Your search

This paper aims to report a case study of exploring the effect of ?assessment for learning? on improving student learning and facilitating teachers? professional development in the examination-oriented context of Hong Kong. By adopting Variation Theory of the Lesson Study approach, data were collected through pre- and post-tests, interviews with students and teacher participants and observation field-notes in order to help diagnose students? learning difficulties and provide evidence for teachers to refine their teaching strategies to enhance students? learning effectiveness. The students? improvement in learning performance informed the teacher participants of the usefulness of ?assessment for learning? in the classroom.

This thesis aims to explore how learning accounting for non-accounting major students could be enhanced through a comprehensive framework connecting individual attributes and learning approaches. While accounting is considered an important and mandatory discipline for business students, it is also considered a difficult subject which deters students’ engagement in the subject. Although the issue has been widely recognized, there are relatively less discussions on possible remedies. Learning accounting is a dynamic process that go beyond the traditional one-to-many learning and teaching settings, all factors revolving the students’ learning environment and process, altogether determine and affect the learning efficiencies. A meta-analysis was first performed to understand the standings of accounting education and to identify gaps within existing literatures in the field of management, accounting, tourism and general education researches. A documentary review on the curricula of all Macau HEI programs involving compulsory accounting courses was also conducted to understand the role and significance of accounting courses for non-accounting college students in Macau. Based on the literature review, this study borrows constructs from theory of planned behavior (TPB) models in its research framework. It attempts to provide a comprehensive framework to understand how students learn accounting efficiently by delving into individual learning styles of the students and their perceived helpfulness and self-efficacy, in respective to different learning techniques. Due to its exploratory nature, a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative methodology is adopted, where both focus group discussions and in-depth interviews are performed with non-accounting students to elicit understandings on student’s difficulties in learning accounting and their preferences for different learning styles. Then, a full-scale quantitative survey is conducted in a Macau higher education institute to assess the learning efficiencies of accounting in different situations. A triangulation with feedback from faculties and administrators are also elicited to provide alternate dimensions on the issues. With no surprise, there is no one best 3 teaching style or method for all students, this thesis contributes to accounting education research by provide a comprehensive diagnosis on the all-round learning stimulus and hindrance in learning accounting. At the end, recommendations are provided for accounting educators to emphasize on the uniqueness of students and to encourage a more dynamic and open environment for learning. Limitations of the studies are also discussed

In recent years, the integration of Machine Learning (ML) techniques in the field of healthcare and public health has emerged as a powerful tool for improving decision-making processes [...]

Under Macau Arbitration Law (MAL, art 64.1), an award shall be made in writing and shall be signed by the arbitrator or arbitrators. Furthermore, the law provides that in case of arbitral proceedings with more than one arbitrator, the signatures of the majority of all members of the arbitral tribunal shall suffice, provided that the reason for any omitted signature is stated (MAL, art 64.2).

Virtual reality, a computer-generated 3D environment, allows one to navigate and possibly interact, resulting in real-time simulation of one or more of the user’s five senses (Gutierrez et al., 2008; Vince, 2004). Virtual tours and places have swiftly become popular in education, professional training, arts, exhibitions, and medication and rehabilitation. The empirical studies derived from the PhD thesis research aim to identify the conditions for Macao’s single-user experience to achieve mindfulness in virtual reality through immersion and interactivity.

The purpose of this study is to examine work engagement and mental well-being in Macau, specifically after more than three years of COVID. Examine whether external factors such as emotional support from supervisors, co-workers, and family members have a positive impact on work engagement and mental well-being, and whether the internal factor self-reflection with its three aspects of need for self-reflection, engagement in self-reflection, and insight from self-reflection moderates the relationship between emotional support, work engagement, and mental well-being. The target audience consists of Macau's integrated resort, hospitality, and gaming industry employees. According to the Affective Event Theory (AET), affective events at work generate emotional responses that influence the attitudes and behavior of employees in the workplace. In this study, this theoretical framework was used to clarify the interplay of variables that explain emotional support from supervisors, co-workers, and family members, work engagement, and mental well-being. An online self-response survey (N=325) was used to conduct quantitative and cross-sectional research. There was also a combination of simple random sampling, convenience sampling, and referral sampling. All variables were found to be correlated, and while perceived supervisor support was a significant predictor of all aspects of work engagement and mental well-being, family and co-worker support only predicted certain aspects of these variables. Self-reflection partially moderated the positive effects of certain emotional support on work engagement and mental well-being

Social workers’ work engagement and burnout were tested in relation to (a) personal variable, i.e., emotional intelligence; (b) organizational variables, i.e., work satisfaction and affective commitment. Regressions revealed emotional intelligence - controlling self – negatively predicted depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment and positively predicted three facets of work engagement. Emotional intelligence - understanding others – was a negative predictor of reduced personal accomplishment. In addition, work satisfaction negatively predicted three components of burnout and positively predicted emotional work engagement. Affective commitment was a positive predictor of three facets of work engagement and negatively predicted reduced personal accomplishment. Implications for management are discussed.

