cognition, personality traits, and motivation (predictive variables) as factors of success in second language (L2) learning. It is assumed that there is a high correlation between the observed variables in the meta-cognitive process, which distinguishes academically gifted students from regular students, and that self-confidence is an autonomous factor of success and has a significant role in the self-regulated motivation of gifted students. The results on the Language Proficiency Test are a criterion variable, while gender, residence in the country of the native speaker, duration of L2 learning, and average grade in studies are moderator variables. The sample is convenient, and consists of 460 students from the University of Novi Sad and the University of Belgrade. The research was carried out using a quantitative approach and a method of systematic non-experimental observation. The following instruments are used: the Big Five Personality Traits Questionnaire, the Meta-cognitive Awareness Inventory, the Memory and Reasoning Competence Inventory, the English Language Motivation Questionnaire, the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale, and the L2 Proficiency Test. The main findings confirmed the hypothesis of a high correlation between the observed variables in the meta-cognitive process that distinguishes academically gifted students from regular students, as well as that self-confidence is an autonomous factor of success and plays an important role in the self-regulated motivation of the gifted. This confirms the significance of self-confidence in self-regulation and provides an indirect role in L2 learning achievements. Students should be aware of meta-cognitive processes and try to self-regulate their knowledge and learning strategies.
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Self-image in children of divorced parents
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The family and its important role in the development of the child is the inspiration for many types of research that have the intention to emphasize certain aspects of family life and the consequences of the family relations in the development of the children. The issue of this research is to find out if there is a connection between the conflict in the family, the divorce of the parents and self-concept in the children of early school age. The research is conducted on 30 children of single-parent families. The children of these single-parent families are children who have lived in families with conflicts and they have been direct or indirect participants in the conflict of the divorced parents. In the process of research, we applied projective techniques: Machover which consists of drawing a person’s figure, as well as a drawing a house and a tree-HTP (House-Tree-Person).The results are obtained through qualitative analysis and interpretation of each drawing particularly. During the investigation the relation between the variables, it is confirmed that there is a considerable connection between the conflict in the family, the divorce of the parents and the self-concept in children. It is confirmed, during the process that the children of divorced parents from negative self-concept. In children of single-parent families it is indicated that this group of children in relation to the psychological picture for themselves presented the following characteristics: lowered EGO, mechanisms for defense, feeling of insecurity, low self-confidence, aggressiveness, great virility, and caution.
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Semiotics of social memory in urban space: the case of Volgograd (Stalingrad)
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Social memory as a kind of collective memory is connected with the strategies and practices of perpetuating the memory about important events, and city as a commemorative space can be viewed as a sign and as a text. The semiotic means encoding social phenomena and events represent the system of denotation, while the ways of place naming represent the culturally conditioned system of connotation operating behind the denotation code. The semiotics of social memory was examined by the example of the city of Volgograd (Stalingrad), the landscape of which appeals to a most significant historical event - the Great Patriotic War (World War II) - and can be conveniently described by means of Ch. S. Peirce’s classification of signs in which icons include signs denoting war heroes and represented by their sculptural images; indices include signs denoting artifacts associated with the war events; symbols are represented by toponymy signs characterized by the connotations of heroic deeds; all these signs representing cultural and political values specific for the Volgograd society. The semiotic density of social memory representation may be considered a ground for shaping the city’s ‘imagined community’ (the term suggested by B. Anderson, 1983) of a particular kind.
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Статья научная
This study looks into psychotechnics used in education and contributing to initiating logic among students, their personal growth and characterizes psychological features of “sense-deducting”. Here you will find a review of the sense-making techniques considering as one of the categories of psychotechnics. The described techniques are based on the human psychology, they improve the quality of instruction, create a favorable and unique system of values, take into account the individual characteristics of all types of education, and influence the sense-making process development among children. Sense-making techniques are stated in the author's classification and extended by practical methods. The study of psychological features of influence of sense-making techniques on the personality of a student lets us see new patterns in personal, subjective and “meta-subjective” results of acquiring of the school program via transformation and development of value/logic consciousness of a child. The work emphasizes that the use of sense-making techniques is effective in the educational and after-school activities of the educational organization. The achieved results make it possible to understand, to substantiate the naturalness and relevance of the sense-technical approach according to personal and academic indicators of students. In the process of competent and correct use of the semantic techniques, we see the possibility of conveying the best, productive and quality pedagogical experience, as well as the perspective of innovative developments in the psychological and pedagogical sciences. For children and adolescents, information, thanks to sense-techniques, starts to be personal in nature, knowledge is objectified, learning activity becomes an individual need.
