This work defines and evaluates the original contributions to the discipline of digital curation that the author has made through ten years of her career for the purposes of gaining a PhD by Published Works. It presents ten published papers, three of which are co-authored, and a narrative concerning the contributions made by these. This narrative explains the professional and academic contexts in which the papers were authored and the impact they have made. The work describes the progressive contributions to both the professional and academic development of the discipline through: an historical analysis of its origins, analysis of the conceptual space it inhabits, theoretical modelling of this conceptual space to enable practical implementations, and the development of higher education curricula. The work reflects on the disciplinary significance of these contributions and suggests next-steps for the author’s research.

An important variable not often examined in the literature is the relationship between target behaviors and their reinforcers. Previous research has demonstrated faster acquisition rates of simple receptive and imitative skills when the reinforcer used was part of the behavior chain that it reinforced. The current study evaluated the effectiveness of a direct reinforcement contingency to teach pairs of advanced receptive skills with three children with autism. During the indirect reinforcement condition, the therapist reinforced correct responding by handing the child an edible reinforcer. During the direct reinforcement condition, the reinforcer was located under the container displaying the correct response. Results showed that no participant reached mastery criterion regardless of the reinforcement contingency, although slightly higher levels of correct responding were observed during the direct reinforcement phase for all three participants on one skill.

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<p>Within the last decade, the study of individual differences in reading skill has become an active area of investigation. Much of this research has been conducted with children, and has focused on selected processes hypothesized to underlie proficient reading skill. Relatively less attention has been directed toward evaluating the effects of experience in contributing to skill differences. The experiments reported in the thesis were designed to examine multiple dimensions of reading skill, and to evaluate the effects of repeated experience in two groups of readers selected on the basis of their comprehension skill. The results indicated that difference between skilled and less-skilled readers were apparent on all measures of reading. Despite these overall group differences, the less-skilled readers were at least able to benefit from repeated experience as were their more skilled peers. The results in the first experiment indicated that the less-skilled readers were poorer at word-level processing, particularly in processing unfamiliar lexical items. The second experiment examined whether this poorer processing reflected an inability to benefit from experience over repeated trials. The results indicated that the performance of both skilled and less-skilled readers improved with repeated experience. Moreover, similar gains were observed after repetition with text in Experiment 3. The results of Experiment 4 further indicated that, although the less-skilled readers appears less sensitive to higher-order dimensions of text structure when reading for meaning, their performance across specific transfer conditions indicated that they were able to used higher order information to facilitate comprehension. The results of these experiments suggest that investigation of the role of repeated experience in contributing to individual difference may clarify factors critical to the acquisition of proficient reading skills. The implications of these findings for models of reading and for future research are discussed.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Central to Realism's framing of the international are its conception of the inside/outside structure of political form and the idea of a state of nature. This thesis provides a materialist critique of these conceptions. Its starting point is that the Marxist criticism of Realism has fallen short because Marxism in IR has constructed no theory of the political and as a result it has been unable to answer Realism's perception of the ‘tragic' and unchanging nature of international political existence. To remedy this deficiency, the thesis both establishes an alternative understanding of Marx for IR and draws upon Adorno's extension and deepening of Marxian critical theory. The argument next elaborates a reading of Marx's theory of capital that reveals a considerable degree of hitherto unappreciated thematic congruence with Realism's understanding of the international as a timeless scene of entrapment. It then mobilises Adorno's philosophical anthropology to explain this similarity, focusing on the critical accounts of abstraction in both Marx and Adorno. Finally, it uses these theoretical elements to address the question of political form directly, taking up specific aspects of Carl Schmitt's, Giorgio Agamben's and Walter Benjamin's thinking concerning sovereignty and the exception and reading them through the frame of Adorno's critique of the concept. The result is a critical theory of political form that: (i) can explain, without conceding to, the Realist conceptions both of the necessary inside/outside structure of the political and of the international as a timeless state of nature; and (ii) can demonstrate an instrinsic theoretical connection between the global nature of capital and the bounded and delimited form of the political in a way that has not been achieved before in IR.

