Singapore First Aid Guidelines 2021

The Singapore Resuscitation and First Aid Council is updating the guidelines for first aid based on the latest evidence-based review from the International First Aid Taskforce Consensus on Science with Treatment Recommendations published in 2020. This is part of the regular updating of standards of care and training for first aid. This article presents some of the updated evidence-based approaches to first aid treatments in common emergencies such as asthma, chronic bronchitis, anaphylaxis, shock, unresponsiveness, seizure, heat disorders, ingested poisons, bleeding, head and spinal injury, bites and dental injuries. These updated treatments will be incorporated into the Standard and Child First Aid course syllabus in Singapore.

The multi-disciplinary approach to an interdisciplinary virtual exchange

New communication technologies are changing the way we work and communicate with people around the world. Given this reality, students in Higher Education (HE) worldwide need to develop knowledge in their area of study as well as attitudes and values that will enable them to be responsible and ethical global citizens in the workforce they will soon enter, regardless of the degree. Different institutional and country-specific requirements are important factors when developing an international Virtual Exchange (VE) program. Digital learning environments such as ProGlobe – Promoting the Global Exchange of Ideas on Sustainable Goals, Practices, and Cultural Diversity – offer a platform for collaborating with diverse students around the world to share and reflect on ideas on sustainable practices. Students work together virtually on a joint interdisciplinary project that aims to create knowledge and foster cultural diversity. This project was successfully integrated into each country’s course syllabus through a common global theme; sustainability. The focus of this paper is to present multi-disciplinary perspectives on the opportunities and challenges in implementing a VE project in HE. Furthermore, it will present the challenges that country coordinators dealt with when planning and implementing their project. Given the disparity found in each course syllabus, project coordinators uniquely handled the project goal, approach, and assessment for their specific course and program. Not only did the students and faculty gain valuable insight into different aspects of collaboration when working in interdisciplinary HE projects, they also reflected on their own impact on the environment and learned to listen to how people in different countries deal with environmental issues. This approach provided students with meaningful intercultural experiences that helped them link ideas and concepts about a global issue through the lens of their own discipline as well as other disciplines worldwide.

Professors Who Signal a Fixed Mindset About Ability Undermine Women’s Performance in STEM

Two studies investigate how science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professors’ fixed mindsets—the belief that intelligence is fixed and unchangeable—may induce stereotype threat and undermine women’s performance. In an experiment ( N = 217), we manipulated professors’ mindset beliefs (fixed vs. growth) within a course syllabus. While both men and women perceived the fixed mindset professor to endorse more gender stereotypes and anticipated feeling less belonging in the course, women reported these effects more than men. However, only for women did this threat undermine performance. In a 2-year longitudinal field study (884 students enrolled in 46 STEM courses), students who perceived their professor to endorse a fixed (vs. growth) mindset thought the professor would endorse more gender stereotypes and experienced less belonging in those courses. However, only women’s grades in those courses suffered as a result. Together, these studies demonstrate that professors’ fixed mindset beliefs may trigger stereotype threat among women in STEM courses.

Effect on Procrastination and Learning of Mistakes in the Design of the Formative and Summative Assessments: A Case Study

The design of the formative and summative assessment processes is of paramount importance to help students avoid procrastination and guide them towards the achievement of the learning objectives that are described in the course syllabus. If the assessment processes are poorly designed the outcome can be disappointing, including high grades but poor learning. In this paper, we describe the unexpected and undesirable effects that an on-demand formative assessment and the timetable of a summative assessment that left the most cognitively demanding part, problem-solving, to the end of the course, had on the behavior of students and on both grading and learning. As the formative assessment was voluntary, students procrastinated till the last minute. However, the real problem was that due to the design of the summative assessment, they focused their efforts mainly on the easiest parts of the summative assessment, passing the course with ease, but achieving a low learning level, as evidenced by the low scores of the problem-solving part of the summative assessment.

Further Education as an Integrative Pivot of Lifelong Learning

this study is focused on analysing further education as an integrative pivot of lifelong learning. Modern universities are currently undergoing changes in terms of transformation into entrepreneurial units aimed at commercialization of educational services including further educational programs. The topicality of the research is stipulated by the global urge to stay competitive in the saturated educational services market due to the increasing number of institutions both state and private rendering educational services. The aim of the study is to reveal the needs for further education of representatives among young and academic audiences and devise a course syllabus within further educational programs relevant to the detected requirements of potential listeners. The authors put forward a hypothesis suggesting that there are courses whose unique selling points might be attractive to learners. The results obtained through the questionnaires demonstrated that students and academic staff envision an ideal course to meet all their educational needs in a different way which gives momentum to reconsider the format of rendering educational services and recompose further educational programs making them client-friendly in terms of duration, group size, location, range of courses available and flexibility regarding program contents. The results of the study are of significance due to the fact that further educational programs will be far more susceptible to the needs and requirements of the target audience possessing such features as adjustability, flexibility and modularity.

The Implementation of Authentic Assessment in Course Syllabus Incorporating the Pragmatic Acquisition

The fact that students have lack of reading comprehension as the result of ineffective implementation in course syllabus. The study aims at implementing authentic assessment in extensive reading. The objective of activities in authentic assessment is to enhance the students’ pragmatic acquisition in understanding political news text. Qualitative method design is used by conducting classroom action research. The finding indicates that the pedagogy implementation provides various tasks in improving the students’ pragmatic acquisition. The result reveals that reading strategy can be reinforced through listening, writing, and speaking to have an understanding in a context. Forty-five students in extensive reading class answer open-ended questionnaire and the result shows that pragmatic acquisition is an effective strategy to comprehend the reading text. The integration of authentic assessment and the acquisition of semantic meaning are suggested to be investigated in future research.

Pre-service English language teachers’ conceptions of sustainable development: a case from Turkish higher education context

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how sustainable development (SD) is conceptualized by pre-service English language teachers in Turkey and design a specialized course syllabus on SD in English language teaching (ELT) in the light of the research findings. Design/methodology/approach The study used a mixed-methods sequential explanatory study design and investigated the case of a state university in Turkey with the involvement of 133 pre-service English language teachers. Findings The findings indicated that most pre-service English language teachers received no training or a course on SD in their whole education life and tended to associate SD mostly with the economic growth of a country, followed by education, social and ecological concepts. It was also found that the majority of the participants had a unidimensional view of SD. No direct links with ELT have been detected from participants’ responses. The findings also pointed to the eagerness of the participants to receive an ELT-specific course on SD providing that the course involves interactive teaching and learning activities with reference to contemporary sources focusing on global and local issues, as well as studying the methods facilitating the incorporation of such issues into teaching practice. Research limitations/implications This research is based on the experience of one Turkish university with limited quantitative and qualitative data. Practical implications Based on the participants’ knowledge, views and suggestions, this paper contributes to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence obtained from a local context and suggests a practical framework for a field-specific course syllabus aiming to enhance teacher candidates’ knowledge, skills and values related to SD and its incorporation into ELT. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study seeking to explore pre-service ELT teachers’ conceptualization of SD in Turkish higher education, and drawing on the research findings, the authors attempted to design a course syllabus targeted at pre-service teachers in ELT departments.