Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1965. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

<p> Adult learners have become the majority on many college campuses, but as many as two-thirds of these students do not persist in attaining a degree. Although future labor projections present a positive outlook, an estimated shortage of graduates appears imminent despite the fact that individuals with bachelor&rsquo;s degrees have greater earning potential, lower unemployment rates, and greater career opportunities. The cause of this persistence problem is examined through analysis of the factors that affect persistence and the enrollment patterns of adult learners. </p><p> The diversity of the nontraditional adult population contributes to this predicament of low completion rates as their heterogeneous characteristics creates difficultly in analyzing which factors, in isolation or in combination, can be attributed to the gap in achievement. Moreover, a consistent standard of measuring adult student retention is lacking. Some colleges and universities do not even track degree persistence and completion rates for nontraditional adult students. </p><p> The purpose of this study is to examine the characteristics of nontraditional adult learners to determine how these factors influence a student&rsquo;s ability to persist toward degree completion. This study examined student demographics, finances, employment, academic records, institutional factors, and enrollment patterns to gain an understanding of what motivates adult students to complete a degree, continue to persist, or to cease enrollment altogether. With this information, institutions of higher learning will be in a better position to determine methods, policies and practices that will encourage, empower and motivate all adult learners to persist in their studies despite any combination of factors putting at risk their potential to graduate. The research design was a quantitative, nonexperimental, correlational, predictive design.</p>

This thesis sets out to explore a comparative study of four Popular Educators using Freirean pedagogical practices in Canada and South Africa and discusses how different country contexts affect their pedagogies. This study explores how critical pedagogy addresses the mobilization of theory and its application into practice in different contexts. In order to analyse and conceptualize the facilitator’s pedagogy and the mobilization of Freire’s theory into their practice; Freire’s critical pedagogical theory was drawn on as well as the theories of other critical and feminist pedagogues, some of who analyse how theory is mobilized into practice. Foley’s theory of ideology is also drawn on alongside Freire’s educational theory. Finally, theories and research examining contextualized pedagogy is employed to analyse how Freire’s critical pedagogy is applied in different social contexts. This is a qualitative comparative study and the research took place in both Cape Town, South Africa and Toronto, Canada and utilized three forms of qualitative data collection tools; interviews, observations and document analysis. The researcher observed two days of workshops for each organisation, conducted interviews with four facilitators and four participants, two facilitators and two participants from each organisation, and carried out document analysis using one organisation information brochure or website from each organisation. Key findings have suggested that the lead facilitators’ pedagogies are greatly influenced by their foundational insurgent, liberating ideologies; ideologies that have been formed over their lifetime through life experiences and engagement with influential theorists and their theories. The lead facilitators’ pedagogies in both contexts pedagogies employ aspects from the Freirean model such as guided student-centred learning. However, availability of access to resources in each context affected facilitators’ ability to engage in different forms of student-centred learning activities. The study confirmed that facilitator’s curriculums were engaging with relevant issues pertaining to students lives, but the delivery of these issues did not align with a Freirean model in both contexts. The divergence from a Freirean delivery was found to be interwoven within the power relations in the classroom. The findings revealed that is seemed difficult for lead facilitators to completely dissolve hierarchies in the classroom, even though an exchange of knowledge was greatly advocated by both facilitators and participants. This study has elucidated how important it is to consider a multitude of factors, including contextual and personal histories when attempting to appropriately contextualize pedagogical models to be conducive to different contexts.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1982. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 443-497). Also available in print.

<p> This dissertation investigated the association of course delivery method with persistence of first-time, beginning, and transfer nontraditional undergraduate students at two public universities over a 6-year period (2009&ndash;2015). Research exists on nontraditional undergraduates, nontraditional instructional methods/delivery, and persistence among college students; however, most research does not combine these constructs in the way this dissertation has. This dissertation adds to research on persistence among a little researched, but large and growing, population in higher education, nontraditional students, by examining the association of course delivery methods with their persistence. Analysis of the data sets revealed strong persistence results at Rush (77%) and Southeast (68%), well above persistence for first-time beginning and transfer students entering in Fall 2009 or Spring 2010 at the two institutions, and exceeding rates reported in other studies of nontraditional students. Logistic regression did not support the researcher&rsquo;s original non-directional hypothesis that course delivery method may be associated with persistence among nontraditional students at these two institutions. This dissertation study adds to research in four ways: (a) inclusion of an institutional lens added contextual data for better understanding of the quantitative result; (b) considering course delivery method as a factor in persistence; (c) providing contrast to the deficit perspective of attrition by focusing on persistence; and (d) adding evidence to the importance of multiple, cross-campus strategies that respond to student needs.</p>

<p> Everyone, at some time in their life, has been a target of or witnessed bullying; Think of the grade school bully on the playground taunting a classmate or the high school bully humiliating a peer through name-calling, isolation, or mobbing. It is difficult to believe incivility continues into adulthood and even into the workplace. With higher education in the United States a privilege rather than a right, the academy has become its own entity with its own housing, law enforcement, governing body, and unique population. Institutions mirror societal conventions with a hierarchical organization evincing the same social and professional interactions as a system based on power and privilege. Though incivil interactions may take place, bullying behavior may not be as transparent as seen in children, but research attests to workplace incivility and bullying as an area of concern. The 2017 Workplace Bullying Survey revealed 35% of Americans experienced workplace bullying and 15% had witnessed it happening to others; this equates to at least 50% of people have been involved in workplace bullying, either as a target or a bystander (WBI, 2017). This study examined the phenomenon of incivility among faculty and staff in institutions of higher learning through the lens of descriptive quantitative research. This study also collected information to identify common characteristics of targets and their perpetrators. Study participants were administered the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R), the leading instrument to measure perceptions of workplace bullying. The staff, faculty, and administration subjects were employed at four-year brick and mortar found when examining only the sample of self-identified targets. Meaningful differences were found and patterns emerged with comparative analysis and the inclusion of non-victims with the target population. Demographic factors provided further significance identifying commonalities of targets and non-victims, including race, longevity at the institution, orientation, and gender. The majority of respondents witnessed or were targets of bullying and incivility.</p><p>

