Background: A cyclical relationship has been documented among a teacher’s self-efficacy, stress, and segments of their professional wellness (i.e., psychological, financial). Despite the recognized importance of teacher wellness and self-efficacy, research pertaining to public school elementary teachers specifically regarding these constructs is sparse.
Purpose: The current exploratory study aimed to discover the relationship between teachers’ self-efficacy and teacher wellness, controlling for factors such as time spent teaching, and potential site-based differences in the relationship.
Methods: The sample was comprised of 33 elementary school teachers across two elementary schools (K-5th grades), in two geographically different states, who completed the standardized Teacher Sense of Self-Efficacy Scale Short Form and the Five Factor Wellness Inventory.
Results: Results from a Spearman’s rho indicated that, for both schools, there was a moderate, statistically significant, positive correlation between teachers’ self-efficacy and wellness with higher self-efficacy related to higher wellness.
Conclusions: Given the results, the new insights into the relationship between teacher wellness and self-efficacy, regardless of location, indicates that preservice higher education training programs must emphasize the critical priority of building, supporting, and creating sustainable practices for teacher wellness and self-efficacy. As these practices begin prior to entering the profession, teachers can implement their coping skills to maintain higher wellness and self-efficacy levels, providing healthy modeling to others and potentially increasing effectiveness of instruction and retention levels.
Background: The higher education institutions will achieve autonomy traversing the path of graded accreditation. The autonomy of higher education is linked with the quality of education and accreditation. Higher education institutions will not only achieve autonomy but will sustain it in ever-changing external and internal environments.
Purpose: The purpose is to design strategies for the sustenance of autonomy in higher education institutions.
Method: The paper is based on an exploratory qualitative study conducted during 2020. The research objectives emanate from the review of the literature and the experiences of the researcher. The research objective is further explored from the literature review to formulate the research questions.The population for the study constitutes the autonomous higher education institutions of the country including engineering, management, pharmacy, and polytechnic institutions. The researcher selected a purposive sample to gather the information and views of the respondents. Respondents were selected from all over India, all types of institutions, and all levels of the institute. The researcher designed a comprehensive, concise, precise, and accurate structured and semi-structured research instrument based on the literature, experiences, and focus group discussion. This research instrument was validated on content and construct in a group of six persons working in the area of autonomy. Then it was prepared in the Google form which was validated by forty respondents. The respondents are principals, heads of departments, senior faculty members working in national-level institutes, higher education institutes, and technical institutions.The instrument was mailed to more than 8000 respondents out of which 954 respondents provided information. The information is provided by principals, deans, heads of departments, and senior faculty members. Secondary information is also used to fill up the gap to achieve the research objective. The information received from structured instruments is compiled using Microsoft Excel Sheet to calculate the weighted mean and percentage.
Results: The strategies for sustaining autonomy at central government, state government, regulatory body, institute, teacher, and student levels are evolved.
Conclusion: To reap the full potential of autonomy and its sustenance strategies at different levels of hierarchy need to be effectively implemented on continuous basis.
Background: NETS-T Standards for teachers define the knowledge and skills that teachers or educators need to have in order to successfully and effectively integrate technology in teaching and learning.
Purpose: It is essential for every community to know the status of their teachers’ NETS-T educational technology practices.
Methods: A questionnaire consisting of 6 educational technology factors, with a number of items or performance indicators, under each factor was administered to 76 Grade 10 English medium Secondary School teachers. The sample included 14 male teachers, and 62 female teachers from 11 schools that were conveniently selected.
Results: Findings were that most teachers strongly agree to the items mentioned under the TOC factor and PPP factor, while most of them agreed to the items mentioned under PDL, AAE, SEL, and TLC factors. A significant statistical difference in the distribution of the average scores of items for pairwise comparisons of some schools was found under TOC, PDL, AAE and PPP items.
Conclusions:There was no significant statistical difference in the distribution of average scores of items for pairwise comparisons of schools under SEL and TLC factors.
Background: The provision of graded accreditation and autonomy of colleges has been made in the national education policy (NEP) 2020 which will be applicable for all types of higher education institutions in the country. The authors have noticed that there are very few diploma engineering programmes having accreditation and that too will expire for the majority of the programmes in June 2022.
