The study explored the perceptions of thirteen, female student-athletes who chose to participate in intercollegiate athletics, specifically basketball. Each of the participants was enrolled at a Division I institution in the same athletic conference. Both institutions are nationally ranked institutions in their primary (revenue generating) sport (NCAA, 2004). All of the participants were offered full athletic scholarships to other institutions, yet they made their college choice decision based on multiple factors. The data revealed that although student-athletes undergo a similar process as non-athletes, their experience in many ways was different due to the additional factors they have to consider. As indicated by the findings of this study, the process to choose a college was a challenge for student-athletes as they considered the opinions of others, the prestige of the coach and the collegiate athletic program and their commitment to academic performance. Overall, participants were satisfied with their college choice process and felt they identified the institution that fit their personal and academic goals.

ASSISTments is an online adaptive tutoring system with the ability to provide assistance to students in the form of hints and scaffolding. ASSISTments has many features to help students improve their knowledge. Researchers run studies in order to discover ways for students to learn better but ASSISTments is missing one major aspect for researchers: student level personalization. It is easy to create an assignment for a particular class or school but it would take much longer to create an assignment for each student and it would be difficult for the teacher to look through many assignment reports. One of the strongest code blocks in coding is the if-then; allowing the program to branch off to another set of code under certain circumstances. ASSISTments needed an if-then system in order for students to branch off to other parts of the assignment under certain circumstances. With this, researchers would be able to personalize assignments to give more help to lower knowledge students or allow students to get a choice of what kind of tutoring they would like to receive. With this idea in mind, the basic if-then structure was implemented into ASSISTments using problem or problem set correctness as the condition statement. Once the if-then system was created opportunities opened to create additional experiments and run studies in ASSISTments. The basic if-then was limited in using correctness only for its condition statement. This meant that a new if-then system would need to be implemented to include custom condition statements that allowed the researcher to have the assignment branch on any condition using all the information recorded in the assignment. While work was being done on the if-then system, research was being done and two papers were written on partial credit in ASSISTments. Partial credit was found out to be as accurate as knowledge tracing in determining student performance on the next problem. Once a partial credit algorithm was found, a study using if-then was analyzed. It was found that there was no statistically significant difference between students who were given a choice on their feedback and students who received no choice.

The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate how the role of knowledge may be the missing link in economics and to argue that the assumption of unbounded rationality, which underpinned neoclassical economics, should be replaced by bounded rationality and that bounded rationality should be redefined as people are rational, but are constrained by asymmetric and imperfect knowledge. This decomposition of bounded rationality makes it possible for us to operationalize bounded rationality, which was founded by Herbert Simon in the 1950s, but has not been widely adopted in economics because the concept was considered too difficult to formalize. The inclusion of asymmetric and imperfect knowledge considerations in microeconomics provides new insights into the existence and boundaries of firms, the role and nature of institutions, financial market inefficiency and political choices. The inclusion of asymmetric knowledge considerations in macroeconomics can help explain the unequal distribution of wealth between individuals, firms and nations. A lack of knowledge, and the difficulties in overcoming a lack of knowledge, can help to explain aspects of economic fluctuations, prices rigidities, monetary non-neutrality and unemployment. Most importantly, when the role of knowledge is considered, it provides better explanations to various anomalies in economics, helps reconciles differences between various theories and may opens up the possibility of unifying various schools of economic thought.

