Top PDF Prevalence of Tobacco Use among Junior High and Senior High School Students in Taiwan

How can Taiwan use the findings from the junior high and senior high GYTS to assist in developing their tobacco control program? In general, the main goal of a comprehensive tobacco control program is to improve the health of the population by encouraging smokers to quit, eliminating exposure to secondhand smoke, and encouraging people not to initiate tobacco use. Previous studies have shown that demand reduc- tion measures, primarily those that increase the price of tobacco, are effective in significantly reducing initi- ation of tobacco use and consumption among young people. 16 In addition to demand reduction measures, comprehensive tobacco control programs often include nonprice interventions such as restrictions on smoking in public places and workplaces, a complete ban on advertising and promotion by tobacco companies, dis- semination of information on the health consequences of smoking through various media such as prominent warning labels on cigarette packets and countermar- keting campaigns, and development and implemen- tation of school-based educational programs in combination with community-based activities. 16,17

Abstract BACKGROUND: Tobacco use is a major preventable cause of death in the world. This article describes and compares tobacco use prevalence for students attending junior high schools and senior high schools in Taiwan. METHODS: This report uses data from the Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS) completed among 4689 junior high school students and 4426 senior high school students in Taiwan in 2004-2005.

Graduate Institute of Nursing, Taipei Medical University, No. 250, Wu-hsing St., Taipei (110), Taiwan. plchen@tmu.edu.tw OBJECTIVES: Most smokers begin using tobacco in their teens and recent reports indicate that smoking prevalence is climbing among youth in Taiwan. The purpose of this paper was to determine the associated factors of susceptibility of youth smoking by different types of schools. METHODS: A total of 4689 junior high students and 3918 senior high students participated in a school-based survey to determine the associated factors of susceptibility of youth smoking through anonymous self-administered questionnaire in 2004-2005. RESULTS: Susceptibility to initiate smoking ranged from 11.3% for junior high to 12.7% for general senior high and 12.4% for vocational senior students. For all/male smoking-susceptible students, more junior high students had one or more parents or best friends who smoked than did general or vocational senior high students. For all/female smoking-susceptible students, significantly more junior high students experienced secondhand smoke in public places than did non-susceptible students.

Yet, the results of an anonymous Internet-based survey of 1454 teenagers (Juvonen & Gross, 2008) are inconsistent with the com- mon assumption that cyberbullies are usually anonymous, sug- gesting that teenagers are aware of cyberbullying behavior and know exactly who did what. Anonymity is one good cover in cyber- space, but it cannot be inferred that every cyberbully would use it at all or would use it successfully. It is also possible that teenagers simply transfer the bullying field from the school bathroom or the school storage room to blogs and IMs and that teenagers do not tend to hide their identity, just as they typically do not wear masks when beating up a peer in a face-to-face confrontation. While cyberbullying accompanies traditional bullying, the victims might be able to guess the cyberbully’s identity. Interestingly, online materials quite obviously are more open to the public than are the bathrooms or the storage rooms in schools; but teen cyberbul- lies might not be aware of this fact. They do not expect that teach- ers, parents, or other adults would read their blog online or check their IM records, and most adults are indeed neither aware of such goings-on nor able to do anything about the matter if they are.

The adolescent welfare law in Taiwan has legislated to forbid adolescents under 18 to smoke, drink, and chew betel nut. The legislation also inflicts punishment on those who provide cigarette to the adolescents. However, smoking is a kind of social behavior and the health risk perception of smoking and health education should be concentrated simultaneously. Although the first time trying tobacco smoking is due to curiosity, it should be realized that consecutive tobacco smoking could lead to damaging their health, particularly when strongly associated with betel nut chewing and drinking. An effective health education program for the high-risk group students is necessary to prevent the increase of tobacco smoking among Taiwan’s adolescent students.

