Teacher Policy Research Articles

Evaluasi Pelaksanaan Kebijakan Merdeka Belajar pada Satuan Pendidikan Non-Formal

Non-formal education is a planned and systematic educational curriculum that is implemented independently by the government and the community in achieving learning goals. The purpose of this evaluation discussion is to improve the independence of non-formal education units by optimizing secondary data obtained from various relevant references collected through the development of documents and documentation matrices of norms, standards, procedures, and activities to provide recommendations. regarding study guidelines. The stages of data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing are analyzed. To ensure freedom of learning with a quality learning process in non-formal education units, the learning process also requires quality teaching resources. What is important here is that the government pays attention to universities that train private teachers. Therefore, alternative recommendations that need to be considered by the government include (1) freedom of learning policy, (2) quality teacher policy.

Combining Building Block Process With Computational Thinking Improves Learning Outcomes of Python Programming With Peer Assessment

The capability of computer programming language logic is one of the basics of technical education. How to improve students “interest in program logic design and help overcome students” fears of coding has become vital for educators. Cultivating practical talents with information technology application and basic programming development will become one of the important topics in the department of information related science. The objective of this research is to improve the ability of learning basic programming courses by using Zuvio interactive software. Zuvio employs the mathematical logic of computational thinking to analyze problems and enhance learners’ interest in learning programming skills through a graphical interface tool with building blocks. It uses innovative interactive teaching to use peer and self-assessment to study the content of the course. Zuvio improves the design ability of different groups of class learning Python programming. In line with the innovative teaching policy of the schools and the current stage of the learner’s learning model, learning effectiveness can be achieved. The research results were analyzed by midterm and final experimental group scores, and the progress of the experimental group’s scores was examined through descriptive statistics. The average and standard deviation of the assessment were used to analyze the progress of the experimental group students in the programming course. In the classroom, assessment criteria were set up as the basis for peer assessment scoring. After the midterm and final exams, the teacher assessment and peer assessment scores were analyzed for cognitive differences, and possible learning differences were analyzed. The students’ professional ability was examined to see if it met the professional standards required by the course, and whether innovative teaching methods could improve the learning outcomes of learners with different professional backgrounds in Python programming.

유아교사의 디지털 역량과 어린이집의 조직혁신성이 테크놀로지 자아효능감에 미치는 영향

Objectives This study aimed to find out the difference in technology self-efficacy according to the socio-demographic variables of early childhood teachers, and the relationship and influence between early childhood teachers' digital competency and innovativeness of childcare center, technology self-efficacy.
 Methods A survey was conducted on 217 early childhood teachers in childcare centers in Seoul, Gyeonggi, and Incheon, from May to June 2023. Early childhood teachers' digital competency, innovativeness of childcare center and technology self-efficacy of day care centers were evaluated directly by early childhood teachers. The collected data were analyzed by one-way ANOVA, correlation analysis, and multiple regression analysis using the SPSS WIN 26.0 program.
 Results First, the difference in technology self-efficacy according to the age and experience of early childhood teachers showed that the younger the age, the higher the technology self-efficacy. Second, it was found that there was a significant relationship between early childhood teachers' digital competency, innovativeness of childcare center, and technology self-efficacy. Finally, as a result of analyzing the relative influence of early childhood teachers' digital competency and innovativeness of childcare center on technology self-efficacy, 48% of the explanatory power was shown, and both digital competency and innovativeness of childcare center were influential variables.
 Conclusions The study results imply that it is necessary to develop teacher education programs considering age and career and teacher policies to support teachers' digital capabilities along with innovativeness efforts in childcare centers.