Food quality attributes arising from farming methods are important to many Canadians. The credence nature of these quality attributes necessitates some form of quality assurance for accurate signalling to consumers. This thesis examines the appropriate role for private, third party, and government actors in credible quality assurance systems for production-derived attributes. Concurrently, it explores the nature of trust that Canadians put in various organizations for quality assurance. In a nationwide survey, Canadian consumers obtained significant benefits from government verification of pesticide free and environmentally sustainable grains contained in pre-packaged sliced bread. The data was collected using a discrete choice experiment. Farmers, third party, and government organizations were similarly trusted for accurate information about farming methods. The dimensions of this trust varied across organizations. Government standards relating to environmental sustainability were perceived as most effective. Results obtained using a latent class multinomial logit model showed that respondents who most valued production-derived food quality also received the greatest benefit from government verification and significant negative utility from supermarket or third party verification. In relative terms, the difference in utility between third party and government verification represents 141% of the value of the environmentally sustainable attribute and 87% of the pesticide free attribute. The results suggest that significant consumer benefit can be achieved if government were to take a leading role in quality assurance for production-derived quality.

Sociology has long struggled with the problem of human agency in its theoretical constructions. Systematically purged from the corpus of positivist, functionalist and rational choice theories, agency has nevertheless surfaced repeatedly in empirical analyses as a constant reminder that individuals are able and willing to act in ways that are not fully explained by the dominant theories. This thesis deals with the problem of human agency by exploring a particular instance of human interaction in which the choices and actions of individuals as well as the contingencies facing them are particularly conspicuous. The example chosen as a case study is the conflict over the planned Roşia Montană gold and silver mine in Romania. As neither the supporters, nor the opponents of the planned open cast mine have managed to impose their will and determine the commencement or cancelation of the mining project, the resulting struggle was extended over more than a decade. During this period, a variety of social actors with different interests and worldviews were drawn into complex interactions with each other, thus making the trajectory and outcome of the conflict unpredictable. At the same time, there emerged an enlarged space for human agency, especially for those actors that have been usually conceived as voiceless and powerless. The origins of this space of agency are traced to the particular configuration of macro-social processes which interacted in series of highly contingent events. More exactly, none of the broad processes discussed in the literature on resource conflicts – such as accumulation by dispossession, the resource curse or unequal development – ran its full course in determining the outcomes of the conflict. The temporary suspension of overpowering structural determinations opened up a realm in which social actors could convert the contingencies of the conflict into opportunities and risks. Individuals became relatively free to make choices and influence the choices of others. The language of the sociology of translation is used as the most apt description of the fluidity of these interactions. The dynamic between the ordering and reordering of the social world of Roşia Montană through interaction is a key insight of the thesis.

In this thesis I investigate the relationship between the gender distribution across industries and occupations and the incidence and consequences of displacement. First, I provide empirical evidence to support the idea that women self-select into less risky industries and occupations, that is industries and occupations with lower displacement rates and lower earnings growth. Using data from the Displaced Worker Survey (1984-2002), the corresponding Annual Demographic Supplement to the March Current Population Survey, and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, I find that, even though women have a lower incidence of displacement in the aggregate, they are more likely to get displaced at the one-digit industry and occupation level than men. Displacement is also more costly for women, in terms of both employment and monetary consequences, which suggests that women’s choice of safer sectors could be an insurance mechanism against the risk of displacement and its costly consequences. I then construct a dynamic occupational choice model in the spirit of Keane and Wolpin (1997), in which occupation(industry) groups differ not only in terms of the rate of human capital accumulation, but also in the risk and associated cost of displacement, as well as in the value of the non-monetary utility component. I calibrate the model for men and perform a number of counterfactual experiments for women. Quantitative results suggest that differences in displacement probabilities, together with differences in re-employment probabilities, and in human capital penalty rates at displacement explain up to 15% of the gender occupational segregation, and up to 10% of the gender industry segregation. Allowing women to also have an extra preference for non-employment explains in a proportion of 60% why women avoid high risk occupations, that is occupations with higher displacement risk, higher earnings growth and higher human capital depreciation (or alternatively, lower human capital transferability).

