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Culturally Responsive Assessment in Teaching English to Young Learners:Valuing Home Languages and Identities
Get PDFThis study investigates how culturally responsive assessment (CRA) can be implemented in Indonesian primary English classrooms to better reflect and value learners’ home languages and cultural identities. In a context marked by linguistic and cultural diversity, traditional assessments often ignore students’ local knowledge and communicative repertoires, leading to disengagement and inequitable learning outcomes. CRA offers an inclusive alternative by integrating students’ cultural backgrounds and linguistic assets into the assessment process. Using a qualitative multiple-case study design, the research involved three Grade 4 English teachers and their students from public schools in Central Java, South Sulawesi, and West Papua. Data were collected through classroom observations, interviews, and document analysis, then analyzed thematically. Findings revealed three key themes: (1) Recognition of home languages and cultural identity in assessment tasks enhances learner engagement, (2) Institutional pressures and standardized expectations limit teachers’ ability to implement CRA fully, and (3) CRA fosters student confidence and more authentic demonstration of language skills. Despite contextual challenges, when learners’ identities were affirmed through assessment, they participated more actively and performed with greater ease. The study highlights the need for teacher training, flexible curriculum policy, and localized assessment strategies to support inclusive language education. It also calls for a shift in how success is defined—away from rigid standards and toward more meaningful, culturally grounded learning experiences. These findings contribute to the growing discourse on equity and inclusion in Teaching English to Young Learners (TEYL), particularly in multilingual and multicultural contexts like Indonesia
Potato protein isolate hydrogels as potential scaffolds for bone tissue engineering
Get PDFIntroduction/Objectives:Potato protein isolate (PPI), enriched with patatin, shows comparable gelation ability to egg protein. This study aimed to investigate the potential of PPI hydrogels as a scaffold for bone tissue engineering.Methods:Potato protein isolate powder, Solanic 200, was provided by Royal Avebe U.A. PPI films were generated in multiwell plates by oven-baking a 5% w/w PPI suspension at 70 °C for 3 hours. MG-63 cells were used as a model cell line and cultured on PPI films with adhesion and cell proliferation measured using the resazurin assay. Cell viability was measured on day 10 post-seeding using LIVE/DEAD stain and quantified using FIJI software. PPI hydrogels were formed by heating 10%, 15%, or 20% w/w PPI in a 90 °C water bath for 30 mins. For crosslinked gels, 5% w/w 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)carbodiimide hydrochloride (EDC) and 5% w/w Nhydroxysuccinimide (NHS) relative to PPI were added to the solutions immediately prior to heating. The water-holding capacity of hydrogels was evaluated by weighing the gel mass before and after soaking in water at room temperature for 24 hours. Hydrogel degradation was examined by incubating 20% w/w PPI hydrogels in 0.1% v/v trypsin solution at 37 °C and weighing the gels at 1, 3, 6, and 10 days. Young’s modulus was calculated based on the stress-strain curve of both natural and crosslinked PPI gels under compression.Results:The adhesion of MG-63 cells to PPI films relative to tissue culture plastic was over 95% and cells showed steady growth over time. At 10 days post-seeding, the cell viability on PPI films was approximately 100%. For hydrogels, when soaked in water, the mass of all concentrations of natural PPI gels increased no more than 5%. Crosslinked hydrogels increased by 16.63% and 8.63% for 10 and 20% crosslinked hydrogels, respectively. In the degradation test, both natural and crosslinked PPI gels steadily decreased in mass from day 1 to day 10. Crosslinked hydrogels increased in mass on day 1 due to water absorption. From day 1 to day 6, crosslinked gels had higher mass percentages than natural gels. However, on day 10, natural PPI gels retained 70% of the original mass while crosslinked gels were 60%, which was significantly lower. The Young’s modulus of hydrogels increased with increasing protein concentration, reaching 0.2 MPa in 20% gels. The stress-strain curve of crosslinked PPI gels showed a non-linear relationship, suggesting viscoelastic properties, which will be further investigated. Conclusions:PPI films were cytocompatible with MG-63 cells. The crosslinked PPI hydrogels showed promising biodegradable properties and water-holding ability. The viscoelasticity, porosity, interconnectivity, and biocompatibility of crosslinked hydrogels with MG63 cells will be evaluated in the future. Overall, heat-induced PPI hydrogel is a simple prepared, inexpensive, and renewable material for bone tissue engineering applications
Cross-border effects of conflict on human development:evidence from the Arab region using a difference-in-differences approach
Get PDFThis paper aims to evaluate the repercussions of conflicts in the MENA region on the Human Development Index (HDI) of neighboring countries, utilizing HDI as a comprehensive metric for assessing human development. The methodology employs panel data for 20 Arab countries, focusing on subnational HDI and its indicators, retreived from the Global Data Lab. The study utilizes the Difference in Difference (DiD) method, distinguishing treated groups consisting of countries bordering conflict zones and control groups comprising other nations. Specifically, we concentrate on the Syrian conflict (2011) and the Yemeni conflict (2014). While existing literature predominantly explores the impact of conflicts on a country’s own HDI, this contribution seeks to determine whether these effects extend to neighboring countries. This extends the scope of current literature, providing valuable insights into the regional implications of conflicts on human development
It Sounds Squishy:Understanding Cross-Modal Correspondences of Deformable Shapes and Sounds
Get PDFComputing interfaces are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with systems that engage multiple sensory channels simultaneously. Deformable and shape-changing interfaces offer rich tactile experiences, but there is limited understanding of how they can be combined with other modes of sensory feedback. We systematically explored the audio, visual and tactile cross-modal correspondences of deformable shapes with a particular focus on auditory feedback. 50 participants were asked to associate deformable tactile stimuli, varying in stiffness and shape, with the sound qualities pitch, brightness, fade-in time and fade-out time, under visuo-tactile and tactile-only conditions. Our findings provide the first insights on how (1) shape, both its form and visibility, play a significant role in associations for pitch and brightness; (2) stiffness plays a dominant role in associations over a sound’s fade-in and fade-out times. These findings are distilled into the first design guidelines for integrating auditory feedback into physical interfaces
Fast Inexact Bilevel Optimization for Analytical Deep Image Priors
Get PDFThe analytical deep image prior (ADP) introduced by Dittmer et al. (2020) establishes a link between deep image priors and classical regularization theory via bilevel optimization. While this is an elegant construction, it involves expensive computations if the lower-level problem is to be solved accurately. To overcome this issue, we propose to use adaptive inexact bilevel optimization to solve ADP problems. We discuss an extension of a recent inexact bilevel method called the method of adaptive inexact descent of Salehi et al.(2024) to an infinite-dimensional setting required by the ADP framework. In our numerical experiments we demonstrate that the computational speed-up achieved by adaptive inexact bilevel optimization allows one to use ADP on larger-scale problems than in the previous literature, e.g. in deblurring of 2D color images
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