The Perceptions of the Use of Translanguaging as a Form of Oral Feedback in Indonesian Tertiary English Language Teaching Context

As the practice of using different languages to extend the process of knowledge construction, translanguaging is often performed in teachers’ corrective feedback in foreign language classrooms. The research aimed to analyze students’ perception of the implementation of translanguaging as a form of oral corrective feedback in an EFL-speaking context at a private university in Indonesia. This study used a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design through two phases of data collection: a questionnaire (N=60) and semi-structured interviews (N=8). The findings of this study indicate that students perceive translanguaging as a beneficial practice in implementing oral corrective feedback in the EFL-speaking classroom, such as increasing the chances for language acquisition, empowering students to take educational risks, creating a more welcoming and socially inclusive learning environment due to students’ diverse language proficiency, and increasing in-classroom participation and engagement. However, it is also perceived that translanguaging should not be used too excessively to avoid confusion amongst students with lower target language proficiency. It is recommended that teachers give students a fair chance to interact meaningfully with more than one language by including translanguaging oral feedback as a pedagogical strategy, to help students reach their academic goals, notice differences in language, and promote bilingualism and biliteracy. The students' positive opinions of translanguaging highlighted its potential as an effective pedagogical technique. It is also hoped that this research becomes a basis for establishing English language teaching policies that are appropriate to the multilingual pedagogical context in Indonesia.

Official policies of English language education in Iran: ‘policy as discourse’ in national documents

ABSTRACT Considering the uncontested global status of English today, overt and covert policies of English language teaching (ELT) have shaped a significant area of broader national language (education) policies. In this study we investigated nine major national policy documents to portray the overall official ELT policies in Iran. The documents were explored through qualitative content analysis in search of manifest statements and conceptual categories that provided educational policy directions. Adopting a view of policy as discourse, we coded statements directly related to ELT and those related to language education, as well as generic statements about all subject areas, which were interpreted to include the teaching and learning of English. The discursive climate of the overall official Iranian ELT policy appeared to be mainly shaped by policy directions focusing on Islamic values, Iranian Revolutionism, and character and morality, along with some language-teaching specifics. The findings may indicate that beyond issues of policy incompleteness, the Iranian official ELT policy may be suffering from policy indeterminacy. We argue that in contexts like Iran, more coherent ELT policies may be needed to account for both the ideological nature of English and its practical applicability in the world today.

Adversary Agnostic Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies have been shown to be deceived by perturbations (e.g., random noise or intensional adversarial attacks) on state observations that appear at test time but are unknown during training. To increase the robustness of DRL policies, previous approaches assume that explicit adversarial information can be added into the training process, to achieve generalization ability on these perturbed observations as well. However, such approaches not only make robustness improvement more expensive but may also leave a model prone to other kinds of attacks in the wild. In contrast, we propose an adversary agnostic robust DRL paradigm that does not require learning from predefined adversaries. To this end, we first theoretically show that robustness could indeed be achieved independently of the adversaries based on a policy distillation (PD) setting. Motivated by this finding, we propose a new PD loss with two terms: 1) a prescription gap maximization (PGM) loss aiming to simultaneously maximize the likelihood of the action selected by the teacher policy and the entropy over the remaining actions and 2) a corresponding Jacobian regularization (JR) loss that minimizes the magnitude of gradients with respect to the input state. The theoretical analysis substantiates that our distillation loss guarantees to increase the prescription gap and hence improves the adversarial robustness. Furthermore, experiments on five Atari games firmly verify the superiority of our approach compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Changing of the Guard: Reflecting on the Impact of Administrative Change on Campus Stakeholders

This case study explores the challenges faced by incoming principals who encounter unexpected situations along with the impacts on multiple stakeholders of leadership transition on a middle school campus. Leadership shifts are felt throughout organizations in diverse ways and may even have a personal impact on individuals in a school community. Leadership transition, by its very nature, is a change. Change, especially at the top, presents organizations with myriad possibilities and similar stressors. Principal turnover has a direct impact on school achievement. The principal is key to sustainable school improvement, a process that may take 5 to 7 years after a new principal has been named. High-performing principals often leave campuses and move to central office positions because of their success with campus achievement. In the late 1990s and early 2000s in Texas, more than 30% of principals left their campuses within the first 2 years. Principals leave schools for varying reasons, such as promotions to other campuses, district-level roles, new opportunities in other districts, retirement, and positions out of the educational field. The reader should consider all perspectives in the narrative. This case study involves issues related to transition, change, instructional policies, decision-making, staff culture, and the impacts of COVID-19 on student achievement.

