Control room operators are faced with frequent security-economy decision-making situations necessitated by stressed system operating conditions, and there is increased need for securityeconomy decision-support tools. Although probabilistic methods are promising in this regard, they have been mainly used in planning environments. This task force paper explores their use for operational decision-making, comparing them to the more traditional deterministic approach. Two examples are used to facilitate this comparison via overload and low voltage security assessment to identify secure regions of operation for a small 5-bus system and for the IEEE Reliability Test System. The results of this comparison show that the probabilistic approach offers several inherent advantages.

The educational context in Malaysia demands students to be equipped with sound grammar so that they can produce good essays in the examination. However, despite having learnt English in primary and secondary schools, students in the higher learning institutions tend to make some grammatical errors in their writing. This study presents the grammatical errors made by tertiary students in their writing. The participants were a group of Diploma students who sat for a university entrance exam. One hundred and forty-four written essays of the students were collected and analysed using content analysis. Findings revealed that subject-verb agreement and tenses were the most common type of errors. Students over-generalised and perceived that the tenses could be used interchangeably. Another common error found was in the students' construction of complex sentence. In such constructions, they failed to include essential and nonessential clauses. If teachers do not teach strategies to assist students in comprehending the concept of Subject-Verb Agreement (SVA), tenses, essential and nonessential clauses, these students will continue to make such errors in their tertiary education. The findings may have useful implications for English language teachers as understanding students' learning difficulties and providing appropriate grammar instruction is the key to effective teaching for ESL teachers.

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The problem of mastering English does not involve students alone. The English language teachers, policy makers and curriculum developers are also affected. Thus, teachers have resorted to using higher order thinking skills (HOT) as a means to teach writing to weak ESL learners. The study aimed at developing and validating a higher order thinking skills module for teaching writing to weak ESL learners. It employed a qualitative research paradigm using documents analysis, interviews, observations and validation form. It was conducted in two phases. The first phase was completed with needs analysis specifically identifying problems teachers faced in teaching writing using higher order thinking skills in six selected secondary schools. The ADDIE model approach was used by the ESL teachers and experts in HOTs to create the module content. In the second phase, the teachers were observed ten times to investigate the effectiveness of using the HOTs module developed for teaching writing. The findings revealed that the HOTs module served as a guideline for the teachers in applying and integrating thinking skills in the process of teaching writing. These findings were used to guide decisions on implementing the appropriate teaching pedagogy to apply HOTS for teaching writing.

This paper reviews the literature on the teaching of higher order thinking skills to teach writing in Malaysian context. The issues pertaining the usage of higher order thinking skills to teach writing are also discussed in this paper. ESL teachers are only trained to ask Higher Order Thinking Skills questions where the teaching of writing is concerned but most of them have very little knowledge on implementing the pedagogical knowledge of higher order thinking skills. Despite having multiples of programs to help teachers to infuse higher order thinking skills to teach writing, past studies have reported that teachers were not prepared to teach higher order thinking skills in their own classrooms. Hence, this paper further analyses the need to investigate the issues that are related on the usage of higher order thinking skills to the teaching of writing which needs immediate attention.