Relationships among education, oppression and class have been presented and explained in distinct and different ways by different social theories, namely, neo-classical and orthodox Marxist determinist, conflationist, and Marxian overdeterminist theories. Human practice, following these different social theories has had, and may continue to produce, different social structures, some of them disastrous, irrespective of whether the disasters are intended or not. Others carry in them seeds of freedom and justice. Determinist theories have contributed to disastrous human practice by being exclusionary in approach, picking either education or oppression as their entry points to which they assigned the privileged position of causality, independent of all other processes. The class process is one of those omitted processes because determinist theories had thought it would be wiped out following changes in education or oppression processes. Conflationist theory has formulated its logic differently, gliding education into oppression, presenting and explaining them to mean the class process. Result: changes have occurred in human practice which are nothing other than continual reformulations of the cultural process of education whose guiding threads are those determinist and conflationist theories. Politics, too, has been reformulated to mean competition for power--a process that tends toward oppression even if unintended. The class process itself has either been denied existence in contemporary society or inessentialized vis-a-vis education and oppression, leaving it untouched in the process of changes in education and oppression. This study rests on an alternative methodological standpoint with respect to how education, oppression and class are related, and how they might be removed. Using alternative Marxian theory, whose logic is overdetermination, I present and explain these three distinct and different processes and their relationships. The method of overdetermination understands the processes of education, oppression, and class to be mutually and contradictorily related. Its political implications, which this thesis tries to accentuate as having a promise in achieving freedom and justice, are that changes must simultaneously occur in education, oppression, and class processes. Following this viewpoint, overdetermination believes a different set of processes will constitute a free and just society. Those processes are politics, classlessness, and non-indoctrinational education.

This thesis examines the ways in which active citizenship is conceptualised by a variety of actors within the Workers’ Educational Association South Wales and is the work of an ‘insider’ with experience of the organisation as both employee and Trustee. The Association is a democratically structured, voluntary organisation with a history of providing adult education in communities throughout south Wales for more than a hundred years. Its reliance on funding from the Welsh Government for the majority of its income is a significant aspect of the background to this study, particularly as one of the Association’s aims is the provision of courses that ‘will assist in the promotion of active citizenship’. The research is set within the contexts of changes in adult education policy during the Association’s lifetime and a contemporary emphasis on the economic purpose of education, the contested nature of the concepts of citizenship and active citizenship and the organisation’s historic role in relation to the Labour movement and past tensions in respect of the receipt of state funding. The study explores through semi-structured interviews with those responsible for the Association’s strategic direction, both senior staff and Trustees, as well those whose role is to implement policy as Development Workers and Part-time Tutors, how active citizenship is understood and whether or not there is a shared understanding within the Association. A picture emerges in which there appears to be uncertainty among a significant proportion of participants about the Association’s purpose as well as a lack of a shared understanding of what active citizenship means and of the kinds of active citizenship the Association could promote. The study also reveals shortcomings in organisational capacity to achieve the aim of promoting active citizenship. The thesis concludes with a series of policy recommendations for the Association to consider.

Background: Continuing professional education (CPE) for nurses is deemed an essential component to develop, maintain and update professional skills and practice in order to ensure that nurses respond effectively to care requirements and provide a high standard of patient care. However, there is little empirical evidence of its effectiveness or factors which may influence its application into practice. This thesis explores a continuing professional education programme on the safe administration of medication and how new knowledge and skills are transferred into clinical practice. Design: Realist evaluation provides the framework for this research study. Realist evaluation stresses the need to evaluate programmes within "context," and to ask what "mechanisms" are acting to produce which "outcomes." The realist evaluation cycle for this study had four distinct stages. Firstly, I built initial theories as conjectured CMO configurations (Stage 1 and 2), then these CMO conjectures were tested (Stage 3) and then they were refined (Stage 4). Methods: Data was collected and analysed separately for each of Stages 1, 2 and 3. However, as realist evaluation is iterative, I often returned to a previous stage to clarify meaning or understanding. Document analysis and interviews were used in Stage 1 to commence the process of building CMO conjectures. Realist interviews took place in Stage 2 to refine the conjectured CMO configurations. Stage 3 involved the testing of the conjectured CMO configurations through three embedded case studies which involved interview, clinical observation, analysis of further documents and analysis of data from reported critical incidents and nursing care metric measurements. Findings: This study has shown the significant role of the ward manager in the application of new learning from the safe medication administration education programme to practice. Local leadership was found to enable a patient safety culture and the adoption of a quality improvement approach in the local clinical area. The multi-disciplinary team at both organisation and local level was also found to be a significant context for the application of the safe medication administration education programme into practice. Reasoning skills, patient identification and receptivity to change were identified to be key mechanisms which were enabled within the described contexts. The exploration of the context and mechanisms and their relationship allowed for further exploration of outcomes associated with the context and mechanism constructs. Recommendations: The conjectured CMO configurations put forward at the end of the thesis should be further tested utilising a different CPE programme. These theoretical propositions could inform policy and practice on the factors required to ensure learning from CPE is applied in practice. The realist evaluation framework should be applied when evaluating CPE programmes as the rationale for providing CPE programmes is to maintain and improve patient care.

Thesis (MTech (Education))--Peninsula Technikon, 2005. / Word processed copy. Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-72). Also available online.