Zainudin Abu Bakar

Unconscious learning processes: mental integration of verbal and pictorial instructional materials

This review aims to provide an insight into human learning processes by examining the role of cognitive and emotional unconscious processing in mentally integrating visual and verbal instructional materials. Reviewed literature shows that conscious mental integration does not happen all the time, nor does it necessarily result in optimal learning. Students of all ages and levels of experience cannot always have conscious awareness, control, and the intention to learn or promptly and continually organize perceptual, cognitive, and emotional processes of learning. This review suggests considering the role of unconscious learning processes to enhance the understanding of how students form or activate mental associations between verbal and pictorial information. The understanding would assist in presenting students with spatially-integrated verbal and pictorial instructional materials as a way of facilitating mental integration and improving teaching and learning performance.

Construct validation of epistemological beliefs questionnaire for secondary school science students: lesson for practitioners

Student’s epistemological beliefs are important to the teacher’s teaching plan and construction. Various studies have highlighted that the regulatory role of students’ epistemological beliefs underpinnings their cognitive processing strategies, regulation of learning, learning approaches, learning orientations and conceptions of learning. As teachers, they should consider different efforts to measure epistemological beliefs which proposed general domain independent measures and specific domain dependent measures. This study is intended to highlight the process of preparing and validating the Urdu version of a domain dependent Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire for secondary school science students. Later, a confirmatory factor analysis was employed to examine the hypothesized dimensions of the translated Urdu version by using the Partial least squares approach of structural equation modelling. Twelve items of the translated version of Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire with adequate validity and reliability indices were loaded across three dimensions of students’ epistemological beliefs namely Belief in Knowledge Certainty, Belief in Knowledge Justification and Reasoning, and Belief in Omniscient Authority. This confirmation will implies the teachers upon epistemological belief of the student, what to expect and dimensions to consider in their classroom teaching and learning activities.