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9 pp. / When we go to the grocery store it is a fairly easy task to select and purchase nutritious meals. A readily available, predictable food supply is conveniently organized and displayed in the aisles. The nutritional composition of most foods is clearly labeled so you can immediately know what nutrients (and perhaps, toxins) you will be consuming. In contrast, rangeland animals live in a world where nutrients and toxins are constantly changing across space and time. For example, there may be 10s to 100s of plant species growing on a single acre, and each plant can differ widely in the kinds and amounts of nutrients and toxins it offers to free-ranging herbivores. Even at the level of the individual plant, plant parts vary in their concentration of nutrients and toxins; leaves, stems, and flowers, all differ in the kinds and amounts of nutrients and toxins they contain. Nutrient and toxin content of the same plant species can also vary depending on where it grows (in the sun vs. shade, on a wet vs. dry site, on a fertile vs. infertile site, etc.). Mother Nature can also drastically alter foraging environments as a result of natural disasters like floods, fires, or droughts. Wild animals may find themselves in unfamiliar environments during their natural migration patterns. Range and wildlife management practices can also place wild and domestic herbivores in unfamiliar environments via relocation and reintroduction programs or via grazing management practices. Despite all these challenges, rangeland herbivores are remarkably adept at selecting plants that meet their nutritional needs while largely avoiding plants that do not. The fact that animals preferentially select plant species that are more nutritious than what is available, on average, is strong evidence that animals are able to somehow detect nutrient and toxin levels in plants as they change across space and time. In this paper, we examine recent important discoveries that underscore the importance of learning as a critical mechanism which allows rangeland herbivores to survive in a world where the only constant is change (Provenza, 2003; www.behave.net).

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In today's changing society, companies need to work with continuous change and improvement to evolve with the market. It is therefore important for managers to learn how to manage teams because they are expected to streamline selected products or processes in the business. Employees and teams need to develop in line with the changing environment in this process feedback is a tool and an important pillar. Leaders must learn to manage and transform feedback into something useful. The purpose of this study was to create an understanding of how systems-based feedback in the form of employee surveys can be a support for the leader in team development. We wanted to identify relevant behaviors and actions of the leader that may increase the work with feedback. Further examined how the NPS method can assist in monitoring system-based feedback. In our theoretical framework we outline the theories that underpin the study, which lands in a self-constructed analysis model containing four themes; feedback process, the group becomes team, lead the team and employee input. To gain a deeper understanding of the different themes we chose to do a qualitative study in which we later interviewed six respondents from two different companies. Respondents gave us different insights into the use of feedback. This eventually resulted in six aspects that relate to behaviors and practices of how a leader can use and utilize system-based feedback, in the form of employee surveys.

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Syftet med studien är att undersöka ett konsultföretags interventionsmodell för grupputveckling ur ett konsultperspektiv respektive kundperspektiv. Detta görs för att ta reda på vilka strategier som kan användas för att arbeta med grupputveckling och för att undersöka dessa strategiers upplevda resultat. Studiens teoretiska referensram består av forskning inom grupputveckling. Susan Wheelans teori om hur effektiva team skapas ses som en grund för studien, där hennes 10 nycklar till produktivitet utgör kriterier för vad som kännetecknar högpresterande arbetsgrupper. Studiens empiriska material består av intervjuer med konsulter på konsultföretaget samt kunder till dem. Resultatet visar att majoriteten av kunderna upplever konsulternas strategier som framgångsrika och att de har fått ett förbättrat företagsklimat, främst i form av ett öppnare klimat mellan de anställda. Vidare visar resultatet att faktorer som berör det existentiella och personella har varit framträdande i konsulternas tillvägagångssätt. Resultatet visar även på att utvärdering av interventionen kan ses som ett utvecklingsområde, för att ur ett långsiktigt perspektiv kunna uttala sig om strategierna verkligen fungerar.

The research reported in this thesis investigated issues relating to the use of computer-assisted assessment in Higher Education through the design, implementation and evaluation of a computer-adaptive test (CAT) for the assessment of and provision of feedback to Computer Science undergraduates. The CAT developed for this research unobtrusively monitors the performance of students during a test, and then employs this information to adapt the sequence and level of difficulty of the questions to individual students. The information about each student performance obtained through the CAT is subsequently employed for the automated generation of feedback that is tailored to each individual student. In the first phase of the research, a total of twelve empirical studies were carried out in order to investigate issues related to the adaptive algorithm, stakeholders’ attitude, and validity and reliability of the approach. The CAT approach was found to be valid and reliable, and also effective at tailoring the level of difficulty of the test to the ability of individual students. The two main groups of stakeholders, students and academic staff, both exhibited a positive attitude towards the CAT approach and the user interface. The second phase of the research was concerned with the design, implementation and evaluation of an automated feedback prototype based on the CAT approach. Five empirical studies were conducted in order to assess stakeholders’ attitude towards the automated feedback, and its effectiveness at providing feedback on performance. It was found that both groups of stakeholders exhibited a positive attitude towards the feedback approach. Furthermore, it was found that the approach was effective at identifying the strengths and weaknesses of individual students, and at supporting the adaptive selection of learning resources that meet their educational needs. This work discusses the implications of the use of the CAT approach in Higher Education assessment. In addition, it demonstrates the ways in which the adaptive test generated by the CAT approach can be used to provide students with tailored feedback that is timely and useful.