The effects of language and home factors on Lebanese students’ mathematics performance in TIMSS

Understanding the long-standing educational inequities associated with socioeconomic status remains significant for transforming educational policies and practices. To better understand entanglements among socioeconomic status and students’ performance in mathematics, we examined different home factors (including language of the test) that influence Lebanese learners’ performance in TIMSS. Exploring TIMSS data can assist us in identifying areas and groups of students who require additional assistance in order to address inequities. The purpose of this study is to investigate how language and other home factors influence Lebanese students’ mathematics performance in TIMSS. Mathematics is taught in a foreign language (English or French) in Lebanon, according to Language of Learning and Teaching policy (LoLT) that dates to 1926. Using TIMSS data and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), we looked at how students performed in mathematics based on the language of the test and how often they spoke it at home. Other home factors such as parents’ education level, number of books owned, and parents’ involvement were also examined. Results show that not speaking the language of the test at home and other SES-related factors had different but mostly significant contribution to students’ mathematics scores. Lebanese students’ overall low performance suggests the time is ripe for a reformed Lebanese curricula that responds to the needs of learners and of society, taking into consideration students’ cultural capital and language of instruction.

Language Revitalization: Challenges for Kazakh in Higher Education

This paper is an initial attempt to evaluate the challenges of promoting a new national language as a medium of instruction (MOI) in a post-socialist higher education (HE) context. In the case of Kazakhstan, the choice of MOI is perceived as a key tool to strengthen national identity and resist domination of Russian; in higher education sector language policies are constructed to foster cultural independence which translates into establishing Kazakh as a full-fledged medium of academia. Drawing on the historical-structural approach (Tollefson, 1991, 2013), we analyze the ideologies and practices of university students studying in Kazakh. Findings from audio-recorded interviews suggest that implementing Kazakh-medium instruction policies face numerous pragmatic and ideological challenges, such as a dearth of teaching and learning resources in Kazakh and lack of Kazakh-speaking faculty. This study contributes to scholarship on language revitalization in the context of tertiary education.

THE IMPACT OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AMONG ACEHNESE EFL PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS

It is well known that the belief systems of teachers have a considerable impact on teaching. In the end, teachers' beliefs—which also affect their consciousness, teaching attitude, teaching methods, and teaching policies—have an impact on students' development (Shinde & Karekatti, 2012). Although there has been extensive research on teachers' beliefs, there has not been much done explicitly on teachers' or pre-service teachers' religious beliefs. Therefore, this study sought to understand the significance of religious beliefs in Aceh's EFL pre-service teachers' lives. Five pre-service teachers from an English Language Education Department at one of the Islamic universities in Aceh provided the data in the form of reflective journals and interviews. Using codes and themes, the collected data underwent a qualitative analysis. The results showed that religion had an impact on pre-service teachers in five areas, including going through a tough period, participating in religious activities, interacting with others, seeking knowledge, and considering their future careers.

Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the emotional and cognitive experiences of social work students in Israel

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions worldwide transitioned to remote learning. These transitions continue to create difficulties and dilemmas for students and instructors. The challenges surrounding the remote teaching of helping professions, such as social work, have been particularly pronounced and have impacted the student learning experience. This study aimed to examine the emotional and cognitive experiences of 150 Israeli social work students who transitioned to remote learning during the spread of COVID-19. Students’ emotional adjustment to remote learning was assessed using the Kübler-Ross five emotional stages of grief. The findings highlight students’ mixed emotions. Despite more than half of respondents stating that remote learning negatively impacted teaching quality and made it difficult to achieve the same level of intimacy as in-person practice classes, most participants recognized the advantages of remote learning and were open to it in the future. The current study looks at emergency remote learning as a new phenomenon influencing the future of social work teaching policies, creates a foundation for understanding the complexity of remote learning in the social work profession, and offers opportunities to learn from experience and engage in further research.

