At a southeast United States high school career center, career and technology education (CTE) programs failed to meet the state career and college readiness benchmarks. Meeting these benchmarks is necessary for students who transition from high school to the workplace or a postsecondary education program. Bandura's social learning theory served as the conceptual framework for this study. The purpose of this bounded, qualitative case study was to explore students' perspectives of their career and college readiness or nonreadiness after completing a CTE program. Purposeful sampling was used to identify 10 participants who had completed a vocational technical center (VTC) CTE program. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews composed of open-ended questions. Interview data were analyzed thematically using open coding. Participants stated that CTE diversity and leadership training did not prepare them for a career or a college degree. They determined they would benefit from project-based learning, collaborative work groups, on-site work experiences, technology integration, creating and developing ideas and products, and interpersonal skills in CTE programs. Based on the findings of this study, a 9-week CTE curriculum was designed to increase career and college readiness outcomes grounded on the Secretary's Commission on Acquiring Necessary Skills (SCANS) framework. This endeavor may contribute to positive social change by assisting administrators and teachers in the decision-making process for CTE courses and programs; ultimately, improving career and college readiness for CTE program completers.

The purpose of this study is to determine if transformational leadership styles of agriculture teachers in Jessamine County has an impact on successful transitions of program completers. To be more specific, the focus was to look at agriculture teachers at Jessamine Career and Technology Center (JCTC) to see if they exhibit components of transformational leadership. If so, does transformational leadership of those teachers assist students with successful transitions after graduation? Successful transition is deemed by the Kentucky Department of Education as students that seek post-secondary education, employed full-time or enlist in a branch of armed services. The population for this study consists of graduates from Jessamine County between the years of 2010-2012. All participants were program completers in the agriculture career major. All participants also meet the criteria of successfully transitioning. The participants in the study indicated agriculture teachers at JCTC did exhibit all components of transformational leadership. Participants also indicated transformational leadership utilized by the agriculture teachers assisted them in successfully transitioning after high school. Relationships between participants and agriculture teachers at JCTC were an indicator of why transformational leadership was a successful leadership style of the agriculture teachers.

[pt] Esta tese investiga o modo como a criança, no início da aquisição do português como língua materna, identifica a presença de estruturas recursivas no sintagma complementizador. Assume-se que a criança identifica a informação gramatical com base nas interfaces entre a língua interna que se desenvolve na criança, e os sistemas envolvidos no desempenho linguístico. Recursividade é a propriedade do sistema linguístico que possibilita a geração de um número infinito de objetos sintáticos complexos a partir de um número finito de itens lexicais, por meio de um número finito e restrito de operações. Em línguas, tais como o português, pode haver recursividade no nó mais alto da hierarquia sintática (C - complementizador), o que possibilita a geração de orações completivas (OCs). OCs satisfazem os requisitos de verbos que subcategorizam um CP, ocupam a posição de complemento do verbo e podem ser introduzidas por um complementizador. O aporte teórico desta tese é uma teoria da aquisição da linguagem fundada na hipótese do bootstrapping fonológico (MORGAN e DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al, 1997) aliada à concepção de língua apresentada no Programa Minimalista (PM) da Linguística Gerativista (CHOMSKY, 1995, 1999, 2005; HAUSER, CHOMSKY e FITCH, 2002), tal como é proposta nos termos do modelo procedimental de aquisição da linguagem em Corrêa (2009a; 2009b; 2011). São reportados dois grupos de experimentos, cada um centrado em um tipo de informação que pode servir de pista para a criança identificar a presença de estruturas recursivas, quais sejam: a forma fônica dos complementizadores e a estrutura da OC, respectivamente. Os resultados indicam que, embora não haja evidência conclusiva de que a criança seja sensível à presença do complementizador por suas propriedades fônicas, aos 12 meses, crianças parecem ser sensíveis à estrutura da completiva, o que sugere que reconhecem a possibilidade de C como nó recursivo. Ao reconhecer a estrutura da completiva, a criança vai além da interface fônica e pode dar início ao processamento de relações de subcategorização. / [en] This thesis investigates how children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP) identify recursive structures in the complementizer phrase. It is assumed that children identify grammatical information based on the interfaces between the internal language and the systems related to linguistic performance. Recursion is a property of the language system which allows humans to build an infinite set of complex syntactic objects from a finite set of lexical items and syntactic operations. BP allows recursion in the highest node of the hierarchical structure (C - complementizer), building completive clauses. Structurally, completive clauses occupy the position of the complement of a verb and are introduced by a complementizer. The theoretical framework of this thesis is a procedural theory of language acquisition that reconciles the phonological bootstrapping hypothesis (MORGAN AND DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al, 1997) and minimalist assumptions (CHOMSKY, 1995, 1999, 2005; HAUSER, CHOMSKY AND FITCH, 2002), as in Corrêa (2009a; 2009b; 2011). Two groups of experiments are reported, which focus on possible cues to the identification of a recursive structure, namely: the phonic form of complementizer and the structure of the completive clause. The results indicate that, although there is no conclusive evidence that children are sensitive to the presence of the complementizer due to its phonic properties, children, at 12 months, are sensitive to the structure of the completive clause, thereby suggesting that they go beyond the phonetic interface and start to be able to process subcategorization relations.

Une nouvelle méthode d'analyse des représentations sociales est ici appliquée au cas des représentations de l'alimentation. <br />On expose, de la théorie des représentations sociales développée par l'école de Moscovici, une nouvelle formalisation à base d'analyse combinatoire. Le formalisme permet notamment de décrire de façon simple la propagation des représentations dans une population, et leurs fonctions pragmatiques. On fonde sur ce formalisme "en relativité complète" une théorie pour extraire, à partir de corpus d'énoncés libres en langue naturelle, les éléments de base qui constituent les représentations. On développe concrètement cette théorie sous la forme de méthodes et de techniques de recueil et d'analyse informatisée des données textuelles<br />Ces techniques sont exposées puis appliquées d'abord à 2 corpus à propos de “ manger ” provenant respectivement des associations libres produites par 2000 adultes français, et de 500 définitions issues d'un grand dictionnaire. Ces analyses dégagent des résultats similaires : “ manger ” est constitué de six noyaux de sens : libido, prendre, nourriture, repas, remplir, vivre.<br />Une analyse des évocations libres de “ bien_manger ” par 2000 autres adultes français permet ensuite de clarifier les relations théoriques entre représentations et comportements. Puis, à partir notamment d'une enquête lourde sur 1600 ménages (quelques centaines de questions), on décrit les grands types de comportements et de représentations des Français en matière d'alimentation, et on précise les limites de l'influence réelle représentations sur les comportements.<br />On dégage enfin quelques hypothèses nouvelles sur les lois de développement des représentations individuelles, notamment celle du “ trophisme ” (développement par l'usage des aspects les plus utilisés), et sur l'écologie des représentations sociales en tant que populations de représentations individuelles.