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The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of support provided to learners from child headed homes (CHH) by the Institutional Level Support Teams ILST). This was a two-phased study involving a literature study and empirical research. The study employed a qualitative research method to elicit information from participants by means of individual interviews. The literature revealed that learners from CHH are part of our school systems even though the phenomenon of CHH is not increasing. These learners experience many challenges such as role adjustment, stress and grief and school drop outs. Due to lack of various needs it would be difficult for them to reach a level of self-actualisation unless schools provide support. Poverty, HIV/AIDS and the breakdown of appropriate alternative care were revealed as contextual factors leading to CHH. There are also policies and reports guiding the support of learners in schools. There are national programmes that are provided from national level to support needy learners included, namely NSNP, school based crime prevention programmes, the child support grant, the sanitary pads project, exemption from paying school fees and the food garden project. A qualitative method was used and data was collected by means of semi-structured interviews and documents. Five sites were purposefully selected and fifteen ILST members participated. The research sites comprised of five secondary schools. Data were collected from three strata, namely the principal, ILST coordinator and the teacher with the highest number of learners from CHH in his/her class. The study revealed that national programmes were more constant than school-based which were ad-hoc and disjointed. Factors hampering the provision of support included problems with identification of learners from CHH, lack of policies guiding the provision of support to learners from CHH, lack of leadership and the ILST members not being committed enough. Factors enhancing the provision of support included good leadership, availability of programmes at national and the involvement of external stakeholders.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of support provided to learners from child headed homes (CHH) by the Institutional Level Support Teams ILST). This was a two-phased study involving a literature study and empirical research. The study employed a qualitative research method to elicit information from participants by means of individual interviews. The literature revealed that learners from CHH are part of our school systems even though the phenomenon of CHH is not increasing. These learners experience many challenges such as role adjustment, stress and grief and school drop outs. Due to lack of various needs it would be difficult for them to reach a level of self-actualisation unless schools provide support. Poverty, HIV/AIDS and the breakdown of appropriate alternative care were revealed as contextual factors leading to CHH. There are also policies and reports guiding the support of learners in schools. There are national programmes that are provided from national level to support needy learners included, namely NSNP, school based crime prevention programmes, the child support grant, the sanitary pads project, exemption from paying school fees and the food garden project. A qualitative method was used and data was collected by means of semi-structured interviews and documents. Five sites were purposefully selected and fifteen ILST members participated. The research sites comprised of five secondary schools. Data were collected from three strata, namely the principal, ILST coordinator and the teacher with the highest number of learners from CHH in his/her class. The study revealed that national programmes were more constant than school-based which were ad-hoc and disjointed. Factors hampering the provision of support included problems with identification of learners from CHH, lack of policies guiding the provision of support to learners from CHH, lack of leadership and the ILST members not being committed enough. Factors enhancing the provision of support included good leadership, availability of programmes at national and the involvement of external stakeholders.

Previous studies suggest that the reasons that Hispanics do not use support groups might include utilizing the family as an informal support group structure, the use of spiritual support, language barriers, the lack of access to a computer and the Internet, the lack of face-to-face interactions in Internet groups, and the lack of cultural competence. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the attitudes of Hispanics toward Internet cancer support groups (ICSGs) and reasons for the lack of participation in ICSGs. In this feminist qualitative study, 30 Hispanic individuals who were receiving cancer care were contacted for telephone interviews. The participants were interviewed to obtain their responses to questions related to current use and interest in using ICSGs. The researcher used qualitative thematic analysis to analyze the data. Four major themes arose. They were the need for a strong social network, attitudes about information access, concrete barriers to obtaining support, and the need for respect and empowerment. The major theme of “a strong social network” includes five sub-themes: (a) differences in online and face-to-face communication; (b) loneliness, isolation; (c) existence or lack of familial support; (d) spiritual support; and (e) informal support. Participants had mixed attitudes about information access. Positive attitudes were more common and included wanting to learn about their disease and learn how to obtain information and support via computer. Some participants did not want to obtain information, and some had negative attitudes about learning to use the computer. Many participants did not own a computer and had transportation problems that limited their access to a computer. The theme involving the need for respect and empowerment addressed the empowering use of Spanish in support of Hispanic cancer patients and empowerment via the group leader, who was Hispanic. The findings suggest a need to develop culturally competent ICSGs for Hispanics. One goal would be to augment instead of replace support. For example, an ICSG could have a spiritual basis, or there might be several ICSGs—one each for patients, families, and supporters such as friends from church. ICSGs also could target people without these supports. The existing knowledge should be used to provide direction for future research and for the development of cancer support groups that could meet the unique needs of Hispanic cancer patients. / text

Educational institutions strive to stay on the edge of technological advances in response to stakeholders' desire to receive value for their investment. Rapid changes in computer technology present a dilemma to colleges and universities in the support and training arena. An important segment of the institutional population, office support staff are vital to the everyday running of departments with extremely diverse responsibilities critical to the institutional mission. Office support staff seem to be left out when support and training programs for new technology are being planned. With technology changing so quickly it is vital that organizations have support and training programs in place that will continually provide office support staff with updated skills. The developmental study used an implementation analysis method to develop an online support community (OSC) to provide a central location to find and contribute support for computer technology issues that affected productivity. A needs assessment comprised of literature reports, focus group feedback, and historical records as well as the results of a pre-survey and inventory ensured data triangulation and was used to define content areas for technology support and training. A Learning Management System was used to plan and design the OSC in the initial treatment and workplace software, SharePoint, for the second treatment. Discussion forums and content areas were created using the defined technology content areas. Office support staff participated in the study and data were collected using surveys, content postings, interviews and electronic reporting. The OSC was evaluated after the first and second treatments using an evaluation model of reaction, learning, behavior, and results. The results indicated that an OSC can be effectively used to provide technology support for office support staff. Elements necessary for design include: long-term documentation, content matter experts, medium that allows for open-ended login, evidence of knowledgeable participants sharing useful data, participant leaders, and IM for immediate answers. The need for support and training for office support staff is ongoing and necessary for the productive and efficient completion of their job and work responsibilities. The results will be useful in designing online support communities and for planning support and training events.

