Psychology

As the present world challenges schools and the entire school community with many changes in the hope of improving the learning outcomes of students, schools and teachers, they are tasked with constantly upgrading the standards of education. Professional development has always been the focus of most of these improvements. In most schools and in the International Baccalaureate, teachers recognise that professional development does not end after the 1-hour or 3-days or 4-weeks sessions, it is continuous in nature and extends towards their everyday dealings. This study is a qualitative research that involves primary school teachers of an IB World School. The outcome of this research seems to capture the teachers’ perspective on professional development and how it has influenced their teaching practice. A review of relevant literature on the topic of professional development will give an idea on what professional development is, its purpose, how it has met the needs of teachers and how it has caused significant changes in teaching techniques. Mixed research methods were adopted in this study, the perspectives of a small group of primary teachers were recorded and analysed; allowing for comparisons with the results of the previous researches conducted in the field.

Violent behaviour has contributed to destruction of facilities, physical disability, anxiety and poor academic performance in schools. In Bungoma County, cases of student violence in secondary schools have been reported in the recent years. For instance, in 2008, eight cases were reported, whereas in 2009 the number rose to over 30 cases. The purpose of the study was to establish teachers’ and students’ perceptions on forms and Psycho-social determinants of violent behavior among public secondary school students in Bungoma County, Kenya. The study was based on the Social learning theory by Albert Bandura which states that learning of behavior is through imitation, reinforcement and identification. A descriptive survey research design was adopted. The study population was composed of 63 Principals, 2,340 teachers, 20,670 form two students and 4 County Education Officers. Stratified random sampling technique was used to select 364 teachers and 1,152 form two students from 213 public secondary schools while 213 Principals and 7 District Education Officers were selected using purposive sampling technique. Questionnaires and in-depth interview guides were used to collect data. Findings of the study revealed that forms of violent behavior as perceived by teachers and students were; rioting, fighting, bullying and sexual violence. Psycho-social determinants perceived by the teachers and students included; anxiety problems, experiencing mental problems and being fearful. It was concluded that rioting was the main form of violent behavior in secondary schools. Recommendations of the study were that: guidance and counseling be reinforced; and consistent control and discipline be encouraged.

Teacher development has become a key concept in the field of education. Both pre-service and in-service teacher training are extremely crucial in the entire process of the development of a teacher as a professional. In-service training received due attention from the experts and educators in order to strengthen the base of pre-service training or lay a new foundation for those who have no formal training, and to follow up training needs as continuous teacher development. Education has been changing globally in order to meet the urgent demand of the society, economics, and science-technology. There has been a focus all over the world to develop the teachers of the institutions to meet the needs of the students, and institutional effectiveness leading to the national development. King Abdulaziz university (KAU) is one of those pioneering institutions in Saudi Arabia that has been taking the initiatives to equip its staff to raise them to the international standards (if required). Jeddah community college (JCC), being the part of KAU also realised the need of teacher development activities. Many training, pedagogic, and developmental activities took place in the past especially from 2007 till date. The present paper aims at exploring those training activities that were carried out at JCC in order to equip and update the skills of the target teachers. In this connection, many seminars, workshops, training sessions were organised by the JCC, and the teachers attended those programmes within the college, university, and even went abroad for a 2 week-intensive trainer’s training organised at Greenwich Community College, London, UK. The training course was sponsored by the university. It was expected that after such teacher development activities, the teacher preparedness will be enhanced, and the outcomes will be more beneficial for the students. As a matter of results, the present teaching at JCC is modern, novel, innovative, e-learning/online learning based and computer assisted which itself is one of the motivating factors, interesting for the learners, and needed for the ultimate human resource development.

The present study aims to determine the relationships between perceived paternal parenting styles and locus of control. In addition, the moderating role of family income was also tested. Sample consisted of 382 school-going adolescents with an average age of 14.27 years. A multi-stage cluster sampling was used for collecting the data. A self-administered questionnaire was prepared for the participants at their selected schools. Fathers’ parenting style was measured using the inventory of Parental Authority Questionnaire, as well as a scale that assessed the respondents’ locus of control. Results demonstrated that paternal authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles were significantly related to internal locus of control. However, no significant moderating effect was found for family income. The present study emphasizes the need for continued focus on the link between child rearing strategies and child developmental outcomes.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed to test the hypothesized relationship between maternal and paternal parenting behavior and adolescents’ anxiety. Probability proportional to size sampling (PPS) technique was used to identify 1,200 school-going adolescents (aged 12-17 years) from selected daily secondary schools in Malaysia. Data were collected using self-administered questionnaire that comprised questions on demographic information, Parenting Behavior scale, as well as Beck Anxiety Inventory-Malay (BAI-Malay). The structural modeling proposed that maternal and paternal hostility were found to be associated with higher levels of anxiety. Findings seem to indicate that low-quality of parenting behavior would put adolescent at an increased risk for subsequent anxiety problem. Implications are discussed in relation to efforts that would help to diminish internalizing problems in adolescents, particularly anxious symptoms.

