Purpose: Given the unique characteristics of physical education(PE) teaching in K-12education,PE teachers' information behaviors deserve special attention.This article reports a survey study of PE teachers' in...Purpose: Given the unique characteristics of physical education(PE) teaching in K-12education,PE teachers' information behaviors deserve special attention.This article reports a survey study of PE teachers' information behaviors,covering information literacy skills and behaviors of information seeking and information use.Design/methodology/approach:A questionnaire survey was conducted of K-12 PE teachers in the Tianjin municipal region of China,with a response rate of 61.9%.Findings:PE teachers lack skills with information retrieval systems in general.The Internet continues to be their primary information source,and they rely more on personal collection and colleagues than the school library for teaching materials.They rarely develop a searching strategy,employ querying tactics,or use advanced search functions,and they tend to be content with finding a few relevant articles.Research limitations:The survey is limited to the Tianjin municipal region in scope.Though attempting to reach 210 participants from 40 schools,it yielded only 130 valid responses.A larger survey covering more regions and with greater responses may be useful.Practical implications:Insights from this study inform the educational and on-job training of K-12 PE teachers to improve their information literacy skills.Originality/value:Little research exists on PE teachers' behaviors of information seeking.This study bridges the gap and enriches our understanding of K-12 teachers' information behaviors.展开更多
Sustainable Development Goal(SDG 4)lays solid theoretical foundation for the development of higher teacher education in improving the quality of teaching faculty nationwide.Sustainable teacher training paves a way for...Sustainable Development Goal(SDG 4)lays solid theoretical foundation for the development of higher teacher education in improving the quality of teaching faculty nationwide.Sustainable teacher training paves a way for teacher professional development in the long run.China’s“National Teacher Training Program”serves a connection between higher teacher education and K-12 teachers in multiple perspectives when exploring K-12 teachers’improvement of the essence by upgrading the initiative of the program with the assistance of educational technology and modern educational philosophy from mutual creation to mutual benefit.Direction orientation strategic design based on demand for teaching faculty,curriculum setting in modules,and characteristics creation have been carried out to upgrade the training of teacher colleges and National Teacher Training Program in the future for achieving a win-win situation between higher teacher education and K-12 education.展开更多
The quality of K-12 education has been a very big concern for years. Previous methods studied only one or two factors, such as school choice, or teacher quality, on school performance. Therefore the results they provi...The quality of K-12 education has been a very big concern for years. Previous methods studied only one or two factors, such as school choice, or teacher quality, on school performance. Therefore the results they provide can be limited. We propose a multi-agent approach to integrate multiple actors in a school system. These actors include teachers, students, supporting staffs and administrators. The interactions among these actors compose a hierarchical school social network. We first detect the hierarchical community structure in this school network by using an agglomerative hierarchical algorithm. Existing agglomerative hierarchical algorithms usually calculate similarity or dissimilarity between two clusters by using some measure of distance between pairs of observations. We, however, develop a method that calculates similarity based on social interactions between interactions is essential in multi-agent systems. Our algorithm is applied to 15 school districts in Bexar County, Texas, and it provides satisfying results on generating the hierarchical structure of all school districts. We then use the detected structure of the social network to evaluate the school system’s organization performance. We design and implement a funding evaluation model to decompose the funding policy task into subtasks and then evaluate these subtasks by using funding distribution policies from past years and looking for possible relationships between student performances and funding policies. Experiments in the 15 school districts in Bexar County show no significant correlation between student performance and the amount of the funding a school district received.展开更多
With the promise of achieving bilingualism,biliteracy,and cultural pluralism,Chinese immersion programs for students from kindergarten to 12th grade(K-12)in North America,especially the US,have been proliferating in t...With the promise of achieving bilingualism,biliteracy,and cultural pluralism,Chinese immersion programs for students from kindergarten to 12th grade(K-12)in North America,especially the US,have been proliferating in the past two decades.Research on this rapidly growing population of non-native Chinese learners is also growing.This research synthesis focuses on 35 selected studies published in recent years on Chinese immersion in both Chinese and English language journals and books.The review found that researchers are exploring a wide range of issues with respect to language and literacy development in Chinese immersion programs,including academic achievement in English,language and literacy acquisition in Chinese,instructional strategies and classroom interaction,as well as learners’language use and its sociolinguistic variations.These studies reflect a growing interest in and demand for learning more about the lesser-researched Chinese foreign language(CFL)learner population,and this review concludes with suggestions for future research on Chinese immersion based on its curricular features as well as specific considerations for conducting research with young,emergent bilingual and biliterate learners.展开更多