EFL teachers’ awareness of dyslexia

Abstract Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities among students, and teachers are often the very first to notice dyslexic students. It is therefore imperative that teachers be well-prepared to intervene appropriately and effectively once they encounter dyslexic students. The current study investigates teachers’ knowledge about the disorder in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context. Employing a questionnaire designed by Soriano et al. (2016), the study evaluates the awareness of dyslexia among 84 Iranian English teachers working in language institutes. The findings revealed that the majority of the teachers lacked adequate knowledge of the disorder but that they wished to learn more about this learning disability. Furthermore, the teachers’ awareness of the disorder was found to be independent of their demographic characteristics such as gender, previously completed programs, years of teaching experience, and experience with dyslexic students. The findings of this research can be informative for teacher educators, curriculum designers, and materials developers as there seems to be a need for revisions in teacher training curricula, instructional policies, and materials.

Exploring multilingual education in Morocco: official documents and teachers’ perceptions

ABSTRACT The Moroccan Ministry of Education has recently implemented a multilingual programme, called ‘language alternation’ (LA). The programme aims at improving students’ foreign language (FL) proficiency level and promoting plurilingualism by using French, English, and Spanish, for the teaching of math, physics and life and earth sciences at the secondary level, instead of the official language, Arabic. The study sought to understand this new tendency in Moroccan education by examining official educational documents and exploring teachers’ perceptions using Grounded Theory (GT), which is a hypothesis-generating methodology. The findings showed a gap between the conceptualised language recommendations in the official documents and the implementation of these recommendations in Moroccan schools. In addition, it seems that the new enacted educational policy has brought about challenges for both students and teachers. The interviewed teachers were concerned about their students’ initial FL proficiency, the negative effect of the new policy on students’ content learning, the lack of trainings in the methodology of the new medium of instruction (MOI) policy and limited agency of teachers in the conceptualisation and implementation of the new policy.

An Assessment of the Effectiveness of the Remedial Teaching Education Policy

The remedial teaching policy is a flagship education policy of the Greek Ministry of Education that aims to create a school of equal opportunities by providing additional support to students from disadvantaged social backgrounds. In this work we utilised a data set provided by the Ministry of Education, followed a black box approach and built on previous results in order to achieve the first ever evaluation, based on data, of the remedial teaching policy. Our findings indicate that remedial teaching is very effective in supporting very weak students, helping 70% of them achieve better academic performance and one out of three of them to sustain this enhanced academic performance in the future, long after they have stopped receiving remedial teaching. On the other hand, and contrary to what is widely believed, our results show that remedial teaching has the opposite impact to what it was designed for, as it is primarily the privileged students that receive the benefits. Consequently, in the way it is currently implemented, remedial teaching widens the gap between privileged and disadvantaged students rather than reduces it. The implications of the work are wide and far reaching, including the establishment of the need to revisit the way remedial teaching is implemented, the highlighting of the value in the data gathered by the Ministry of Education and the proof that individual educational policies can be objectively assessed despite being part of a complex system in which multiple education policies are implemented concurrently.

