Thesis (Ph.D.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / South Africa

This thesis sets out to obtain an understanding of what it means to be an assessor in higher education, more especially within the Rhodes University context. The concept of assessment, a highly contentious and complex issue, is examined against a background of competing understandings of the nature and purpose of higher education, including the striving for excellence versus the call to more equitable ideals associated with a mass higher education and training system. An overview of salient issues is presented in which both traditional and alternative paradigms of measurement and assessment theory are explored with a view to considering foundational principles upon which sound assessment practice should be based. Specific methods and instruments of assessment are examined with the purpose of evaluating their potential for empowering students as active participants in their own learning and in the assessment process. In a field in which much of the literature seeks improved assessment merely through the administration of increasingly sophisticated assessment techniques, a phenomenological investigation offered a unique way of understanding the meaning assessors make of their practice. Making use of in-depth interviews with five lecturers at Rhodes University the researcher, interacting in a personal manner with people not viewed as experimental objects but as human subjects, assisted participants in moving towards non-theoretical descriptions that accurately reflected their experience. Insights contained in the data were synthesised and integrated into a consistent description of the essential nature of the experience, the primary endeavour of the phenomenologist being to transform naïve experience into more explicitly detailed conceptual knowledge. The essence of how these educators understand themselves as assessors at Rhodes University is perhaps best encapsulated by a considerable sense of agency or initiative on their part. While participants make use of a variety of assessment strategies, they are conscious that assessment cannot be viewed in isolation from other aspects of their teaching and the curriculum. Not only do they make use of different assessment methods but, conscious of accommodating the diverse needs of students, understand their responsibility in terms of providing learning opportunities to assist students in meeting the course outcomes and fulfilling their potential. Rather than allowing pressures from within and outside of the academy to dictate, these lecturers, with significant hard work, courage and a capacity for reflective practice, have embraced the challenges associated with higher education in a state of transition.

This study was carried out to investigate how Grade 10 Life Science teachers in three schools in the Omusati region of Namibia are including Environmental Learning (EL) in terms of the curriculum policy. A qualitative approach was used to generate data through document analysis, interviews and classroom observations to investigate the application of the policy of including environmental learning in classroom curriculum practice. The research was primarily directed towards examining constraints and enabling factors in the context of the three schools that participated in the study. The study revealed that teaching strategies for the inclusion of environmental learning were not widely evident, suggesting disparities between the policy of enabling environmental education through the inclusion of environmental learning across the curriculum. It was notable that teacher knowledge and interest in environmental education influence how they include environmental learning and that assessment practices narrow the scope of environmental learning in ways that do not include critical thinking and problem solving skills. The study concludes that despite diverse constraints inhibiting inclusion, the evidence suggests that the inclusion of environmental learning in Namibia’s Life Science curriculum can enable environmental education. The above main findings are used to make recommendations toward strengthening environmental content knowledge of teachers and to improve assessment practices. It was also noted that some of the environmental learning constraints could be transformed into enablers with more teacher support and by making a better link between environmental learning theories and practices. This will involve a redirection of the curriculum documents as well as the provision of other learning support materials to support environmental learning. The study has enabled me to conclude that what is happening should be encouraged so that it continues and is strengthened although the implementation of environmental learning is not as clear as the policy had mapped out.

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This thesis suggests that the idea of the rhetorical situation-a work's text (or language), author, audience, and social context-can serve as a connection between literature, literary theory, and composition studies. Criticisms of Emily Dickinson's Poem 754 are presented, and each is categorized according to the element of the rhetorical situation upon which it focuses.

MPM / Oliver Tambo Institute for Governance and Policy Studies

Thesis (PhD. (Education)) --University of Limpopo, 2017. / South Africa has embarked on the official inclusion of school-based assessment in all subjects for transforming once-off pen and paper testing to redress the past rigid, norm-referenced, unreliable and non-transparent discriminative educational assessment in schools. The introduction does not only aim at offering constant constructive feedback to learners to improve performance, but it also assists teachers to diagnose, facilitate and improve on their assessment methods, to report learner performance to relevant stakeholders like parents, schools, districts and lastly national departments of education and to inform teaching and more assessments. Over and above it forms 25% of the total mark for all subjects in further education and training including Grade 12. There is compelling empirical evidence that school-based assessment positively influences the performance of learners in large scale assessments. In spite of its significance, the school-based assessment of literature set-works has received scant attention in secondary schools. Despite the local and international interest and implementation of school-based assessment nowadays, its administration in South Africa schools still remains a challenge. This study therefore followed an interpretive qualitative approach to respond to the question: What are the experiences of English first additional language teachers in assessment of literature set-works in secondary schools in Limpopo province? The teacher self-efficacy theory guided this study. It was not only used to substantially explain the stature of a literature teacher, but also to generate strategies to promote teacher flexibility and application of assessment practices in English first additional language. The theoretical and practical implications of self-efficacy theory are discussed in terms of their relevance to both the literature teacher and school-based assessment expectations. Multiple qualitative data collection methods of focus group interviews, openended questionnaires, documents and field notes were employed to strengthen findings in a natural setting. Respondents were selected through the purposive sampling. Five districts of Limpopo province were sampled for this study: four focus group interviews were conducted, 139 open-ended questionnaires were returned and documents relevant to answering the research question were analysed. Data were transcribed and then analysed by the Tesch (1990) method (as in Creswell 1994) of qualitative data analysis and constant comparison method. Teachers operating in the assessment of English first additional language have acknowledged the importance of school-based assessment, moderation and literature set-works, however they still feel literature assessment in schools does not receive the attention it deserves. The qualitative data revealed that teachers face various challenges in the implementation of school-based assessment of literature set-works. Most teachers through their responses still face challenges of time, resources and curriculum advisory support, inability to design their own literature set-works tasks, learner illiteracy and lack of teacher efficacy. Moreover, teachers are keenly dependent on previously written question papers. Findings have further shown that teachers suffer the pressures of authorities who impose extra assessment work on them and the selected literature prescribed works that stay for too long in the curriculum – these comprise the programme of assessment. These findings, although they may not be generalised, might contribute to prospect future research and educational change in assessment of literature set-works in schools. Various recommendations have been made for educational stakeholders in further research prospects and future improvement on assessment of literature set-works in schools emphasizing the independence of English literature setworks