Curriculum reform with a school-based approach: intellectual,structural and cultural challenges     

Theodore Lee  Yin Cheong Cheng  James Ko 《School Leadership & Management》2018,38(3):278-301

Curriculum reform with a school-based approach is often assumed to offer schools and teachers autonomy at the site level, thus enabling them to develop a school-based curriculum and pedagogies to better fit the needs of students. Over the past decade, school-based curriculum development in Hong Kong has encountered issues that deserve worldwide attention and discussion. By reviewing the experiences of two schools in Hong Kong and drawing on international evidence, this study identifies key challenges and difficulties in school-based curriculum reform in three areas. Intellectually, there is a lack of a strong and broad shared knowledge base for curriculum development. As a result, most school-based curriculum initiatives have been piecemeal, fragmented and shallow. Structurally, many teachers have wasted time ‘re-inventing the wheel’ when developing school-based curricula. This effort has left them without sufficient time and energy to be effective in teaching. Culturally, reliance on school management to steer school-based reforms has prevented the development of a new culture in which teachers have the autonomy to make changes in their daily practices. Without cultural changes, curriculum reforms are not sustainable or effective. This study proposes a cooperative platform that integrates the strengths of central intelligence and school-based initiatives to maximise support for curriculum development at the teacher, school-site and system levels.  相似文献   

Dimensions of Market Demand Associated with Taekwondo Schools in North America: Development of a Scale     

Min Kil Kim  James J. Zhang  Yong Jae Ko 《Sport Management Review》2009,12(3):149-166

Since the introduction of martial arts in the United States, the sport of Taekwondo (TKD) has rapidly grown and developed. Although the elevated interest in this sport has increased the magnitude of the TKD market, no systematic studies have been conducted to investigate the market demand variables associated with TKD schools in North America. To a great extent, lack of study has been due to the unavailability of a viable measure. The purpose of this study was to identify the dimensions of market demand for TKD schools and develop the Scale of Market Demand Associated with Taekwondo School (SMD-TKD). Research participants (N = 205) were TKD school members who were 18 years and older from 22 TKD schools in major cities of Florida. A factor analysis using principal component extraction and varimax rotation produced six factors with 51 items returned (i.e., Personal Benefits, School Operation, Instruction Quality, Program Offering, Locker Room, and Cultural Learning). Multiples regression analysis revealed that all market demand factors, except for Program Offering and Cultural Learning, were positively (p < .05) predictive of TKD consumption, suggesting that the SMD-TKD is useful for marketing studies on TKD consumers.  相似文献   

End-of-Life Decision Making in Older Korean Adults: Concerns,Preferences, and Expectations     

Eunjeong Ko  Holly Nelson-Becker  Youngjoon Park  Minjung Shin 《Educational gerontology》2013,39(2):71-81

This study explored Korean older adults’ concerns and preferences regarding end-of-life care and the expected role of physicians in the decision making process. The purpose was to assist health care professionals, in particular, physicians, to better understand how to interact with Korean older adults. A qualitative method using in-person interviews was conducted with Korean older adults (N = 54). The seven main themes generated in this study included the following: (a) life-sustaining treatments and hope for quality of life; (b) physician expert status; (c) truth telling and ethics; (d) preferred way to disclose bad news; (e) physician's role to treat, (f) potential misuse of life-sustaining treatments; and (g) priority of patients’ preferences. Overall, study participants generally anticipated a larger role for physicians in their own end-of-life decision making, though some expressed concerns about the outcome of giving such power to physicians, especially in agreeing to life-sustaining treatments. Although culture provides one important clue about expectations, it is always crucial for health care providers to ask about individual preferences and to develop an open communication style to decrease distress. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding concerns and preferences regarding end-of-life care among Korean older adults and the importance of assisting them in planning end-of-life care within a cultural framework.  相似文献   

Exploring School Improvement in Hong Kong Secondary Schools     

James Y. C. Ko  Philip Hallinger  Allan D. Walker 《Peabody Journal of Education》2013,88(2):216-234

