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Journal of Education & Social Sciences - Volume 5, Issue 2 2017
By Martin Thomas
10.20547/jess0521705200
It has been observed that a large number of Pakistani researchers are inclined towards quantitative research paradigm. Perhaps the reason is that they see outcomes of quantitative research as generalizable frameworks/models and a more accessible contribution to the knowledge economy. Using an etic view, these researchers try to explain the phenomenon in a way that is general and broader. Although the importance of quantitative research cannot be denied, ignoring the need of the qualitative research in solving the problems prevailing in various aspects of education is rather unwise. The Journal of Education and Social Sciences (JESS) has been successful in encouraging local and international researchers to contribute both quantitative and qualitative research papers to the journal. Our policy has increased the JESS' viewership and consequently attracted a large number of researchers from all over the globe. The flux of scholarly work has made the paper-review process a challenging task and has compelled the JESS' review committee to increase the number of papers in each volume and raise the standards of paper selection. It is to be noted that after volume 5, issue 2, all volumes of JESS will publish at least 9 papers and all papers will be selected by using a triple-blind-review technique instead of a double-blind-review technique. The current volume [volume 5, issue 2] of JESS presents the original work of researchers from various countries for scholarly engagement of the JESS readers. This volume includes five research articles, four from the local and one from an international contributor. The review article by Maryum Firdous and Saima Masoom Ali, concludes that success in tertiary education is positively correlated with success in life. Using Ecology Model of Dalton, Elias and Wandersman (2007), the reviewers explored the impact of several aspects of academic success on success in life. In this model, the environment has interconnected layers of proximal and distal systems, which comprise five ecological levels of analysis: individual, microsystem, organizations, localities and macrosystem. The review paper suggests that the individual factors have been explored more than the factors related to other ecological levels, which remain underexplored. Muhammad Younus and Imran Khan investigated the effect of strategy - based reading instruction on reading comprehension and reading use. Using the quasi-experimental design, the researchers found that cognitive, metacognitive, social/affective and test-taking strategies have significant effect on students' reading comprehension. Eldonna L. May and Might K. Abreh claim that to be productive members of African society, as well as a responsible world citizens, the continent's next generation of leaders requires a full suite of knowledge and skills to compete in national, international and global markets. In relation to the acquisition of a variety of skills, ICT literacy is mandated for all primary and school students by both African Deans Education Forum (ADEF) and Education for All (EFA) goals. However, when contrasted with urban areas, schools in rural, underserved communities present a problematic situation with insufficient infrastructure, access and training which is required to insure equality with their urban counterparts. The research by Eldonna and Might presents a synthesis of the issues and indicators causing the marginalization in rural and underserved communities of Ghana in ICT deployment and usage. The paper that took the fourth place in the journal is written by Kifayat Khan, Muhammad Iqbal Majoka, Khalid Khurshid and Syed Manzoor Hussain Shah. Their research aimed to explore the effectiveness of active learning methods on students' academic achie-vement in physics at secondary school level in Pakistan. Using an experiment design, a control group was taught physics through a traditional teaching method (TTM) and an experimental group through an active learning method (ALM). The researchers found that the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group in all the focused learning levels that include, knowledge, understanding, application, problem-solving, observation and reasoning. The researchers thus recommended using the ALM while teaching science subjects especially physics. A paper by Roshan Ali Teevno and Rasul Bakhsh Raisani took the fifth place in the journal. The focus of the research presented by these authors was to explore the strategies the students adopt for learning reading English and to determine the effect of these adopted strategies on students' reading comprehension performance at secondary school level. The data gathered from 359 students revealed that the students at higher secondary schools and intermediate colleges use a variety of reading strategies such as reading aloud, silent reading, summarizing the reading text, outlining the grammatical structures and pattern contained in the texts, answering simple questions, looking for the meaning of new vocabulary and translating English text in their mother language. The authors found that the skillful use of the reading strategies used by students were strongly correlated with the students' performance in reading comprehension.