Abstract: Social work education is competency based in nature. There is an expectation that graduates of social work programs throughout the world are to be prepared to practice at a level of competence, which is beneficial to both the well-being of individuals and community. Experiential learning is one way to prepare students for competent practice. The use of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is a form experiential education that has been successful in a number of disciplines to bridge the gap between the theoretical concepts in the classroom to the real world. PBL aligns with the constructivist theoretical approach to learning, which emphasizes the integration of new knowledge with the beliefs students already hold. In addition, the basic tenants of PBL correspond well with the practice behaviors associated with social work practice including multi-disciplinary collaboration and critical thinking. This paper makes an argument for utilizing PBL in social work education.
Abstract: Developing a responsible personal worldview is central to sustainable development, but achieving quality education to promote transformative learning for sustainability is thus far, poorly understood. Most programs involving education for sustainable development rely on changing behavior, rather than attitudes. The emphasis is on the scientific and utilitarian aspect of sustainability with negligible importance on the intrinsic value of nature. Campus sustainability projects include building sustainable gardens and implementing energy-efficient upgrades, instead of focusing on educating for sustainable development through exploration of students’ values and beliefs. Even though green technology adoption maybe the right thing to do, most schools are not targeting the root cause of the environmental crisis; they are just providing palliative measures. This study explores the under-examined factors that lead to pro-environmental behavior by investigating the environmental perceptions of both college business students and personnel of green organizations. A mixed research approach of qualitative, based on structured interviews, and quantitative instruments was developed including 30 college-level students’ interviews and 40 green organization staff members involved in sustainable activities. The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed for analysis. Categorization of the responses to the open‐ended questions was conducted with the purpose of identifying the main types of factors influencing attitudes and correlating with behaviors. Overall the findings of this study indicated a lack of appreciation for nature, and inability to understand interconnectedness and apply critical thinking. The results of the survey conducted on undergraduate students indicated that the responses of business and liberal arts students by independent t-test were significantly different, with a p‐value of 0.03. While liberal arts students showed an understanding of human interdependence with nature and its delicate balance, business students seemed to believe that humans were meant to rule over the rest of nature. This result was quite intriguing from the perspective that business students will be defining markets, influencing society, controlling and managing businesses that supposedly, in the face of climate change, shall implement sustainable activities. These alarming results led to the focus on green businesses in order to better understand their motivation to engage in sustainable activities. Additionally, a probit model revealed that childhood exposure to nature has a significantly positive impact in pro-environmental attitudes to most of the New Ecological Paradigm scales. Based on these findings, this paper discusses educators including Socrates, John Dewey and Paulo Freire in the implementation of eco-pedagogy and transformative learning following a curriculum with emphasis on critical and systems thinking, which are deemed to be key ingredients in quality education for sustainable development.
Abstract: Teaching and learning should involve social issues by which effectiveness and humanity is due consideration as a guideline for sharing and co-creating knowledge. A qualitative method was used after a pioneer study to confirm pre-service teachers’ awareness of open knowledge. There are 17 in-service teacher candidates sampling from 181 schools in Taiwan. Two questions are to resolve: a) How did teachers change their educational ideas, in particular, their attitudes to meet the needs of knowledge sharing and co-creativity; and b) How did they acknowledge the necessity of working out an appropriate way between the educational efficiency and the nature of education for high performance management. This interview investigated teachers’ attitude of sharing and co-creating knowledge. The results show two facts in Taiwan: A) Individuals who must be able to express themselves will be capable of taking part in an open learning environment; and B) Teachers must lead the direction to inspire high performance and improve students’ capacity via knowledge sharing and co-creating knowledge, according to the student-centered philosophy. Collected data from interviewing showed that the teachers were well aware of changing their teaching methods and make some improvements to balance the educational efficiency and the nature of education. Almost all teachers acknowledge that ICT is helpful to motivate learning enthusiasm. Further, teaching integrated with ICT saves teachers’ time and energy on teaching preparation and promoting effectiveness. Teachers are willing to co-create knowledge with students, though using information is not easy due to the lack of operating skills of the website and ICT. Some teachers are against to co-create knowledge in the informational background since they hold that is not feasible for there being a knowledge gap between teachers and students. Technology would easily mislead teachers and students to the goal of instrumental rationality, which makes pedagogy dysfunctional and inhumane; however, any high quality of teaching should take a dialectical balance between effectiveness and humanity.
