Design My Music Instrument: A Project-Based Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics Program on The Development of Creativity

Creativity is an essential factor in ensuring the sustainable development of a society. Improving students’ creativity has gained much attention in education, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) education. In a quasi-experimental design, this study examines the effectiveness of a project-based STEAM program on the development of creativity in Chinese elementary school science education. We selected two fourth-graders classes. One received a project-based STEAM program (the experimental group, n = 33), and the other received a conventional science teaching (the control group, n = 33) over 6 weeks. Students’ creativity was assessed before and after the intervention using a multi-method approach, including a test of divergent thinking, a story completion through the Consensus Assessment Technique (CAT), a creative self-efficacy (CSE) measure, and a group-based creative project. Moreover, all students received a test of their science knowledge after the intervention. The results showed that compared with the control group, the creativity of the experimental group students improved significantly for 6 weeks at both individual and group level, even though their knowledge in science were comparable. This result confirmed the effectiveness of a project-based STEAM educational program improving elementary school students’ creativity. Implications are discussed.

Teacher readiness in applying ATL skills in the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme Schools

<p>This article aims to understand the challenges faced by teachers in implementing the Approaches to Learning Skills (ATL Skills) for the teaching of <em>Bahasa Melayu</em> (Malay Language) in the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme Schools (MYPIB) in Malaysia. This qualitative case study employed purposive sampling that involved six resilient teachers who were directly involved in the implementations of ATL Skills consisting of four <em>Bahasa Melayu</em> teachers, a MYPIB coordinator and ATL skills coordinator. Triangulation was used to compare data from different sources using semi-structured interviews, story completion tasks, and document analysis. Using the ATLAS.ti software as an aiding tool, thematic analysis was carried out to identify the themes that emerged from the codes. Findings showed that teacher readiness is a challenge that needs to be addressed in the process of applying ATL skills in the MYPIB implemented by the Malaysian Ministry of Education. Teachers still need courses and training to improve their mastery in the ATL skills application. This study provided implications to teaching and learning, and recommendations to teachers as well as the Ministry to make improvements in the effort to apply ATL skills in the teaching-learning processes at the MYPIB schools.</p>

NATIVE ENGLISH TEACHERS IN EFL SPEAKING CLASSES: DEPICTING THEIR STRATEGIES TO TEACH VIETNAMESE STUDENTS

The aims of this research are; (1) to know the strategies used by native English teachers to teach speaking to the students of Vietnam National University of Agriculture, (2) to describe how the strategies contributed to the students speaking skills, and (3) to explain the problems faced by native English teachers in EFL speaking classes. This research is descriptive research with a qualitative approach. The data were collected through classroom observation, interviews, and documentation. It presents the result of the study in the form of a descriptive explanation. The findings of this research are the strategies used by native English teachers to teach speaking to the students of Vietnam National University of Agriculture, namely (a) group discussion, (b) role play, (c) brainstorming, (d) storytelling, (e) story completion, (f) describing picture, (g) game (guessing the word), (h) using target language/interview. Based on those strategies, the results show that the strategies help students to improve their speaking skills, vocabulary, and confidence. Also, it can help students to solve problems, increase sensitivity, think critically, and express their ideas. Furthermore, the findings of the problems faced by native English teachers in speaking class are (a) pronunciation, (b) lack of confidence, (c) lack of ending sounds, (d) no vocabulary and grammar.

The child as an active participant: enhancing the child's attachment to kindergartens through architectural design

PurposeRecently, children are no longer considered the passive users of their spaces; they are rather treated as active participants in those spaces design, with their own experiences. The present research aims to investigate the impact of selected architectural variables of kindergartens' design on the child's attachment to the place. It also examines the multi-complex approach in dealing with children in experiments.Design/methodology/approachSpatial analysis and photographing methods were used to analyse the educational spaces in two kindergartens in Greater Cairo, Egypt. In measuring children's place attachment, the research depended on a complex participatory approach, which comprised interviews with children, story completion, children's drawings and visual questionnaires.FindingsThe results of this qualitative study highlight that the design of a kindergarten classroom's details plays a significant role in strengthening the child's place attachment. The results also stress that connection and exposure to nature supports the child's spatial values.Originality/valueThe authors argue that this paper is considered a good basis for including children as the architectural design decision-makers for their buildings, by shedding light on the architect–user relationship and its impact on the design process. It demonstrates how architectural design of child-oriented spaces can promote a child's self-identity and perception.

Paragraph Boundary Recognition in Novels for Story Understanding

The understanding of narrative stories by computer is an important task for their automatic generation. To date, high-performance neural-network technologies such as BERT have been applied to tasks such as the Story Cloze Test and Story Completion. In this study, we focus on the text segmentation of novels into paragraphs, which is an important writing technique for readers to deepen their understanding of the texts. This type of segmentation, which we call “paragraph boundary recognition”, can be considered to be a binary classification problem in terms of the presence or absence of a boundary, such as a paragraph between target sentences. However, in this case, the data imbalance becomes a bottleneck because the number of paragraphs is generally smaller than the number of sentences. To deal with this problem, we introduced several cost-sensitive loss functions, namely. focal loss, dice loss, and anchor loss, which were robust for imbalanced classification in BERT. In addition, introducing the threshold-moving technique into the model was effective in estimating paragraph boundaries. As a result of the experiment on three newly created datasets, BERT with dice loss and threshold moving obtained a higher F1 than the original BERT had using cross-entropy loss as its loss function (76% to 80%, 50% to 54%, 59% to 63%).

IMPROVING STUDENT’S SPEAKING SKILL BY USING STORY COMPLETION TECHNIQUE AT SMP N SATAP WARINGIN

This research aims to determine the use of story completion techniques in improving students'speaking skills of SMP N Satap Waringin. This independent variable was the story completiontechnique, and the dependent variable was the students' speaking skills. This research populationwas the second-grade students of SMP N Satap Waringin academic years 2020/2021, consistingof 90 students. The sample of the research consisted of 26. The sample was chosen by using alottery. The instrument used in this research was the test. The test was used in the pre-test andpost-test. Hypothesis test showed that there was significance value ɑ = 0,000 &lt; ɑ = 0.05 it meantthat Hi was accept. It can be concluded that using story completion was increasing students’speaking skills of the SMP N Satap Waringin.