With the rapid increase of mobile phone ownership throughout the world in the last decade, it would seem useful to find ways to adapt handsets for learning purposes. Despite some obstacles that can hinder this technology from being used in education, with the relentless advancement in technology, the adoption of this new concept can still be expected. However, in Taiwan where the mobile phone penetration rate is one of the highest in the world, there seems to be very little research done regarding the use of mobile phones for language learning. This study reports on an investigation into the current digital environment for junior high school students in Taiwan as well as their attitudes towards incorporating handsets as tools for English learning. Among the one hundred and eighty four students surveyed in two junior high schools, it was found that the ownership of handsets has increased rapidly within the three year period. Most of them acknowledged the potential advantages and disadvantages brought by handsets in terms of ways to facilitate the learning. Based on the findings, it is clear that the students’ attitudes towards using mobile phones to learn English correlate strongly to their original attitude to this language. Also, students who had a handset of their own tended to be a bit more optimistic for the potential of this new way of language learning than their counterparts. The paper will discuss the implications of the findings for development of mobile language learning software in Taiwan.

Tuberculosis (abbreviated to TB) is one of important global health hazards. Since 1993, World Health Organization (WHO) and International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IUATLD) have been conducting an all-out global wide campaign of integrated care for TB patients called Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS). DOTS was found to be most effective by WHO after trials in many countries with high prevalence of TB, and now it is highly recommended by WHO to all countries as a profound TB control strategy. World Bank has also made an assessment of DOTS and hails it a health investment of the highest cost benefit. DOTS is to take advantage of the watchful eyes of a trustworthy bystander to closely observe the process, ascertain that the patient would take each and every dose of prescribed TB medications, and thus make sure the patient would get cured. It is hoped to be able to spot and identify 75% of all smear positive TB patients and cure 85% among them.

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Wei-Ti Kuo ∗ , Chao-Shainn Huang ∗ , and Chao-Lin Liu ∗ Abstract We investigated the problem of classifying short essays used in comprehension tests for senior high school students in Taiwan. The tests were for first and second year students, so the answers included only four categories, each for one semester of the first two years. A random-guess approach would achieve only 25% in accuracy for our problem. We analyzed three publicly available scores for readability, but did not find them directly applicable. By considering a wide array of features at the levels of word, sentence, and essay, we gradually improved the F measure achieved by our classifiers from 0.381 to 0.536.

Center for Teacher Education & Institute of EducationNational Chiao Tung University1001 Ta Hsuch RdHsinchu 300Taiwancctsai@mail.nctu.edu.tw Educators and psychologists have evidence that students’ conceptions of learning have a profound influence on the learning process, and thus are related to learning outcomes. The purpose of this paper was to explore the conceptions of learning science held by 120 Taiwanese high school students. The interview data gathered from these students, analysed by a phenomenographic method, revealed seven categories of conceptions of learning science, including: learning science as memorizing, preparing for tests, calculating and practising tutorial prob- lems, the increase of knowledge, applying, understanding, and seeing in a new way. The educational contexts or curricular programmes in which these high school students enrolled also played a role in their conceptions of learning science. This study finally proposed a framework to describe the variations of the conceptions of learn- ing science, consisting of the following features: the forms of knowledge acquisition, motivational orientations, and standards of evaluating learning outcomes. How to change students’ unfruitful conceptions of learning science was also discussed.

This study is aimed at investigating junior high school students’ English learning strategy use in an EFL learning environment and the relationship between students’ English learning strategy use and four factors – gender, year of study, fondness of English, previous ESL experience, and school location. Participants in this study were 240 first- year to third-year students from Shi Yuan Junior High School in Taichung City and Homei Junior High School in Changhua County. All the participants have once studied English curriculums at elementary school for at least two years before entering Junior High School. The instruments for this study included two sections. First section is personal background information with six items; second section is a Chinese questionnaire with fifty Likert-scale items mostly adapted from Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) items. To collect data for the study, all the participants were asked to complete a copy of the junior high school students’ English Learning Strategy Use Questionnaire under the supervision of English teachers during class time. Before beginning to fill out the questionnaire, teachers briefly explained the purpose of the study to the participants by an oral approach and showed them how to respond to the items and mark their responses on the questionnaire. Every participant had approximately 3-5 minutes to complete the