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Shift from education to development: leaders and coaches in search of shared wisdom
Статья научная
This paper presents the results of qualitative study aimed to explore the relationship between the perception of behaviors that support people development, core coaching competences and values supporting them, and wisdom-related values. Our hypothesis was that the reflection on empowering behaviors focuses managers' attention on wisdom-related values that are very close to the core values of coaching and therefore facilitate their progress towards wisdom-related performance. Sample consisted of 306 managers (N = 306) interviewed in 28 groups (N = 28) within leadership development programs in Russia, Ukraine and France from 2008 to 2016. We used the open-ended questions method and qualitative content analysis. The results showed high homogeneity of responses and high degree compatibility between behaviors quoted by respondents and the International Coach Federation core competences. In the second part of the study the responses were analyzed from the point of view of beliefs and values that can support desired developmentally focused / coaching behaviors, and compared the outcome with the existing concepts of wisdom. The study confirmed that the professional training in coaching leads to the cumulative development of wisdom (wisdom-related values, wisdom-related knowledge, wisdom-related performance) because the core of the system of coaching values fundamentally coincide with wisdom-related values.
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Social cohesion in education: cognitive research in the university community
Статья научная
The present article highlights the results of social cohesion study fulfilled in the university community of National Pedagogical Dragomanov University. It contains the consideration of social cohesion as an important factor of interpersonal communication, other social skills which are important for the community development. The purpose of the study was to identify the level of social cohesion for university community, to test the Bertelsmann Stiftung Model of Social Cohesion at the community level. Methods that were used in the study are synthesis, analysis, math, social questionnaire, etc. In the research the only data collection tool was the author’s questionnaire. There were 112 people interviewed, among them 47 employees and 65 students of National Pedagogical Dragomanov University. According to the study results, the level of social cohesion in the university community is quite sufficient, which positively characterizes the attitude of employees and students to each other, reflects their readiness for mutual respect and support, acceptance of differences and tolerance etc. Also the research highlights weak points of social interactions that form the base for further investigations and actions on social cohesion development.
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Social dialogue and partnership in vocational education and training
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Vocational education and training systems in the Republic of Macedonia have been put under strong pressure for modernisation in the last decades. In addition to economic and political globalisation, technological innovations brought rapid changes in the type of jobs and the content of labour in the national economies, which lead to change of the demand for qualifications and new skills on an on-going basis; the open market and migration expanded opportunities for work within and between countries, and the complexity of the demand for new skills on the labour market have dramatically begun affecting and shaping the structure, organisation and content of vocational education and training. This report is based on the experiences from the collaborative approach applied in the development of the Strategy for Vocational Education and Training in a Lifelong Learning Context for the Republic of Macedonia, implemented through a process of consultation with a broad stakeholder basis. It addresses the participants in the process, the steps undertaken to ensure involvement of stakeholders and ultimately ownership over the process (or its components), the obstacles encountered and steps undertaken to address them, the problems, their causes and proposals for preventing and/or eliminating them, as well as the lessons learned and recommendations for further development of the social dialogue and partnership.
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Статья научная
Body is a complex and polymorphic object that lies at the intersection of a number of dimensions: natural-social-cultural; individual-social; body-soul; flesh-spirit; private-public; visible-invisible; decent-indecent; real-virtual; health-illness. If the body is in the heart of psychological research, lay thinking analysis rests somewhat in the shadow of this research line. Following the ideas of the social representations theory, the aim of study was to reveal how the body was represented in groups of young and older Russian women. A total sample consisted of 314 Russian females (N=258 females formed the group of young females from 18 to 25 years old, Mage=19.73, SDage =1.56; N=56 females formed the group of older females aged from 39 to 55 years old, Mage=45.63, SDage =4.68). The snowball technique was used in order to recruit the participants, they were invited to fulfil the online questionnaire. A free-association technique was used. The data were analysed by using prototypical analysis. The obtained results shed light on the articulation of the two normative elements health-beauty in the social representations of body in the two generations of Russian women. The comparison of the hypothetical structure of social representations (my body, ideal body, female body) in the two age groups of Russian women reveals several points concerning the lay mentality as a matter of age. A further study to verify the hypothetical structure of the social representations of body in young and older Russian women is needed.
