Ecd Educators Outlook on Early Years Curriculum and Pedagogy Fostering Children’s Holistic Development

The main purpose of the study was to explore educators' views on children's the early years' curriculum and pedagogy implemented in Pakistan. This research study is grounded in qualitative design i.e. Case study. The case included examining educators, the early years' and school managers' critical reflections on children's learning and development during the early years' education. This research study is first of its kind in the context of Pakistan as the early years teachers' views about their teaching practices have rarely incorporated in recent studies. The main finding of this study was that curriculum and pedagogies used in early years' program has never been concentrated earlier as potential research themes. Though many research studies have been conducted on the implementation of ECE programs, but not any specific study concentrated on matching curriculum goals with its implementation to facilitate children's holistic development. It was learnt that national curriculum framework 2007 is not followed in most ECE classes. The main reason was found that many practitioners i.e. Educators and managers have not seen or read it. Consequently, national philosophy is compromised while nurturing children holistically It is therefore recommended for teachers and educators to study the national and now provincial curriculum framework because it has set a benchmark as what to achieve and suggested how to achieve the goals.

Improving Social Book Search Using Structure Semantics, Bibliographic Descriptions and Social Metadata

The emergence of the Social Web and social collaborative cataloging web applications have changed the way books are described, discovered and accessed. These applications present books not only through the bibliographic descriptions or professional metadata but also allow users to describe these resources through user-generated content or social metadata. This social practice has attracted researchers under the broader topic of Social Book Search to make it part of the book retrieval process aiming to improve the relevance of search results and understand the impact of the Social Web on the search performance. For this purpose, the classical Information Retrieval (IR) approaches are employed to produce an initial set of search results, which are re-ranked using the social metadata to see if the search relevance gets improved. Although numerous studies found that the social metadata improves over the baseline run, they are unable to exploit fully the potential role of the query-document representation and weighting model, which questions the credibility of such a conclusion. Also, in re-ranking, most of the studies evaluated and compared different metadata features to produce better search results but remained silent about the final shape of re-ranking. To fill these gaps in the literature, this research work considers the contribution of the querydocument representation and weighting model to the fullest to produce a strong classical baseline run and re-ranks it using a multifeatured fusion of different social metadata features. Our best-performing baseline and re-ranking runs outperform the existing approaches on several topics sets and relevance judgments. The findings suggest that the best document representation can be achieved if the social metadata is made part of the search index. The best query representation is achieved using all-topic-fields. The relevance of search results improves with re-ranking the best-performing baseline runs. These findings have implications for researchers working in Libraries, Information Science, IR, and Interactive IR.