Analysing Islamic Curricula in View of Digital Citizenship

This study is aimed at determining the inclusion scope of the nine digital citizenship dimensions within the content material of a jurisprudence course at the high school level in Saudi Arabia. To achieve the objectives of the study, the researchers designed a digital citizenship checklist listing the dimensions that must be included in the high school jurisprudence course. The list encompassed the following nine areas: digital arrival, digital-physical fitness and morals, digital rights and responsibilities, digital telecommunications, digital laws, digital health and safety, digital trade, and digital security. A descriptive content analysis was used to examine the data. Based on the results of the study, several findings were revealed. The most significant ones were: a) not enough dimensions were included in the Digital Citizenship Jurisprudence Course, b) the digital citizenship dimensions involved in the course were not balanced. Based on the findings of the study, the researchers designed a framework for the digital citizenship dimensions and introduced several recommendations and suggestions.

Pre-Service Teachers and Student Assessment: Saudi Arabia

Evaluation is highly important in improving learning. Therefore, trainee teachers must be taught to evaluate effectively before commencing teaching. This research aimed to study the difficulties teachers in the field of art education face while evaluating students’ work. A descriptive analytical method was used to study a cohort of 63 students from the Department of Art Education at the College of Education at Jazan University. The researcher used a questionnaire consisting of nine paragraphs to collect information and data, which was presented to a committee of specialists to ensure its validity. The Cronbach alpha coefficient was used to calculate the reliability of the resulting data, giving a reliability coefficient of 0.96, which was acceptable for this study. The results focused on the school administration’s lack of reliance on evaluation in art education to determine the students’ outcomes and the students’ poor interest in the evaluation results and in improving their performance. The study suggests some methods of evaluation in art education, with the most important recommendations relating to the importance of placing art education grades within the grades of students, writing a list of criteria with which to evaluate students in order to measure their performance and supporting and motivating talented students.

Psychological Identity and Family Upbringing

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a counselling program to support psychological identity in the light of parental socialisation for a sample of first-year secondary school students. The sample (347) included students randomly selected from eight schools that represented all secondary schools in Dammam and 34 students who showed symptoms of identity disorder. These students were divided into two groups: one experimental group (17) and one control group (17). The research tools consisted of the Psychological Identity States Scale and the Parental Socialisation Styles Scale (their validity and reliability were verified) and a counselling program to improve cases of psychological identity disorder. A descriptive method was used here because it was suitable for identifying the students with psychological identity disorder. A quasi-experimental method was used to investigate the effectiveness of a counselling program in supporting psychological identity. The results showed that the most common cases of problems related to identity were: achieving identity, suspending identity, identity disorder and identity blocking. The most common patterns of family upbringing were: neglected, democratic, permissive, dispersed and authoritarian. There was a statistically significant effect of the indicative program in: improving the status of achieving identity, reducing two cases of identity lock and identity disorder. There was no significant effect of the indicative program in reducing the status of suspending identity.

Epistemic Cognitive Beliefs and Academic Help Seeking

This study aims to identify the levels of Epistemic Cognitive Beliefs (ECB) and the behaviour of Academic Help Seeking (AHS) among secondary school students in Jordan and detect the ability of ECB to predict AHS behaviour. It also aims to identify differences in the levels of ECB due to the variables of gender, academic branch and the interaction between gender and academic branch. The sample of the study consisted of 330 students who were in their second year of secondary school. To achieve the aims of the study, the ECB scale (Wang et al., 2013) and the AHS scale (White, 2011) were used. The results indicated that the levels of both ECB and AHS were high among secondary school students in Jordan. There were statistically significant differences in the levels of ECB due to the gender of the students, which favoured males, and due to academic branch, which favoured the sciences. Finally, there were no statistically significant differences in the levels of ECB due to the interaction between gender and academic branch. Furthermore, ECB contributed to the explanation of 34.9% of the AHS behaviour.