M.Ed. (Curriculum Studies) / The aim of this dissertation is focused on the composition of funded guideliness for effective teacher evaluation. A literature study is undertaken in this dissertation to gain background on the problematic nature of teacher evaluation. Emphasis is placed on: * the essential aspects of teacher evaluation * the negative symptoms of teacher evaluation * the difficulties (bottle-neck) in teacher evaluation, and * the characteristics of unsuccessful teacher evaluation. The aim of this research is not to focus on the global aspects of teacher evaluation, but to focus on the problematic nature that surrounds teacher evaluation. The literature study is of great importance for this study, because it creates the basis for the empirical study. The empirical study focuses on the meaningfulness of evaluation for the teacher as currently implemented in the school, and also to identify the difficulties in the evaluation practice. Both aspects are integrated in the guidelines for teacher evaluation, contribute to a positive attitude and teacher evaluation.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-118).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-118).

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) can include multiple technologies and applications combined to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the transportation system or network. These applications are deployed with the anticipation that the desired project goals and objectives established by multiple stakeholders will be achieved. Once a system is deployed, the project goals and objectives should be evaluated. The evaluation can provide both quantitative and qualitative feedback to assess the impacts associated with the investment in building, designing and implementing these systems. This research includes a methodology to evaluate large scale ITS infrastructure projects using the Interstate 91 (I-91) ITS Project as a case study. The methodology developed includes a review of literature, a clear definition of project goals, objectives and intended outcomes, the development of hypotheses for project outcomes, specific measures of effectiveness, pre and post-data collection methods and criterion to measure the success rate of achieving the intended objective. The following recommendations should be considered by the I-91 ITS Project Team as next steps in conducting an ITS evaluation; identify and prioritize the goals and objective areas, develop a multi-phase evaluation approach, identify existing data sources of pre-deployment data, identify missing data requirements and document the existing communication protocol prior to deployment. Such a large scale evaluation requires an extensive level of effort, and priority should be given to developing a multi-phase approach. This research may be also used towards the development of an Evaluation Plan which is recommended as a component of the six step process outlined in the Evaluation Guidelines, from the United States Department of Transportation.

This work supports the thesis that sound quantitative evaluation for spam filters leads to substantial improvement in the classification of email. To this end, new laboratory testing methods and datasets are introduced, and evidence is presented that their adoption at Text REtrieval Conference (TREC)and elsewhere has led to an improvement in state of the art spam filtering. While many of these improvements have been discovered by others, the best-performing method known at this time -- spam filter fusion -- was demonstrated by the author. This work describes four principal dimensions of spam filter evaluation methodology and spam filter improvement. An initial study investigates the application of twelve open-source filter configurations in a laboratory environment, using a stream of 50,000 messages captured from a single recipient over eight months. The study measures the impact of user feedback and on-line learning on filter performance using methodology and measures which were released to the research community as the TREC Spam Filter Evaluation Toolkit. The toolkit was used as the basis of the TREC Spam Track, which the author co-founded with Cormack. The Spam Track, in addition to evaluating a new application (email spam), addressed the issue of testing systems on both private and public data. While streams of private messages are most realistic, they are not easy to come by and cannot be shared with the research community as archival benchmarks. Using the toolkit, participant filters were evaluated on both, and the differences found not to substantially confound evaluation; as a result, public corpora were validated as research tools. Over the course of TREC and similar evaluation efforts, a dozen or more archival benchmarks -- some private and some public -- have become available. The toolkit and methodology have spawned improvements in the state of the art every year since its deployment in 2005. In 2005, 2006, and 2007, the spam track yielded new best-performing systems based on sequential compression models, orthogonal sparse bigram features, logistic regression and support vector machines. Using the TREC participant filters, we develop and demonstrate methods for on-line filter fusion that outperform all other reported on-line personal spam filters.

This work supports the thesis that sound quantitative evaluation for spam filters leads to substantial improvement in the classification of email. To this end, new laboratory testing methods and datasets are introduced, and evidence is presented that their adoption at Text REtrieval Conference (TREC)and elsewhere has led to an improvement in state of the art spam filtering. While many of these improvements have been discovered by others, the best-performing method known at this time -- spam filter fusion -- was demonstrated by the author. This work describes four principal dimensions of spam filter evaluation methodology and spam filter improvement. An initial study investigates the application of twelve open-source filter configurations in a laboratory environment, using a stream of 50,000 messages captured from a single recipient over eight months. The study measures the impact of user feedback and on-line learning on filter performance using methodology and measures which were released to the research community as the TREC Spam Filter Evaluation Toolkit. The toolkit was used as the basis of the TREC Spam Track, which the author co-founded with Cormack. The Spam Track, in addition to evaluating a new application (email spam), addressed the issue of testing systems on both private and public data. While streams of private messages are most realistic, they are not easy to come by and cannot be shared with the research community as archival benchmarks. Using the toolkit, participant filters were evaluated on both, and the differences found not to substantially confound evaluation; as a result, public corpora were validated as research tools. Over the course of TREC and similar evaluation efforts, a dozen or more archival benchmarks -- some private and some public -- have become available. The toolkit and methodology have spawned improvements in the state of the art every year since its deployment in 2005. In 2005, 2006, and 2007, the spam track yielded new best-performing systems based on sequential compression models, orthogonal sparse bigram features, logistic regression and support vector machines. Using the TREC participant filters, we develop and demonstrate methods for on-line filter fusion that outperform all other reported on-line personal spam filters.