Purpose: To ascertain the awareness of faculty members on the accreditation process was the main purpose of the study. Apart from it, reasons for a very low number of programme accreditation were inferred and suggestions are made for the national board of accreditation (NBA), state government and polytechnics to improve and innovate the quality of diploma engineering programmes to satisfy the future needs of students, employers and society and implement the provisions of NEP 2020.
Method: A descriptive research study was undertaken using the structured and semi-structured instrument designed by the researchers. The responses were collected from 525 principals, heads of departments and faculty members of the polytechnics of the country using Google Form.
Results: It is found that on 95 parameters of the accreditation process the cumulative weighted mean level of awareness of faculty members is more than 60 percent. That clearly indicates that teachers are having in-depth awareness ofthe requirements of the accreditation process but they are achieving the minimum expectable level on various pre-qualifiers, criteria and sub-criteria because of various reasons.
Conclusions: There is a number of other reasons which are abstracting the polytechnic and programmes to qualify for the accreditation. These reasons should be identified and addressed using well-designed quality improvement and innovation interventions at state, polytechnic and faculty members levels.
Background: Systematic collection of scientific evidence on the applicability an usability of model and its components is an important aspect of design and development research.
Purpose: The aim of this study is to determine external validity of the organic reaction teaching model in terms of its practicability and potentiality in enhancing students’ performance scores.
Method: A field testing method was conducted across five matriculation colleges in Malaysia by five (5) experts’ chemistry lectures who implemented a lesson plan developed based on the model’s constructs and then responded to an open ended questionnaire to express their views on the practicability of the model. 40 matriculation Students that participated in the field testing were also evaluated to determine the potentiality of the model on their performance in organic reactions. Four main themes having of many codes and quotations were identified.
Results: The analysis of the results indicates that the model is compatible, clear and flexible for teaching organic reactions. Moreover, the model components have the potential of miximizing students’ academic performance in organic reaction with an overall score of 84.4 % in the organic chemistry tests. Thus, the model was found practicable for teaching and have the potential to minimized students’ common errors in organic reaction mechanisms.
Conclusions: The findings of this study may similarly work as a reference model in developing modules and measuring instruments to reduce errors in other procedural concepts in chemistry and other science-related subjects.
Background: Emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence are accompaniment to each other for refining human life. Spiritual intelligence builds up moral value, spiritual values and a strong belief system whereas emotional intelligence helps to develop personal relationships with one’s own self, social relationships with others and to manage the emotions.
Purpose: The high school students are facing a major burst of emotions which needs to be channelized to give them the right direction in life. In this, their emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence play an imperative role. Present research paper is an attempt to explore the relationship between emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence of high school students. It examines how the spiritual intelligence affects the emotional intelligence of the students.
Methods: This research is carried out on 150 students of 9th standard CBSE affiliated schools. For data collection, Spiritual Intelligence Scales by Misra (2014) and Emotional Intelligence Test by Soni and Sharma (2009) were used. The SPSS software is used for the analysis of the data. Descriptive Statistic: Mean, Median, Mode, Standard Deviation, Skewness and Kurtosis are calculated to check the normal distribution of the data and inferential statistics: Pearson Correlation Coefficient and Regression Analysis are calculated to measure the relationship between the variables under study.
Results: The results of the study reject the null hypothesis and reveal that spiritual intelligence has a significant positive correlation with the emotional intelligence of the students.
Conclusions: The study shows that the students who are spiritually more intelligent have more stable emotions as compared to the other students.
Background: Effective skill development remains an important vehicle for national prosperity. Aswhat appeared to work with their predecessor generation (Gen X) does not have the same results with Millennials many educators today are experimenting with pedagogies to effectively train Millennials. Globally, it is becoming evident that the Millennials in higher education learn very differently than their predecessors.
Purpose: Our study provides comparisons on three learning parameters of learning affectivity, goal orientation and competition between Gen X & Millennials.
Methods: To study whether the learning attributes are similar or they differ across the two generations we compared the means of the three attributes under consideration. Results: We find Millennials to be different from Gen X across the three studied parameters suggesting that teaching pedagogies require a rethink for Millennials.