MEDIATION AS A SKILL IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSES IN SECONDARY EDUCATION

Although the importance of mediation tasks was introduced in Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR) in 2001, the development of mediation skills was finally legitimized in the recent edition of CEFR (Council of Europe, 2020). However, the development of this “fifth” language skill during the language classes remains a problematic issue: contrary to the other four language skills (reading, writing, speaking and listening), teachers often face the dilemma of how and when to introduce mediation activities and to what extent mediation should be applied in the process of foreign language teaching and learning. The aim of the research is to survey language teaching policies in Lithuania, Latvia and other EU countries from the aspect of the development of mediation skills in language classes in secondary education. Teaching programs of the English language in senior classes of the secondary school are surveyed from the aspect of mediation skills as defined in the newest edition of CEFR. The research results show that mediation activities are still not adequately included in foreign language classes: first of all, language syllabuses must be adjusted to the revised edition of CEFR. The research has proved the necessity of mediation skills to be included in the secondary education programs of foreign languages. Therefore, the selection of textbooks used in senior classes of foreign languages in secondary education must follow the recommendations outlined in CEFR, where the development of mediation skills is especially emphasized due to the present needs. It has been determined that mediation activities can develop students’ multilingual and plurilingual skills and raise students’ awareness of the peculiarities of both the native language and the foreign one.

Senior High School Mathematics Teachers’ Perceptions and Use of Continuous Assessment

This study sought to ascertain how Senior High School mathematics teachers perceived Continuous Assessment (CA) and used CA scores. It also explored relationships between teachers’ perceptions of CA and their use of CA scores as well as the difficulties mathematics teachers faced administering CA. One hundred sixty (160) Senior High School mathematics teachers from two districts in the Central Region of Ghana participated in the study. Questionnaires were administered to the research participants in 16 Senior High Schools (SHSs) across the two districts. The data collected was analyzed, using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The results from the study revealed that the participants perceived CA primarily as a means of generating grades and providing feedback. The majority of the participants used their students’ CA scores for the purpose of generating end-of-term grades. Teachers’ teaching experience and professional status were found to have effect on their perception of CA and the use of CA scores. A strong positive correlation was found to exist between teachers’ perception and their use of CA as well as their teaching experience and the use of CA scores. The implications of the findings for policy and continuous professional development of mathematics teachers have been provided.

A COMPARISON OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE HIGH SCHOOLS LEARNERS’ PERFORMANCE IN MATHEMATICS IN DISTRACT LAYYAH PUNJAB, PAKISTAN

The key purpose of the current study was to inspect the mathematics teaching and education performs of high schools educators and to recognize the break between present mathematics teaching performs in distract Layyah Punjab Pakistan and the finest teaching performs advocated through literatures. In teaching to understand this purpose, the researcher chosen a samples of 100 high school learners and 100 teachers. The sample of study were taken in two phases. In 1st phase 25 high school males schools and 25 government females schools were designated. Likewise 25 private males’ institutes and 25 females’ private institutes were also designated. 10 learners from every of the sample institutes were designated by mean of methodical random sampling method. The study was quantitative data gathering and examination expired parallel and the results accompaniment every other. The quantitative facts were composed with the help of two surveys tool 1 for learners and the other for educators. The reliability coefficient resulting in a pilot study designated that surveys were dependable sufficient to be used in the full study for data gathering. The outcomes presented a thoughtful gap among present and professed coaching and knowledge performs. It was too originated that educators did not even know what class room performs were recommended in instruction policy documents and the National Mathematics Curriculum. In the survey, it was piercing out that the argument and protest method is extremely used by the educators, though the class room comment exposed that the educators frequently used the drill and practice method. Educators give learners a guide for remembering numerous ideas and then practice it. Though numerous educators have spoken intangible considerate of mathematics, it is missing in class rooms. Problem solving teaching technique is claimed to be the best and operative repetition with the standard stated in Nationwide Curriculum Mathematics (2006), data presented that this repetition is infrequently used in mathematics class rooms. It is decided that Pakistani high school mathematics educators do not usage numerous of the finest mathematics instruction performs recommended in the literature. The study likewise observed that certain of the finest mathematics instruction practices are used in private institutes, which is illustrated in the teacher survey. It was recommended that teachers orientate themselves on the usage of the best mathematics instruction performs in high school class rooms. With the purpose of emerging a profounder conceptual considerate amongst learners. Moreover, educators may be given the chance to progress their individual knowledge and considerate of the best performs for coaching mathematics as recommended in national education policy and curriculum pamphlets. Furthermore, it is recommended that upcoming study may be lead to inspect how pre-service and in-service preparation makes middle school mathematics educators to usage the best performs in coaching mathematics.