Escalation of commitment to failing investments is considered to be representative of biased forms of decision-making which may result in unproductive consequences. Decision makers adopt investment courses of action in initial conditions of uncertainty, which subsequently appear to lead to failure. When confronted with the prospect of their decisions producing losses, they commit decision errors thus escalating their commitment to their original courses of action. Several theories with rational and irrational antecedents have been developed in the literature to explain the escalation phenomenon. Fundamental theoretical differences are associated with the origin of the concept. Escalation of commitment was conceived in the decision theory context of the problem of resource allocation under uncertainty conditions. This thesis describes the resource allocation problem in order to identify and explain associated characteristics. Explanations of these characteristics reveal several problems: there are no decision rules available to handle uncertainty; decision makers consistently violate the requirements for rationality and rational economic decision making; individual utility maximization is divorced from the business objective of profit maximisation and also involves taking increased risks when there is an expectation that investment losses will be recovered; there are several criteria for and methods of investment evaluation which are computationally and analytically difficult to apply; and whether a decision error has been made is indeterminate with some investment projects whose success or failure cannot be determined until after project completion. These problems lead to the conclusion that the determination of the success or failure of an investment decision may depend on the valuation methodology selected. In this respect it is argued that investment decisions undertaken in public organisations should be evaluated using methodologies developed to measure social benefits and costs because calculations of private rates of return provide misleading assessments. Research on the escalation phenomenon is dominated by a psychological perspective, which obtains its findings from extensive investigation of individuals in controlled experimental laboratory conditions. The experimental research has identified personal pre-dispositional, social and situational influences, which contribute to escalation and de-escalation of commitment. The major research focus has resulted in two theoretical explanations for escalation of commitment. These derive from descriptive cognitive motivational theories concerned with expectancy, that encourage rational decision making and dissonance, which in turn produce irrational self justification based decisions. An alternative research focus favours explanations from prospect theory. Research, critical of the psychological explanations favours rational explanations derived from the normative theory of expected utility, which encourages individual self-interested behaviour. This thesis is concerned with explaining escalation of commitment in organisations. This necessarily involves adopting an interdisciplinary perspective. This thesis examines two world expositions, Expo 86 and Expo 88. World expositions are unusual government events whose principal purpose is to celebrate human achievements. Expo 86 was held to celebrate Vancouver’s centenary. Expo 88 was held to celebrate Australia’s bicentennial. They were not designed for their potential profitability. To justify the expenditures involved other objectives are attached to the celebratory purpose. These usually are associated with urban renewal and economic development. They are unorthodox investment projects. They involve long lead times of capital expenditure followed by short operating periods of six months or less, after which time most of the capital improvements are either disposed of or demolished. Expo 86 incurred significant financial losses and was considered an escalation prototype. It became a case study used to develop a generalized theoretical model of escalation. The model specifies how initially formulated rational decisions are replaced progressively by decisions based on self-justification, which escalate commitment. Escalation is reinforced by psychological pre-dispositional, social and structural influences. The model is an extension of research findings from individual laboratory experiments. The thesis identifies several plausible alternative theoretical explanations for escalation in organisations. These involve emotional commitment, social influences to conform to group norms, the possibilities for deviating from rational decision making principles in the presence of uncertainly and the agency theory problem which involves individuals pursuing their own rational self interests which are contrary to the objectives of an organisation. Expo 86 was directly linked to urban renewal objectives. The economic project and urban planning studies of Expo 86 concluded that the event successfully achieved the urban development objectives using social cost benefit analysis as the criterion of evaluation. These objectives were rationally conceived and executed. As a result of the examination, the thesis explores the problems associated with investment projects having multiple objectives, looks at how rational explanations can be accommodated in the theoretical model and questions whether calculations of accounting negative rates of return should be the criteria for evaluation and the determinant of whether Expo 86 qualified as a prototypical example of escalation in organisations. The analysis of Expo 88 reinforced these concerns. A longitudinal dimension was adopted in the case study. This enabled the origins of the event to be explored, the objectives to be identified and the project to be evaluated using various private and public investment criteria. Expo 88 qualified as a failed private investment project on all but one of the financial investment criteria employed. The evaluation of Expo 88 as a public investment project produced social benefits and economic impacts in excess of social costs. Expo 88 was conceived by influential individuals who promoted the initiative for an exposition on the basis that its staging would be publicly and personally beneficial. The project was associated with multiple objectives other than its celebratory purpose that included tourism development and urban renewal from which the public was expected to benefit and which promoters believed justified the event. The principal decision makers were not directly influenced by profitability considerations because information had been provided during the planning phase, which indicated that the project would produce financial losses. Because of public pronouncements it became politically necessary to include the profitability of the project as an objective. Various costly and deceptive measures were adopted in order to generate an impression of profitability. At the same time success was promoted publicly and successfully, not in terms of its profitability, but in terms of attendance figures. As a result of the analyses, the theoretical model was modified by incorporating rational motives into the original structure. Decision makers were driven by rational motives over the life of the projects. In the case of Expo 88 these rational motives derived from agency theory relationships and the pursuit of objectives concerned with economic development, celebration and political recognition. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the contributions and limitations of the research. The contributions involve modifications to the theoretical model to reflect the importance of rational motives in the decision making process, generalisation of the causes of escalation in organisations in various contingent circumstances and the impact that multiple project objectives and methodological problems concerned with evaluation criteria have on theory development. The major limitation relates to the selection of public organisations engaged in unorthodox investment projects as inappropriate representatives to examine the escalation phenomenon.

