Students with disabilities are highly at-risk for administrative disciplinary actions that remove them from school for misconduct. School leaders have the authority and expertise to reduce the amount of these removals by reconsidering their current methods for discipline, reflecting on how these affect their students, and making changes to student consequences. The purpose of this study was to determine what highly skilled principals in the field have found to be the most effective strategies in reducing or eliminating out-of-school suspensions for students with disabilities. This insight is invaluable to the discussion on next steps to close the discipline gap between special education and regular education students. This study used a Delphi model for research building consensus through three rounds of surveys. This input was collected from a panel of 15 principals from 13 school divisions across Virginia that were identified as having already achieved success in eliminating out-of-school suspensions for students with disabilities. The panel concluded that principals must ensure a positive relationship with every student, use alternative, logical, and authentic consequences, and identify and implement individualized supports and accommodations when addressing student misconduct to eliminate out-of-school suspensions for their students with disabilities. Principals should implement practical strategies that proactively build positive relationships and help them better understand the child as an individual in order to reduce or eliminate suspensions in their schools. / Doctor of Education / Students with disabilities are highly at-risk for administrative disciplinary actions that remove them from school for misconduct. School leaders have the authority and expertise to reduce the amount of these removals by reconsidering their current methods for discipline, reflecting on how these affect their students, and making changes to student consequences. The purpose of this study was to determine what highly skilled principals in the field have found to be the most effective strategies in reducing or eliminating out-of-school suspensions for students with disabilities. This insight is invaluable to the discussion on next steps to close the discipline gap between special education and regular education students. This study used surveys to gather input and find agreement on best practices from a panel of elementary school principals from many school divisions across Virginia. The panel concluded that principals must ensure a positive relationship with every student, use alternative, logical, and authentic consequences, and identify and implement individualized supports and accommodations when addressing student misconduct to eliminate out-of-school suspensions for their students with disabilities. Principals should implement practical strategies that proactively build positive relationships and help them better understand the child as an individual in order to reduce or eliminate suspensions in their schools.

[pt] O presente trabalho visa apresentar as possíveis relações e implicações entre os atributos do Ser parmenídico e os pressupostos da Teoria das Ideias platônicas, relações e implicações exploradas, particularmente, por meio do exame das aporias da participação dos entes sensíveis nas Ideias realizado no diálogo Parmênides. Para apresentar essas possíveis implicações, torna-se necessário fazer uma apresentação das teses sobre o Ser, apresentadas por Parmênides em seu poema, Sobre a natureza, analisando, sobretudo, o que se reconhece como Via da verdade, mais precisamente, naquele que se reconhece como o fragmento 8 desse poema. Logo em seguida é necessário examinar passagens de diálogos consideradas, por alguns comentadores, como contendo traços do desenvolvimento do que é comumente admitida como a Teoria das Ideias. Assim, passamos, brevemente, por determinados diálogos da fase inicial, bem como alguns diálogos da fase de maturidade, detendo-nos, mais detalhadamente, aos diálogos médios como Fédon e Banquete, nos quais essa teoria é estabelecida em seu formato mais tradicional. Buscamos ainda, examinar a terminologia associada à Ideia nesses diálogos. Para que, ao final, se estabeleça uma relação entre a crítica do diálogo Parmênides com as teses presentes no poema de Parmênides. / [en] This thesis aims to present the possible relationships and implications between the attributes of the Parmenidean Being and important assumptions of Plato s Theory of Ideas. I will explore relationships and implications particularly through the examination of the aporias of participation of sensitive beings in the Ideas, such as carried out in the dialogue Parmenides. To undertake this line of arguments, it is necessary to tackle the theses about Being, presented by Parmenides in his poem, On Nature, analyzing. Above all, it is necessary to investigate what is known as the Way of Truth, specially the fragment 8 of Parmenides poem. Next, I will examine relevant passages of Plato s dialogues, namely those considered relevant for the development of the principal tenets of Plato s Theory of Ideas. Thus, I will briefly go through certain dialogues from Plato s initial phase, as well as some mature dialogues, focusing in more detail on the medium dialogues such as Phaedo and Banquet, in which this theory is established in its more traditional format. I will also seek to examine the terminology associated with the Idea in these dialogues, so that, in the end, a relationship is established between the criticism of the Parmenides dialogue with the theses presented in Parmenides poem.