When the City of the Name of God of Macao marked 400 years of Portuguese administration in 1956, the Catholic community’s participation was marked by a wide range of activities that included liturgical celebrations, public processions and other devotions that involved large numbers of the lay faithful, members of confraternities, in addition to the clergy and religious of the enclave. Twenty-one years later the Diocese of Macao celebrated its own quatercentenary with celebrations of a decidedly more sober character and at the retrocession of Macao to Chinese control in December 1999, other than a few liturgical events and hierarchical presence at civic ceremonies, the Church was all but invisible. As the Diocese of Macao plans for its 450th anniversary, some of the former richness has begun to return. This paper outlines the long ebb tide and now-nascent flow of the tide of Catholic public piety in Macao over this period by reference to the Catholic religious processions of the City and seeks to offer tentative explanations grounded in the theological, ecclesial, political and cultural winds that have blown across the Pearl River Delta since the end of the Second World War.

The main focus of this thesis was to characterize the patient information leaftlets as a text genre in Portugal, compare it with the same text genre in other countries and propose a new form of elaborating these documents in order to rise its comprehensibility levels. Therefore, we proceeded with an analysis of the patient information leaflet as a text genre and its relationship with text linguistics and translation. We also analyzed a corpus of 50 patient information leaflets with focus not only on its content, but also in the way they were created. In order to know the opinion of the general public, a survey about the situation of these documents in Portugal was distributed. In order to find the differences between these documents in different contexts, we made a comparison of a portuguese leaflet with leaflets from other countries. By last, we proposed a new writing scheme for these documents, reformulating one of the leaflets analyzed in the corpus and, to get the opinion of the general public, distributing a survey where the reformulated version was compared to the original one. The results point out to a lack of uniformity between documents and the way that they are created in pharmaceutical companies. The content of the patient informations leaflets in Portugal has an excess of text, technical language and a visual organization that is not appealing, problems that were also pointed out by the public in a survey. In the comparison between leaflets of different countries, big differences were found even when they were produced by the same company. When confronted with the original version and the reformulated version of the same document, the general public prefered the latter.

Introduction This study aimed to investigate elite athletes’ mental well-being, and to ascertain whether the personal factor resilience and the social factor social support can play a role in promoting mental well-being and life satisfaction. In addition, this is one of the first studies to investigate well-being among elite athletes who are from a region belonging to an unrecognised National Olympic Committee and are not eligible to join the Olympic Games. Material and methods Eighty-four full-time elite athletes (37 males, 47 females) with mean age of 22.36 years old participated in this quantitative research study. Formal letters describing the purpose and organiser of the study were sent to the sport entities in Macao asking their permission for the researchers to contact the elite athletes to participate in this study. After gaining the permission, the elite athletes belonging to these entities were approached individually, to inform them of the purpose of the study and receive their consent. Results Regression revealed that emotional support and adaptability of resilience were strong positive predictors of mental well-being. Additionally, mental well-being was found to be a strong positive predictor of life satisfaction. The results reflected that in elite athletes possessing high adaptability and receiving more emotional support could help to maintain their mental well-being. Conclusions Implications (based on the findings) are discussed in order to provide insights for policy makers or coaches how to promote elite athletes’ mental well-being.

Parental nutrient reserves are directly related to reproductive performance in sea cucumbers. This study focused on the lipid requirements of male and female sea cucumbers Apostichopus japonicus during the reproductive stage and analyzed their physiological responses to a high-fat diet (HFD). The intestinal lipid metabolites and microbiome profile changed significantly in animals fed with the HFD, as given by an upregulation of metabolites related to lipid metabolism and an increase in the predominance of Proteobacteria in the microbiome, respectively. The metabolic responses of male and female sea cucumbers to the HFD differed, which in turn could have triggered sex-related differences in the intestinal microbiome. These results suggest that the lipid content in diets can be differentially adjusted for male and female sea cucumbers to improve nutrition and promote reproduction. This data contributes to a better understanding of the reproductive biology and sex differences of sea cucumbers.