M.Ed. (Educational Management) / Mokgalane (Mokone, 1999: 7) asserts that the implementation of the new PPN in 1998 represented different things to different people. For educators affected by the process, it represented a life of uncertainty, possibilities of being shifted from one school to another and a great number of sad stories of an uncertain future in education. However, for educator unions and the government, it represented the opportunity to redress past injustices by equitably and fairly distributing educational human resources. The motivation for the new PPN thus appears to have been political and not based on educational criteria — a situation that would be untenable. Although the implementation of the new PPN had good objectives in principle, namely to provide a fair basis for the staffing of schools to redress the injustices of the past, it directly and indirectly affected the educators' work values, namely security, good working conditions, a reasonable learner-educator ratio, good interpersonal relations, opportunities for advancement, a reasonable work load, the status of the teaching profession, good quality supervision, support by educational authorities, and good mental and physical health. During the implementation of the new PPN, newly appointed educators were appointed on a month-to-month basis, which meant their appointment was temporary. Even permanently appointed educators were not certain about their future in their schools because they could be moved whenever the new PPN indicated that some of them had to be declared in excess and had to be redeployed. In addition workloads had to increase in schools where the number of allocated educator posts decreased. The result of this was that relations between affected educators and principals became strained. Further to this teacher salaries could not increase reasonably because of the emphasis on cutting departmental expenditure. Affected educators felt the Department of Education did not have their interests at heart. All these factors reduced the work satisfaction of educators with the result that many teachers engaged in routinised defensive teaching to compensate for the lack of support, and to avoid criticism and possible termination because they did not have the necessary skills to perform alternative jobs (Steyn & Van Wyk, 1999:39; Weisberg 1994: 125). They were less dependable, less committed and often disloyal to the Department (Byars & Rue, 2000:304). This was indicated by, among other things, high rates of turnover, absenteeism, tardiness, excessive stress, burnout, and late coming among educators.

Distributional Semantic Models are one of the possible answers produced in (computational) semantics to the question of what the meaning of a word is. The distributional semantic answer to this question is a usage-based one, as distributional semantics models (henceforth, DSMs) are employed to produce semantic representations of words from co-occurrence patterns in texts or documents. DSMs have proven to be useful in many applications in the domains of Natural Language Processing. Despite this progress, however, a full understanding of the different parameters governing a DSM and their influence on model performance (which, in fact, is also important for getting a better linguistic understanding of neural word embeddings) has not been achieved yet. This is precisely the goal of this dissertation. Taken together, the experiments presented in this thesis represent (to the best of our knowledge) the largest-scope study in which window and syntax-based DSMs have been tested in all parameter settings. As a further contribution, the thesis proposes a novel methodology for the interpretation of evaluation results: we employ linear regression as a statistical tool to understand the impact of different parameters on model performance. In this way, we achieve a solid understanding of the influence of specific parameters and parameter interactions on DSM performance, which can inform the selection of DSM settings that are robust to overfitting. This thesis has a strong focus on cognitive data, that is, on DSM parameters that lend themselves to a cognitive interpretation and on evaluation tasks in which DSMs are tested in their capability of mirroring speakers’ behavior in psychological tasks (semantic priming and free associations). One of the most important contributions of this thesis is the consistent finding that neighbor rank (i.e., the rank of a word among the distributional neighbors of a target) is a better indicator of semantic similarity/relatedness than the distance in the semantic space, which is commonly used in the literature. The cognitive interpretation of this result is straightforward: neighbor rank, which is evaluated systematically for the first time in this thesis, is able to capture asymmetry in the relation between two words, while distance metrics, commonly employed in distributional semantics, are symmetric.

This diploma thesis deals with the assessment of the effectiveness of the information system in business plant RH + and the proposal of changes. Part of the work is discussed in the theoretical background, aimed at explaining the basic concepts used in the thesis. Analysis of the current state of the information system in the selected company and an assessment of its effectiveness. Input data will be obtained using a questionnaire survey. The output of the analysis is a set of proposals that help minimize risks and improve efficiency. The relevant proposals will include the costs necessary to achieve them.