This body of work is composed of three individual papers that each seek to explain individual differences in creative cognition. Paper 1 used structural equation modeling to examine the ways in which creative problem solving and creative idea generation relate or differ. Results from Paper 1 demonstrate that divergent thinking and creative problem solving are best represented as a bifactor model, bearing distinct domain-specific factors, as well as a shared domain-general factor. Though working memory and fluency of memory retrieval explained significant portions of the domain-specific constructs, they only explained ~2% of variance in the domain-general factor. Paper 2 explores the idea that domain-general creativity can be attributed to the structure of one’s knowledge. Semantic networks were developed and compared across high and low general creativity, divergent thinking, creative problem solving, and working memory. Results indicated that, in general, a looser network structure is more amenable for flexible thought processes across multiple classifications of creative ability. Paper 3 explores the idea that domain-general creativity can be attributed to one’s ability to overcome salient, prepotent responses. More specifically, Paper 3 argues that the presence of ambiguities enhances the likelihood that someone will develop a faulty mental representation that requires restructuring in order to reach the desired solution or response. Results demonstrate that overcoming ambiguities in language comprehension draws on similar processes as creative problem solving: ambiguous language comprehension predicted creative problem solving above and beyond that of working memory, fluid intelligence, or normal sentence comprehension. Importantly, this relationship was unique to creative problem solving, as the effect disappeared when predicting analytic problem solving. Together, these studies suggest that the ability to overcome ambiguities and the organization of one’s semantic knowledge are both critical components underlying creativity. More generally, this work has highlighted the ways in which domain-specific and domain-general processes are unique or shared across different measures of creativity, and researchers should be aware of these relationships as they work to advance the creativity literature.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act mandates that all school districts provide a free appropriate public education to students with Individualized Education Plans in their least restrictive environment. Co-teaching in inclusion classrooms is a collaborative effort, with a general education teacher and a special education teacher, to provide academic and behavioral support to students with disabilities with their non-disabled peers. A review of the literature identified several studies conducted over the years that document the effects of employing co-teaching models in inclusion classrooms for middle school special education students and high school special education students. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the academic achievement of middle school special education students and high school special education students in inclusion classrooms using the co-teaching model. Data collection consisted of classroom observations of English Language Arts and Mathematics co-taught classrooms, teacher surveys, and teacher interviews from a Title I school located in Mississippi. The action research that was conducted in this study will provide the school district with information about the future of how to educate middle school students and high school students in co-taught classrooms. The research results revealed that co-teaching in inclusion classrooms for middle school students with disabilities and high school students with disabilities is pertinent to the academic success of these students. Moreover, the results showed that the majority of participants perceive co-teaching in inclusion classrooms as a benefit to students with Individualized Education Plans as noted by the students’ academic gains on universal screeners, during progress monitoring, in English Language Arts and Mathematics.

With the transition from closed to open innovation in recent years, the next trend for companies has been to bring in new ideas from external stakeholders using innovation tools, known as Open Innovation Software (OIS). The most common type of OIS, called idea management systems, allows participants to submit, evaluate, and engage in discussions around ideas. However, implementing software to support innovation is not a sure success and potential problems may arise. The purpose of this thesis is to research problems within features in current idea management systems, and to provide guidelines that suggest ways that may eliminate or reduce the impact of the particular problems. Interviews were conducted with representatives from five different idea management systems. The respondents demonstrated their systems, which made it possible to gather features and to learn about problems that exist in these systems. Five problems within features were found; these were related to engagement, duplicates, idea evaluation, complexity, and bias. Numerous recommendations regarding how the impact of these problems may be reduced have been identified. The findings of this thesis show that Problems with engagement is best dealt with using features that delivers better feedback in order to give more motivation to the participants. As for managing duplicates, it is recommended to implement a feature that suggests similar ideas during the idea submission phase. It was found that allowing users to have an unlimited amount of votes should be avoided. To prevent bias, managers should be careful of having features that displays idea ratings before users have casted their vote, features that allow users to edit their casted vote unless an idea has been edited,  and  for instance features that show ideas in order of popularity.

No description available.

