<p> This study sought to address the challenge of interesting university professors in adopting more deliberate and integrated approaches to course design through a multi-case study of five professors in the liberal arts at a top-tier research university. Professors watched video-recorded interviews with five of their own past students who were graduates of the university. The researcher interviewed the professors before and after they viewed the alumni feedback. Professors were asked to reflect on what most surprised and concerned them in the interviews and if and how they were inclined or disinclined to alter their courses. Professors were also asked to compare feedback from alumni to feedback from students. Central findings related to the research questions were that: (a) professors&rsquo; views of their course and course design changed after receiving feedback from their alumni; (b) professors perceived a need to alter their course design when they received surprising and concerning feedback from alumni; (c) but, feedback needed to be sufficiently concerning for professors to be inclined to alter their course designs, and (d) even then, several factors disinclined professors to follow through on changes. These factors opposing change include professors&rsquo; recollections of their college experiences, lack of pedagogical and course design knowledge, and university disincentives to focus on teaching. Professors appreciated hearing from the alumni because alumni had longer-term and more real world perspective than current students and were unconcerned about grades. Professors uniformly disliked, and to a great extent disregarded, student feedback from course evaluations because surveys are anonymous and lack context about who is making a comment and why. In contrast, the alumni interviews allowed professors to see and hear personalized feedback that provided context for which individual said what. Several additional findings emerged from the research. These were: (a) professors developed courses based on limited understanding of what students retained in a course; (b) professors relied considerably on their own educational experiences and on trial and error in creating courses and in their teaching; and (c) professors&rsquo; dislike of course evaluations made them skeptical of student feedback. These findings have potential significance for professors, faculty developers, universities, and students because they suggest an avenue for impacting faculty attitudes about their course design by planting seeds of curiosity about the link between design and course impact. Findings also support the use of alumni interviews as a tool for collecting feedback and existing evidence that faculty development efforts are best when they are personal, context-specific, and endure over time. Because this was a small exploratory study, repeating the alumni interview approach with more faculty and alumni is recommended.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to analyze the general education faculty members&rsquo; perspectives on the internationalization of the general education curriculum in Mississippi community colleges. The participants in this study included all full-time instructors of general education courses at 2 of the 15 public community colleges in the state of Mississippi. The study used a survey <i>Analysis of Faculty Perception: Factors Affecting the Internationalization of General Education Curriculum in Mississippi Community Colleges</i> to examine factors that included a) importance of internationalization, b) institutional success with internationalization efforts and c) importance and existence of administrative support for internationalization. No studies were found that analyze nor investigate the importance of internationalizing the general education curriculum in Mississippi community colleges. Quantitative data were collected using Survey Monkey online instrument that was sent to full-time general education faculty members teaching at the 2 community colleges in the State of Mississippi. The data were analyzed using Kruskal-Wallis Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Mann-Whitney U Test tables and descriptive statistics were reported. </p><p> Results showed that a large number of the educators recognized the need for a partner institution in another country. Many of them also recommended that there should be a designated administrative office to coordinate and support international education initiatives, and they also saw the need for their college to have a plan designed to increase international/global understanding among students and to have general education courses with an international/global focus available to all students. Some differences in perceptions were observed in the teachers&rsquo; perceptions of internationalization based on years worked in higher education, country of birth, gender, international experience, and level of education. The educators believed that internationalization activities on their campus was a positive movement towards expanding their offerings to students by helping to develop an educational environment where they can become more globally competitive and more professionally effective. Many of the educators in this study support the expansion of programs that support study abroad or student exchange programs.</p>

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Commonly, teacher evaluations function as summative appraisal mechanisms of teacher performance and effectiveness, as accountability measures and assurances of quality instruction to educational stakeholders. Recently, greater interest in the potential for evaluations to contribute to improvements in teaching and learning has emerged. The use of professional teaching standards and evaluation rubrics represents a significant advance in the design of evaluation tools and procedures. Continuing implementation challenges however, means the potential for evaluations to notably enhance teachers’ professional development is far from realized within many educational contexts. The traditional focus on the individual within evaluations also fails to recognize the collaborative work of teaching teams and to capitalize on the potential of teachers to support improvement in each other’s practice. This inquiry explored the circumstances under which evaluations might promote professional development at the individual level and within teaching teams. The study is located within an international school, which utilizes the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program curriculum. The research question driving the inquiry was; how can teachers and principals within IB PYP schools achieve a focus on professional development and systematic learning within teacher evaluation? An Instructional Rounds protocol was employed to promote a focus on professional development within this qualitative case study. Fullan’s Change Theory guided the implementation and analysis of change in the form and function of evaluations within the school. Findings suggest viable and valuable professional learning can be incorporated into and supported during evaluations. A structured process, incorporating greater frequency of feedback, check-ins, dialogue and collaborative work between supervisors and teachers is needed to produce the monitoring mechanism and sustained gentle pressure necessary to support on-going professional learning. Redefining and broadening concepts of improvement, of involved leadership and professional development is important. Limited focus on specific goals and connecting peers with similar goals encourages commitment to improvement efforts.