Despite the increasing attention of organizational commitment in the management literature, most studies predominantly focus on full-time workers in traditional work settings. The results of this study highlight important directions for implementing strategies to increase casual academic’s organizational commitment. Organization commitment is important because it is known association with other important organizational variables such as turnover, absenteeism and work effort. This study provides the first step in better understanding the factors that affect the organization commitment.

The writing assessment has long been considered a problematic area for educational assessment professionals and TEFL practitioners in particular. Due to a significant growth in the number of language learners in the past two decades, fairness issues in ESL writing assessments have been of growing interest and importance and have given birth to a great deal of theoretical and empirical research which have been examining the effect of various factors on the evaluation of students’ writing. The result of such studies leads us to question the accuracy and the raters’ fairness in rating learners’ written works. Hence, the rater variable, affected by various factors, has always been an important issue in the literature of writing assessment. This paper aims at investigating the impact of raters’ personality traits on the analytic evaluation of the students’ writings, encapsulating the probable effect of the genre too. In order to measure the personality traits of raters, NEO FFI developed by Costa and McCrae has been applied. A group of language instructors rated an expository essay and an argumentative one based on Jacobs’ rating scale. The results of the study indicate that there is a relationship between the raters’ personalities and the score they have assigned to the students’ writing. The genre of the essay has also been significant in the process of rating.

Sexuality is an important component of human life given its implication for sexual satisfaction, reproduction, egalitarianism and the continuity of the human race. The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the literature on cultural sex-role prescriptions for male control and female deference particularly in the Nigerian literature, and to demonstrate the implication of such for relationship satisfaction, sexually transmitted diseases and egalitarianism. In this article, we emphasize the socio-cultural specifics of the Nigerian society and its role in perpetuating power imbalance, sexual inequality and sexual in-expression between men and women.

This study investigated factors that contributed stress and the level of occupational stress among the technical teachers who are currently teaching in technical schools in Johore, Malacca and Negeri Sembilan. There were five teacher stress sources that included in this study: pupil misbehaviour, teacher workload, time and resources difficulties, interpersonal relationships, and recognition. A total of 92 teachers (N = 92) from nine technical schools in three states, which are Johore, Malacca and Negeri Sembilan were choosed randomly to represent the population by using the cluster over cluster method. The instrument for this study was adapted from the Teacher Stress Inventory constructed by Boyle, Borg, Falzon and Baglioni (1995) and had been modified by Mokhtar (1998) and Mazlan (2002). A pilot survey was done among 20 technical teachers in a technical school in Johore Bahru. The alpha croncbach for the instrument in this study was 0.982. The data were analyzed using both despcriptive (mean, frequency, and percentage) and inferency (Independent t-Test, Pearson Correlation, and One Way ANOVA) methods. Data analysis indicated that the overall stress level of respondent was moderate. Among the five stressors, pupil misbehaviour was the strongest determinant of teacher stress with a mean of 3.67. Other factors were teacher workload (mean = 3.00), time and resources difficulties (mean = 2.97), recognition (mean = 2.90), and interpersonal relationships (mean = 2.85) respectively. The workload and other factors had caused a moderate stress on the respondents. The results indicated that there was no significant difference of work stress among the respondent based on gender, marriage status, and highest academic qualification. Furthermore, the results were failed to indicate a significant correlation between teacher stress and demographic factors such as age, length of teaching experience, and the respondents’ monthly salary.

Psychologists have identified personality variables as one of the most important factors related to physical illness. The period since 1950s till date, research has continued to show positive results relating illness to psychological factors and personality. Research in this area suggests that stress seems to affect some people more than it does to others, and researchers have looked for personality variables that might account for differential effects of stress. This study attempts to compare the neuroticism versus emotional stability scores of hypertensive and normotensive as well as male and female participants. The study adopted a 2 (hypertensives and normotensives) x 2 (males and females) factorial design. Two hundred and forty participants (120 chronic hypertensives and 120 normotensives) are selected from Gurgaon, Delhi. Out of 120 hypertensives, there were 60 males and 60 females. Similarly 60 healthy males and 60 healthy females not suffering from hypertension or any other disease were selected. The participants of all the four groups compared with respect to their scores on neuroticism versus emotional stability. The results indicate that hypertensives showed more score in all the dimensions of neuroticism compared to normotensives. It is also found that females have more depression and anxiety than males. They are more self-conscious and more vulnerable to stress compared to males. Males score high on anger, hostility and impulsive dimensions of the personality.