The adoption of project management techniques is a crucial decision for corporate governance in construction companies since the management of areas such as risk, cost, and communications is essential for the success or failure of an endeavor. Nevertheless, different frameworks based on traditional or agile methodologies are available with several approaches, which may create several ways to manage projects. The primary purpose of this work is to investigate the adequate project management methodology for the construction industry from a general perspective and consider a case study from Macau. The methodology considered semi-structured interviews and a survey comparing international and local project managers from the construction industry. The interviews indicate that most construction project managers still follow empirical methods with no specific methodology but consider the adoption of traditional waterfall approaches. In contrast, according to the survey, most project managers and construction managers agree that the project's efficacy needs to increase, namely in planning, waste minimization, communication increase, and focus on the Client's feedback. In addition, there seems to be a clear indication that agile methodology could be implemented in several types of projects, including hospitality development projects. A hybrid development approach based on the Waterfall and Agile methodologies as a tool for the project management area may provide a more suitable methodology for project managers to follow.

This research paper analyses the marketing efforts and important attributes of Macau tea restaurants that have been open for more than 20 years, especially the digital methods that tea restaurants have used to sustain their business and meet customers' needs in the era of digital transition after the onset of the 2019 Covid 19 pandemic year. Using online marketing channels nowadays become an important tool for communicating with customers today. Despite the old Tea Restaurants in Macau did not put much efforts on digital channels for communication yet, to find out how tea restaurants survive in the rival restaurant industry in Macau, qualitative and quantitative methods were used to see how they meet the needs of their customers. For the quantitative method, an online survey questionnaire in bilingual English and Traditional Chinese was conducted with 280 respondents on customer purchase habits, importance of restaurants’ attributes and social media insights on tea restaurants, and the data was analysis by SPSS for the relationship and significance. For the qualitative method, 7 interviews were conducted with the business owners of the old tea restaurants which that have been opened for more than 20 years, including marketing efforts and their attitudes towards digitalization. To find out the marketing strategy of Macau’s old tea restaurants in the digital transformation era, it was found that “place” and “product” are the most important marketing mix for customers. Tea restaurant owners focus on product quality, and generate “word-of-mouth” which is customer-generated marketing, and is an effective way to influence customers for local tea restaurants. Meanwhile business owners will consider digitalize in the near future as well to match the new young customers’ online habits and the need for “place” such as online delivery platform

What strategies did educators use to cultivate a sense of belonging, self-competence, and agency among students with Special Educational Needs (SEN)? Did educators face any challenges in implementing these strategies? Were the findings of this study specific to the inclusive school in Macau, or can they be generalised to other educational settings? This study brings to light educators' inner perspective of students' sense of belonging, self-competence, and agency. Specifically, it aims to uncover the academic and emotional needs of students with SEN and the importance that these may have in promoting a positive educational experience. By gathering the perspectives of educators in an inclusive school in Macau who work side-by-side with these students daily, we can understand how essential these elements are in contributing to their overall development. The purposive sampling approach was used in this study to further investigate various experiences and perspectives of educators within an inclusive classroom setting. The educators interviewed provided insight into an inclusive classroom with students with SEN in full-time attendance. The educators sampled in this study facilitated the search for strategies, challenges and support systems to cultivate a sense of belonging, self-competence and agency, among students with SEN. Findings showed educators' understanding of the importance of students with SEN's sense of belonging, self-competence and agency. The educators' awareness of their students' interactions with peers, and the educators themselves, was prominent, revealing how the sense of belonging for students with SEN affected these relationships. Regarding students' sense of self-competence, according to educators, students with SEN had opportunities to showcase their confidence in specific classroom areas and to exercise independence in the classroom, within the set curriculum and lesson plans. In the findings, educators illuminated the importance of agency in students with SEN. However, they were apprehensive about changes in lesson plans, cultivating a fully independent classroom setting and providing choices to students with and without SEN. The study's implications highlight the educational practices and policies that effectively supplement students with SEN's academic and social environments. The findings of this study aim to guide curriculum developers, educators and parental figures in fostering positive learning experiences for students with diverse learning needs

In the past decades, the field of cinema has undergone several transformations. The digital turn increasingly called for new forms of production, distribution, and exhibition, which imply different ways of thinking, doing, and experimenting cinema. These new forms also reduced the gap between cinema to other so-called visual arts. If cinema and visual arts were already in the process of merging, the last years forced the naturalization of thinking in similar theoretical grounds. This special issue aims to be a forum for the discussion of new practices of researching cinema, and the changes in cinema’s forms of experience and production.