Soft Action Priors: Towards Robust Policy Transfer

Despite success in many challenging problems, reinforcement learning (RL) is still confronted with sample inefficiency, which can be mitigated by introducing prior knowledge to agents. However, many transfer techniques in reinforcement learning make the limiting assumption that the teacher is an expert. In this paper, we use the action prior from the Reinforcement Learning as Inference framework - that is, a distribution over actions at each state which resembles a teacher policy, rather than a Bayesian prior - to recover state-of-the-art policy distillation techniques. Then, we propose a class of adaptive methods that can robustly exploit action priors by combining reward shaping and auxiliary regularization losses. In contrast to prior work, we develop algorithms for leveraging suboptimal action priors that may nevertheless impart valuable knowledge - which we call soft action priors. The proposed algorithms adapt by adjusting the strength of teacher feedback according to an estimate of the teacher's usefulness in each state. We perform tabular experiments, which show that the proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art performance, surpassing it when learning from suboptimal priors. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness of the adaptive algorithms in continuous action deep RL problems, in which adaptive algorithms considerably improved stability when compared to existing policy distillation methods.

Econometric Modelling of CGPA and its Associated Factors: A Study of Undergraduate Students of Riphah International University Malakand Campus

This study is conducted to model the CGPA and its associated factors of undergraduate students of Riphah International University Malakand Campus Chakdara Dir lower, Pakistan. The stratified random sampling method is used to identify the students from population. The academic departments are considered as strata. One hundred and eight undergraduate students are selected for taking information from the University. Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) Model is used for modelling the CGPA and its associated factors. The MLR model shows that SSC obtained marks, parents’ education, parents’ support and attention in classes is significantly related with obtained CGPA of the students. In terms of policy recommendations, the results of this study present several policies for teachers, parents and administration. Both teachers and administration should focus on attention of students in class. Teachers should prepare interesting and informative lecture that students remain attentive in class. While administration should ensure standard class rooms consist of necessary facilities. Parents should support their children morally, financially and every aspect of life. Teacher and University administration should focus on those students who have illiterate parents. They should play role to guide the students more as their parents is illiterate. Finally, parents should ensure high marks of their children in previous classes that they can perform well in university. This study can be extended to other universities with large sample sizes. Other factors like teacher, environment and administration role can be consider for future study.

“The spirit is willing, but the content is weak?” Enacting the mother tongue policy in teaching information and communication technology to preschoolers in Zimbabwe

This mini-ethnographic case study examined the enactment of the mother tongue (MT) medium of instruction policy in teaching information and communication technology (ICT) to preschoolers or early childhood development (ECD) learners in a Zimbabwean school. The study employed an eclectic cognitive sense-making, ethnography of language policy and planning (ELPP), and technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) framework to look into practices of one preschool teacher, Mrs K, in her quest to enact the mother tongue policy. Despite her 26 years of experience in teaching preschoolers, Mrs K had not received adequate training on teaching ICT, a new subject in the ECD curriculum. While at first glance, she appeared to be abiding by the policy, some of her lessons proved to be teacher-dominated, and the classroom dialogue formulaic thus undermining the all-pervading learner-centred pedagogy on which the new curriculum edifice was premised. The paper thus explores the complex interplay of knowledge of content, technology and pedagogy; experience; cognitive and other contextual factors in impacting teacher sense-making and enactment of the mother tongue policy in teaching ICT to pre-school learners. One major factor which appeared to be influencing teacher understanding of policy was lack of ICT content knowledge and knowledge of how to teach ICT using both English and MT. The policy reformers seemingly rushed to implement the curriculum without capacitating teachers on how to use the mother tongue to teach ICT at ECD level. The study thus proposes strategies for teacher professional development in ICT, particularly for resource-constrained environments.