Denna rapport söker att utforska ett nytt sätt att organisera front-end innovation. Därmed förbättra modeller av aktuell forskning som ger belägg för framgångsrika sociala nätstrukturer eller heterogenitetförhållanden, målet med denna studie är att hitta idealiska personlighetskonstellationer inom projektteam - för att göra dem kraftfulla och användbara. Det finns begränsad forskning som beskriver hur individers personlighetsdrag i team påverkar förmågan att innovera, dock vet man att personligheten är en absolut nödvändigt för att matcha ihop rätt personer för att skapa rätt resultat. Inledande research påvisade fyra idénytto- dimensioner som gör en idé värdefull; kundorientering, genomförbarhet, marknadsmöjligheter och strategisk passform. Den teoretiska referensramen tyder på att var och en av de fyra personlighetsarketyperna (rationals, guardians, idealists och artisans) är naturligt benägna för att producera idéer inom dessa dimensioner. Att känna till den dominerande typen av idéer som enskilda personer producerar möjliggör organisering för att  förbättra flödet av idéer. En noggrann metodik har genomfördes där ett initialt personlighetstest med 96 deltagare genomfördes, följt av en idégenereringssession i skräddarsydda personlighets-team med de nämnda deltagarna, det medförde att 179 idéer producerades. Samarbeten med externa yrkesmän underlättade kategorisering av idéerna enligt de fyra idé-nytto-dimensionerna. Vid korrelation- och regressionsanalys av datan påvisades att personligheter har en prediktiv effekt, som kan utnyttjas. Arketypen rationals, var benägna att producera genomförbara och kundorienterade idéer. Fortsättningsvis kan idealister och artisanier porträtteras som motsatser, eftersom deras idéer var mindre genomförbara men rik på möjligheter på marknaden. Ett företag kan därför vertikalt översätta en kortsiktig lågrisk innovationsstrategi genom att sysselsätta rationella arketyper lämpligt. Likaså idealister och artisanier spelar in för att passa en långsiktig framtidsorienterad innovationsstrategi. / This report embarks to explore a new way to organise front-end innovation. Enhancing the models of current research that conclude to beneficial social network structures or heterogeneity ratios, this study aim to find ideal personality constellations within project teams - to make them powerful and useful. There is limited research given to how an individual’s personality traits in the context of a team impacts the potential of that team to innovate, yet it is vital to match up the right individuals in order to create desirable outcomes. Initial exploration provided insights to the key dimensions that makes an idea valuable; customer orientation, feasibility, market opportunity and strategic fit. The theoretical framework suggests that each of four personality archetypes (rationals, guardians, idealist and artisans) is naturally prone to produce ideas within one or more of those specific dimensions. Knowing the predominant type of ideas, which teams produce will allow for a better organisational structure to improve the flow of ideas. A meticulous methodology was designed to supply the quantitative and qualitative data needed for such conclusions. A personality test with 96 participants, followed by an ideation session granted for a sample of 179 ideas to be produced. Collaborations with external industry professionals facilitated for the categorisation of ideas according to the four idea utility dimensions. The empirical data was analysed within correlations and regressions to show that personalities have, in fact, a predictive impact that can be exploited. The archetype of rationals, on the one hand, was prone to produce feasible and customer orientated ideas. Alternatively, the idealist and artisan archetypes portrayed to opposite as their ideas were less feasible but rich in market opportunities. A firm can therefore vertically translate a short-term, low risk innovation strategy into tasking rationals appropriately. Likewise, idealists and artisans come into play to suit a long-term and future oriented innovation strategy.