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allowing play on the Internet, and modeling non-anxious behavior. Besides instructional techniques, findings from this study deserve consideration when designing such training sessions. The follow-up interviews in this study indi- cated that teachers already recognize the benefits of the Internet: the speed in finding and transferring information, an increase in teaching flexibility, and an increase in students’ motivation to learn. However, teachers in this study also expressed, among other things, concerns over students’ abilities to evaluate the information they find on the Internet, and to govern their own use-time in appropriate ways. Therefore, when teacher-training is planned and implemented, the concerns of teachers should be addressed, in addition to the particulars of hardware and applications. For example, those developing training sessions might help teachers to address questions such as:

their strategy use. While teaching vocabulary based on SSBI, teachers should, on the one hand, employ instructional approaches that can cater to the needs of students with different learning styles. They can either vary vocabulary learning activities designed for a particular learning style or design activities that involve different learning styles. On the other hand, teachers should help students extend their learning style preferences so that they can learn effectively even when their teacher’s teaching style does not match their most preferred learning style. It is also important for teachers to help students try strategies that are unfamiliar to them or do not match their learning styles by integrating strategy training into classroom instruction. For example, by teaching the vocabulary learning strategy “configuration,” one of the infrequently used strategies in this study, teachers may not only cater to the needs of students with visual learning style preference but also help expand the strategy repertoire and flex the learning style of students with other style preferences. According to Oxford (2004), students usually use learning strategies that fit their basic learning styles if they are not encouraged or forced to use a certain set of strategies. However, through strategy instruction, teachers can help students “stretch” their learning styles by trying out strategies outside of their primary style preferences (Oxford, 2004). Strategy instruction can not only broaden students’ vocabulary learning strategy use but also make them become more flexible learners. Students with greater learning-style flexibility may also become higher achievers (Kirby, 1979).

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For a complete survey, please refer to Appendix A. 2.3. Procedure of data collection After the target students were chosen, they were asked to browse a few selected local Internet-based instructional sites and systems, which had been nominated as the best instructional web sites by the Ministry of Education, Taiwan. During the pro- cess, pupils were first asked to evaluate the sites, and later to respond their preferences by using the CILES. These sites, based upon the researchers’ perspectives, could be viewed as more constructivist-oriented. They included a variety of information and resources to help students’ knowledge construction and social interactions. Since sample students at least obtained such actual Internet learning experiences, involving the navigation of certain local instructional sites before completing the CILES, it could be believed that the variability about students’ interpretations of the Internet learning environments would not be very high. That is, their general perceptions toward the features as well as the possible functions of Internet-based learning en- vironments would not be highly divergent. They had some similar experiences and interpretations toward the Internet-based learning environments and thus they all had adequate experiences to show their preferences toward these environments.

Tuberculosis (abbreviated to TB) is one of important global health hazards. Since 1993, World Health Organization (WHO) and International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IUATLD) have been conducting an all-out global wide campaign of integrated care for TB patients called Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS). DOTS was found to be most effective by WHO after trials in many countries with high prevalence of TB, and now it is highly recommended by WHO to all countries as a profound TB control strategy. World Bank has also made an assessment of DOTS and hails it a health investment of the highest cost benefit. DOTS is to take advantage of the watchful eyes of a trustworthy bystander to closely observe the process, ascertain that the patient would take each and every dose of prescribed TB medications, and thus make sure the patient would get cured. It is hoped to be able to spot and identify 75% of all smear positive TB patients and cure 85% among them.

Most studies assume that the critical determinant of parental influence is whether they smoke or not. 22 This influence is obvious when youngsters hold smoking parents as a role model to imitate. 2 56 In addition, having cigarettes easily available in the home certainly facilitates adolescent experimentation. 2 57 However, we have found that parental influence is much more than simply their smoking beha- viour. Parental attitude, which may be expressed in terms of tolerance toward smoking or the extent of TLC exhibited toward children, is another important dimension of parental influence. Ours is one of very few studies comparing the dual parental factors of smoking behaviour and perceived parental attitude. 8 27 58 59 Two studies that did take this approach found that the joint effect was much more powerful than individual effect. Nolte et al reported a 10-fold synergistic relationship in youth smoking between smoking parents who were permis- sive and non-smoking parents who disapproved of smoking. 49 Newman replicated this study and found a smaller, though still significant, threefold difference. 38 In contrast, a smaller relationship was found in both studies (twofold or less), when only one variable (behaviour) was considered. In our study, parental smoking yielded odds ratios of 1.8 for boys and 2.0 for girls. However, when attitude (TLC) was added, the relationship became much larger, 2.8 for boys and 3.9 for girls. These results confirm the notion that parental influence has been underestimated in studies when only one aspect of parenting was considered.