Conclusions: These results could be useful in designing appropriate teaching pedagogies that are likely to improve Millennials’ learning.
Background: Learning losses does not mean forgetting only curricular learning but slipping back of fundamental learning abilities that learner would have acquired during schooling. School closures in India have severely disrupted learning processes of children resulting in learning losses and social gaps in academic outcomes. Though school closure is a global phenomenon, its adverse effects on learning outcomes are unevenly distributed in the society.
Purpose: The paper aims to trace the phenomenon of learning losses resulting from a prolonged school closures during COVID 19 pandemic at the national level since march 2020.The study further is directed to trace accessibilities and uses of digital resources in India.
Method: The study used secondary sources of data mainly of Bihar to ascertain the trend of learning losses. The data were regenerated to measure the emerging trend. Results: Learning loss was unevenly distributed in the society. Those who were digitally equipped had compensated their learning losses during school closures. The Bihar had mere 5 per cent computer and 15 internet facilities. The rural households had only 3 per cent computer and 13 per cent internet facilities. Primary grade children especially of disadvantaged groups in Bihar suffered more because they have very limited home learning resources. Learning crisis was more prominent at elementary school level where both the home resources and digital tools were inadequate. They spent hours in surfing social media for private purposes. The phenomenon of cyber loafing was widely seen among young students, showing a serious problem of internet abuse by secondary school students.
Conclusion: Despite constraints Bihar managed to continue school learning programme during COVID 19. It had a largest force of digitally-equipped teachers (about 1.25 lakh) known as Potential Learning Community (PLC) who were ready to deliver e-contents to beneficiaries. Teachers established connectivity with parents and learners who had no android mobile. They started running Schools on Mobile (SOM) classes. The paper discusses learning recovery plan such as engaging community, reallocating resources for schools, etc.
Background: Self-efficacy in the use of ICT refers to a person’s belief in their ability to succeed in the use of ICT in the teaching, learning and assessment process as well as research purposes.
Purpose: The incorporation of ICT into teaching, learning and as-sessment, and for research purposes is a powerful tool that pro-motes the teaching-learning environment in several ways. This study was aimed at investigating Physics Tutors’ self-efficacy (PTSE) level towards ICT integration into teaching, learning, as-sessment and research in the various Colleges of Education (CoE) in Ghana.
Methods: A Four-point Likert Scale Questionnaire was used to ob-tain quantitative data from 16 physics tutors sampled from the 16 Science and Mathematics Colleges of Education in Ghana. The data obtained was analyzed based on a number of factors such as historical inclination towards the use of ICT among other things.
Results: The findings from the study however reveled that most physics tutors accept and believe that the use of ICT in teaching physics significantly improves on teaching and learning. However, many of the Physics Tutors believe that there isn’t enough support in terms of logistics and training from the various stakeholders such as institutional heads, supervisors and even colleagues in the usage of ICT in teaching and learning physics Conclusions: It is concluded that the overall PTSE towards ICT integration in the CoE is above average (2.6 on a scale of 4).
Background: The twenty-first-century learners can be termed as digital natives and therefore, any discussion on the pedagogies and curriculum must concentrate on integrating digital literacy skills and the teaching and learning materials must focus on the development of the technological intelligence of the learners. The principal appre-hension for all the educationists and curriculum planners is how to transform and modify higher education for preparing the learners of this century to more effectively cope with the challenges of today’s labor market.
Purpose: The paper aims to answer two key questions facing higher educational educators are those of: (i) what is the present status of higher education in preparing the graduates with the necessary skills and competencies for 21st-century skills, and (ii) how can the present education system integrate the digital and technological intelligence in the curriculum?
Methods: Exploration of the current Indian higher education cur-riculum and critically analyzing the results of various studies con-ducted in a similar area and by analyzing newspapers, educational policies, public survey results, and literature regarding the trends and developments in the higher education academia.
Results: This disposition visualized the possible challenges and suggests practical measures to solve the problems and demand for a new paradigm where there is symbiotic integration of digital literacy skills and technological intelligence is highlighted. Conclusion: There is a great need for updating and transforming the curriculum and pedagogic approaches in tune with the learning styles and demands of the learners.