In general education classrooms across the United States, students with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) learn how to write and cultivate their writing skills. Teachers of students with ASD have the unique responsibility of carrying out effective instruction to all students. However, the growing body of research around evidence-based practices and approaches for students with ASD is limited. Two effective practices that have shown positive statistical significance for students with ASD are the self-regulated strategy development model (SRSD) and the social-emotional learning (SEL) framework. General education instruction faces a research-practice gap because of the widespread lack of strategy instruction and lack of evidence-based practices implemented in the classroom. The purpose was to design an integrated strategy instruction tool with an SEL framework, to provide potentially more feasible and equitable writing instruction for elementary students with ASD in general education classrooms. Therefore, a relationship skills themed expressive writing unit aligned with fifth grade language arts Florida State Standards was developed. Specifically, the researcher integrated the SRSD model into a five-day themed writing unit that teaches mnemonic writing strategies. The writing unit utilizes high-quality, SEL themed children's literature, cooperative learning practices, writing stations, and many formative assessment opportunities. In the future, the researcher's next step is to implement the writing unit in a general education classroom with a substantial ASD population to examine its efficacy and effectiveness. Hopefully, the feasibility of this innovative writing unit will decrease the research-practice gap that general education teachers face.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibilities and opportunities of adopting AI in product development within small to medium enterprises. To fulfill the purpose, the first research question was formulated as “What challenges and opportunities do SMEs face in product development and how can AI facilitate these?”, and the second “What factors are significant for adopting AI in PD?” For this study, a combination of case study, literature review, and interviews was utilized to answer the research questions. The case study provided practical insights and empirical data and the literature review formed the foundation for the theoretical framework. Through this methodological approach, the study achieved its research objectives and contributed to a better understanding of the topic. The empirical data of this study shows that there are several challenges in both product development and in the adoption of AI. These challenges include limited resources, organizational barriers, and knowledge gaps. Through the analysis where the empirical data was compared to the theoretical framework, broadening of the results was enabled. This led to the understanding that limited time was related to the number of employees, issues in the information flow within the group management, and that the knowledge gap was the result of the absence of research into AIPD. Furthermore, it was found that significant factors for adopting AI in PD were to have an incentive to innovate and a competitive market situation. The case study is a single-case study which affects the general applicability as a multiple-case study is considered more beneficial because the results are easier to generalize. Additionally, the scope of the study is delimited to the first three stages in product development: ideation, definition, and prototyping, SMEs encounter resource constraints which hinder the adoption of AI in PD, mainly due to limited time, insufficient number of employees, and the absence of dedicated research departments. Despite these challenges, the potential benefits of AI streamlining and enhancing ideation and prototyping processes presents significant opportunities for innovation within SME’s. / Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka möjligheterna och fördelarna med att införa AI i produktutveckling inom små och medelstora företag. För att uppfylla syftet formulerades den första forskningsfrågan som ”Vilka utmaningar och möjligheter står små och medelstora företag inför i produktutveckling och hur kan AI underlätta dessa?” och den andra som ”Vilka faktorer är betydelsefulla för att införa AI i produktutveckling?”. För denna studie användes en kombination av fallstudie, litteraturgenomgång, och intervjuer för att besvara forskningsfrågorna. Fallstudien gav praktiska insikter och empiriska data medan litteraturgenomgången utgjorde grunden för det teoretiska ramverket. Genom detta metodologiska angreppssätt uppnådde studien sina forskningsmål och bidrog till en bättre förståelse av ämnet. Studiens empiriska data visar att det finns flera utmaningar både i produktutveckling och vid införandet av AI. Dessa utmaningar inkluderar begränsade resurser, organisatoriska hinder och kunskapsluckor. Genom analysen, där den empiriska datan jämfördes med det teoretiska ramverket, möjliggjordes en breddning av resultatet. Detta ledde till förståelsen att begränsad tid var relaterad till antalet anställda, problem i informationsflödet inom koncernledningen, och att kunskapsluckan var resultatet av avsaknaden av forskning inom AI i produktutveckling. Vidare visade det sig att betydande faktorer för att införa AI i produktutveckling var att ha incitament att innovera och en konkurrensutsatt marknadssituation. Fallstudien är en enskild fallstudie vilket påverkar den generella tillämpligheten då en flerfallstudie anses mer fördelaktig eftersom resultaten är lättare att generalisera. Dessutom är studiens omfattning avgränsad till de tre första stadierna i produktutveckling: idégenerering, definition och prototypframtagning. Små och medelstora företag stöter på resursbegränsningar som hindrar införandet av AI i produktutveckling, främst på grund av begränsad tid, otillräckligt antal anställda och avsaknaden av dedikerade forskningsavdelningar. Trots dessa utmaningar presenterar de potentiella fördelarna med AI, effektivisering och förbättring av idé- och prototypprocesser betydande möjligheter för innovation inom små och medelstora företag.

De produkter och tjänster som syns ute på marknaden är oftast resultatet av en lång berättelse i entreprenörskapets rum. I entreprenörskapsrummet sker ett samspel mellan människor vilket gör att varje inblandad person har en egen förståelse för vad som har hänt i denna utvecklingsprocess. Den här studien ämnar undersöka och öka förståelsenför de händelser som har utspelat sig innan ett erbjudande har blivit redo för marknaden, detta genom att de involverade personerna får återge sin egen berättelse. Studien undersöker ett nystartat fallföretag som håller på att utveckla sin affärsidé. I uppsatsen presenteras studien och dess utförande i form av en berättelse där Sherlock Holmes och dr Watson har huvudrollerna. Vi utgår från ett konstruktionistiskt synsätt och ett abduktivt angreppssätt har tillämpats. Vi ser att människor identifierar möjligheter utifrån deras unika bakgrund som även formar deras motiv. Motiven ger oss en inblick ivarför och hur samspelet mellan idé och människor sker. / The products and services available on the market are often the result of a long story in the entrepreneurship discourse. When practicing entrepreneurship people interact with each other, thus every person involved has its own understanding of what has occurredduring the development process. The aim of this study is to examine and deepen our understanding of the events before an offer is ready for the market; this by letting the involved persons tell their own story. The study examines a case of a startup company which is currently developing its business idea. In the thesis the study and its execution is presented in the form of a story starring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Constructionism and an abductive method are applied. Finally we can see that people identify opportunities based on their unique background which also forms their motive. The motives give us an insight in why and how the interaction between idea and people is played out.