Sociology has long struggled with the problem of human agency in its theoretical constructions. Systematically purged from the corpus of positivist, functionalist and rational choice theories, agency has nevertheless surfaced repeatedly in empirical analyses as a constant reminder that individuals are able and willing to act in ways that are not fully explained by the dominant theories. This thesis deals with the problem of human agency by exploring a particular instance of human interaction in which the choices and actions of individuals as well as the contingencies facing them are particularly conspicuous. The example chosen as a case study is the conflict over the planned Roşia Montană gold and silver mine in Romania. As neither the supporters, nor the opponents of the planned open cast mine have managed to impose their will and determine the commencement or cancelation of the mining project, the resulting struggle was extended over more than a decade. During this period, a variety of social actors with different interests and worldviews were drawn into complex interactions with each other, thus making the trajectory and outcome of the conflict unpredictable. At the same time, there emerged an enlarged space for human agency, especially for those actors that have been usually conceived as voiceless and powerless. The origins of this space of agency are traced to the particular configuration of macro-social processes which interacted in series of highly contingent events. More exactly, none of the broad processes discussed in the literature on resource conflicts – such as accumulation by dispossession, the resource curse or unequal development – ran its full course in determining the outcomes of the conflict. The temporary suspension of overpowering structural determinations opened up a realm in which social actors could convert the contingencies of the conflict into opportunities and risks. Individuals became relatively free to make choices and influence the choices of others. The language of the sociology of translation is used as the most apt description of the fluidity of these interactions. The dynamic between the ordering and reordering of the social world of Roşia Montană through interaction is a key insight of the thesis.

In this thesis I investigate the relationship between the gender distribution across industries and occupations and the incidence and consequences of displacement. First, I provide empirical evidence to support the idea that women self-select into less risky industries and occupations, that is industries and occupations with lower displacement rates and lower earnings growth. Using data from the Displaced Worker Survey (1984-2002), the corresponding Annual Demographic Supplement to the March Current Population Survey, and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, I find that, even though women have a lower incidence of displacement in the aggregate, they are more likely to get displaced at the one-digit industry and occupation level than men. Displacement is also more costly for women, in terms of both employment and monetary consequences, which suggests that women’s choice of safer sectors could be an insurance mechanism against the risk of displacement and its costly consequences. I then construct a dynamic occupational choice model in the spirit of Keane and Wolpin (1997), in which occupation(industry) groups differ not only in terms of the rate of human capital accumulation, but also in the risk and associated cost of displacement, as well as in the value of the non-monetary utility component. I calibrate the model for men and perform a number of counterfactual experiments for women. Quantitative results suggest that differences in displacement probabilities, together with differences in re-employment probabilities, and in human capital penalty rates at displacement explain up to 15% of the gender occupational segregation, and up to 10% of the gender industry segregation. Allowing women to also have an extra preference for non-employment explains in a proportion of 60% why women avoid high risk occupations, that is occupations with higher displacement risk, higher earnings growth and higher human capital depreciation (or alternatively, lower human capital transferability).

After viewing this interactive tutorial a user will be able to login into WebCT 4 and will be able to take a multiple choice quiz.

Food quality attributes arising from farming methods are important to many Canadians. The credence nature of these quality attributes necessitates some form of quality assurance for accurate signalling to consumers. This thesis examines the appropriate role for private, third party, and government actors in credible quality assurance systems for production-derived attributes. Concurrently, it explores the nature of trust that Canadians put in various organizations for quality assurance. In a nationwide survey, Canadian consumers obtained significant benefits from government verification of pesticide free and environmentally sustainable grains contained in pre-packaged sliced bread. The data was collected using a discrete choice experiment. Farmers, third party, and government organizations were similarly trusted for accurate information about farming methods. The dimensions of this trust varied across organizations. Government standards relating to environmental sustainability were perceived as most effective. Results obtained using a latent class multinomial logit model showed that respondents who most valued production-derived food quality also received the greatest benefit from government verification and significant negative utility from supermarket or third party verification. In relative terms, the difference in utility between third party and government verification represents 141% of the value of the environmentally sustainable attribute and 87% of the pesticide free attribute. The results suggest that significant consumer benefit can be achieved if government were to take a leading role in quality assurance for production-derived quality.