Progress in Language, Literature and Education Research Vol. 1

This chapter explores challenges facing Early Childhood Care and Education in rural areas of Botswana. Issues that are analysed in the chapter are derived from secondary sources such as journals, books and unpublished sources such as students’ research projects and newspapers. Early childhood care and education (ECCE), which addresses the period from birth to 8 years old, is important because it capitalizes on a period of rich brain development for children and, when it is of good quality, can help them achieve their full potential. It can lay the foundation for good health and nutrition, learning and educational success, social-emotional learning, and economic productivity throughout life. Despite the evidence for these social, human and economic developmental gains, it is still often given low priority in education policy and investment and, where it does exist, may exclude marginalized groups. ECCE has its own extra vulnerability in that much of it is privately provided. Quality Early Childhood Care and Education programs are beneficial to children in numerous ways. Consequently, from time immemorial, various stakeholders not only in Botswana, but the world over, have embarked on various efforts to try to provide such services. However, several challenges in the provision of Early Childhood Care and Education services prevail in various countries. The chapter discusses such issues in the context of Botswana. These include: low access to ECCE services; funding constraints; nutritional challenges; gender disparity in the provision of ECCE services; shortage of trained and qualified teachers and low compensation as well as high staff turnover. The chapter also maps the way forward in relation to addressing the challenges. Among the recommendations made toward mitigating the current challenges are: the Government should assume leadership in the provision of ECCE services; improvements in the nutritional value of meals that are given to pre-schoolers, as well as the need to address gender disparities in ECCE.

The goal of the current study was to identify the relationship between metacognition awareness and achievement motivation in higher secondary school students in the humanities and sciences stream who were between the ages of 15 and 16. Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one's understanding and performance.  Metacognition is the capacity to consider, comprehend, and manage one's learning. In contrast, achievement motivation refers to the ongoing quest for greatness. Although there has been a lot of study on metacognition awareness and achievement motivation with respect to various age groups, the research on specific streams with the age range of 15–16 years has so far been ignored. It was found that there was positive correlation between Metacognition Awareness and Achievement Motivation. Moreover, the students of both streams differed on both the dimensions, for Metacognition Awareness and Achievement Motivation with values, (‘t’=3.14) and (‘t’=0.48) respectively. As a part of correlational findings metacognition awareness and achievement motivation were moderately correlated with each other for humanities higher secondary school students (‘r’=0.27), whereas for the science higher secondary school students there exists high correlation as they are positively correlated with each other (‘r’= 0.72). Thus, with an attempt to focus on psychological causal factors, the sample survey significantly proves the difference and relationship amongst the limited sample size and comparatively covering a smaller geographical area. This study tried to focus on assessing and examining the metacognition awareness and achievement motivation with varied sample which is helpful in the evaluation of various educational programmes and activities in educational settings in near future.

This research investigates how Arabs in Israel feel about the prevalent use of Code-Switching (CS) and their language preferences when communicating with different individuals. As a speaker of this dialect myself, I am aware of the need to study this phenomenon from the speaker’s perspective since it is a heated debate in my society whether to inhibit codeswitching or deal with it as a normal language contact phenomenon. This debate is perceived from different perspectives by Arabs in Israel.

Thus, to study and understand this debate better, a survey consisting of three sections was given to 131 bilingual participants, comprising 47 males and 84 females from various towns in the north, Galilee, and the Triangle areas, ranging in age from 18 to 60 years. The collected data was analyzed, considering the age and gender of the respondents. The study uncovered some intriguing findings. The participants generally expressed negative views toward the use of CS; nevertheless, they acknowledged the significance of Hebrew in their daily lives. There were also differences in attitudes towards CS usage based on age and gender. Moreover, the survey indicated that CS is commonly employed when interacting with friends and acquaintances, but less frequently when communicating with strangers.