As advances in information and communication technologies give way to more innovative opportunities for teaching and learning at a distance, the need to provide supporting structures for online students similar to those offered to on-campus students is becoming more significant. Although a range of support services has been proposed in the past, there is a need for a comprehensive system which education specialists can use to provide online academic support for medical students working in peer groups. The goal of the investigation was to provide such a system, which has the potential to foster knowledge construction, through high levels of sociocognitive processing, ultimately resulting in enhanced academic achievement. The multi-dimensional approach to investigating this problem necessitated utilizing a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The design and development of the system were guided by results of a review of the relevant literature which revealed the necessary considerations for supporting students online. Implementation followed instructional design principles geared at success for online environments. To assess the impact of the use of the system, the following analyses were carried out: to assess the level of sociocognitive processing that took place, discourse analysis and group interaction analysis were carried out; to assess impact on academic achievement, a quasi-experimental approach was carried out, controlling for select variables between the two groups which were used; and to garner the lessons which were learned, observation and survey methodology were employed. The results revealed that students did not interact at high levels of sociocognitive processing and that there was no significant difference in the academic achievement between the treatment and control groups. Survey results provided reasons for lack of participation/interaction and recommendations were proposed for alternative implementations to encourage participation in this particular group which is medical students. The recent developments in social and mobile technologies have provided education specialists with a rich evolving field in which to harvest innovative methods of supporting students in online learning environments. It would be interesting to investigate how these new technologies can encourage active participation in support groups and the impact this support structure would have on academic achievement.

The master thesis System of peer support at the Police of the Czech Republic deals with peer support as a kind of social support for the security corps. The thesis summarizes the foreign practice (especially the USA) and the European guideline recommendations for the successful introduction of peer support in the organization. It also describes current Czech practice and offers its comparison with foreign practice. The research was conducted through semi- structured interviews with nine peer support providers in the Central Bohemia Region. Analysis of the interviews brought findings on the current state of collegiate support, barriers and other recommendations for the successful development of peer support within the police force. Keywords: peer support, social support, police

Social support has been identified as an important component of planning for careers among high school students. Lent, Brown, and Hackett (2000) advocated for the importance of this support within Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT). These authors identified a need for further research with better measurement for examining contextual support and its connection to career decision-making. Ali et al. (2011) developed a set of measures to address this need for better measurement, but identified the need for more nuanced examination of specific types of contextual support. The current study was designed to assess the importance of nuanced measuring of different types of support in career-decision making. Specifically, two scales, School Personnel and Community, from the Contextual Support of Post Secondary Planning Scales (CSPSPS) are analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis to force the scales into the factor structures proposed by Ali et al. (2011). Additionally, exploratory factor analysis was used to further examine the school personnel scale. Finally, interventions to aid School Personnel and Community in ways to support students in career decision-making are considered.

In the age where quick turn around time and high speed manufacturing methods are becoming more important, quality assurance is a consistent bottleneck in production. With the development of cheap and fast computer hardware, it has become viable to use machine vision for the collection of data points from a machined part. The generation of these large sample points have necessitated a need for a comprehensive algorithm that will be able to provide accurate results while being computationally efficient. Current established methods are least-squares (LSQ) and non-linear programming (NLP). The LSQ method is often deemed too inaccurate and is prone to providing bad results, while the NLP method is computationally taxing. A novel method of using support vector regression (SVR) to solve the NP-hard problem of cylindricity of machined parts is proposed. This method was evaluated against LSQ and NLP in both accuracy and CPU processing time. An open-source, user-modifiable programming package was developed to test the model. Analysis of test results show the novel SVR algorithm to be a viable alternative in exploring different methods of cylindricity in real-world manufacturing.

The aim of the study was to establish how and compile educational relationship-focussed reading support strategies for educators to support learners who experience barriers to reading. The educator-learner relationship first had to be delineated by establishing the dimensions of the relationship, namely emotional, cognitive and value-driven activities that impact on the learner's feelings, knowledge and attitudes towards his or her world, and for the purpose of this study, how these pertain to the learner's reading development. Components of reading development, as well as barriers to reading and appropriate supportive reading activities were also described. The most essential reading skills are indicated to be a motivation to read, linguistic cueing in reading in terms of phonemic, morphemic, syntactic and semantic cueing, sight word recognition and comprehension. On this theoretical basis the reading support strategies were compiled encompassing reading and relationship-focused activities. Aims for achieving the relationship and reading skills were established, for which appropriate reading and relationship activities were then compiled. Qualitative research was implemented in the design and implementation of the reading strategies. Data were obtained from implementing the reading and relationship-focussed strategies, from learners' reading profiles, from educators' and learners' evaluation of the strategies, as well as from the researcher's own evaluation as a research participant. All the results were then triangulated to arrive at the findings of the research. These indicate that the reading and relationship activities will be successful if presented simultaneously, and with full cooperation by educators and learners alike. The contribution as well as the limitations of the research are indicated, and finally recommendations are provided. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Education))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.