Background: Patient evaluation of primary health care (PHC) as a recognised means of obtaining important information for quality improvement can be enhanced with the availability and use of acceptable, reliable and valid questionnaires. This research reports the development and validation of the patients' evaluation scale (PES) for assessment of the quality of primary health care in Nigeria. Methods: Mixed methods design was used to develop and validate items, response scale and domains in the Patients' Evaluation Scale. Items were derived from literature review and content analysis of interviews with patients. Face and content validity were established with primary health care experts and patients while quantitative pilots were conducted to determine questionnaire's acceptability across groups and appropriate response format. The conduct of a large multi-centre psychometric validation survey was used to determine the internal structure (exploratory factor analysis), reliability (internal consistency), construct, criterion and discriminative validities (Pearson's correlation coefficient, structural equation modelling using regression equation method) and acceptability (scale and item response pattern) of the questionnaire. The discriminatory properties were assessed by questionnaire's ability to differentiate population groups' scores in line with 'a priori' hypotheses. Results: The development resulted in the long and shortened forms of PES containing 27 and 18-items respectively. Both showed good indices for validity and acceptability among various population groups in Nigeria. PES-SF resulted from the deletion of items in PES that didn't meet recommended Eigen value < 1, factor loading < 0.5, item-total, item-domain correlation < 0.4 and item-item correlation within domains of < 0.2. PES-SF has Cronbach's alpha of 0.87 for entire questionnaire and 0.78, 0.79 and 0.81 respectively for the three domains (codenamed 'facility', 'organisation', and 'health care'). The three components solution from the Scree plot explained 56.6% of the total variance of perceived quality. Items correlated significantly higher with domain identified through factor analysis than with other domains. In line with 'a priori' hypothesis, scale and domains scores of PES-SF could differentiate population groups based on patients' clinical and socio-demographic characteristics. PES-SF scores also showed significant correlation with patient general satisfaction and likelihood of returning or recommending others to the PHC centres. Conclusion: The patient evaluation scale designed for exit assessment of patients' experiences with PHC in Nigeria shows good measurement properties. It will be useful to clinicians, researchers and policy makers for patient-focused quality improvement activities in Nigeria. Further research will involve translation to major Nigerian languages and to assess PES validity against observed quality criteria.

Since the early 2000s, Social Media has become part of the everyday activity of billions of people. Museums and galleries are part of this major cultural change - the largest museums attract millions of Social Media 'friends' and 'followers', and museums now use Social Media channels for marketing and audience engagement activities. Social Media has also become a more heavily-used source of data with which to investigate human behaviour. Therefore, this research investigated the potential uses of Social Media information to aid activities such as exhibition planning and development, or fundraising, in museums. Potential opportunities provided by the new Social Media platforms include the ability to capture data at high volume and then analyse them computationally. For instance, the links between entities on a Social Media platform can be analysed. Who follows who? Who created the content related to a specific event, and when? How did communication flow between people and organisations? The computerised analysis techniques used to answer such questions can generate statistics for measuring concepts such as the 'reach' of a message across a network (often equated simply with the potential size of the a message's audience) or the degree of 'engagement' with content (often a simple count of the number of responses, or the number of instances of communication between correspondents). Other computational analysis opportunities related to Social Media rely upon various Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques; for example indexing content and counting term frequency, or using lexicons or online knowledge bases to relate content to concepts. Museums, galleries and other cultural organisations have known for some time, however, that simple quantifications of their audiences (the number of tickets sold for an exhibition, for example), while certainly providing indications of an event's success, do not tell the whole story. While it is important to know that thousands of people have visited an exhibition, it is also part of a museum's remit to inspire the audience, too. A budding world-class artist or ground-breaking engineer could have been one of the thousands in attendance, and the exhibition in question could have been key to the development of their artistic or technical ideas. It is potentially helpful to museums and galleries to know when they have inspired members of their audience, and to be able to tell convincing stories about instances of inspiration, if their full value to society is to be judged. This research, undertaken in participation with two museums, investigated the feasibility of using new data sources from Social Media to capture potential expressions of inspiration made by visitors. With a background in IT systems development, the researcher developed three prototype systems during three cycles of Action Research, and used them to collect and analyse data from the Twitter Social Media platform. This work had two outcomes: firstly, prototyping enabled investigation of the technical constraints of extracting data from a Social Media platform (Twitter), and the computing processes used to analyse that data. Secondly, and more importantly, the prototypes were used to assess potential changes to the work of museum staff information about events visited and experienced by visitors was synthesised, then investigated, discussed and evaluated with the collaborative partners, in order to assess the meaning and value of such information for them. Could the museums use the information in their event and exhibition planning? How might it fit in with event evaluation? Was it clear to the museum what the information meant? What were the risks of misinterpretation? The research made several contributions. Firstly, the research developed a definition of inspiration that resonated with museum staff. While this definition was similar to the definition of 'engagement' from the marketing literature, one difference was an emphasis upon creativity. The second set of contributions related to a deeper understanding of Social Media from museums' perspective, and included findings about how Social Media information could be used to segment current and potential audiences by 'special interest', and find potential expressions of creativity and innovation in the audience's responses to museum activities. These findings also considered some of the pitfalls of working with data from Social Media, in particular the tendency of museum staff to use the information to confirm positive biases, and the often hidden biases caused by the mediating effects of the platforms from which the data came. The final major contribution was a holistic analysis of the ways in which Social Media information could be integrated into the work of a museum, by helping to plan and evaluate audience development and engagement. This aspect of the research also highlighted some of the dangers of an over-dependency upon individual Social Media platforms which was previously absent from the museums literature.

