Jamaliah Abdul Hamid

Knowledge strategies of school administrators and teachers

Purpose – To examine the knowledge strategies of school administrators and teachers in schools to acquire and use information for decision making in various areas of school development.Design/methodology/approach – Quantitative correlational research design using survey questionnaire as the main instrument for data collection. The respondents were from 40 schools, and involved random selection of 282 school administrators and 500 teachers. The research was conducted using a 23 item questionnaire.Findings – Personal knowledge strategies of school administrators and teachers are highly correlated to the perception of positive knowledge management environments in their schools (r = 0.57, p < 0.001); the quality of data kept within schools (r = 0.63 p < 0.001); and the extent decision making in schools was information‐driven. Personal strategies also tend to influence the knowledge culture within schools. Personal strategies can maneuver the way people seek and tolerate new knowledge, and how ideas are valued...

Exploring the Relationship between Campus Leadership Development and Undergraduate Student Motivation to Lead among a Malaysian Sample.

Despite the number of studies investigating the perceived effectiveness of campus-based leadership development programming among undergraduates, most have focused on programme outcomes and few have investigated the role of the campus environment in enhancing students’ motivation to lead, particularly in non-Western contexts. To address these gaps, the current study investigated the relationship between perceived campus support for leadership development and both campus leadership involvement and undergraduate students’ motivation to lead. Data were gathered from 368 undergraduates from Malaysian public institutions of higher learning. An instrument to measure perceived campus support for leadership was developed through extensive review of the related literature. Exploratory multiple stepwise regression results showed that extent of involvement in leadership on campus, perceived quality of leadership training, perceived leadership opportunities on campus, quality of staff support for leadership on campus and programme of study accounted for a significant amount of the variance in predicting motivation to lead. The results lend initial support for the need for more experiential learning opportunities, high-quality training and greater staff–student engagement to enhance student motivation to lead. The findings draw particular attention to current university leadership training approaches that focus solely on transfer of skills and knowledge, such as those still employed in many universities. Implications for improving undergraduate student motivation to lead are discussed.

Exploring Trait and Task Self-awareness in the Context of Leadership Development among Undergraduate Students from Malaysia

Despite the theoretical justification for the importance of self-awareness as a key input to leadership development, the construct, as understood according to awareness of one’s traits and tasks, has received little attention in the literature related to undergraduate leadership development. This article sets out to address this gap by investigating Trait and Task Self-awareness (SA) among more than 1700 undergraduate students from Malaysian institutions of higher learning. Analysis focused on comparing Trait and Task SA according to seven demographic variables. Results indicated that older, male students with higher CGPAs from the social sciences scored higher on both types of self-awareness than their counterparts. The findings begin to shed light on Malaysian undergraduates’ status in terms of the development of self-awareness in the context of leadership, and how it can be further enhanced.

Does University Campus Experience Develop Motivation to Lead or Readiness to Lead among Undergraduate Students? "A Malaysian Perspective".

Do students’ experiences on university campuses cultivate motivation to lead or a sense of readiness to lead that does not necessarily translate to active leadership? To address this question, a study was conducted with 369 undergraduates from Malaysia. Campus experience was more predictive of leadership readiness than motivation. Student leadership opportunities, global leadership perspective development, leadership modeling, quality of staff support, and quality of leadership training programs contributed significantly more to leadership readiness than to motivation to lead.

Testing the accuracy of text deconstruction using PTree tool.

Our research project is currently to develop an Automatic Concept Relation Extraction (ACRE) System which automatically extracts concepts and their relationships across texts in all domains of knowledge. Concept Relational Tree (CRT) is one of the text analyzer applications used in the ACRE System to automatically extract concepts and their relationships in a document. To check on the correctness of the extraction of concepts and their relationships, the PTree is designed to reconstruct the text by reverse input. In this paper we present the PTree tool to test the accuracy of the automatic tagging and tree structure created by CRT from texts. The PTree tool is implemented from Java Universal Network/ Graph Framework (JUNG) libraries. This tool provides a few functions to allow for flexibility in drawing parse trees for concept relationships. Due to its flexibility and dynamic features, PTree can be further extended for use in the deconstruction of highly complex texts.