The study's main goal was to determine how any of the aforementioned abilities may increase productivity in government secondary schools. The purpose of the study was to investigate the kinds of abilities required for government secondary school heads to function effectively. Therefore, the study looked at whether school heads could be successful whether they used management skills, leadership abilities, or both. The investigation was conducted in Bulawayo's public secondary schools. The only metric utilized to assess schools' academic achievement was their O' level result. Sixty respondents were included in the sample, including heads of secondary schools, district authorities, and other important figures in the education system including BSPZ coordinators and recently hired secondary school inspectors.  Document analysis, observation, interviews and focus group discussions were used to collect data under the following themes: leadership skills and tasks, management skills and tasks and the concepts of change, motivation, school mission and vision, community involvement and teachers’ needs to finally come out with the head’s recommended attributes. The assessment of school administration revealed transformation in the task with institutions gradually moving away from concentrating on day-to-day neat management tasks towards focusing on a unique, situational designed and visionary approach to school management which requires more leadership qualities. Interviews of education officers revealed that, whilst all government schools were guided by government policy, policy was not meant to kill the individual flair of heads. The focus group discussions revealed that leadership was needed in education as an answer to the dynamic and turbulent environment. The discussions revealed that with the ever-changing times, it was the flexible leader who would be able to identify strategies that would take advantage of the changing environment; the strategies that would go in line with the globalization trends, who was needed by today’s school. Thus, most respondents believed that heads of schools could use leadership skills to create competitive advantage and uniqueness of schools, yet the issue of how policy could be successfully woven into heads’ plans remained debatable. The study therefore recommended that schools as business organizations needed leaders who clearly understood their role in the school production process.

The purpose of the study is to determine the elements that affect the enrollment of women in graduate programs at the National Open University of Nigeria. One in every five of the world’s out-of-school children is in Nigeria. Even though primary education is officially free and compulsory, about 10.5 million of the country’s children aged 5-14 years are not in school. Only 61 percent of 6-11 year-olds regularly attend primary school and only 35.6 percent of children aged 36-59 months receive early childhood education. In the north of the country, the picture is even bleaker, with a net attendance rate of 53 percent. Getting out-of-school children back into education poses a massive challenge.

 The only university in Nigeria that uses completely open and distant learning is the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). In many countries, open and distant learning has become an essential component of the educational system. In this type of learning, the teacher and the student are physically apart for a sizable portion of the course. The student may study whenever and wherever they choose using this kind of instruction. Women now have more access to education as a first or second opportunity thanks to open and distant learning. In order to study for a diploma, a bachelor's degree, or a master's degree, many women in Nigeria have enrolled in the open and distant learning programs of the National Open University of Nigeria. This study is interested in the exposition of the factors that influence the enrolment of women into higher education programmes of the National Open University of Nigeria. The study is a descriptive survey design. Four research questions guided the study. The population comprised of all the women who are either enrolled or have completed a Bachelors or Masters degree in the National Open University of Nigeria. Snowball and purposive sampling procedures were used to identify the women for the study, from the five (5) selected study centres of the university in the South-east geopolitical zone of the country. The sample was made up of four hundred (400) women who have enrolled and those who have gone through the university’s higher education programme. A self-designed and validated questionnaire was used for data collection. Interviews and focus group discussions were also used for data collection. The reliability of the instrument was established using Cronbach Alpha formula. The reliability was 0.78. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data collected. The findings revealed that the need to acquire higher qualification for promotion in the workplace, peer influence, flexibility of open and distance learning and the nature of the entry requirements of National Open University of Nigeria were the major personal, socio-economic and institutional factors influencing the enrolment of women. The study also revealed that the women were faced with two major challenges namely; combining their studies with family responsibilities, and lack of adequate computer skills. Suggestions were made on how to ameliorate the challenges, so as to encourage more women to embrace open and distance learning.

