ISLAMIC EDUCATION AND ISLAMIC REVIVALISM IN INDONESIA: A CASE STUDY OF KUTTAB AL-FATIH PURWOKERTO

Kuttab is a new phenomenon in the Indonesian education system. Apart from pesantren, madrasa, and Islamic schools which are publicly familiar and formallyrecognized by the Indonesian government, kuttab new actor and joins the Islamic education arena with the specific offer on Quranic and Islamic belief learning. Thisstudy aims at revealing ideological roots of Kuttab Al-Fatih (KAF) and analyzing its educational concept. Kuttab Al-Fatih is selected because of its rapid spread andsuccess to establish 34 branches throughout Indonesia. Using a qualitative approach to study KAFs in Purwokerto, the study shows that KAF embraces conservative andfundamentalistic thought in Islam. The educational concept of kuttab is idealizing past glorious Islamic institutions and civilization. Therefore, the spirit of KAF is to restore ideal Islamic education of the past

Investigating the Effect of Graduate Business Programs of the Schools of Business in Jordan in Forming Soft-Power Leadership Conceptualization among MBA Students

The main objective of the study is to explore the extent of the conceptualization of soft-power leadership among graduate business students, and the degree to which they apply the concept in their study programs in the Jordanian universities. In precise, to explore the effect of curriculums and courses, learning style, and the way the business program is managed in forming the concept of soft power leadership in students. The analysis was extended to investigate the variation in the relationship between curriculums, learning style, and program management as independent variables and soft-power leadership concept as dependent variable due to the moderating variables gender, background education, and work sector. A sample of 350 students was drawn from two representative universities in Jordan. Data were collected by a self-designed questionnaire based on literature, Amos 21 was used in the analysis, and findings were as follows: Students have positive attitudes toward soft-power leadership conceptualization with a satisfactory level of belief. Learning style and curriculums have been found to be of significant effect in soft-power conceptualization. This indicates that the American Model of Management Education (AMME) is applied in both curriculums and learning styles in business schools in Jordan. With regards to the moderating effect of gender, background education, and job sector of students it was found that gender significantly affects the relationship between learning style and soft-power concept, and it does affect the relationship between program management and soft-power concept, Background education significantly affects the relationship between both curriculums and program management, and soft-power concept, while the job sector that students belong to in their work only affects significantly the relationship between program management and soft-power concept.  

Spoofing the Limit Order Book: A Strategic Agent-Based Analysis

We present an agent-based model of manipulating prices in financial markets through spoofing: submitting spurious orders to mislead traders who learn from the order book. Our model captures a complex market environment for a single security, whose common value is given by a dynamic fundamental time series. Agents trade through a limit-order book, based on their private values and noisy observations of the fundamental. We consider background agents following two types of trading strategies: the non-spoofable zero intelligence (ZI) that ignores the order book and the manipulable heuristic belief learning (HBL) that exploits the order book to predict price outcomes. We conduct empirical game-theoretic analysis upon simulated agent payoffs across parametrically different environments and measure the effect of spoofing on market performance in approximate strategic equilibria. We demonstrate that HBL traders can benefit price discovery and social welfare, but their existence in equilibrium renders a market vulnerable to manipulation: simple spoofing strategies can effectively mislead traders, distort prices and reduce total surplus. Based on this model, we propose to mitigate spoofing from two aspects: (1) mechanism design to disincentivize manipulation; and (2) trading strategy variations to improve the robustness of learning from market information. We evaluate the proposed approaches, taking into account potential strategic responses of agents, and characterize the conditions under which these approaches may deter manipulation and benefit market welfare. Our model provides a way to quantify the effect of spoofing on trading behavior and market efficiency, and thus it can help to evaluate the effectiveness of various market designs and trading strategies in mitigating an important form of market manipulation.

