2828 research outputs found
Sort by
The Stakeholders’ Perceptions about the Effectiveness of iPads Integrations in Third Grade English Classes in a Private School in Sharjah, UAE
No full textThe presence of mobile technologies within elementary classrooms has been increasing yet review studies which measure the effectiveness of mobile technologies to support children’s learning in English classes remains scarce. The purpose of this study is to examine the attitude of parents, teachers, and leaders of the iPad’s integrations in third grade English classes in one of the private schools in Sharjah. Also, it will look into the barriers and concerns of this integration based on the stakeholders’ attitude and fully find solutions to these barriers. The study adopted a mixed methods approach to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. A survey was distributed to around 100 parents who have kids in third grade in one of the private schools in Sharjah. Also, six third grade English teachers, were interviewed in the qualitative study to investigate their perception of the iPad’s integrations in English classes. Another interview was conducted to five of the schools’ leaders to understand their attitude of the iPad’s integrations in third grade English classes. The primary goal of the interviews is to dig deeper into the phenomena and get more insights about the research problem. The analysis revealed that parents and teachers have neutral attitude toward the use of iPads, they believe that iPads are important for students learning but not for this specific grade level as it has negative effect on students’ fundamental skills. However, leaders have a positive attitude toward this integration, they claimed that students’ performance has been improved since the introduction of the iPads in classrooms. One significant implication that iPads should be given as helping tool to help students in this age enhance their learning. Additionally, a strict enforcement of the MDM system is necessary, and policymakers should establish a good communication with all parties involved to tackle shared concerns. The results of this paper will provide guidance for educators, administrators, and curriculum coordinators in reshaping instructional methods and offer assistance and solutions to minimize the challenges encountered during the implementation process.
Keywords: iPads integrations- 21st century skills - Tablets -Attitude
The Impact of Professional Learning Development Workshops Focused on Technology Integration on Teachers’ Usage and Perception of Technology: A Study on Enhancing Practices and Outcomes in a Private School in Al Ain
No full textThis research paper investigates the impact of technology integration workshops on teachers' utilization of technology in the classroom. The study aims to explore the relationship between participation in these workshops, teachers' perception on the use of technology, and student outcomes. The research is grounded in six traditional and emerging theories, including Transformative Learning Theory, Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Self-Efficacy Theory, Social Cognitive Theory, Constructivist Learning Theory, and Communities of Practice theory, which serve as the foundation for the universal integration of technology into education. A mixed-method approach was used, which involved conducting a survey of a representative sample of schoolteachers and leaders followed by a series of interviews to collect sufficient data about the research topic. Various statistical techniques were utilized to analyse the data, and inferential statistics, particularly Spearman correlation analyses, were conducted to investigate the research hypotheses. The correlation analysis demonstrated a significant positive correlation between the impact of professional learning development workshops focused on technology integration on teachers' usage and perception of technology. The study's findings indicate that technology integration workshops can significantly enhance the practices and outcomes of teachers by increasing their confidence, competence, and motivation in using technology to support student learning. The study identifies key components of effective technology integration workshops and provides recommendations for teacher preparation programs. The implications of this study are significant in today's digital age, where technology has become an essential component of education. The research highlights the need to invest in quality training courses and provide follow-up and continuing support to ensure that the techniques and knowledge acquired in workshops are properly assimilated into their everyday teaching methods, guaranteeing that the acquired skills are put into action consistently.
