This report describes economic trends in building the capacity of renewable energy in several countries.

This report outlines the strategic direction of the energy sector to meet its growing energy demand in an environmentally-sustainable manner over the next two decades, and presents a pathway of policy frameworks and financing mechanisms to get there. This study found that large-scale deployment of energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies can simultaneously stabilize East Asia’s CO2 emissions by 2025 and significantly improve the local environment and enhance energy security, without compromising economic growth.

Responding to globalization and its effects on education and research development, the Thai government decided to push all public universities to become autonomous and establish a system of quality assurances. The establishment of quality assurances has had a large impact on many Thai instructors, especially in new public universities. Thai instructors are now forced to more focus on conducting research because the number of research publications is regarded as one of the main criteria for quality universities. The purpose of this study is to investigate the key factors, at the individual and university levels, which impact on the instructors' behavior in conducting research of the full-time instructors in the faculty of Management Science from the Rajabhat Universities in Thailand. The current study will help explain how and why the instructors accept or refuse to conduct research and provide insight into the salient factors motivating the instructors to produce more research by conducting HLM. Data were collected from 694 participants at 37 institutions via a questionnaire survey. The findings revealed that there was no difference among these 37 universities on behavior in conducting research. The key factors statistically influencing behavior in conducting research of the instructors were facilitating conditions, academic degree, …

This research examines the efficacy, if any, of the Music and Visual Arts (MVA) program in improving the English vocabulary development of first grade Thai students. The researcher developed the Vocabulary Recognition Assessment (VRA) as a measure of English vocabulary development. It employs the accuracy and rapidity method of word recognition as a measurement of English language development in Thai children. Forty first grade Thai students in a Bangkok elementary school participated in the study. Participants were divided equally between an experimental group and a control group. During a nine-week period, students in the experimental group were instructed with the MVA strategy, while students in the control group were taught with the Visual Arts (VA) strategy. Paired sample t-test, ANOVA, and ANCOVA were used to analyze data from the VRA, to compare the pre-test and the post-test in terms of accuracy scores and rapidity scores of the control group and the experimental group. Data revealed that students instructed with the MVA strategy improved their English vocabulary development in terms of accuracy of word recognition significantly more than students taught English using the VA strategy. No significant difference was found between the MVA strategy and the VA strategy in terms of …

This report shows that in spite of the global economic downturn, investment in sustainable energy is still strong.

This project aims to explore the beliefs of international teachers regarding the students with whom they work, and the change in those beliefs over time. Participant observation, interviews, and questionnaires were used as tools of collection to address the following research questions: How did teachers' beliefs about students change over time? What variables were significantly associated with the rate of change in teacher beliefs about students? What types of challenges did teaches face while living and working in Thailand? Over the course of four months, I shadowed twenty-two U.S. teachers in thirteen different locations throughout Thailand. Participants were enrolled in an international teaching program in Thailand that provided a cultural orientation and teacher training. Participants were then assigned to teaching jobs throughout the country. Qualitative and quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS and NVivo software. This project contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning, and anthropological and education research dedicated to exploring teachers' beliefs about students. Results of the study provide vital information about what variables or experiences may influence a critical analysis of beliefs among teachers working with students who they perceive as different from themselves. Due to some of the parallels between this study population and that …

The dengue virus has become widespread worldwide in recent decades. It has no specific treatment and affects more than 40% of the entire population in the world. In Thailand, dengue has been a health concern for more than half a century. The highest number of cases in one year was 174,285 in 1987, leading to 1,007 deaths. In the present day, dengue is distributed throughout the entire country. Therefore, dengue has become a major challenge for public health in terms of both prevention and control of outbreaks. Different methodologies and ways of dealing with dengue outbreaks have been put forward by researchers. Computational models and simulations play an important role, as they have the ability to help researchers and officers in public health gain a greater understanding of the virus's epidemic activities. In this context, this dissertation presents a new framework, Modified Agent-Based Modeling (mABM), a hybrid platform between a mathematical model and a computational model, to simulate a dengue outbreak in human and mosquito populations. This framework improves on the realism of former models by utilizing the reported data from several Thai government organizations, such as the Thai Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), the National Statistical Office, and others. …

Web-based learning has become an important component of education. Higher education institutions in Thailand have become increasingly aware of the widespread use and effectiveness of web-based learning systems. However, the adoption of such learning systems is growing at a slow pace in Thailand. The purpose of this study was to test the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions have a positive effect on usage intention and adoption of web-based learning systems by instructors, in the Departments of Education at the Rajabhat Universities, Thailand; and to test whether experience of use, age, and gender have moderating effects in the adoption of web-based learning systems there. The research design used in this study was a cross-sectional survey design. Data were collected by means of a self-administered paper questionnaire. The study was conducted among the instructors in the departments of education at the Rajabhat Universities in Thailand. A total of 725 surveys were sent out, 454 questionnaires were returned by the respondents, and 14 were eliminated as outliers; thus, the final data set for the study was 440 samples. The two-step approach of SEM was used to test the model …

Institutional repositories have been introduced as an innovative and alternative technology for scholarly communication and have received considerable attention from scholars across disciplines and around the globe. While some universities in Thailand have developed and implemented institutional repositories for nearly a decade, knowledge of the acceptance and use of institutional repositories on the individual level in the country remains limited. As an insufficient knowledge of technology acceptance and adoption at the individual level is considered partially responsible for the underutilization of innovation or of information system implementation, this study seeks to uncover knowledge regarding the level of institutional repository acceptance and use. This study applied the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model and the model of faculty members' self-archiving behavior to investigate factors affecting faculty acceptance and use of university-based institutional repositories. The study employed a mixed methods approach involving a survey followed by semi-structured, one-to-one interview. This study confirms that the success of university-based institutional repositories depends not on a single factor but on multiple factors. The results of the study show that performance expectancy, social influence, and resistance to change were direct determinants of faculty members' intention to use institutional repositories. Additionally, behavioral intention …