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Solar energy application in houses heating systems in Russia
Статья научная
The solar energy is widely used around the world for electricity generation and heating systems in municipal services. But its use is complicated in the number of territories with uneven receipts of solar radiation on the earth’s surface and large number of cloudy days during a year. A hypothesis on the possibility of application of individual solar collectors for heating of houses in the number of cities of Russia has been tested. The existing designs of solar collectors and checking the possibility of their application in northern territories of Russia are investigated. The analysis was carried out taking into account features of relief and other climatic conditions of the Perm and Sverdlovsk regions. As the result of research, the basic recommended conditions for application of solar batteries in houses of the northern Russian cities have been resumed.
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The paper describes the experimental study of the children's specific moral choices from several perspectives. The quantitative and qualitative results of the study were assessed through comparison of the diverse kinds of correct and incorrect moral choices in children aged 6–7 years old and 7–8 years old, the specifics of these choices revealed through resolving two types of specially designed situations with ethnocultural context, namely the situations requiring the child's personal engagement (situations of moral choice) and depersonalized situations (situations with moral challenges, such as “Continue the sentence”).
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Teaching approaches and techniques shape classroom practices and ultimately contribute to students’ learning and achievement. While abundant research exists on how such practices impact student learning in EFL classes around the world, this research still remains scarce in Kosovo. Therefore, the current research addresses this existing gap by exploring the link between teacher classroom practices and student learning. Participants of this study included 10th and 11th grade students across six municipalities in Kosovo (N=237). The respondents were asked to complete a questionnaire inquiring about practices adopted by teachers to teach EFL. The results reveal disparate teaching practices adopted by teachers to teach the material. To that end, female students report enhances participatory and collaborative approaches used by teachers and in the meantime an overall higher perception of the chances given by teachers to express opinions and ideas in class, compared to male students. Similarly, 10th grade students reported higher opportunities provided by the teacher in class to express opinions as well as collaborate with other students to complete tasks. Finally, significant positive correlations are evident between certain collaborative and participatory approaches utilized by teachers in class as well as students’ motivation. Evidently, students enjoy problem solving tasks and are much more active in cases when they collaborate with other students. In conclusion, this study sheds light on how students perceive teacher techniques and teaching methods used in EFL classes.
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Students critical-creative thinking skill: a multivariate analysis of experiments and gender
Статья научная
Students’ ability to practice several thinking skills is one of the problems common in today’s learning. Therefore, this research aims to describe the improvement of students’ critical-creative thinking skills through a multivariate analysis of the experiment model and gender. The experiment models used in this research are the Multiple Skill Laboratory Activity Model (MSLAM) and Higher Order Thinking Laboratory (HOT Lab), with gender, considered as a factor influencing a successful learning process. Research method was a quasi-experiment with data obtained from 328 respondents from five different universities in Indonesia and analyzed using the multivariate tests. The results showed that the experiment model affected the learning outcomes more than genders. Furthermore, the Multiple Skill Laboratory Activity Module proved to improve students’ critical and creative thinking skills better than the Higher Order Thinking Laboratory. This study expected to provide a comparison in determining the types of suitable experiments for learning at colleges and schools.
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Students with visual impairments: braille reading rate
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A comparison reading performance was done between 8 students who are using Braille and 14 students who are using enlarged print to read. Reading performance was determined using reading rate (words per minute, wpm). Reading rate results showed no signifi -cant difference (p>0.05) between those using the Braille (16.62±11.61 wpm) and those using the enlarged print (27.21±24.89 wpm). This study has shown that Braille reader students read at lower reading rate compared to print reader students with visual impairment.
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Students’ Attitudes About STEM Teaching Case Study From Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Статья научная
The knowledge that is based on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is the basis for the development of any country. Less developed countries lack experts in these areas. Therefore, the ENABLE-BIH project (Enhancing and Advancing Basic Learning and Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina) was introduced in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which aims to improve the situation in the education sector. This study included the Public Institution “Ninth Elementary School” in Brcko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina in which this project was implemented. The study included a total of 125 students from this school. The aim of this study is to examine the difference between attitudes about STEM from the point of view of gender differences and the age of students. After the data were collected, the statements were grouped into appropriate factors using factor analysis. The factor analysis showed that five factors stand out in this research. The results of multiple regression analysis showed that there is no difference between students ‘attitudes regarding gender differences, while there is a difference regarding students’ age. The results of this research showed that the ENABLE-BIH project delivered good results and suggests the importance of implementing similar projects in the future.
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