The limitations of the study include the small sample size and the focus on one private school, which limits the generalizability of the findings. However, the results of this study can be applied not only to private schools but also to other educational organizations. In conclusion, this research demonstrates the significant impact of technology integration workshops on teachers' usage and perception of technology. The study's findings provide important insights into the benefits of targeted training for teachers in private schools and emphasize the need for investing in premium professional development plans to meet the individual requirements of educators
Exploring the Role of School Leaders in Enhancing Staff Wellbeing for School Improvement: A Case Study in a Private School in Dubai
No full textStaff wellbeing has been identified as a crucial factor in improving school performance and student outcomes. However, school leaders often face challenges in promoting staff wellbeing, especially in the fast-paced and demanding environment of private schools in Dubai. There is a need for research that investigates the strategies and approaches used by school leaders to enhance staff wellbeing and how these efforts translate into school improvement. Therefore, this study aims to critically evaluate the effectiveness of the staff wellbeing initiatives implemented by school leaders in a private school in Dubai and their contribution to school improvement. The research consults the Full Range of Leadership Theory (FLRT) to identify which specific leadership approaches are associated with higher levels of employee wellbeing and positive organizational outcomes. The study utilized a qualitative approach to address the research question, two open-ended questionnaires were administered to the school leaders and a sample of twenty teachers to enhance external validity. The research findings emphasize how crucial leadership is for teachers’ wellbeing and the success of staff being programs in schools. Teachers stress the value of leaders who appreciate their ideas and encourage collaboration through shared goals and open communication. A sense of ownership in decision-making has an impact on teacher engagement while being left out leads to emotions. Teachers generally have a view of development, but some are dissatisfied when their wellbeing is low. The speed at which changes happen in schools significantly affects teacher wellbeing highlighting the importance of a controlled and gradual approach. The research highlights the need for leadership that considers both staff needs and broader challenges. It also advocates for collaboration, meaningful professional development, and responsive feedback to improve teacher wellbeing and overall school improvement. The study's limitations include contextual specificity and time constraints. In conclusion, the study emphasizes the need for ongoing support and professional development for school leaders to enhance their leadership skills and abilities to effectively promote staff wellbeing. Investing in leadership training programs and creating platforms for sharing best practices can empower school leaders to create positive work environments that foster staff wellbeing, job satisfaction, and, consequently, school improvement. Future studies could expand the scope of research by replicating the study in additional private schools within the UAE. This would allow for an exploration of how the findings may differ or be consistent across diverse contexts
Cyberbullying Detection in Arabic Text using Deep Learning
No full textIn the new era of digital communications, cyberbullying is a significant concern for society. Cyberbullying involves the use of communication technology and data, including messages, photographs, and videos, to undertake aggressive negative actions to harm others. This practice has spread substantially due to rapid technological development and has gained significant attention in several domains involving data exchange, such as e-commerce, digital marketing, social media platforms, and others. Cyberbullying can negatively impact stakeholders, and can vary from psychological to pathological, such as self-isolation, depression, and anxiety potentially leading to suicide. Hence, detecting any act of cyberbullying in an automated manner will be helpful for stakeholders to prevent any unfortunate results from the victim’s perspective. If conducted automatically, rather than relying on human moderators, the process will be faster, enabling the early detection of cyberbullying before severe harm is caused.
Data-driven approaches, such as machine learning (ML), particularly deep learning (DL), have shown promising results. DL approaches provide highly accurate predictive models for detecting cyberbullying. The first contribution of this thesis is conducting an in-depth meta-analysis of existing evaluation methods, classification techniques, and datasets related to ML for cyberbullying problems. The meta-analysis shows that ML approaches, particularly DL, have not been extensively studied for the Arabic text classification of cyberbullying. A potential reason for this research gap is the lack of Arabic-language repositories focusing on cyberbullying despite the large amount of Arabic text that can be extracted from Arabic social media platforms besides e-commerce and mobile applications.
Consequently, I have designed and built a new Arabic text repository, the largest available, that can serve me and others in investigating various classifiers to deal with the issue of detecting cyberbullying. This repository contains 200,000 comments, 46,898 of which were annotated by three human annotators. First, the comments were classified as (positive/negative/neutral), and then the negative comments were further classified into two categories based on their level of negativity (toxic, bullying). The dialect for each comment was also added. This gives the dataset an advantage since it can be used for other purposes such as sentiment analysis and dialect identification, not just for cyberbullying detection. For the dataset to be regarded as a benchmark, Fleiss’s Kappa metric was adopted to measure the inter-annotator agreement (IAA), and the results show that the total Fleiss Kappa coefficient is = 0.869 with a p-value of 10-3, indicating near-perfect agreement among the three annotators.
