Process skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, information processing, teamwork, and communication are important for student success in their coursework and eventually the workplace, but these skills are not always explicitly taught or assessed in undergraduate courses. These skills should be assessed in order to identify areas for student improvement and because assessment practices can provide clear goals to students. However, my analysis of the current literature suggests that instructors do not have the tools necessary to effectively assess and provide feedback on these skills, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate courses. To meet this need of assessing and providing feedback to students, rubrics and other instructional resources have been developed to assess process skills as part of the Enhancing Learning by Improving Process Skills in STEM (ELIPSS) Project. Surveys and interview data indicated that the rubrics were practical for instructors to use to provide feedback to students, represented all relevant aspects of the skills, measured the processes that students used when completing tasks, and could be reliably used by multiple raters. During rubric development, the resources were propagated to the STEM instructor community, and the effectiveness of the propagation methods were examined. The highest rates of adoption resulted from hearing about the rubrics from a colleague or attending a presentation about the rubrics. Additionally, running the ELIPSS workshops and creating the ELIPSS website that people found from searching the internet each led to moderate adoption rates. These results support the idea that a multifaceted propagation strategy may be most effective for researchers who are developing assessment tools. When studying the ways in which STEM instructors were implementing the ELIPSS rubrics, it was found that the instructors each developed different strategies that suited their intended learning outcomes and instructional environments by assessing and providing feedback to students in a variety of ways. Instructors with different class sizes, course levels, online course management systems, and access to teaching assistants all adapted the rubric implementation strategy to fit their unique classroom environments. Multiple instructors reported that they were better able to articulate professional skill expectations to their students through the use of the rubrics. Additionally, they were more aware of how their students interacted with one another in groups after using the interaction rubrics. These results indicate that ELIPSS rubrics can encourage more reflective practice in undergraduate instructors by providing them with more information about their students that can be used to modify their teaching methods. Further work was done to examine how students developed process skills in a first-year chemistry laboratory course. Students in a first-year chemistry laboratory course used the ELIPSS rubrics to assess their own process skills, and they were also assessed by a teaching assistant. Additionally, students reported their understanding of process skills and their perceived improvements over the course of the semester. The results suggest that students understand interpersonal process skills such as teamwork and communication better than they understand cognitive process skills such as critical thinking and information processing. While the evidence further suggests that students improved their process skills, and students reported that they improved their process skills, the students showed inconsistent abilities to self-assess and provide justification for their assessment using rubrics.

Thesis (LLM. (Labour Law)) -- University of Limpopo, 2014 / Constructive dismissal comes into the equation when an employer behaves in such a manner that eventually and ultimately leads to the employee, being the receiving party, in the employment relationship, to terminate the employment contract. This termination must be the direct result of the conduct of the employer that irreparably frustrated the relationship and made it impossible for the employee to remain in the service of the employer in question. The law of constructive dismissal requires a balance between the competing interests of employees and employers. The employee is the one who makes the claim and determines whether to accept the changes made to his position or to resign and seek damages for wrongful dismissal. A factor which creates further uncertainty is that the employee also controls when to make the claim. Although the employee has greater control over constructive dismissal claims, an employer can take steps to limit the risk of an employee making a claim of constructive dismissal.

The emergence of ontologies has marked another stage in the evolution of knowledge engineering. In the biomedical domain especially, a notable number of ontologies have been developed for knowledge acquisition, maintenance, sharing and reuse from large and distributed databases in order to reach the critical requirements of biomedical analysis and application. This research aims at the development of a Brain Gene Ontology by adopting a constructive IS methodology which tightly combines the processes of ontology learning, building, reuse and evaluation together. Brain Gene Ontology is a part of the BGO project that is being developed by KEDRI (Gottgtroy and Jain, 2005). The objective is to represent knowledge of the genes and proteins that are related to specific brain disorders like epilepsy and schizophrenia. The current stage focuses on the crucial neuronal parameters such as AMPA, GABA, CLC and SCN through their direct or indirect interactions with other genes and proteins. In this case, ontological representations were able to provide the conceptual framework and the knowledge itself to understand more about relationships among those genes and their links to brain disorders. It also provided a semantic repository of systematically ordered molecules concerned. The research adopts Protégé-Frames, which is an open source ontology tool suite for BGO development. Some Protégé plug-ins were also used to extend the applicable functions and improve knowledge representation. Basically, the research discusses the availability and the framework of the constructive Information System research methodology for ontology development, it also describes the process that bridges different notions of the brain, genes and proteins in various databases, and illustrates how to build and implement the ontology with Protégé-Frames and its plug-ins. The results of the BGO development proved that the constructive IS methodology does help to fill in the cognitive gap between domain users and ontology developers, the extensible, component-based architectures of Protégé-Frames significantly support the various activities in the ontology development process, and through explicitly specifying the meaning of fundamental concepts and their relations, ontology can actually integrate knowledge from multiple biological knowledge bases.