Jeopardy classroom instruction: Fostering students’ motivation to learn English vocabulary

The issue, dealing with gamification to foster learners’ motivation and vocabulary in learning English, has been investigated recently. It is perceived that gamification will directly affect the teaching-learning process and determine the learning ambiance. This study aims to shed light on the extent of the employment of Jeopardy Classroom Instruction to foster EFL learners’ motivation to learn English vocabulary. The study deployed an action research method with three phases of pre-cycle, cycle 1, and cycle 2. Pre-cycle was to document the initial classroom condition before using Jeopardy Classroom Instruction, while cycle 1 and cycle 2 were for knowing the teaching-learning process situation during the use of Jeopardy Classroom Instruction. The participants were junior high school students. The data were collected through observation, closed-ended questionnaire, and students’ score. The results suggested that Jeopardy Classroom Instruction is an adjunct to aid students’ motivation to learn vocabulary. It helped students to acquire self-belief, learning focus, the value of learning, study management, planning and monitoring and persistence. Also, it mitigated some motivation guzzlers such as learning anxiety, low control, failure avoidance and self-sabotage that might hinder them from learning vocabulary. HIGHLIGHTS: Jeopardy Classroom Instruction helped students to acquire self-belief, learning focus, the value of learning, study management, planning and monitoring and persistence. It mitigated some motivation guzzlers such as learning anxiety, low control, failure avoidance and self- sabotage that might hinder them from learning vocabulary.

Religion and belief in Religious Education

This chapter evaluates religious education. Under the Education Act 1944, it is a requirement in English law that learning about religion and belief must take place in all state-maintained schools, including those in reception classes and sixth forms. During the period up until 1988, teaching was almost entirely based on a Christian, scriptural approach, though increasingly with consideration of the other 'world religions'. The requirement for religious education of a 'Christian character', the notion of 'six main religions', the continuing mandate for a daily act of collective worship, the right to withdraw, and massive change in the real religion and belief landscape suggest that, in relation to religion and belief, we have a mid-20th-century settlement for an early-21st-century reality. This is likely to both reflect and reproduce a lack of religion and belief literacy among school leavers, who are confused by the religion and belief messages communicated in schools and, by extension, in wider society. Ultimately, based on the research findings, religion and belief learning should be concerned with preparing students for the practical task of engagement with the rich variety of religion and belief encounters in everyday, ordinary life.

Adaptive learning under strategic and structural uncertainty: the case of auction games

In games of incomplete information individual players make decisions facing a combination of structural uncertainty about the underlying parameters of the environment, and strategic uncertainty about the actions undertaken by their partners. How well are human actors able to cope with these uncertainties, and what models best describe their learning in such environments? We use a double auction task with different competitive and informational environments to characterize learning abilities of the single human participants (buyers) in a range of adaptive learning models covering reinforcement learning, directional learning and belief learning. Results show that real behaviour is best described using simple models of directional learning type with minimal knowledge assumptions about information efficiency of prices. This behavior is consistent with bounded rationality and risk aversion: human subjects try to maximize their chance for transaction, and do so using the simplest learning rule.

Learning to Communicate Implicitly by Actions

In situations where explicit communication is limited, human collaborators act by learning to: (i) infer meaning behind their partner's actions, and (ii) convey private information about the state to their partner implicitly through actions. The first component of this learning process has been well-studied in multi-agent systems, whereas the second — which is equally crucial for successful collaboration — has not. To mimic both components mentioned above, thereby completing the learning process, we introduce a novel algorithm: Policy Belief Learning (PBL). PBL uses a belief module to model the other agent's private information and a policy module to form a distribution over actions informed by the belief module. Furthermore, to encourage communication by actions, we propose a novel auxiliary reward which incentivizes one agent to help its partner to make correct inferences about its private information. The auxiliary reward for communication is integrated into the learning of the policy module. We evaluate our approach on a set of environments including a matrix game, particle environment and the non-competitive bidding problem from contract bridge. We show empirically that this auxiliary reward is effective and easy to generalize. These results demonstrate that our PBL algorithm can produce strong pairs of agents in collaborative games where explicit communication is disabled.