The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher最新文献

Data- driven decision making DDDM in school settings is often guided and influenced by various sources of data that assist in improving students’ outcomes. School principals as the main educational leaders, play a pivotal role in DDDM using the available school data. Semi-structured interviews with 24 school principals were conducted to investigate the school principals’ perceptions of the role of the school Performance Improvement Unit PIU in applying DDDM in Kuwait’s schools. This paper uses the Kuwaiti Ministry of Education’s framework and the Mandinach et al. (A theoretical framework for data-driven decision making. In: Annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, 2006) model as a background to explain the application of DDDM in government centralized schools. Practical implications are provided to help policymakers develop DDDM in schools.

The aim of this study is to investigate how the emotional orientations in peer assessment affect student performance. Given that the emotional data in peer comments exist in the form of unstructured text, this study applied the text sentiment analysis method to the mining and analysis of peer-review texts. For this purpose, emotional orientations are quantified as emotional variables with a polarity, including positive, negative, and neutral, and degrees of intensity, including high, moderate, and mild. Specifically, a semester-long course entailing repeated peer assessments was organized, and eight hundred and eighty-five valid comments were collected. By using quantitative analysis of the qualitative emotional variables, this paper further explores the relationships between emotional orientations and learning performance. The research results showed that emotional orientations had statistically significant effects on student performance: students with a negative emotional orientation and high emotional intensity were more likely to obtain better grades, while students with average grades preferred positive evaluations and presented no obvious changes in emotional intensity. Accordingly, several recommendations are summarized for researchers and instructors.

Guided by the Self-Determination Theory, this study examines the mediating role of teachers’ basic psychological needs satisfaction in the relationships between teachers’ perceived supervisor learning support and teachers’ use of technology and job satisfaction. 180 teachers in Singapore participated in the study by completing a questionnaire. Results from path analysis revealed that perceived supervisor learning support positively predicted basic psychological needs satisfaction (i.e., need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness). Perceived supervisor learning support directly and positively predicted the use of technology and job satisfaction. Interestingly, perceived supervisor learning support also indirectly predicted teachers’ job satisfaction via the satisfaction of need for autonomy and relatedness. However, perceived supervisor learning support only indirectly predicted the use of technology via the satisfaction of the need for competence but not autonomy and relatedness. Findings suggest the importance of supporting teachers’ basic psychological needs to promote teachers’ use of technology and job satisfaction.

The research literature is rife with studies that explicate how novice academic writers face fears and experience anxieties when writing in English as a Second Language (ESL) contexts. However, many studies have failed to put forward a holistic approach to address the issue. This study fills in this gap by reporting how integrating language and content instruction and providing out-of-classroom assistance for students at a master’s level in an Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)-accredited business school can help them become more confident academic writers and accomplish their publishing goals. This research employed a qualitative research approach through which ten students were interviewed in-depth. The findings of the study reveal that students do not only experience language and content related fears and challenges, but also challenges that are existential in nature. This implies that finding meaning and purpose in their research endeavors which aligns with their professional careers is important. The study makes a case for a holistic pedagogical support for students within a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach, while putting in place a definitive mentoring system outside of class sessions. Future research may evaluate the effectiveness of such a support program for academic publishing and explore ways to adequately address the need for a research agenda that is meaningful for students’ professional and academic careers.

With the rapid advancement of information technologies, automated writing evaluation technologies have developed so fast that they can be applied to writing assessments. However, scanty studies have pooled the effects of automated writing evaluation on writing performance. Through a PRISMA protocol-based meta-analysis, this study concludes that automated writing evaluation technologies can significantly reduce anxiety such as writing anxiety and computer anxiety compared with those without the assistance of automated writing evaluation. Automated writing evaluation can also significantly improve writing motivation and second language (L2) writing skills. Educators and designers should highlight how to combine automated writing evaluation with human rating methods and maximize the improvements in L2 writing skills. In the future, artificial intelligence may be integrated into automated writing evaluation to develop advanced automated writing evaluation to address higher-level issues in writing practice.