Background: Constructive alignment (CA) is a pedagogical approach that emphasizes the alignment between the intended learning outcomes (ILOs), teaching and learning activities (TLAs) and assessment tasks (ATs) as well as creation of a teaching/learning environment where students will be able to actively create their knowledge. Objectives: This paper aims at investigating the extent of constructively-aligned courses in Computer Engineering and Informatics department at Dalarna University, Sweden. This study is based on empirical observations of teacher’s perceptions of implementation of CA in their courses. Methods: Ten teachers (5 from each department) were asked to fill a paper-based questionnaire, which included a number of questions related to issues of implementing CA in courses. Results: Responses to the items of the questionnaire were mixed. Teachers clearly state the ILOs in their courses and try to align the TLAs and ATs to the ILOs. Computer Engineering teachers do not explicitly communicate the ILOs to the students as compared to Informatics teachers. In addition, Computer Engineering teachers stated that their students are less active in learning activities as compared to Informatics teachers. When asked about their subjective ratings of teaching methods all teachers stated that their current teaching is teacher-centered but they try to shift the focus of activity from them to the students. Conclusions: From teachers’ perspectives, the courses are partially constructively-aligned. Their courses are “aligned”, i.e. ILOs, TLAs and ATs are aligned to each other but they are not “constructive” since, according to them, there was a low student engagement in learning activities, especially in Computer Engineering department. / <p>Högskolepedagogik, högskolepedagogisk utbildning, BHU</p>

Canada’s Cuba policy has been an important aspect of Canadian foreign policy in the last five decades. Generally, during that period Canada’s Cuba policy has been different from the US policy. Canada's approach has been to engage with the island through bilateral relations instead of isolation and pressures. This Canadian strategy of engagement towards Cuba had its heyday during the Chrétien administration in the 1990s through the so-called policy of “constructive engagement”. The goal of this approach was to promote democratic change in Cuba's political system using cooperation instead of isolation. Nonetheless, under Harper the orientation of Canadian foreign policy in general, and consequently of Canada’s Cuba policy have evolved towards a different path. Under the Conservatives, Canada has attempted to improve its overall relations with the US through closer cooperation in the political and defense contexts at the international level, and to avoid frictions on conflicting issues that could affect the relationship. The main purpose of this shift is to secure the cardinal interests of the Canadian economic elite with its southern neighbor. Harper’s Cuba policy is in keeping with his general foreign policy orientation: to refrain from pursuing any initiative that implies even a minimal confrontation with Washington. Besides, Cuba’s “constructive engagement” belongs more to the so-called middle power approach or Liberal internationalist model of Canadian foreign policy, where Ottawa preferred to follow a more diplomatic strategy at the international stage. The Harper administration is involved in shifting that paradigm, and is not particularly interested in constructive engagement even though the policy has not been abandoned officially.

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The non-local stabilization of nonlinear systems by output feedback is a challenging problem that remains the subject of continuing investigation in control theory. In this thesis we develop two globally asymptotically stabilizing output feedback algorithms for multivariable nonlinear systems. Our first result is an extension a well-known output feedback method to a class of nonlinear systems whose dynamics can be written as a collection of subsystems that are dynamically coupled through output-dependent nonlinear terms. We show that this method must be modified to accommodate the dynamic coupling by introducing additional nonlinear damping terms into each control input. Our second contribution involves the application of observer backstepping to systems in a restricted block-triangular observer form. In this form, the nonlinearities entering each subsystem are allowed to depend on the output associated with the subsystem, and all upper subsystem states, including unmeasured ones. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated on a magnetically levitated ball. / Controls

The emergence of ontologies has marked another stage in the evolution of knowledge engineering. In the biomedical domain especially, a notable number of ontologies have been developed for knowledge acquisition, maintenance, sharing and reuse from large and distributed databases in order to reach the critical requirements of biomedical analysis and application. This research aims at the development of a Brain Gene Ontology by adopting a constructive IS methodology which tightly combines the processes of ontology learning, building, reuse and evaluation together. Brain Gene Ontology is a part of the BGO project that is being developed by KEDRI (Gottgtroy and Jain, 2005). The objective is to represent knowledge of the genes and proteins that are related to specific brain disorders like epilepsy and schizophrenia. The current stage focuses on the crucial neuronal parameters such as AMPA, GABA, CLC and SCN through their direct or indirect interactions with other genes and proteins. In this case, ontological representations were able to provide the conceptual framework and the knowledge itself to understand more about relationships among those genes and their links to brain disorders. It also provided a semantic repository of systematically ordered molecules concerned. The research adopts Protégé-Frames, which is an open source ontology tool suite for BGO development. Some Protégé plug-ins were also used to extend the applicable functions and improve knowledge representation. Basically, the research discusses the availability and the framework of the constructive Information System research methodology for ontology development, it also describes the process that bridges different notions of the brain, genes and proteins in various databases, and illustrates how to build and implement the ontology with Protégé-Frames and its plug-ins. The results of the BGO development proved that the constructive IS methodology does help to fill in the cognitive gap between domain users and ontology developers, the extensible, component-based architectures of Protégé-Frames significantly support the various activities in the ontology development process, and through explicitly specifying the meaning of fundamental concepts and their relations, ontology can actually integrate knowledge from multiple biological knowledge bases.

Stuttgart, Univ., Diss., 2007. / Druckausg. bei Shaker, Aachen erschienen.