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The purpose of this research is to improve the understanding of what constitutes a successful thesis proposal (TP) and as such enhance the quality of the TP writing in architecture, planning and related disciplines.

Based on extended personal experience and a review of relevant literature, the authors proposed a conception of a successful TP comprising 13 standard components. The conception provides specific definition/s, attributes and success rules for each component. The conception was applied for 15 years on several batches of Saudi graduate students. The implications of the conception were assessed by a students' opinion survey. An expert inquiry of experienced academics from architectural schools in nine countries was applied to validate and improve the conception.

Assessment of the proposed conception demonstrated several positive implications on students' knowledge, performance and outputs which illustrates its applicability in real life. Experts' validation of the conception and constructive remarks have enabled further improvements on the definitions, attributes and success rules of the TP components.

The proposed TP conception with its 13 components is limited to standard problem-solving research and will differ in the case of other types such as hypothesis-based research.

The proposed conception is a useful directive and evaluative tool for writing and assessing thesis proposals for graduate students, academic advisors and examiners.

The research contributes to improving the quality of thesis production process among the academic community in the built environment fields.

The paper is meant to alleviate the confusion and hardship caused by the absence of a consensus on what constitutes a successful TP in the fields of architecture, urban planning and related disciplines.

This Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research is a part of the larger study grant to analyze written reflections through learning log among the third and final year students undertaking BPME 3073 Entrepreneurship module in University Utara Malaysia (UUM). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The data collection techniques are researcher-directed textual data through reflective learning log, taken from 140 students from three classes. A thematic approach was utilized to present the reflections of the students and all data were recorded in a verbatim format.

The findings show that most students have never written a reflective log or essay in the formative assessment. As a consequence, they had difficulty in writing the reflection when being requested to do so. A total 75 (approximately 55 percent) of the reflective logs were identified as level 1 (from 1 to 5 percent) in which reflections were simply written in a descriptive manner, resulted in a balance of 61 learning logs being utilized for further analysis. The students’ reflections on their entrepreneurship’s experience systematically categorize into four different themes comprised of: the nature of entrepreneurship module, entrepreneurial characteristics, opportunity recognition, and creativity and innovation.

As for the limitation of the study, it is important to not to underestimate the challenges of introducing a grade assessment that most of them are not familiar with in their university academic journey. Students need guidance, assurance and confidence writing something that require personal opinion, own thinking, sensitive and personal nature of narration. For most students as found out in this study, self-confessional writing is hard to come by (they dare not attempt it in the first place), only a handful appreciating the writing start with “I,” “me” as first person. More research in this study should be conducted across the university to gauge the response from the students to see if the result of this study is only applicable to this group of students or to this discipline of studies. The researchers would also like to recommend for future studies which take the form of a longitudinal study of similar kind to examine the problems and challenges with regards to promoting learning reflection at the undergraduate level.

Based on the result of the 61 students who had demonstrated an ability in reflective writing, it is suggested that perhaps the university should consider offering coursework that contains a component of reflective writing as part of the assessment. As such, if this is implemented, students of such ability like the one in this sample group would have been benefitted from such assessment which look at reflective ability (Greene, 2014) and which they were allowed to form a broader perspective in relation to the module undertaken. This in turns will foster the growth of reflective ability which is recognized as a learned behavior (Gustafson and Bennett, 1999). In addition, for the future exercise of this reflective learning log, the researcher opined that we should encourage our students to engage with another student (e.g. close friend) in a way that encourages talking with, questioning, or confronting, helped the reflective process by placing the learner in a safe environment in which self-revelation can take place. In addition, students were able to distance themselves from their actions, ideas and beliefs, by holding them up for scrutiny in the company of a peer with whom they are willing to take such risks (Hatton and Smith, 1995).

The results of this research have strongly suggested the need to urgently develop among the students the skills in writing reflectively as they go through the process of higher education which is useful in molding their future professional and entrepreneurial behavior as when they entered the job market which requires a critical reasoning ability.

This study analyzed 24 IELTS Task One (data explanation) prompts for task type, diagram type, subject matter, level of critical thought, and geographical references, in order to determine whether Emirati university students’ anecdotal claims of cultural bias on the IELTS academic writing exam (as experienced by the researcher in the past decade of teaching IELTS in the United Arab Emirates) are valid. The analysis found that the majority of the task types (88%) were non-process in nature (i.e. required the description of data in the form of a chart or graph, rather than the description of a process); 40% of the non-process prompts consisted of more than one diagram. The analysis revealed that 33% of the non-process prompts included bar graphs and 29% included line graphs. Pie charts appeared in 25% of the prompts and tables in only 17%. An Emirati student English preparatory program survey indicated the pie chart as the easiest to understand – a finding that may highlight a difference between the most commonly used IELTS prompt and the students’ prompt preference. A content analysis of topics found a high percentage (58%) of subject matter related to the social sciences, with 79% of the geographical references pertaining to Western contexts. An analysis of the amount of critical thought needed for graph interpretation revealed 52% of non-process prompts required some form of critical thought. The study therefore found that the cultural bias perceived by Emirati students has some validity, given the students’ socio-cultural and educational background.

