Reading Promotion Programme on literature appreciation among the young adults in Sri Lankan Schools Conducted by the Ministry of Education

A pilot reading program as an action research project was introduced by The National Institute of Library & Information Sciences (NILIS) in order to inculcate reading appreciation among young adults in Sri Lankan schools. A sample of 25 school libraries from the Maho Educational Zone was selected for the research study. Each grade nine student studying in the above-selected twenty-five schools was given a young adult literature book to be read within fourteen days, after which the student was required to prepare a portfolio based on the book. The school librarians marked the students' portfolio pieces, and this practice was continued up to the beginning of the third semester, using various literary genres. The students completed the given task within the specified period. According to the students' final portfolio evaluation, it was seen that they had gradually developed their competencies under the affective domain based on the above curriculum. Eventually, the Ministry of Education implemented the above program among all the junior and senior secondary schools in Sri Lanka as “Books are the Best Friends” with the assistance of NILIS.

Application of Interaction Effect Multichoice Goal Programming in Project Portfolio Analysis

How to choose the optimal project portfolio based on the enterprise objectives is very important for the survival and development of an enterprise. However, the current portfolio analysis needs to be improved in the aspects of interaction effect analysis, multichoice target planning, and method simplicity and practicability. The method of portfolio selection proposed in this study takes into consideration the complex interaction within the portfolio, which makes up for the deficiency of the existing research on portfolio selection. This paper illustrates the application of the multichoice object programming method in the analysis of the combination of two-project and three-project interaction effects by a series of examples. The results show that the method is applicable in portfolio evaluation. The method of multichoice goal programming of the interaction effect provides the basis for enterprise to measure the complex relationship within the portfolio and also provides a new method and idea for the selection of the enterprise project portfolio.

GCC countries' market risk premia and US monetary policy announcements

PurposeThis paper aims to examine if the market risk premiums of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are particularly higher on prescheduled US monetary policy announcement days. The findings shed light on the causality relationship from the state of the global economy to the GCC equity markets as well as their integration with the rest of the world.Design/methodology/approachThe author takes the standard event-study approach, following Fama et al. (1969). As the announcement days are prescheduled, the impact of the announcements on the GCC markets' risk premia allows for test of causality, while other studies address predictability and association.FindingsThe author finds that excess returns are higher, both economically and statistically, on announcement days in most individual GCC countries and the region overall. Moreover, additional compensations may not appear on the exact days of announcement in a few countries; rather, on the days right before or after announcements, possibly due to information leakage or gradual diffusion. My results show that there is a causal relationship from the state of the global economy to the GCC equity markets' risk premia. This new evidence supports integration between the Gulf region's and the world's financial markets.Practical implicationsThe evidence of risk–return transmission from US monetary policy announcements to GCC countries' equity indices supports integration between the region's and the world's financial markets. The study results will help guide investors' and corporations' investing, capital budgeting and portfolio evaluation decisions.Originality/valueThis paper extends the announcement literature (Savor and Wilson 2013, 2014) by examining the responses of the GCC countries, the major players of the global oil markets. The empirical analysis documents a causal relationship from the state of the global economy, as revealed by US monetary policy announcements, to the GCC equity indices. This new evidence supports increased integration between the Gulf region and the world, a finding that investors and corporations should consider when making investing, capital budgeting and portfolio evaluation decisions.

Design of a Blockchain-Based e-Portfolio Evaluation System to Assess the Education and Teaching Process

The e-Portfolio evaluation can truthfully assess the education and teaching process. This technique boasts several advantages: diverse evaluation sub-jects, emphasis on process evaluation, support to individualized develop-ment, and integration between teaching and evaluation. This paper applies blockchain to e-Portfolio evaluation, aiming to solve the thorny issues in tra-ditional e-Portfolio evaluation: privacy protection, data sharing, and infor-mation tracing. Firstly, the functional demand of blockchain-based e-Portfolio evaluation system was analyzed for multiple users: student, teacher, visitor, and administrator. Next, modular design was conducted for the sys-tem, the system boundaries and roles were defined, the relationship between roles was clarified, and a use case was provided to illustrate the client for each user. Based on the functional realization logic of the system, a se-quence diagram was plotted for the realization of system functional demand. Finally, seven chaincodes were designed to satisfy the requirements of the evaluation system. The advantages of the system performance were verified through experiments. The research results provide theoretical and practical bases for the application of blockchain in other evaluation tasks of education and teaching.