Scholars have increasingly sought to understand how the process of school improvement differs among schools operating in different school levels, conditions, and contexts. Using Rosenholtz's (1985 Rosenholtz, S. 1985. Effective schools: Interpreting the evidence. American Journal of Education, 93: 352–388. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) conception of “moving” and “stuck” schools as a framework for thinking about school improvement, this study examines the learning outcomes of 39 Hong Kong secondary schools over a 3-year period. We examine whether features of leadership and school capacity differed with respect to these learning outcomes within the sample of moving and stuck schools. This research in Hong Kong has identified several factors that appear to synergistically contribute to differences in patterns of improvement in learning across different subjects in both moving and stuck schools. These factors include resource management of principals and school capacity in terms of professional learning community; workload of teachers; alignment, coherence, and structure; and resource capacity. This study extends the research on leadership and capacity building as a means of school improvement, in the process elaborating on their impact within a non-Western society.  相似文献   

An economic valuation study of public libraries in Korea     

Young Man Ko  Wonsik Shim  Soon-Hee Pyo  Ji Sang Chang  Hye Kyung Chung 《Library & information science research》2012

The economic value of public libraries for local residents in Korea was measured. An economic-value measurement model that enables the estimation of diverse types of public library services was designed, using a conditional-value measurement method. Benefits were taken as the value of the main services provided by public libraries, such as accessibility to informational materials, facilities, and programs. Costs included the total amount of expenses at libraries such as personnel expenses, materials purchasing expenses, and other operational costs. Data were collected from 1220 users from 22 public libraries in the province of Seoul/Gyeonggi-do and the other seven Korean provinces. The return on investment (ROI) was calculated to be 3.66.  相似文献   

An incidence survey of battered children in two elementary schools of Seoul     

K Kim  B Ko 《Child abuse & neglect》1990,14(2):273-276

Among the 1,142 girls and boys aged 9 to 11 years, 8.2% were seriously battered, 58% were mildly battered and 33.8% were unbattered during the past year. Child battering was more serious in families in the lower social strata, with poor living conditions, in broken families such as those with stepparents or absent mothers, and where parents were unskilled workers or unemployed. Finally, child battering was closely related to all other forms of family violence.  相似文献   

A generic construct based workload model for web search     

Jia-Lang Seng  I-Feng Ko  Binshan Lin   《Information processing & management》2009,45(5):529-554

Benchmarks are vital tools in the performance measurement, evaluation, and comparison of computer hardware and software systems. Standard benchmarks such as the TREC, TPC, SPEC, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Wisconsin, AS³AP, OO1, OO7, XOO7 benchmarks have been used to assess the system performance. These benchmarks are domain-specific and domain-dependent in that they model typical applications and tie to a problem domain. Test results from these benchmarks are estimates of possible system performance for certain pre-determined problem types. When the user domain differs from the standard problem domain or when the application workload is divergent from the standard workload, they do not provide an accurate way to measure the system performance of the user problem domain. System performance of the actual problem domain in terms of data and transactions may vary significantly from the standard benchmarks.In this research, we address the issue of generalization and precision of benchmark workload model for web search technology. The current performance measurement and evaluation method suffers from the rough estimate of system performance which varies widely when the problem domain changes. The performance results provided by the vendors cannot be reproduced nor reused in the real users’ environment. Hence, in this research, we tackle the issue of domain boundness and workload boundness which represents the root of the problem of imprecise, ir-representative, and ir-reproducible performance results. We address the issue by presenting a domain-independent and workload-independent workload model benchmark method which is developed from the perspective of the user requirements and generic constructs. We present a user-driven workload model to develop a benchmark in a process of workload requirements representation, transformation, and generation via the common carrier of generic constructs. We aim to create a more generalized and precise evaluation method which derives test suites from the actual user domain and application setting.The workload model benchmark method comprises three main components. They are a high-level workload specification scheme, a translator of the scheme, and a set of generators to generate the test database and the test suite. They are based on the generic constructs. The specification scheme is used to formalize the workload requirements. The translator is used to transform the specification. The generator is used to produce the test database and the test workload. We determine the generic constructs via the analysis of search methods. The generic constructs form a page model, a query model, and a control model in the workload model development. The page model describes the web page structure. The query model defines the logics to query the web. The control model defines the control variables to set up the experiments.In this study, we have conducted ten baseline research experiments to validate the feasibility and validity of the benchmark method. An experimental prototype is built to execute these experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that the method based on generic constructs and driven by the perspective of user requirements is capable of modeling the standard benchmarks as well as more general benchmark requirements.  相似文献   

