The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher最新文献

Materials development is increasingly recognized as a valuable venue for narrowing the research–practice gap. This qualitative case study explores how four middle school teachers and three university researchers collaborated in a community of practice (CoP) to write textbooks by highlighting the interplay between their collaborative relationships and actions. Data were collected from several sources, including semi-structured interviews, observations, and artifacts. The findings reveal that this textbook writing CoP was characterized by the interplay of joint enterprise, mutual engagement, and a shared repertoire; mutual engagement, featuring dynamic interaction between the participants’ collaborative relationships and actions, played a pivotal role. In light of a nuanced interpretation of teacher–researcher collaboration in this CoP, we foreground the role of mutual engagement and the factors which influence it. The study concludes by highlighting the mutually reinforcing nature of the dynamic interplay between language teachers’ collaborative relationships and actions in bridging the research–practice gap in communities.

Teachers’ motivational strategies can be categorised into two types of motivating styles—autonomy-supportive style versus controlling style (Reeve in Educ Psychol 44:159–175, 2009). Several factors can affect the teachers’ use of motivational strategies, and student-related factors are some influential reasons. In this study, we focussed on identifying the student-related reasons that could affect the teachers’ motivating styles through 56 teacher interviews from 17 secondary schools across Singapore. From the teachers’ accounts, we identified “student profiles”, “students’ behaviours”, “students’ engagements”, and “students’ feedback” as the student-related factors that could affect the teachers’ motivating styles. By identifying these factors, we hope to raise awareness amongst the teachers (at the personal level) and their social environments (at the contextual level) on what can facilitate or thwart the expression of autonomy-supportive teaching. We also hope to provide useful information on what the social environments can do to support teachers in autonomy-supportive teaching.

Online teaching has gained more momentum since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. While this mode offers many benefits, one major concern is maintaining academic integrity, as online instruction can provide more opportunities for cheating. This study aimed to explore students’ attitudes toward cheating in online assessments (OAs) and any potential differences based on gender and nationality. Since our purpose was to perform a cross-cultural examination of cheating behaviors in an academic environment, we conducted the study in culturally diverse countries. The participants were 629 university students from Iran, Romania, and Lebanon. They completed a questionnaire about academic integrity in OAs. The results showed that 60% of the participants had no negative views on cheating in OAs, 58.5% admitted to cheating in OAs themselves, and 85% viewed OAs as less reliable than in-person assessments. During OAs, the most common ways of cheating included using notes on paper, relying on course materials, and sharing answers through social media and messaging apps. The main motivations for cheating included stress, time constraints, and the desire to achieve a higher grade, while factors that deterred cheating included moral and social stigma and the rights of other students. The study found no significant difference in attitudes toward cheating in OAs between male and female participants, but there were significant differences between students of different nationalities (p < 0.05).