文摘Purpose: Given the unique characteristics of physical education(PE) teaching in K-12education,PE teachers' information behaviors deserve special attention.This article reports a survey study of PE teachers' information behaviors,covering information literacy skills and behaviors of information seeking and information use.Design/methodology/approach:A questionnaire survey was conducted of K-12 PE teachers in the Tianjin municipal region of China,with a response rate of 61.9%.Findings:PE teachers lack skills with information retrieval systems in general.The Internet continues to be their primary information source,and they rely more on personal collection and colleagues than the school library for teaching materials.They rarely develop a searching strategy,employ querying tactics,or use advanced search functions,and they tend to be content with finding a few relevant articles.Research limitations:The survey is limited to the Tianjin municipal region in scope.Though attempting to reach 210 participants from 40 schools,it yielded only 130 valid responses.A larger survey covering more regions and with greater responses may be useful.Practical implications:Insights from this study inform the educational and on-job training of K-12 PE teachers to improve their information literacy skills.Originality/value:Little research exists on PE teachers' behaviors of information seeking.This study bridges the gap and enriches our understanding of K-12 teachers' information behaviors.
文摘Sustainable Development Goal(SDG 4)lays solid theoretical foundation for the development of higher teacher education in improving the quality of teaching faculty nationwide.Sustainable teacher training paves a way for teacher professional development in the long run.China’s“National Teacher Training Program”serves a connection between higher teacher education and K-12 teachers in multiple perspectives when exploring K-12 teachers’improvement of the essence by upgrading the initiative of the program with the assistance of educational technology and modern educational philosophy from mutual creation to mutual benefit.Direction orientation strategic design based on demand for teaching faculty,curriculum setting in modules,and characteristics creation have been carried out to upgrade the training of teacher colleges and National Teacher Training Program in the future for achieving a win-win situation between higher teacher education and K-12 education.
文摘The quality of K-12 education has been a very big concern for years. Previous methods studied only one or two factors, such as school choice, or teacher quality, on school performance. Therefore the results they provide can be limited. We propose a multi-agent approach to integrate multiple actors in a school system. These actors include teachers, students, supporting staffs and administrators. The interactions among these actors compose a hierarchical school social network. We first detect the hierarchical community structure in this school network by using an agglomerative hierarchical algorithm. Existing agglomerative hierarchical algorithms usually calculate similarity or dissimilarity between two clusters by using some measure of distance between pairs of observations. We, however, develop a method that calculates similarity based on social interactions between interactions is essential in multi-agent systems. Our algorithm is applied to 15 school districts in Bexar County, Texas, and it provides satisfying results on generating the hierarchical structure of all school districts. We then use the detected structure of the social network to evaluate the school system’s organization performance. We design and implement a funding evaluation model to decompose the funding policy task into subtasks and then evaluate these subtasks by using funding distribution policies from past years and looking for possible relationships between student performances and funding policies. Experiments in the 15 school districts in Bexar County show no significant correlation between student performance and the amount of the funding a school district received.
文摘With the promise of achieving bilingualism,biliteracy,and cultural pluralism,Chinese immersion programs for students from kindergarten to 12th grade(K-12)in North America,especially the US,have been proliferating in the past two decades.Research on this rapidly growing population of non-native Chinese learners is also growing.This research synthesis focuses on 35 selected studies published in recent years on Chinese immersion in both Chinese and English language journals and books.The review found that researchers are exploring a wide range of issues with respect to language and literacy development in Chinese immersion programs,including academic achievement in English,language and literacy acquisition in Chinese,instructional strategies and classroom interaction,as well as learners’language use and its sociolinguistic variations.These studies reflect a growing interest in and demand for learning more about the lesser-researched Chinese foreign language(CFL)learner population,and this review concludes with suggestions for future research on Chinese immersion based on its curricular features as well as specific considerations for conducting research with young,emergent bilingual and biliterate learners.
