Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF EDUCATION in the Department of Philosophy of Education at the University of Zululand, 2002. / This study advocates to examine the efficacy of values clarification with particular reference to its impact on critical thinking and effective communication for secondary school learners. The capability of discerning and focusing on critical aspects of situations and seeing the patterns characterising those situations is a far more holistic capability than those commonly defined in competency-based approaches. Such holistic capabilities represent the links between disciplinary knowledge and professional skills. Secondary school educators find certain values important for their learners and these are articulated by means of the curriculum and studied or taught through values clarification. Values clarification is a process of helping the individual to arrive at his or her own values in a rational and justifiable way without a set of values being imposed. Values education therefore exists in order to strengthen the transfer of values in the school while critical thinking aims to develop a reflexion on values and a value development by means of analysing and comparing opinions and communicating effectively about them. Moral development is dedicated to the stages of cognitive development for learning values and the skills to reflect on them. In this way they are both cognitive, skills-oriented educational tasks. It is clear that education is concerned with critical thinking and many skills have been formulated that learners need to acquire in order to facilitate thinking critically and communicating effectively. Critical thinking manifests itself in a plethora of skills such as identifying assumptions (both stated and unstated both one's own and others), clarifying, focusing, and remaining relevant to the topic; understanding logic and judging sources by their reliability and credibility. This calls for not only skills but dispositions such as being open-minded, considerate, impartial as well as suspending judgment, taking a stance when warranted, and questioning one's critical thinking skills. By implication, this reflects on teaching values clarification and critical thinking, since critical thinking derives from the fact that learners should be taught to think, to solve problems and to communicate, and to encourage involvement in their own learning. Learners need to think critically as citizens in society — being able to detect bias, recognizing illogical thinking, avoiding stereotyping of group members, reaching conclusions based on solid evidence and guarding against propaganda. For this reason critical thinking must pervade the secondary school curriculum. In conclusion, the fundamental purpose of education should have its manifestation in the acquisition of knowledge (knowing what?) and skills (knowing how); and the manipulation thereof to think critically and communicate effectively

Following up on the educational reform initiatives of the 1990s and early 2000s, which are centered on the notion of accountability, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's Race to the Top initiative strives to bring such accountability down to the level of the individual teacher through the use of advanced statistical parsing of student achievement data. Through the calculation of "teacher value-added," a given teacher's "effectiveness" can be measured and ranked, hence assigned a value. Duncan's rhetoric around the issue, and the assumptions visible in the studies of teacher quality and effectiveness that he and other reformers cite, suggest that at long last we as a society will be able to know and to communicate just who our best and our worst teachers are. Such an ability will allow us as a polity, on this view, to direct public funding much more efficiently than has heretofore been possible: armed with this new knowledge, we can reward the best teachers to ensure that they do not abandon the profession for higher-paying employment, and cull the worst teachers so that they may be replaced with more effective personnel. The newfound ability to distinguish between good and bad teachers also has transformative implications for teacher training programs. By analyzing the practice of the highest-quality teachers, one might discover "what works" in classrooms, the specific behaviors, skills, or mental states involved in highly effective teaching. Once discovered, these behaviors, skills, or mental states might then be given to pre-service teachers, which would dispense with what Duncan considers to be the overly theoretical and largely abstract curricula of current teacher education programs. The problem outlined above is obviously philosophical in nature. The method of investigation involves a conceptual analysis of Race to the Top's teacher-quality and achievement-data initiatives, comparing the policies to the Secretary of Education's public rhetoric employed to market the policies to the public. Taking the public rhetoric as an expressing the various needs to which the policies will be responsive, this thesis tests the coherence of the underlying assumptions about teaching and learning, and assesses the conceptual fit between the needs visible in the rhetoric and the outcomes sought and measured according to the proposed policies. The thesis finds that Duncan's public rhetoric expresses largely unproblematic needs, fears, or disquietudes around questions of teacher quality, but that the policies intended to answer those needs are wholly insufficient to the task. At issue is a misconception of teaching as a skillful endeavor, a mistaken idea about what teaching is. This thesis concludes that the needs and desires expressed in Duncan's rhetoric do necessitate a response, but that any adequate response will require a different view of teaching and learning entirely. The thesis offers the fundamental requirements of a different notion of teaching and learning, one better suited to the needs of the public, as the Secretary of Education expresses them.