The application of DL to cyberbullying detection problems within Arabic text classification can be considered a novel approach due to the complexity of the problem and the tedious process involved, besides the scarcity of relevant research studies. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate several versions of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Feedforward Neural Networks (FNNs) for detecting cyberbullying in the Arabic language. Although these algorithms are widely used in text classification and outperform the performance of classical classifiers, many have been extensively investigated in other domains such as sentiment analysis and dialect identification, as well as cyberbullying detection in English text. Hence, a comprehensive study focusing on Arabic cyberbullying can fill this gap in research. In this study, I conduct a performance evaluation and comparison for various DL algorithms (LSTM, GRU, LSTM-ATT, CNN-BLSTM, CNN-LSTM, CNN-BILSTM-LSTM, and LSTM-TCN) on different datasets of Arabic cyberbullying to obtain more precise and dependable findings. As a result of the models’ evaluation, a hybrid DL model is proposed that combines the best characteristics of the baseline models CNN, BLSTM and GRU for identifying cyberbullying. The proposed hybrid model improves the accuracy of all the studied datasets and can be integrated into different social media sites to automatically detect cyberbullying from Arabic social media posts. It has the potential to significantly reduce cyberbullying. Other results, related implications, and limitations, along with future research are also clarified and discussed
The Impact of Leaders’ Collegiality on Teachers’ Engagement for Organizational Improvement: A Case Study in an IB School in the United Arab Emirates
Get PDFThe essence of this study arises from the developments observed in the 21st century, where researchers have dedicated substantial endeavors towards investigating the importance of collegiate leadership in elevating the standard of education within school environments. This study delves into the crucial role of leaders' collegiality in driving school improvement, emphasizing the necessity for positive school leadership practices in enhancing educational quality. The primary objective is to investigate how leaders' collegiality contributes to school improvement and students' academic achievement. Shedding the light on the main research question, which is: What is the impact of leaders’ collegiality on teachers’ engagement for school improvement in IB schools? Drawing upon a range of leadership theories and studies, with particular emphasis on selected key theories, the research employs a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative data from interviews with senior and middle leaders and teachers with quantitative data from surveys distributed to middle and senior leaders and teachers. This study does not only highlight the importance of leaders’ collegiality in Abu Dhabi schools but also ensures the importance of collegiality in IB schools since ADEC / ADEK evaluation forms as Irtiqaa that are utilized to evaluate schools’ performance in Abu Dhabi is one of the main aspects schools focus on in teachers’ performances to achieve during all school academic year. The findings of this study reveal that leaders' collegiality positively influences employees, fostering a conducive working environment and ultimately leading to improved student academic success. This study underscores the critical importance of leaders' collegiality in educational practice, offering insights for future research and emphasizing the need for positive school leadership practices in school improvement efforts
Exploring College Students’ English Language Learning Motivation and Their Teachers’ Motivational Strategies
No full textMotivation is a key element in the process of L2 learning. This leads many researchers to investigate the students' motivational factors, teachers' motivational strategies, students' perceptions about their teachers' strategies, and what strategies students use to maintain their L2 learning motivation insides and outside the classroom. The literature reveals that many studies explored students’ perceptions regarding their motivational factors for learning English but rarely tackled both students’ and teachers’ perceptions regarding students’ motivational components and the motivational strategies which teachers use to maintain or boost students’ English learning motivation.
This study explores students' motivational factors and what approaches students use to maintain their motivation. Besides, it will explore EFL teachers’ and students’ views about motivational strategies used in Abu Dhabi EFL classrooms in order to investigate potential mismatches.
Collecting qualitative and quantitative data adopted a mixed-method approach which was carried out in the academic context of three campuses in one of Abu-Dhabi's private colleges. This involved first the administration of a questionnaire to teachers and students. Second, six EFL teachers and six EFL students were in-depth interviewed individually for the purpose of exploring further those essential issues which might be revealed from both teachers and students' personal opinions in regard to motivational factors in learning the language along with those that might be shown in respect to teachers and students' viewpoint relating to the strategies adopted by teachers for motivating their students.
Findings reveal that students have average interest and motivation to learn English. Besides, their motivation is mostly instrumental i.e., future career, academic study, and travelling. In addition, there are discrepancies between students and teachers’ perceptions of the important motivational strategies which should be used by teachers to boost students’ motivation to learn English.
The findings will help teachers focus more on their students’ motivational factors; and consequently, they will help in tailoring their classes in a way which will be more motivating for the learners. Moreover, by having a clear picture of students’ perceptions of the motivational strategies used in classroom, teachers will have more awareness of the motivational strategies used in their classes. Moreover, policy makers of English language teaching in the UAE will get a good picture about how things go with college students regarding English language learning
Improving the Performance Measurement Using Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) in Borouge
No full textA hierarchy of measurements called Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is used in the industrial sector to gauge the performance of production machines. OEE measurement is a crucial machine performance tool that assesses availability, performance, and quality rate. It is inspired by Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). This study was conducted in Al Borouge company is a prominent petrochemical firm that offers unique and new polyolefin solutions for the energy, mobility, advanced packaging, infrastructure, healthcare, and agricultural industries. The main issue found relating to the two extruder production lines productivity was where availability and quality show a significant decrease. Thus, data were collected for 12 months from the two extruders and analysed using Microsoft Excel Software to determine the value of the output table and presented graphically.