This chapter aims to identify knowledge, practice and satisfaction while learning Nursing process among student nurses after attending CLH.com, a mixed teaching method program. Mastering everything from a simple nursing care skill to a complicated Nursing Process necessitates the commitment of both teachers and learners. Nursing education is not a one-day endeavor for any student.  This study intended to address the learning need of beginner Nursing student in drafting Nursing care plan by using mixed teaching methods during Covid -19 pandemic. On the basis of consecutive sampling, 80 student nurses were chosen for this chapter.  To teach nursing process and developing standard nursing care plans, a planned program with a mixed mode of instruction was created and given the name CLH.Com.  A knowledge questionnaire was administered, and practice was assessed through the creation of an individual Nursing care plan. Students' satisfaction was measured using a three-point Likert scale.  Following a knowledge questionnaire and practice evaluation, the mean knowledge of the experimental and control groups was compared. With combined teaching strategies, there was a significant improvement in the mean score for knowledge (9.7±1.66) and practice (11.42), respectively.

Integration of IoT and AI has tremendous potential to revolutionize education and usher in a new era of technological advancement in the field. This chapter delves deeply into the difficulties and potential benefits of such a merger. IoT's vast network of devices and sensors makes possible unprecedented real-time data collecting; AI's tremendous ability to evaluate this data and provide actionable insights has the potential to radically alter the educational landscape. Important worries about data safety, ownership, and unlawful access arise as a result of these new obstacles. The massive data stores generated by IoT devices in particular highlight critical concerns about privacy and security. There are also technical hurdles to overcome, such as ensuring the smooth operation of IoT devices and the compatibility of various AI systems. The future of schooling may improve, though. Strict security standards in schools, promoting standardization for easy integration, and investing in specialist teacher training are all highly recommended. These precautions can help maximize the advantages while mitigating the risks associated with the convergence of technologies.

This investigation on the function of pedagogical inspectors in the Moroccan educational system, particularly middle and high schools, is based on quantitative research. The educational system generally refers to the structure of all institutions and the opportunities for obtaining education within a country. It includes all pre-school institutions, starting from family education, and/or early childhood education, through kindergarten, primary, secondary, and tertiary schools, then lyceums, colleges, and faculties also known as Higher education (University education). This framework also includes institutions of continuous (further) professional and personal education, as well as private educational institutions. The research generally aims to evaluate the validity of inspectors' interventions and how they affect public school teachers' performance in a good way. As a result, this paper's various components all contribute to its two major goals. One is to characterize how often an inspector visits a specific instructor over the academic year, and the other is a measure of teachers' levels of satisfaction with the influence inspectors have on their instruction. We hypothesize that inspectors do not have enough contact with the teachers they are in charge of inspecting and developing, and that teachers negatively approach the role of inspectors as officers whose main mission has long been falling off the goal of improving the effectiveness of teachers.

This study aims to pinpoint the root reasons of students' passivity as well as the methods they take to combat it. A Google Forms-distributed questionnaire was used to gather the data for this investigation. Small-group conversations were used to confirm the respondents' responses. The results suggest the following: Technical issues: The respondents somewhat concur that poor sentence structure and poor pronunciation contribute to their passivity in class; Internal issues: The interviewees overwhelmingly concur that internal factors like anxiety, insecurity, and fear of making errors cause their passivity. They also moderately agree that peer pressure is a contributing factor; and Environmental factors: The respondents strongly agree that motivation, or the lack thereof, influences their passiveness. They moderately agree that the frequency of using the language and the availability of practice opportunities impact their level of passiveness. Regarding the strategies used to overcome passiveness in the classroom, the findings are as follows: The respondents heavily rely on translation when answering questions, while they moderately use it when organizing ideas and writing responses; they frequently employ hand gestures and facial expressions to convey their ideas; extensively use English movies, reading English books, and watching English classes on social media platforms to develop their speaking skills; and they commonly engage in self-talk and conversations with peers, while rarely engage in conversations with English-speaking individuals and provide comments during class discussions.