This thesis explores the impact of peer feedback on two secondary level classrooms studying English as a foreign language in Taiwan. The effectiveness of teacher-led feedback has consistently been the focus of the relevant literature but relatively fewer studies have experimentally investigated the impact of peer-led feedback on learning. This research is based on the belief that the investigation of the process of peer-led feedback, as well as the effectiveness of peer-led correction, will enhance our understanding of learners’ communicative interactions. These data will allow us the opportunity to provide suggestions for successful second/foreign language learning. This study was conducted following a mixed-methods quasi-experimental design involving a variety of data collection and analysis techniques. Observations of peer-peer dialogues taken from a Year 7 and a Year 8 class were analysed using content analysis, in order to classify the types of peer feedback provided by the Year 7 and Year 8 learners. Pre-and post-measures, including English speaking tests, questionnaires, and checklists, were examined with non-parametric statistical tests used to explore any changes in relation to the learners’ speaking development after the quasi-experiment. Key findings included frequency and distribution of seven types of peer feedback, as used by the Year 7 and Year 8 learners, and the statistical results that revealed the differences between the pre-and post-measures. Among the seven types of peer feedback (translation, confirmation, completion, explicit indication, explicit correction, explanation and recasts), explicit correction and translation were the two techniques used most frequently by the learners. Post-test results indicated an improvement in the learners’ speaking performance. The results of pre- and post-questionnaires and pre- and post-checklists showed different levels of change in the learners’ self-evaluation of their own ability to speak English, as well as their attitudes towards corrective feedback. These results allow us to gain insight into the nature of peer interaction in communicative speaking activities as well as learners’ motives behind their feedback behaviours. Additionally, the results shed light on learners’ opinions towards corrective feedback that they received or provided in peer interaction. Further, the results yield a deepened understanding of impacts of peer feedback on L2 development by examining changes in learners’ speaking performance, self-confidence in speaking English and self-evaluation of their own ability to speak English after a peer-led correction treatment. In conclusion, the study suggests that adolescent learners are willing and able to provide each other with feedback in peer interaction. The feedback that they delivered successfully helps their peers to attend to form and has positive impacts on their peers’ English- speaking performance. Moreover, the study provides explanations for learners’ preference for certain types of feedback techniques, which hopefully helps to tackle the mismatch between teachers’ intentions and learners’ expectations of corrective feedback in the L2 classrooms.

The first stars, galaxies and black holes in the universe produced large quantities of ionising UV radiation; forming H II regions in the neutral gas before the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR). These ionisation fronts will have come into contact with overdensities in the surrounding Intergalactic Medium (IGM), including haloes which were in the process of collapse. Previous studies have shown that the feedback processes on these secondary haloes can either disrupt the gas, or induce further cooling from the formation of molecular hydrogen. The ionising source will eventually die and create a defunct H II region, which expands into the surrounding neutral IGM. Minihaloes at the edge of these defunct H II regions are particularly susceptible to positive feedback due to not having been photoevaporated like their counterparts further inside the ionised volume. In this thesis, numerical simulations of minihaloes at the edges of H II regions formed by the first luminous objects before the EoR are presented. A methodology of including secondary ionisations from high energy photons is also implemented into the radiation hydrodynamical code ZEUS-RT. The interaction of differing spectral index sources with minihaloes including secondary ionisation is discussed. The secondary ionisations show the greatest effect for hard spectral sources with a large fraction of high energy photons; where a decrease in photoheating and an increase in ionisation rate is found at the outer reaches of the ionisation front (I-front). The increased ionisation rate lowers the optical depth of the gas for subsequent photons, and thus reduces the trapping of I-fronts in high densities found in the minihalo cores. The ratio of the free electron fraction to the temperature in the core of the minihaloes is found to constrain the resulting evolution. A high ratio is correlated with the creation of molecular hydrogen, which can then induce further cooling and the collapse of the system.A large parameter suite of 3780 two-dimensional minihalo models utilising radiative hydrodynamical simulations with 12 species and a coupled reaction network, including H2 cooling, HD cooling, Lyman-Werner radiation and secondary ionisation is performed. The parameter space includes: the spectral index representing different sources such as quasars or galaxies, the mass of the minihaloes from 105 - 106 Mʘ, the redshift of ionisation from z ~ 10 - 30, and other factors which denote the position of the minihalo relative to the boundary of the H II region. Minihaloes with average core densities of n0 = 2 - 10 cm-3 show almost unanimous positive feedback, while the majority of minihaloes under this average density are disrupted. Minihaloes with core densities above this value generally would have collapsed in isolation anyway, but are found to not be delayed by the I-front. The H2 fraction in the minihalo gas is also increased in models with no blowout by factors between 2 - 100 times that of an isolated minihalo. This is especially significant for lower redshift, z ≤ 15, minihaloes. Finally, a parameter suite of larger 106 - 107 Mʘ minihaloes results in the creation of self-gravitating clumps of gas moving out of the dark matter potential. The gas core is compressed by the I-front, enriched with molecular hydrogen, and ejected by the pressure front after the source dies. These "baryon bullets" could be progenitors of primordial globular clusters found in the haloes of galaxies today. Properties such as old stellar populations and the lack of dark matter haloes can be explained by this radiative ejection method. The dynamical nature of these interacting systems and diversity of subsequent evolution suggest that minihaloes less than 108 Mʘ are important in the early formation history of the universe, and in determining the constraining parameters of the EoR. The feedback mechanisms investigated, and secondary ionisation physics, should be included in astrophysical simulations and analytical calculations determining the evolution of the universe at this critical epoch.