Abstract: Due to the advancement of Internet technology, online
learning is widely used in higher education institutions. Online
learning offers several means of communication, including online
forum. Through online forum, students and instructors are able to
discuss and share their knowledge and expertise without having a
need to attend the face-to-face, ordinary classroom session. The
purposes of this study are to analyze the students’ levels of
participation and critical thinking, types of action and factors
influencing their participation in online forum. A total of 41
postgraduate students undertaking a course in educational technology
from a public university in Malaysia were involved in this study. In
this course, the students participated in a weekly online forum as part
of the course requirement. Based on the log data file extracted from
the online forum, the students’ type of actions (view, add, update,
delete posts) and their levels of participation (passive, moderate or
active) were identified. In addition, the messages posted in the forum
were analyzed to gauge their level of critical thinking. Meanwhile,
the factors that might influence their online forum participation were
measured using a 24-items questionnaire. Based on the log data, a
total of 105 posts were sent by the participants. In addition, the
findings show that (i) majority of the students are moderate
participants, with an average of two to three posts per person, (ii)
viewing posts are the most frequent type of action (85.1%), and
followed by adding post (9.7%). Furthermore, based on the posts
they made, the most frequent type of critical thinking observed was
justification (50 input or 19.0%), followed by linking ideas and
interpretation (47 input or 18%), and novelty (38 input or 14.4%).
The findings indicate that online forum allows for social interaction
and can be used to measure the students’ critical thinking skills. In
order to achieve this, monitoring students’ activities in the online
forum is recommended.
Abstract: The main purpose of the study was to determine whether students- interpretation achievement differed with the use of various multimedia presentation types. Four groups of students, text only (T), audio only (A), text and audio (TA), text and image (TI), were arranged and they were presented the same story via different types of multimedia presentations. Inference achievement was measured by a critical thinking inference test. Higher mean scores for the TA group compared to the other three groups were found. Also when compared pairwise, interpretation achievement of the TA group differed significantly from scores of the T and TI groups. These differences were interpreted with the increased cognitive load. Increased cognitive load for the TA group may have invited students to put more effort into comprehending the text, thus resulting in better test scores. Findings of the study can be seen as a sign of the importance of learning situations and learning outcomes in multimedia-supported learning environments and may have practical benefits for instructional designers.
Abstract: Collaborative problem solving in e-learning can take
in the form of discussion among learner, creating a highly social
learning environment and characterized by participation and
interactivity. This paper, designed a collaborative learning
environment where agent act as co-learner, can play different roles
during interaction. Since different roles have been assigned to the
agent, learner will assume that multiple co-learner exists to help and
guide him all throughout the collaborative problem solving process,
but in fact, alone during the learning process. Specifically, it answers
the questions what roles of the agent should be incorporated to
contribute better learning outcomes, how agent will facilitate the
communication process to provide social learning and interactivity
and what are the specific instructional strategies that facilitate learner
participation, increased skill acquisition and develop critical thinking.
Abstract: The element of justice or al-‘adl in the context of
Islamic critical thinking deals with the notion of justice in a thinking
process which critically rationalizes the truth in a fair and objective
manner with no irrelevant interference that can jeopardize a sound
judgment. This Islamic axiological element is vital in technological
decision making as it addresses the issues of religious values and
ethics that are primarily set to fulfill the purpose of human life on
earth. The main objective of this study was to examine and analyze
the perception of Muslim engineering students in Malaysian higher
education institutions towards the concept of al-‘adl as an essential
element of Islamic critical thinking. The study employed mixed
methods approach that comprises data collection from the
questionnaire survey and the interview responses. A total of 557
Muslim engineering undergraduates from six Malaysian universities
participated in the study. The study generally indicated that Muslim
engineering undergraduates in the higher institutions have rather
good comprehension and consciousness for al-‘adl with a slight
awareness on the importance of objective thinking. Nonetheless there
were a few items on the concept that have implied a comparatively
low perception on the rational justice in Islam as the means to grasp
the ultimate truth.
Abstract: Weblog is an Internet tool that is believed to possess
great potential to facilitate learning in education. This study wants to
know if weblog can be used to promote students- critical thinking. It
used a group of secondary two students from a Singapore school to
write weblogs as a means of substitution for their traditional
handwritten assignments. The topics for the weblogging are taken
from History syllabus but modified to suit the purpose of this study.
Weblogs from the students were collected and analysed using a
known coding system for measuring critical thinking. Results show
that the topic for blogging is crucial in determining the types of
critical thinking employed by the students. Students are seen to
display critical thinking traits in the areas of information sourcing,
linking information to arguments and viewpoints justification.
Students- criticalness is more profound when the information for
writing a topic is readily available. Otherwise, they tend to be less
critical and subjective. The study also found that students lack the
ability to source for external information suggesting that students
may need to be taught information literacy in order to widen their use
of critical thinking skills.