According to United Nations in 2020, the pandemic of COVID-19 has caused the largest disruption of education systems in history. The sudden transition from traditional classroom to online classroom has caused many students to become anxious with their learning especially when they have to learn writing skills through several online mediums such as instant messenger (e. g. Whatsapp and Telegram), social media (e. g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube), live meeting session (e. g. Google Hangouts Meet, Zoom and Cisco Webex) and education tools (e. g. Google Classroom, Padlet and Kahoot). To address this issue, this qualitative study explored the reported experience of nine students from Diploma of Banking Studies who are taking the writing course through an online medium, namely Telegram. The students are prompted with a list of interview questions focusing on writing anxiety. Their responses were analysed, and two major themes were generated. The results revealed that the participants in this study described external and internal reasons as the causal factors to their writing anxiety. The internal reasons can be classified further into somatic anxiety, cognitive anxiety, and avoidance behaviour. The participants suggested a few major coping strategies to overcome their writing anxiety such as taking a deep breath, taking some time off from writing task, getting some entertainment and practising relaxation.
Individual learning style causes a person to approach situation in different ways. As a result, it is important to investigate the learning styles of future students to improve the quality of the teaching and learning. This research used Kolb's Learning Style Inventory to compare the learning styles of pre-science and pre-business students. A survey research design was utilized and a total of 121 samples was finally analyzed. Findings revealed that prescience students were dominantly assimilator whereby pre-business students were dominantly converger. With respect to the SPM (Malaysian Certificate of Education) achievement and learning styles, ANOVA revealed that there was significant difference in SPM English between accommodator and assimilator; between accommodator and converger. On the other hand, there was significant difference in SPM Mathematics between accommodator and converger. Furthermore, pre-science students were balanced with abstract conceptualization "thinking" learning mode and concrete experience "feeling" mode and highly comfortable with active experimentation "doing" mode. Pre-business students were more comfortable with abstract conceptualization "thinking" learning mode and active experimentation "doing" mode. This research suggests that the educators should be familiar with the learning styles of their students and engage with varieties of instructional strategies to ensure the success of their students.
Higher institutions are being reshaped to include technology-based syllabus in their curriculum design. It is worth to note that the emerging of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has triggered the university's curriculum reviewers to include the platform in the syllabus contents. An English MOOC for Pre-Diploma was developed. To evaluate the course developed, the study aims to determine students' perceptions on the MOOC course. The data were collected via survey and there were 186 respondents involved. Three main areas of the course evaluation were evaluated: 1) Content Evaluation, 2) Instructional Evaluation and 3) Technical Evaluation. The study revealed that content evaluation has the mean value of 4.25 (SD=0.68), technical evaluation with the mean value of 4.24 (SD=0.71) and instructional evaluation with the mean value of 4.14 (SD=0.70). The average mean value reported for three different types of evaluations is 4.21 (SD=0.70). The finding indicates that the respondents are most likely strongly agreed with the course content, instructional and technical part, thus, has effectively helped the users to learn the English language by using MOOC platform.
Many researches emphasize the importance of developing students' ability to solve problems related to number or algebraic equations. As at-risk students' understandings of the algebraic concepts are in need of guidance, this study intends to innovative gamification for at-risk students to solve number equations through the use of Flexi-EQ Solver. In this quantitative study, a randomly selected 161 at-risk students answered the test questions. From the test answers, students' difficulties in learning mathematics concepts were analyzed. On the other hand, another 56 randomly selected at-risk students answered a questionnaire. From the test analysis, the students face major difficulties in factorization on algebraic expression, linear equations in one variable, transformation of formula and solving logarithmic equations. An innovative gamification framework embedded in Flexi-EQ Solver was then proposed for atrisk students. Flexi-EQ Solver which also called as Flexible-Equations Solver is a flexible interface featuring step-by-step exploration solutions for exponential, logarithmic, square and square root, inequality, decimal, percentage, fraction and trigonometric equations. Flexi-EQ Solver helps at-risk students to visualize number equations by seeing, touching, hands-on and manipulating it. On the average, the respondents agreed on the use of Flexi-EQ Solver for learning mathematics. With respect to the usage of Flexi-EQ Solver, 57.1% of the respondents highly recommended the use of Flexi-EQ Solver. Majority of at-risk students proposed the incorporation of visual learning theory and multiple representations as an innovative gamification framework in learning mathematical skills.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.