This paper explores a five-year case example of two educators engaged in practice-based professional development (PBPD) for the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model in a middle school. It examines the transformative effects and challenges of improving writing instruction, the activities involved and alternative PBPD delivery methods. Highlighting a collaborative effort between an institute of higher education (IHE), a middle school and ThinkSRSD, a PBPD for SRSD developer, the example underscores the long-term benefits and innovative insights into engaging with PBPD for SRSD over multiple years.

The case involves analyzing survey data collected over five years. These surveys, which included specific SRSD-related queries and open-ended questions, were instrumental in assessing the evolution of the educators’ perceptions regarding SRSD and their engagement with PBPD. Additionally, the paper details PBPD activities as documented in a research journal, providing a comprehensive account of the developmental process.

Through a cross-institutional partnership, two middle school general educators participated in PBPD for SRSD for 30 h across five years. Their engagement with PBPD progressed from initial introduction and implementation to facilitating PBPD for SRSD among peers and at the national level. Over time, the most consistently enacted SRSD action was “memorize it,” while actions such as “discuss it,” “support it” and “independent performance” showed greater variability. Both educators consistently praised SRSD and sought continued PBPD engagement over the five years.

Our case example is the first five-year analysis of PBPD for SRSD among general middle school educators, highlighting the benefits and challenges of adopting evidence-based writing instruction. Our example emphasizes the need for continuous and focused professional development in areas crucial for student success, including self-regulation, prewriting strategies and techniques for fostering independent performance. Moreover, the two middle school educators’ critical feedback is invaluable for refining PBPD for SRSD. This work also enriches professional development schools (PDS) literature by offering effective strategies to support middle school teachers in developing a vibrant writing community, a cornerstone for student advancement in writing.

The main purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between student ratings and teacher ratings on a university-level writing assignment in order to investigate the extent to which students have the ability and wherewithal to accurately and reliably assess themselves on a finished writing product. The Pearson Product Moment coefficient was used to determine whether or not there was a statistical correlation between student scores and teacher scores while the Intra-Class Coefficient and Spearman Brown Prophecy formula were used to determine the degree of agreement between raters as well as amongst all of the raters for an average reliability score. In this case the results were very promising as it was found that student and teacher scores correlated very highly and demonstrated a strong degree of agreement. This suggests that self assessment may be used to assist students in this particular context to better understand the conventions of English writing and ultimately improve their overall writing ability.

As publishers and academia swiftly head towards e-textbooks, it is important to understand how students feel about using e-textbooks as a primary learning tool. This paper discusses results of a small-scale study looking into how a group of language learners view and use e-textbooks as learning tools in ESL classrooms. The paper concludes by offering teaching implications that could ease integrating e-textbooks in language classrooms in a more effective and efficient manner.

Semantic retrieval and discovery of datasets published as open data remains a challenging task. The datasets inherently originate in the globally distributed web jungle, lacking the luxury of centralized database administration, database schemes, shared attributes, vocabulary, structure and semantics. The existing dataset catalogs provide basic search functionality relying on keyword search in brief, incomplete or misleading textual metadata attached to the datasets. The search results are thus often insufficient. However, there exist many ways of improving the dataset discovery by employing content-based retrieval, machine learning tools, third-party (external) knowledge bases, countless feature extraction methods and description models and so forth.

In this paper, the authors propose a modular framework for rapid experimentation with methods for similarity-based dataset discovery. The framework consists of an extensible catalog of components prepared to form custom pipelines for dataset representation and discovery.

The study proposes several proof-of-concept pipelines including experimental evaluation, which showcase the usage of the framework.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, there is no similar formal framework for experimentation with various similarity methods in the context of dataset discovery. The framework has the ambition to establish a platform for reproducible and comparable research in the area of dataset discovery. The prototype implementation of the framework is available on GitHub.

Instructors at tertiary-level institutions in the Gulf are increasingly encouraged to reflect on their teaching practice. This article is both a reflection on my own practice and an attempt to demonstrate, through recounting a personal experience, how reflection can contribute positively to any teacher's self-knowledge and consequent performance in the classroom.

Cotton soliton is a newly introduced notion in the field of Riemannian manifolds. The object of this article is to study the properties of this soliton on certain contact metric manifolds.

The authors consider the notion of Cotton soliton on almost Kenmotsu 3-manifolds. The authors use a local basis of the manifold that helps to study this notion in terms of partial differential equations.

First the authors consider that the potential vector field is pointwise collinear with the Reeb vector field and prove a non-existence of such Cotton soliton. Next the authors assume that the potential vector field is orthogonal to the Reeb vector field. It is proved that such a Cotton soliton on a non-Kenmotsu almost Kenmotsu 3-h-manifold such that the Reeb vector field is an eigen vector of the Ricci operator is steady and the manifold is locally isometric to.

The results of this paper are new and interesting. Also, the Proposition 3.2 will be helpful in further study of this space.