This study starts by calculating the availability, performance rate, and rate of quality, then listing the six biggest losses that happen in order to determine the achievement of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) value. According to the findings, the average OEE on a first extruder is 95%, and second extruder is 91%, the value is higher than the world's ideal OEE standard value of > 85%. But This research needs to make improvement on these components to increase the value of OEE. Three of the six major losses downtime losses, speed losses, and quality losses were grouped together. The findings show there is no set up/adjustment and speed losses. Moreover, breakdown losses were 2.2% for first extruder and 6.06% for second extruder, and decreased quality losses were 1.28% for first extruder and 2.8% for second extruder for the study of six significant losses (which became three big losses due to speed losses and set up/adjustment do not exist)
The Education System in Post-conflict Syria – Examining PIRLS as an International Assessment Measure to Ensure the Quality of Students Achievements
No full textThis open access book presents contributions on a wide range of scientific areas originating from the BUiD Doctoral Research Conference (BDRC 2022)This paper provides a general contextualisation of assessment and learning criteria and processes within the framework of leadership and management perspective in post-conflict and war affected countries, with Syria as an example. Through this paper the researcher provided an overview of the related academic literature done on the subject as well as evaluating the importance of applying one of the International Assessment Measures (IAMs) as a solution for educational reformation. The paper evaluates the adoption of one assessment measure to support the special and emergency requirements of post-conflict countries such as Syria
Arabic Hotel Reviews Sentiment Analysis Using Deep Learning
No full textArabic Hotel Feedback sentiment analysis plays a significant role in understanding the opinions and sentiments expressed by customers in their reviews. With the growing popularity of online platforms and social media, Arabic Hotel Feedback have become a valuable source of information for both hotel owners and potential customers. Sentiment analysis techniques aim to automatically classify the sentiment polarity of these reviews as positive, negative, or neutral, providing valuable insights into customer satisfaction and areas of improvement for hotels. In this study, we present a comprehensive analysis of Arabic Hotel Reviews sentiment analysis. We collected a large dataset of Arabic hotel Feedback from various online platforms, encompassing a wide range of hotels and customer experiences. The dataset was carefully annotated with sentiment labels by human annotators to serve as ground truth for training and evaluation purposes. We employed state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing techniques to develop sentiment analysis models specifically tailored for the Arabic language. Our models utilized advanced text preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification algorithms to accurately predict sentiment polarity in Arabic hotel reviews. We evaluated the performance of our models using various evaluation metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, to assess their effectiveness in sentiment classification. The results of our study demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of sentiment analysis in Arabic Hotel Reviews. Our models achieved high accuracy and robust performance in sentiment classification, enabling hotel owners to gain valuable insights into customer sentiments and make informed decisions to enhance customer satisfaction and improve their services. CNN model demonstrated superior performance in terms of precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy, consistently achieving a score of 74% across all evaluation metrics. The SVM model closely followed with a score of 73% for the same metrics. The LSTM model exhibited slightly lower performance, achieving values between 70% and 71%. On the other hand, the DT model had the lowest scores among all the models, with values of 66% and 68%. The findings of this study contribute to the growing body of research in sentiment analysis and provide valuable insights into sentiment patterns specific to Arabic hotel reviews. Overall, this study highlights the importance of sentiment analysis in the context of Arabic Hotel Feedback and provides a foundation for future research and applications in the field. The insights gained from sentiment analysis can empower hotel owners, marketers, and decision-makers to better understand customer sentiments, address concerns, and optimize their services to meet customer expectations in the dynamic and competitive hotel industry
Moving from the Subject-Based Curriculum to the Skills-Based Curriculum in Abu Dhabi Schools: Does It Lead to Reform? A Theoretical Analysis & Case Study Paper in One of Abu Dhabi Private Schools
No full textThis open access book presents contributions on a wide range of scientific areas originating from the BUiD Doctoral Research Conference (BDRC 2022)This paper is a theoretical research study examining the feasibility of implementation of skills-based curriculum model as it relates to the UAE in comparison to other countries. Through this Paper, the researcher made a conceptual analysis, revisited the relevant literature, and identified the theoretical framework of curriculum reform in the UAE educational system with a view on the intended development of curriculum from the conventional subject-based model into the more futuristic and aspiring skills-based in Abu Dhabi schooling environment. The results showed that educational authorities in the UAE should place their focus on an enhanced model of skills-based curriculum, generally known in the literature as the “attained curriculum” category, as an enhanced model of skills-based curriculum to achieve meaningful learning