Digital Storytelling is one of the new pedagogical tools that call upon students’ creativity and helps them to “learn by doing”. It is one of the important steps towards creating the 21st-century learning environment as it promotes the integration of student-centred and technology-enriched learning environment for learners. Despite the many benefits that this learning tool has to offer, many educators are still reluctant to integrate this kind of technology in their classes which resulted in low implementation of this technology among the educators.  Therefore, this study is intended to determine pre-service teachers’ experience and perceptions of digital storytelling for 21st-century skills in a learning environment. A set of questionnaire was distributed to 150 trainee teachers from the Faculty of Education in one of the public universities in Malaysia. The result of this study reveals that pre-service teachers’ have moderately experienced the use of digital storytelling in their learning (M=2.98; SD=1.332). The finding also showed that the pre-service teachers responded positively towards the use of digital storytelling in the classroom (M=3.94; SD=0.713). The correlation analysis further showed that the pre-service teachers’ experience with digital storytelling has significantly given the impact on their perception towards the implementation of this tool in the teaching and learning process. Considering the many advantages of the digital storytelling towards the enhancement of 21st-century skills among the younger generations, therefore more aggressive steps need to be done to strengthen the teaching preparation programme in higher educational institutions. This is very important to ensure that the future teachers produced are well-equipped with all the teaching skills and technologies to educate the next millennial generations. KEYWORDS: 21st-century learning, Millennial,  Digital storytelling, Pre-service teachers, Student-centered

The article discusses a study carried out to investigate scientific reasoning skills among 82 science pre-service teachers at the Faculty of Education, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), one of the public universities in Malaysia. The development of general scientific abilities is critical to enable students of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to successfully handle open-ended real-world tasks in their future careers. Teaching goals in STEM education include fostering content knowledge and developing general scientific abilities. One such ability is scientific reasoning. Scientific reasoning encompasses critical thinking skill is an important and vital learning outcome in modern science education. Lawson (1978) categorized scientific reasoning into four domains: Conservative Concept, Proportional Concept, Control Variable and Probabilistic Thinking, and Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning. An instrument by Lawson (1978) was adapted for the study. The findings show that a majority of the science pre-service teachers possess low ability in scientific reasoning. It is also found that there was no significant difference among the science pre-service teachers of the physics, biology and chemistry disciplines examined. Physics students had developed higher ability in Conservative Concept, Proportional Concept, and Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning and chemistry students had higher ability in Control Variable and Probabilistic Thinking, whereas biology students had moderate ability in the four scientific reasoning patterns. KEYWORDS: scientific reasoning; science education; higher education.

As various technologies been incorporated into education and training, the evolution of e-learning also takes its turn in many universities. In Malaysia, the evaluation of motivational dimensions of the application is considered vital as e-learning had been embedded and integrated as part of teaching and learning assistance tool in many universities. The aim of this research is to investigate the dimensions of motivation of dental students in using e-learning as part of their learning-assisted-tool. The adapted questionnaires from Website Motivational Checklist (WebMAC) professional were distributed to 144 dental students from a Malaysian public university. The motivational dimensions investigated are meaningful, stimulation, easy-to-use and organization. The outcome of the study revealed that the elearning website can be improved to increase the motivational dimensions. Some improvements on meaningful, stimulation and easy-to-use motivational dimensions are being required.

Plant secondary metabolites and their derivatives play a significant role in anticancer drug therapy since they are effective against specific characteristics while reducing side effects. Dillapiole is a phenylpropanoid that holds several bioactivities like anti-fungal, anti-inflammatory, anti-leishmanial, and anti-cancer. This study aims to investigate the possible cytotoxic effect of dillapiole on human breast cancer, MCF-7 cells. Cells were cultured in complete RPMI media and incubated at standard culture conditions. After the cells reached 80% confluency, cells were treated with various concentrations (ranging from 0 µM to 150 µM) of dillapiole and tamoxifen as a positive control. Cells were later incubated at 48 and 72 hours. Using WST-1 assay, the cytotoxic effect was determined for both incubation times. Results show tamoxifen inhibited the MCF-7 cells with the IC50 at 75.9 µM and 39.8 µM for 48 and 72 hours respectively. Parallel with the positive control results, there was a significant cytotoxic effect of dillapiole against MCF-7 cells at 48- and 72-hours incubation with the IC50 at 92.1 µM and 63.1 µM respectively. Based on these results, dillapiole was cytotoxic against MCF-7 cells and its cytotoxic activity was both in a time and dose-dependent manner (<0.05). The morphological analysis supported the WST-1 assay. Our preliminary finding is in agreement with other previous studies, suggesting that dillapiole appears to be a promising anti-cancer agent and opens a wider possibility of downstream analysis on its underlying cytotoxicity mechanism.

Contribution/ Originality: This study is one of the very few studies which have investigated the conceptual understanding of preservice teachers in space science. The findings of the study reveal the needs to integrate more relevant and updated instructional strategies into the classroom to shed light on the misconceptions held by future teachers.