This research addresses issues of self-concept, social status, and relative age as they relate to moderately (n=146) and highly (n=161) gifted students. Previous research regarding self-concept and giftedness yielded mixed results. The majority of social status research had not been conducted with gifted students, and relative age issues have been addressed only with young children. Therefore, the present research was conducted to carry the previous studies further. Only one self-concept scale, the Behavior scale, showed a significant difference between highly and moderately gifted students with highly gifted students outscoring moderately gifted students. No significant differences between moderately and highly gifted students were found in the proportion of students in the three social status categories of popular, rejected, and neglected. There was not a significant relationship between IQ scores and social status. However, those participants who were in the rejected group tended to be brighter, and those participants in the neglected group tended to be less bright, than the popular group. The participants in the rejected group were also significantly younger than those participants in the popular and neglected groups.

Personality testing can be an adequate instrument for prediction of future job performance. However, the predictive ability of these tests has been only moderate at best. This researcher attempted to determine if feedback would help improve the predictive ability of personality tests. The results indicated that feedback did not moderate the relationship between the personality dimensions and job performance for all of the personality construct s except Openness to Experience. This researcher also attempted to replicate the findings of the Barrick and Mount (1993) study which found that autonomy moderated the relationship between Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and job performance. This researcher found support for Barrick and Mount's findings for Extraversion and Conscientiousness, but not for Agreeableness.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) and web services make it possible to construct rich and complex distributed systems which operate at internet scales. However, the underlying design principles of SOA can lead to management problems for processes over web services.<p> This thesis identifies several potential problems with the management of processes over web services, and proposes the use of explicit context as a possible solution. The available options are explored, and the WS-Context specification is implemented and evaluated.<p> The SOA design principles of loose coupling, interaction at an interface, autonomy, and composablity can lead to management problems for processes over web services. Processes over web services where one composite service invokes other composite services which in turn invoke other composite services can lead to complex invocation trees. These invocation trees may be different at different times due to the shifting effect of loose coupling, as new services are swapped in to replace those in previous invocations. In such an environment how well can we define the interface of the top level service in a static document such as a WSDL? Because there is a separation between the ultimate service consumer, and the ultimate service provider how can the service consumer correctly assign fault when a service fails? When concurrency is used, and encouraged, how can we deal with the inevitable race conditions and deadlock? In distributed systems where portions of processes execute on systems beyond our organizational control, how can we pause, or kill these processes? Many of these systems model long-running business processes. How do we communicate changes in process requirements?<p> The use of an explicit context is a potential solution to these types of problems. The abstraction context provides an environment in which the process participants can describe their requirements, query those of other process participants, and react to changes in the environment.<p> A sample context server, based on the WS-Context specification, was implemented using the Erlang language. The sample context server provides the basic operations required to manage and store contextual information about a process.<p> The sample context server was evaluated to determine the cost of employing a context as part of a web service based software system. The performance of the sample server was also evaluated.<p> Test were conducted on the time costs of the basic operations of the context server, and they were found to have a constant time cost. The operations for getting and setting the contents of the context were found to have a time cost dependant on the size of the context. The cost of propagating the context along a chain of service invocations was tested and found to have an overhead which increased linearly with the length of the service invocation chain.<p> The context server was stress tested using a closed loop test which simulated the interaction of a number of concurrent clients, and an open loop test which simulated bursts of arriving requests. The open loop testing showed that the context server could handle 75 concurrent clients. Beyond 75 concurrent clients, the response times of the context server began to slowly increase. The closed loop testing showed that the context server had a maximum throughput of 190 requests per second for bursts of 200 requests with an interarrival time of 4 milliseconds.

This paper presents findings from a pilot study that investigated the extent to which teachers make connections between mathematical concepts and concepts from other disciplines. Data from concept maps and interviews were collected. The analysis revealed that the kinds of connections teachers made are closely tied to teachers’ disciplines of specialisation. The findings suggest that for some teachers, though desirable, it may not be feasible to require them to make connections with disciplines that are not within their areas of specialisation. This presents tensions for learners learning mathematics in classrooms where opportunities for making connections between mathematics and other learning areas are available but are neither taken up nor appropriately used by teachers.

This paper presents findings from a pilot study that investigated the extent to which teachers make connections between mathematical concepts and concepts from other disciplines. Data from concept maps and interviews were collected. The analysis revealed that the kinds of connections teachers made are closely tied to teachers’ disciplines of specialisation. The findings suggest that for some teachers, though desirable, it may not be feasible to require them to make connections with disciplines that are not within their areas of specialisation. This presents tensions for learners learning mathematics in classrooms where opportunities for making connections between mathematics and other learning areas are available but are neither taken up nor appropriately used by teachers.

Annual poster session where NEXUS investigators and trainees share their research on the social contexts of health behaviour.

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This research explores the “higher goods” as indicators of self-transcendent well-being. The higher goods are here conceptualized as consisting of both contents and modalities. The contents are the classical transcendentals unity, truth, goodness, and beauty; the modalities are encounter, enlightenment, and transmission. Despite millennia of interest in philosophical and theological literatures, researchers have largely overlooked the intrinsic link between modality and content within empirical psychology. This thesis (a) develops and validates an empirical measure of the higher goods using matrix modeling techniques borrowed from multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), (b) evaluates the correlation of the Big Five personality traits and their respective aspects with the higher goods, and (c) examines the higher goods within the broader self-transcendent well-being conceptual space. By formally conceptualizing, operationalizing, and measuring these constructs within the psychological domain, this thesis paves the way for continued examination and elaboration of higher goods as indicators of self-transcendent well-being.