Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 4, Page 999-1013, October 2022.

Taiwan is an island country situated in the northwest Pacific, close to the southeast of China. The land area is about 36,000 square kilometers. The population of Taiwan is about 23 million, and it consists of the majority Han ethnic groups and dozens of minority groups who are collectively called “Formosan,” an appellation for indigenous peoples in Taiwan. Formosans can be divided into Pingpu and Gaoshan by their living area. In recent years, marriages between Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and Southeast Asians (...) have increased significantly. Because of the genetic background of the Taiwanese people, it was thought to be highly beneficial for Taiwan to establish a biobank specifically designed for the Taiwanese population, as it would enable large-scale cohort studies to be carried out for common diseases occurring in Taiwan. (shrink)

The article focuses on the analysis of curriculum documents from Taiwan to investigate how benchmarks for learning nature of science are positioned in different versions of the science curricula. Following a review of different approaches to the conceptualization of NOS and the role of NOS in promoting scientific literacy, an empirical study is reported to illustrate how the science curriculum documents represent different aspects of NOS. The article uses the family resemblance approach as the account of NOS and adapts it (...) for analysis of the curriculum documents. The FRA defines NOS as cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional systems that serve as constructs of knowledge categories with a high level of interconnectedness. The FRA was used as an analytical tool for investigating two sets of Taiwanese curriculum guidelines published 10 years apart, providing an opportunity to discuss how NOS is addressed in the curriculum reforms. The findings show a shift away from the excessive centralization of the cognitive-epistemic system to a consideration of the social-institutional system. Modifications to the benchmarks are proposed in order to achieve a more holistic and progressive approach to NOS. The article contributes to studies on NOS in science education by illustrating how the FRA can act as a tool for exploring interconnectedness of NOS ideas in the curriculum. (shrink)

This study proposed a children’s digital art ability training system with artificial intelligence-assisted learning, which was designed to achieve the goal of improving children’s drawing ability. AI technology was introduced for outline recognition, hue color matching, and color ratio calculation to machine train students’ cognition of chromatics, and smart glasses were used to view actual augmented reality paintings to enhance the effectiveness of improving elementary school students’ imagination and painting performance through the diversified stimulation of colors. This study adopted the (...) quasi-experimental research method and designs the pre-test and post-test for different groups. The research subjects are the Grade 4 students of an elementary school in Taitung City, Taiwan. The test tools included an imagination test and an evaluation of painting performance ability. The test results of a total of 30 students before and after the experiment included the experimental group that received the children’s digital art ability training system with AI-assisted learning and 30 students in the control group that had not received the teaching were analyzed by covariance. These results were supplemented by the description and interpretation of student feedback, teachers’ reflection notes, and other qualitative data to understand the performance of the students in the experimental group in terms of imagination and painting performance. (shrink)

In Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Hsuan L. Hsu examines how literature represents different kinds of spaces ranging from the single-family home to the globe. He focuses on authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett, who drew on literary tools such as rhetoric, setting, and point of view to mediate between individuals and different kinds of spaces. These authors used forms such as the regional sketch, the domestic (...) novel, and the detective story to re-examine how local spaces and communities would change when incorporated into global economic and political networks. Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is valuable reading for American literature scholars, and for all concerned with intersections between literature and geography"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)