In order for foster parents to be prepared to manage problem behavior and develop a positive relationship with a child in their home, local foster care agencies require these parents to attend parent training classes. Unfortunately, even foster care agencies that offer empirically validated parent training courses are unable to prevent the parents' performance from decreasing over time (Cowart, Iwata, & Poynter, 1984; Forehand & King, 1977; Mueller et al., 2003). However, researchers have created booster training sessions to counteract this issue. Booster training sessions allow participants to attend a brief refresher course on skills they have previously learned. Another intervention that has been successful with skill acquisition is video modeling. Video modeling requires less response effort and is not as time consuming compared to other training methods like didactic teaching. The current study evaluated the effectiveness of booster training sessions using video modeling for foster parents who completed a parent training class that was based on basic behavior analysis principles. Results showed an increase in the participants' skills after they received booster training sessions using video modeling.

The purpose of this study was to determine the distribution of interdisciplinary team organization in Virginia high schools, to identify common elements of implementation, to assess the importance of those elements as perceived by team members, and to assess the relationship of these factors to school demographics. In this study, an interdisciplinary team was two or more teachers of different disciplines (one of which is a core subject), who share the same students and have a common planning period. A stratified sampling was used to select 123 Virginia high schools of which 67 consented to participate in the study. All core subject teachers in each school were surveyed. The survey used Erb and Doda's (1989) model of four hierarchical developmental areas of interdisciplinary team organization as the research base. / Ed. D.

Title: Targets used at the first modern Olympic Games and in the period of the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries. Aim of Thesis: The aim of this thesis is to describe the development in individual targets in the period of the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries. The climax should feature the discovery and description of target evaluation at the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. Method: The thesis subject is an analysis of shooting evaluation in a defined period. The methods used for this analysis are data secondary analysis, induction and abduction. Results: Based on the above mentioned methods there were totally five targets of five concentric circles discovered. These targets could have been used for rifle disciplines at the first modern Olympic Games. The values of individual targets were as follows: 1st (10, 21, 33, 46, 60), 2nd (11, 23, 36, 50, 65), 3rd (12, 25, 39, 54, 70), 4th (13, 27, 42, 58, 75), 5th (14, 29, 45, 62, 80). Keywords: shooting sport, pistol disciplines, rifle disciplines

The introduction of technology and the widespread use of ICT in the wealthier nations have led teacher-educators to integrate technological applications in their teaching environment. The research investigated the new teaching modes created by teacher-educators in teacher-training colleges in Israel, due to their transition from traditional teaching to distance-teaching through the Internet. This was a qualitative research using case study within an interpretative paradigm that enabled the researcher to consider the viewpoints of the informants together with her own viewpoint. The research tools included: 14 open interviews, a non-participatory observation, documentation reading and the writing of a personal log. The rich variety of research tools enabled triangulation of data. The conceptual framework of the research was based on theories of teacher-training, distance-teaching, academic disciplines, and several teaching dimensions: organisation and representation of data, organisation and management of teaching and different types of interaction. The research findings indicated intrinsic and extrinsic motives for the teacher-educators transition to distance-teaching. The transition created a pedagogy characterised by four teaching modes that corresponded to different academic disciplines. Each discipline harnessed the technology for intensive use in one or more of the teaching dimensions. The Representation mode used by teacher-educators in the natural sciences and statistics used a large variety of data representations and Internet writing characterised by multiple links. The Interactive mode employed by teacher-educators in the field of literacy principally dealt with formative assessment of the students' writing and used virtual communication tools to tighten the teacher-learner inter-personal interaction. The Organisational mode used in education disciplines focused on organisation and management of teaching and learning through the use of computer applications. The Holistic mode employed by teacher-educators in the fields of education and literature, in substance constituted a combination of all the characteristics of the above-mentioned modes with an emphasis given to social presence of both learners and the teacher. Analysis of the teaching modes led to the creation of a typology of four modes positioned at different points along the following scales: organisation of teaching, flexible – fixed, types of interaction few – multiple; data representation, creative – conservative; computer literate – computer users. There was a clear contrast between teacher-educators teaching education disciplines as a continuation of traditional frontal teaching and those who had previously taught in workshops. At the crossroads of pedagogy with technology, the changes in location, time and lesson character have meant that the implementation of the teaching paradigm of Zeichner and the teaching orientations of Feiman-Nemser have taken on fresh dimensions. The new teaching modes necessitate appropriate training for all teacher-educators working in distance-teaching in accordance with their academic disciplines. The research findings contribute to the reduction of a gap in knowledge concerning the new teaching modes of teacher-educators teaching distance-learning in a teacher-training college in Israel.