Language might be inherent to all human beings and socio-cultural groups, but it has not been a constant unifying element in human histories. The labelling of contemporary languages as dominant and minority attests to the controversy surrounding language. Whereas all humans acquire language intuitively, one must cultivate the art of effective communication. Therefore, Communication Skills is a core subject in many universities. The three-year qualitative study, which generally highlighted the dominant role of English Language in global relations, was an instructor’s avenue to improve upon TVET classroom practice. The specific objective was to help the targeted university learners to develop critical perspectives to strive for effective communication skills. The study interrogated classroom attitudes toward English and Communication Skills, using English language learners (ELL), teachers of Communication Skills and teachers of other subjects. It explored the principles of participatory action research to investigate the reasons behind poor communication skills of learners. Amongst others, students’ marked scripts were analysed to determine effective communication. Additionally, participants’ responses were compared for themes. The study was guided by two research questions: Which effective approaches could a Communications Skills instructor explore to address students’ needs? How does the instructor balance teaching principles and gentle motivational strategies to help students hampered by severe communication handicaps? The study revealed that students’ English grasp was too low and obstructed advanced learning. Participants were persuaded to revisit their position on the subject. Among others, it was recommended that the institution should admit into professional programmes learners who possess the required language proficiency. Additionally, Communication Skills should be taught throughout a professional programme to help learners consolidate communicative skills – effective speaking, writing, reading, and listening.

Introduction: A new mobility screening based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health for children and youth ICF-CY for primary school children is validated. Children with a motor development disorder need to be identified early in order to initiate appropriate therapies. The construct of mobility in the sense of the ICF-CY seems to be an ideal basis for a screening that allows different disciplines to communicate in a unified language.
Hypothesis: The new MobiScreen for primary school children meets all psychometric properties and is able to classify children into conspicuous and not conspicuous.
Methods: In total, 608 primary school children (53 % boys, 47 % girls, age 7.14 \(\pm\) .70 years) of the first and second grades of primary school participated to undergo the MobiScreen 6-8 and a further motor test (MOBAK 1-4 or DMT 6-18). In total, 568 primary school children (56 % boys, 44 % girls, age 9.36 \(\pm\) .79 years) of third and fourth grades of primary school participated to undergo the MobiScreen 8-10 and a further motor test (MOBAK 1-4 or DMT 6-18). Item split times including penalty seconds for performance errors as well as total time including penalty seconds are used to evaluate Inter-Rater-Reliability, Internal Consistency, Criterion Validity, Construct Validity and Diagnostic Accuracy. The significance level was set at p<.05.
Results: MobiScreen 6-8: Inter-Rater-Reliability coefficients range from r=.891 to r=.998. Cronbach's \(\alpha\) reached a value of \(\alpha\)=.722, inter item correlations range from r=.227 to r=.620. Results of the explorative factor analysis show a single factor model with an eigenvalue of 2.645 with a variance explanation of 53% for this factor. Coefficients for Criterion Validity are all significant and range from r=-.446 (MOBAK 1-4) to r=.553 (DMT 6-18). Discriminant analysis shows significant differences in all tasks between healthy children and children with a developmental disorder. For potential cutoff values between 24 and 28 seconds, values for sensitivity range from 1.00 to .86. The AUC reaches a value of .82. MobiScreen 8-10: Inter-Rater-Reliability coefficients range from r=.996 to r=1.000. Cronbach's \(\alpha\) reached a value of \(\alpha\)=.540, inter item correlations range from r=.161 to r=.367. Results of the explorative factor analysis show a single factor model with an eigenvalue of 2.074 with a variance explanation of 41 % for this factor. Coefficients for Criterion Validity are all significant and range from r=-.386 (MOBAK 1-4) to r=-.528 (DMT 6-18). Discriminant analysis shows significant differences in all tasks between healthy children and children with a developmental disorder. For potential cutoff values between 28 and 32 seconds, values for sensitivity range from .89 to .80. The AUC reaches a value of .79.
Conclusions: The given criteria were achieved in a medium to high degree and the screening is able to classify children into conspicuous and not conspicuous. Further studies should follow to enlarge the sample size for improving psychometric properties and definitively fix the cutoff values for both versions.