Wavefield extrapolation in orthorhombic anisotropic media incorporates complicated but realistic models, to reproduce wave propagation phenomena in the Earth's subsurface. Compared with the representations used for simpler symmetries, such as transversely isotropic or isotropic, orthorhombic models require an extended and more elaborated formulation that also involves more expensive computational processes. The acoustic assumption yields more efficient description of the orthorhombic wave equation that also provides a simplified representation for the orthorhombic dispersion relation. However, such representation is hampered by the sixth-order nature of the acoustic wave equation, as it also encompasses the contribution of shear waves. To reduce the computational cost of wavefield extrapolation in such media, I generate effective isotropic inhomogeneous models that are capable of reproducing the first-arrival kinematic aspects of the orthorhombic wavefield. First, in order to compute traveltimes in vertical orthorhombic media, I develop a stable, efficient and accurate algorithm based on the fast marching method. The derived orthorhombic acoustic dispersion relation, unlike the isotropic or transversely isotropic one, is represented by a sixth order polynomial equation that includes the fastest solution corresponding to outgoing P-waves in acoustic media. The effective velocity models are then computed by evaluating the traveltime gradients of the orthorhombic traveltime solution, which is done by explicitly solving the isotropic eikonal equation for the corresponding inhomogeneous isotropic velocity field. The inverted effective velocity fields are source dependent and produce equivalent first-arrival kinematic descriptions of wave propagation in orthorhombic media. I extrapolate wavefields in these isotropic effective velocity models using the more efficient isotropic operator, and the results compare well, especially kinematically, with those obtained from the more expensive anisotropic extrapolator.

This thesis addresses the efficiency improvement of seismic wave modeling and migration in anisotropic media. This improvement becomes crucial in practice as the process of imaging complex geological structures of the Earth's subsurface requires modeling and migration as building blocks. The challenge comes from two aspects. First, the underlying governing equations for seismic wave propagation in anisotropic media are far more complicated than that in isotropic media which demand higher computational costs to solve. Second, the usage of whole prestack seismic data still remains a burden considering its storage volume and the existing wave equation solvers. In this thesis, I develop two approaches to tackle the challenges. In the first part, I adopt the concept of prestack exploding reflector model to handle the whole prestack data and bridge the data space directly to image space in a single kernel. I formulate the extrapolation operator in a two-way fashion to remove he restriction on directions that waves propagate. I also develop a generic method for phase velocity evaluation within anisotropic media used in this extrapolation kernel. The proposed method provides a tool for generating prestack images without wavefield cross correlations. In the second part of this thesis, I approximate the anisotropic models using effective isotropic models. The wave phenomena in these effective models match that in anisotropic models both kinematically and dynamically. I obtain the effective models through equating eikonal equations and transport equations of anisotropic and isotropic models, thereby in the high frequency asymptotic approximation sense. The wavefields extrapolation costs are thus reduced using isotropic wave equation solvers while the anisotropic effects are maintained through this approach. I benchmark the two proposed methods using synthetic datasets. Tests on anisotropic Marmousi model and anisotropic BP2007 model demonstrate the applicability of my approaches.

MPM / Oliver Tambo Institute of Governance and Policy Studies

Magister Administrationis - MAdmin / Training in the South African public service is a highly needed factor, especially in the process of transformation. In the "rationalisation" of the public service, training cannot be conducted in isolation. At the same time training should be seen as a process not an event. Empowering employees with skills and knowledge is vital because this could ensure that the goals of the organisation are attained. As Andrews (1988) argues, training is a systematic process of altering behaviour, knowledge and motivation of employees in order to increase organisational goal achievement. The study focuses on the South African Parliament's Human Resource Department. Training in this department needs to be examined or evaluated for four main reasons. These are: The non-existence of a training policy, lack of funds, non-existence of trainers and poor evaluation

"The approach of the paper is: to explore and identify several problems common to secondary school programs throughout our country, with particular attention to Florida; to present several practices that are common to the Cooperative Education Clubs of Florida; and to suggest their application in other areas of the total school program to meet needs of students enrolled in any curriculum in a better manner"--Introduction. / "August, 1962." / Typescript. / "Submitted to the Graduate School of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science." / Advisor: Marian W. Black, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 49-51).

Magister Educationis - MEd / This research investigated how grade 7 learners dealt with introductory aspects of integers when they are introduced through a temperature model. In particular, the study analysed the effect of an intentional teaching strategy on learners’ engagement with integers. The idea of combining an intentional teaching strategy with the introduction of integers in grade 7 learners using a temperature model is what makes this study unique. A qualitative study was adopted. Data was collected by means of audio and video and also by means of learners’ completed worksheets. The results of the study indicate that the majority of learners could recognise, compare and order integers. It is recommended that the application of intentional teaching with a temperature model is a viable strategy to introduce grade 7 learners to integers.

No abstract available. / Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Mercantile Law / unrestricted

Current procedures for estimating effective length factors for web-tapered members rely heavily on the use of charts and graphs. This makes them difficult to implement using a computer. In addition, they are often based on unrealistic assumptions. In cases where these assumptions are not satisfied, design errors may result. This investigation proposes a modification to an effective length factor expression developed by Lui (1992). This modification allows the expression to be applied to web-tapered members with good accuracy. A derivation of the proposed expression is presented, and the results obtained by applying the expression to a range of frames are compared to the results obtained from second-order finite element analyses. Calculations involved in using the expression are presented. / Master of Science