<p>The purpose of this degree thesis is to investigate what the English teachers in an upper sec-ondary school, think about teaching students in ability grouped classrooms. The questions that I have set out to investigate include what the teachers think about ability grouping in English, the school’s current organisation of ability groups, the pros and cons of ability grouping in English, differentiation in teaching and if students get more individualized teaching with abil-ity groups, how the teachers cooperate and what would be the optimal teaching situation in an English learning classroom.</p><p>I did a lot of theoretical research on the subject and studied old essays on similar subjects. I also did some classroom observations to use as background information for my interviews. I interviewed five teachers of different sex, age, and teaching experience. The teachers clearly had different views on the pros and cons of ability grouping and how to deal with the stu-dents’ different levels of English. They all agreed on the advantages it creates for the teachers, the main advantages being the small groups and the students being on almost the same level. They also agreed on the difficulty of individualised teaching, even with ability groups. Most of them also agreed that the main problem with ability grouping is how to deal with the weak-est or most basic level. It’s important that they have good pedagogical teachers who want to teach them and know how to. It also leads to problems amongst the teachers, in deciding who should or wants to teach which group and how to teach on a certain level. The teachers all had different ideas on how to improve the organisation of English teaching, from small mixed groups or only two ability levels, to a rotation of teachers between the groups and the different areas of English. In conclusion, upper secondary students are used to different groups, since they have chosen not only schools, but programs and individual courses. If the goal is small groups in English, maybe ability grouping is a possible solution. But above all, it has to be a possibility for the students, not the teachers.</p>

<p>The purpose of this research has been to find out whether and how teachers stimulate and motivate well achievers in the elementary school to reach a higher level. To gather information I visited two different schools within the same county in Stockholm and on each school I met and interviewed with two teachers. The answers received from these interviews are presented in this study as my results. I found that the teachers feel that students that do well in the classroom many times work as role models for the other students. Often these students require extra material as they usually finish their workload ahead of others. The extra material has two purposes. On one hand the purpose is to help the children reach a higher academic level while on the hand the extra material is used as a distraction to keep the children busy. The seating arrangement in the classroom and ways of grouping the students is also tools to use for teachers to face all kind of children in school. The teachers often feel that the lack of time often forbid them to spend more time with each student. They also feel that the students that do well in school are the ones who suffer when they are the ones to receive the least amount of time as well as attention. To make all students develop equally on their individual levels it is necessary, according to the teachers interviewed, that the teachers find time for all students in the classroom. A lack of recourses always seem to be a problem in the school system but if the organization is well planed and the classrooms and the material is up to date this could help teachers spending their time on their students rather than the organization. In my opinion the teachers are ability to help all their students as well as the group constellation are crucial factors on how well students perform in school. Which seem to be a fact for all students, not only for the well achieving students.</p>

The purpose of this degree thesis is to investigate what the English teachers in an upper sec-ondary school, think about teaching students in ability grouped classrooms. The questions that I have set out to investigate include what the teachers think about ability grouping in English, the school’s current organisation of ability groups, the pros and cons of ability grouping in English, differentiation in teaching and if students get more individualized teaching with abil-ity groups, how the teachers cooperate and what would be the optimal teaching situation in an English learning classroom. I did a lot of theoretical research on the subject and studied old essays on similar subjects. I also did some classroom observations to use as background information for my interviews. I interviewed five teachers of different sex, age, and teaching experience. The teachers clearly had different views on the pros and cons of ability grouping and how to deal with the stu-dents’ different levels of English. They all agreed on the advantages it creates for the teachers, the main advantages being the small groups and the students being on almost the same level. They also agreed on the difficulty of individualised teaching, even with ability groups. Most of them also agreed that the main problem with ability grouping is how to deal with the weak-est or most basic level. It’s important that they have good pedagogical teachers who want to teach them and know how to. It also leads to problems amongst the teachers, in deciding who should or wants to teach which group and how to teach on a certain level. The teachers all had different ideas on how to improve the organisation of English teaching, from small mixed groups or only two ability levels, to a rotation of teachers between the groups and the different areas of English. In conclusion, upper secondary students are used to different groups, since they have chosen not only schools, but programs and individual courses. If the goal is small groups in English, maybe ability grouping is a possible solution. But above all, it has to be a possibility for the students, not the teachers.

In many earlier investigations a recall advantage of auditory lists spoken in a single voice has been found over recall of lists spoken in two alternating voices. One explanation proposed is an organization strategy which makes recall of alternating-voice lists so difficult. The strategy implies sorting same-voice words into same-voice groups at encoding. Based on this proposition, it was assumed that voice-by-voice recall would be better than recall in order of presentation, as then the recall instruction and the organization of items in memory would be in concordance. The present experiment tested and was unable to support this hypothesis. However, an intriguing interaction between recall instruction and the sex of the participants was found, indicating that males perform worse in the voice-by-voice recall instruction than in serial recall while females’ performance did not differ between the two recall instructions. Implications of these results are discussed.

