This study aims to obtain expert approval and consensus on Life Balance construct instrument among female engineers who have family. The purpose of this instrument is to identify the factors that assist women engineers to have a well-balanced life. The technique used in developing this Life Balance instrument is the Modified Delphi technique. This technique was used to obtain consensus among experts in developing the Life Balance items. The instrument development was performed by seven experts who have expertise, experience, and knowledge in career and engineering fields. The initial results (interviews with experts) identified four key factors in achieving Life Balance which were childcare, flexible career, leave, and social support. An example of how to obtain an interquartile range (IQR) value using the Modified Delphi technique that was carried out for a second time until the consensus was achieved was provided. IQR value is a value derived from questionnaires completed by experts .....

1452 hits

Educators need to take action in terms of acquiring, creating and transferring their knowledge to students based on the professional learning community approach. It involves building a learning community in their classrooms. Researchers and professional organizations have cited the Professional Learning Community (PLC) process as having the potential to impact student achievement positively. As the current era of high stakes accountability has left educators struggling to improve the quality of teaching and learning, PLCs have been recommended to foster collaboration and make educator practices public. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine educator’ descriptions of their PLCs to determine if the practice of the principles influencedstudent academic performance in language teaching. A quantitative research design was implemented to explore the extent to which educator training in PLC principles, the actual practice of PLC principles, and student achievement in language t.....

1016 hits

A remarkable feature of empirical studies is that not many research works investigate the relation between human development and tourism. Although gross domestic product may replace human development to measure economy progress and human well-being in relation to tourism, however, this definition, is narrow, limits to economic side, and ignores the social and cultural factors. To overcome this shortcoming, this study examines the relationship between human development, tourism and economic growth in Malaysia. By using different cointegration approaches, the results indicate that tourism is positively related to human development in the long run. The finding suggests that the known relationship may serve as a guide to policy makers to achieve better development of social and cultural in order to promote the growth...

1180 hits

Nowadays the English language is considered a language of education, business and research. Since English is medium of learning at tertiary level and learners’ competence in English language decides their academic success. The aim of this study was to explore the undergraduate programmes students and teachers’ beliefs about communicative competence and its need for language learning at tertiary level. This study used a descriptive survey method to collect the data from teachers and students of the National College of Business Administration and Economics University and University of Central Punjab Lahore. 300 students and 25 teachers from the English Language faculties were selected using random convenient sampling method. The results of the study have shown that teachers and students have clarity about the concept of communicative competence and believe it is important for job and academic success. Teachers’ low proficiency, lack of interest in speaking in English, outdated syll.....

730 hits

This paper reports the findings on the development and validation of the Fostering Intellectual Excitement (IE) Questionnaire amongst the student teachers. Initially, 16 items which portray the construct of Fostering IE were generated and subsequently administered to a group of 248 teachers. Analyzing the dataset using the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) indicates that, while all the 16 items of IE were retained, they were nevertheless clustered into 4 sub-constructs, labelled as Group Discussion (GD), Critical Thinking (CT), Evaluate Peer’s Work (EW) and Knowledge Transfer (KT) respectively. This 4-sub-construct Fostering IE Questionnaire was again administered to 458 in-service teachers and the dataset were analyzed by means of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) whereby each measurement model was tested to see the relationship of each sub-construct (or latent variable) with its measures. The finding shows that each of the four sub-constructs of the IE has the sufficient valid.....

387 hits

The focal point of this study is the investigation of the dynamic relationship between selected macroeconomic variables, including unemployment, inflation, interest rate and economic growth, in Malaysia. In order to achieve the aims of thisstudy, quarterly time series data from the first quarter of 2001 until the fourth quarter of 2017 was utilised. The Johansen Juselius Co-integration test was used to investigate long run equilibrium in the equation system, and the Granger Causality test in Vector Error Correction framework was used to evaluate the long-term and short-term relationships between the study variables. The findings suggest that a relationship exists between the variables in the long term, including unemployment interest rate, inflation and economic growth across the system equations. The results further suggest that, in the short run, a two-way causality exists between unemployment and economic growth. Moreover, the results show that unemployment affects economic growth, .....

1284 hits

Kajian ini bertujuan untuk mengenal pasti tahap amalan kepimpinan teragih dalam kalangan guru besardi Sekolah Kebangsaan (SK) dan Sekolah Jenis Kebangsaan Cina (SJKC) di Semenanjung Malaysia. Secara khususnya, kajian ini bertujuan untuk mengenal pasti tahap amalan kepimpinan teragih berdasarkan dimensi Visi, Misi dan Matlamat, Budaya Sekolah, Perkongsian Tanggungjawab dan Amalan Kepimpinan serta perbezaannya antara dua jenis aliran sekolah tersebut. Kajian ini mengaplikasikan kaedah kuantitatif yang menggunakan pendekatan tinjauan. Sebanyak 384 orang guru dari SK dan 379 orang guru dari SJKC telah dipilih secara rawak sebagai responden dalam kajian ini. Kajian ini dianalisis secara deskriptif dan inferensi dengan menggunakan skor min, sisihan piawai dan ujian-t. Dapatan kajian menunjukkan tahap amalan kepimpinan teragih secara keseluruhannya di SK (M=4.03; SP=.40) dan SJKC (M=3.99; SP=.45) berada pada tahap yang Tinggi. Selain itu, dapatan kajian ini juga menunjukkan dimensi Visi, Misi.....

1007 hits

This  study  examines  the  discrimination,  exploitation  and  oppression  of  black African women  in western societies in Suzan Lori Park’s Venus. Specifically, the  study  investigates  how  the  playwright  portrays  liberation  of  the black  Africanwomen from such oppression using Spivak’s  concept of Essentialism and Mohanty’s transnational as  part of modern postcolonial feminist theory. The  study  reveals  many  ways  in  which  black  African   women  could  be emancipated  from  discrimination,  exploitation, oppression  and  ensure  their voices  are  heard.  These  include  embracing  education,  creating  awareness  on racism   and   objectification of   African-American   woman,   opposing   the pseudoscientific  belief  of  white  supremacy,  rewriting  the  history  of  black African women and recreating identity for African-American females..

856 hits

This research aims to investigate the Perception of lecturers in Malaysia toward implement of cooperative learning in the Arabic class. A total of 30 lecturers were randomly selected from 3 Malaysian universities; namely UPSI, IIUM, and USIM and self-reported instruments were distributed for data collection. The data were collected using questionnaire consisted 17 questions that relate with 3 Dimensions such as interaction and skill that digested from cooperative learning items were used as independent predictors while performance in Arabic class . The result of this research showed that the lecturers from 3 universities in Malaysia had positive responses toward the implementation of Cooperative Learning approach to teach Arabic Language...

509 hits

One popular clustering technique - the K-means widely use in educational scope to clustering and mapping document, data, and user performance in skill. K-means clustering is one of the classical and most widely used clustering algorithms shows its efficiency in many traditional applications its defect appears obviously when the data set to become much more complicated. Based on some research on K-means algorithm shows that Number of a cluster of K-means cannot easily be specified in much realworld application, several algorithms requiring the number of cluster as a parameter cannot be effectively employed. The aim of this paper describes the perspective K-means problems underlying research. Literature analysis of previous studies suggesting that selection of the number of clusters randomly cause problems such as suitable producing globular cluster, less efficient if as the number of cluster grow K-means clustering becomes untenable. From those literature reviews, the heuristic optimiza.....

1051 hits