Business-IT alignment has been a top research topic for three decades now and consistently ranks high on CIO priorities and concerns. In spite of its seeming advantages, sustainable business-IT alignment remains elusive in practice. This can be attributed to the language and knowledge gaps which impede mutual understanding between business and IT stakeholders. It can also be attributed to the limitations imposed by approaching alignment solely from a strategic perspective. This thesis argues for an ontology-based framework that bridges the language and knowledge gaps through closer interaction between business and IT stakeholders throughout the software development and project management lifecycles, especially at the requirements engineering stage. Attempts at achieving sustainable business-IT alignment predominantly focus on strategic alignment and have not been successful for various reasons. Firstly, driving down alignment initiatives to the operational and tactical levels is challenging. Secondly, it is difficult to operationalize the metrics used for evaluating alignment maturity at strategic levels. These limitations are less pronounced at the functional levels of an organization. It is at these levels that business strategies are executed and interaction between business and IT personnel is most frequent. The interaction between business and IT stakeholders in the execution of IT projects presents an opportunity that can be leveraged to drive alignment maturity. The proposed framework is discussed in terms of its underpinning hypotheses, workflows, tool design and implementation, its use with a third party framework and tool. Antecedents to operational and tactical alignment such as quality, reuse, communication, learning, and shared understanding, are proposed as a practical means of achieving sustainable alignment maturity. The framework is applied to real world, business-critical projects in a top global financial services organization and validated using descriptive statistical analysis and structural equation modelling techniques. Contributions made through the study are highlighted. This includes the Alignment Forces Model which unifies the proposed framework and its support tool within software development and project management lifecycles. The Alignment Forces model and how it can be applied in practice is presented. Results of the quantitative data analyses indicate support for the arguments for the framework towards improving business-IT alignment, however with some limitations. Results also indicate support for the hypotheses for the antecedents to sustainable alignment maturity at lower organizational levels put forward. Finally, suggestions on furthering the study, addressing its limitations, and refining the framework and tool are articulated.

The primary purpose of this study is to examine the degree to which participatory approaches are implemented in evaluations of development programs and projects, because several scholars have researched the benefits of including participatory approaches. This is studied through a case study of Sida’s evaluations. As Sida claims to be committed to implementing participatory approaches, two evaluations were chosen based on a least likely logic. A typology consisting of four levels of participation is used to determine to which degree a participatory approach is implemented in the evaluation. The main finding of the analysis of the two evaluations is that the level of participation in the two evaluations is on an instrumental level, i.e. the second lowest level in the typology. Because of this, it is concluded that Sida’s evaluations have at least an instrumental level of participation.

The aim of this diploma thesis "Use of the Assessment Center method for the evaluation and personal? development of workers in education" is to bring insight into the issue of working with human resources in contemporary companies and furthermore to research opportunities of using these experiences in the field of education. Assessment centre is known as the specific and effective method of evaluation of employees, when more workers are being evaluated, while more evaluators are present at the same time. Contribution of this work can be seen in presentation and reflection of the method as a tool of selection, evaluation and staff development in the field of education. In the theoretical part the application of method is characterized in the context of needs and conditions of the educational field. The empirical part consists of examination in utilization of the method on specific model of developing Assessment centre under the specific conditions of particular school. Qualitative research describes elaboration, realization, and evaluation of a potential of the adapted model. It provides a foundation for the subsequent verification of the effectiveness of the method.

Many billions of dollars each year are spent in pursuit of economic and social development goals. The field of program evaluation aims to measure the efficacy of these programs and allocate funds to achieve optimal results. However, current research on program design and evaluation tends to focus on determining causality through complex statistical methods, neglecting intermediate measures of data, such as network metrics. Similarly, research in computational social science has focused on generating hypotheses and validating theory rather than economic development applications. This thesis develops a novel technique for using computational social science to design and evaluate social and economic programs. A framework for program design and evaluation using network metrics is presented, along with two case studies that illustrate the use of this technique. In the first, we consider Start-Up Chile, an economic development program whose goal is to foster networks between Chileans and international entrepreneurs, using network metrics to evaluate its ability to facilitate connection between Chilean and non- Chilean entrepreneurs. Second, an agent-based model for designing entrepreneurial incubators is developed, with novel conclusions for more efficient design of economic development programs.