Text classification from unlabeled documents with bootstrapping and feature projection techniques     

Youngjoong Ko  Jungyun Seo 《Information processing & management》2009

Many machine learning algorithms have been applied to text classification tasks. In the machine learning paradigm, a general inductive process automatically builds a text classifier by learning, generally known as supervised learning. However, the supervised learning approaches have some problems. The most notable problem is that they require a large number of labeled training documents for accurate learning. While unlabeled documents are easily collected and plentiful, labeled documents are difficultly generated because a labeling task must be done by human developers. In this paper, we propose a new text classification method based on unsupervised or semi-supervised learning. The proposed method launches text classification tasks with only unlabeled documents and the title word of each category for learning, and then it automatically learns text classifier by using bootstrapping and feature projection techniques. The results of experiments showed that the proposed method achieved reasonably useful performance compared to a supervised method. If the proposed method is used in a text classification task, building text classification systems will become significantly faster and less expensive.  相似文献   

Do reading practices make a difference? Evidence from PIRLS data for Hong Kong and Taiwan primary school Grade 4 students     

Shek-Kam Tse  Hwa-Wei Ko  Joseph Wai-Ip Lam  Sau-Yan Hui  Hung-Wai Ng 《Compare》2016,46(3):369-393

This study examined the influence of classroom pedagogic reading practices and out-of-school practices in explaining why the reading attainment of Hong Kong Grade 4 students was superior to that of their counterparts in Taiwan in the 2006 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. Analyses of scores from 9301 students (4712 from Hong Kong and 4589 from Taiwan) revealed that independent reading in school made a distinctive contribution to the reading performance of Hong Kong and Taiwan students after controlling for the effects of students’ and parents’ reading attitudes, the availability of supportive home educational resources and student engagement in a range of reading practices. Out-of-school informational reading was found to be negatively associated with students’ reading attainment for both Hong Kong and Taiwan students. There was evidence that reading aloud in class in Taiwan classrooms significantly contributed to the Taiwan students’ poor reading performance.  相似文献   

Mediating effects of bullying involvement on the relationship of body mass index with social phobia,depression, suicidality,and self-esteem and sex differences in adolescents in Taiwan     

Cheng-Fang Yen  Tai-Ling Liu  Chih-Hung Ko  Yu-Yu Wu  Chung-Ping Cheng 《Child abuse & neglect》2014

The aims of this study were to examine the mediating effect of bullying involvement on the relationships between body mass index (BMI) and mental health problems, including social phobia, depression, suicidality, and low self-esteem among adolescents in Taiwan. The moderation effect of sex on the mediating role of bullying involvement was also examined. Five thousand two hundred and fifty-two students of high schools completed the questionnaires. Victimization and perpetration of passive and active bullying were assessed using the Chinese version of the School Bullying Experience Questionnaire. BMI was calculated from self-reported weight and height measurements. The Social Phobia Inventory, the Mandarin Chinese version of the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale, the suicidality-related questionnaire from the epidemiological version of the Kiddie-Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia, and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale were applied to assess social phobia, depression, suicidality, and low self-esteem, respectively. The mediating effect of bullying involvement on the associations between increased BMI and mental health problems was examined by the Sobel test. The moderation effect of sex on the mediating role of bullying involvement was tested by the multiple-group structural equation model. Victimization of passive and active bullying and perpetration of passive bullying, but not perpetration of active bullying, had a mediating effect on the relationships between increased BMI and all four mental health problems. Sex did not have a significant moderation effect on the mediating role of bullying involvement. Bullying involvement should be a target of prevention and intervention in developing a strategy to improve mental health among adolescents with increased BMI.  相似文献