The purpose of this research has been to find out whether and how teachers stimulate and motivate well achievers in the elementary school to reach a higher level. To gather information I visited two different schools within the same county in Stockholm and on each school I met and interviewed with two teachers. The answers received from these interviews are presented in this study as my results. I found that the teachers feel that students that do well in the classroom many times work as role models for the other students. Often these students require extra material as they usually finish their workload ahead of others. The extra material has two purposes. On one hand the purpose is to help the children reach a higher academic level while on the hand the extra material is used as a distraction to keep the children busy. The seating arrangement in the classroom and ways of grouping the students is also tools to use for teachers to face all kind of children in school. The teachers often feel that the lack of time often forbid them to spend more time with each student. They also feel that the students that do well in school are the ones who suffer when they are the ones to receive the least amount of time as well as attention. To make all students develop equally on their individual levels it is necessary, according to the teachers interviewed, that the teachers find time for all students in the classroom. A lack of recourses always seem to be a problem in the school system but if the organization is well planed and the classrooms and the material is up to date this could help teachers spending their time on their students rather than the organization. In my opinion the teachers are ability to help all their students as well as the group constellation are crucial factors on how well students perform in school. Which seem to be a fact for all students, not only for the well achieving students.

What exactly are the "parts" that make up the whole object, and how and when do they group? The answer that is proposed hinges on Emergent Features: features that materialize from the configuration which make the object more discriminable from other objects. EFs are not possessed by any individual part and are processed as or more quickly than are the properties of the parts. The present experiments focus on visual discrimination of two-line configurations in an odd-quadrant task. RT data were obtained and compared with a prediction based on the number of EF differences in the odd quadrant (the higher the number of EF differences, the faster the discrimination was predicted). The results suggest that the EFs most responsible for the variations in RT might be lateral endpoint offset, intersections, parallelism, connectivity, number of terminators, and pixel count. Future directions include investigating the individual contributions and salience of EFs.

The central research question is the extent to which gifted programming affects student academic outcomes of gifted as compared to not-gifted students and how this differs by race/ethnicity and/or poverty status. Since the identification of elementary school students as gifted is not random, propensity score matching is used to remove this bias in the estimates of the effects. A matched sample of North Carolina middle school students based on individual level data of both gifted and not-gifted students of varied racial/ethnic groups and income levels is used for this analysis. This enables a comparison of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade student achievement to determine the extent to which participating in gifted programming differentiates effects by race/ethnicity and poverty status. I show the additional test score gain, if any, from being in gifted programming compared to students not participating in gifted programs. Variations in gifted program effects across race/ethnicity and income are assessed. This research adds empirical evidence to the more qualitatively focused gifted debate by analyzing differences in student outcomes between gifted and not-gifted students in North Carolina. Since black and lower income students are less likely to participate in gifted programs, they disproportionately encounter less experienced teachers, lower expectations, and fewer resources. The extent to which these additional learning supports translate to differences in student outcomes are analyzed.

Road network extraction from high resolution satellite imagery is the most frequently utilized technique for updating and correcting geographic information system (GIS) databases, registering multi-temporal images for change detection and automatically aligning spatial datasets. This advance method is widely employed due to the improvements in satellite technology such as development of new sensors for high resolution imagery. To avoid the cost of the human interaction, various automatic and semi-automatic road extraction methods are developed and proposed in the literature. The aim of this study is to develop a fully automatized method which can extract road networks by using the spectral and structural features of the roads. In order to achieve this goal we set various objectives and work them out one by one. First bjective is to obtain reliable road seeds, since they are crucial for determining road regions correctly in the classification step. Second objective is finding most onvenient features and classification method for the road extraction. The third objective is to locate road centerlines which are defines the road topology. A number of algorithms are developed and tested throughout the thesis to achieve these objectives and the advantages of the proposed ones are explained. The final version of the proposed algorithm is tested by three band (RGB) satellite images and the results are compared with other studies in the literature to illustrate the benefits of the proposed algorithm.

The purpose of this study was to see how teachers experience their own leadership style and how they did to get their leadership to work in the classroom. The purpose was also to understand the teachers’ actions, what they think is best for the students’ development and how they describe the leadership in the classroom. I interviewed six female teachers and they all have had many experiences since this is their profession. My research was based on Stensmo (2000). There are five dimensions this leadership is based on. These are planning, control, grouping, motivation and individualization. In this study I will perform how the teachers plan and organise their work based on students and work styles. The method I used in this study was the qualitative method in which I as an interviewer posed questions to my informants. The further into the studies I came I perceived that the teachers had different leadership styles. Some educators had authoritarian tendencies, while some had democratic leadership style and the others had a different leadership which had an intermediate form; some of the authoritarian elements, but also moved towards the democratic leadership style. The last method that one of these six teachers used had a situational leadership style as her management style varied depending in what situation she was in. So the results of this study do not only depend on what specific method you use for one kind of class. It is the activity in the classroom that decides how a teacher should be and which method she should use. The teacher should be well prepared and planned before she enters the classroom. Clear rules and instructions give a functioning leadership in the classroom. The teaching should be fun and interesting and all students should have equal opportunity to achieve goals.

In passive RFID systems, how to reduce the collision among tags is an important issue at the medium access control layer. The Framed Slotted ALOHA and its variations are well-known anti-collision algorithms for RFID systems. However, when the Framed Slotted ALOHA is used, the system efficiency and the average time delay deteriorate rapidly when the total number of tags increases. On the other hand, the total number of slots in a frame can¡¦t be infinity. In this thesis, we first compare existing anti-collision protocols and then propose a novel algorithm based on the Enhanced Dynamic Framed Slotted ALOHA (EDFSA) and the Progressing Scanning (PS) algorithm. The proposed algorithm is called Dynamic Grouping (DG). The DG algorithm partitions the RFID tags according to the distances from tags to the reader in order to avoid using too many slots in a frame. Inparticular, the DG algorithm estimates the spatial distribution of tags based on previous scanning results and then adjusts the partition accordingly. Unlike PS algorithm, the DG algorithm is applicable when the RFID tags are uniformly distributed or normally distributed.