In this thesis, we study how and to what extent a self-organized mobile robot flock can be guided by informing some of the robots within the flock about a preferred direction of motion. Specifically, we extend a flocking behavior that was shown to maneuver a swarm of mobile robots as a cohesive group in free space, avoiding obstacles. In its original form, this behavior does not have a preferred direction and the flock would wander aimlessly. In this study, we incorporate a preference for a goal direction in some of the robots. These informed robots do not signal that they are informed (a.k.a. unacknowledged leadership) and instead guide the swarm by their tendency to move in the desired direction. Through experimental results with physical and simulated robots we show that the self-organized flocking of a robot swarm can be effectively guided by an informed minority of the flock. We evaluate the system using a number of quantitative metrics: First, we propose to use the mutual information metric from Information Theory as a dynamical measure of the information exchange. Then, we discuss the accuracy metric from directional statistics and size of the largest cluster as the measures of system performance. Using these metrics, we perform analyses from two points of views: In the transient analyses, we demonstrate the information exchange between the robots as the time advances, and the increase in the accuracy of the flock when the conditions are suitable for an adequate amount of information exchange. In the steady state analyses, we investigate the interdependent effects of the size of the flock in terms of the robots in it, the ratio of informed robots in the flock over the total flock size, the weight of the direction preference behavior, and the noise in the system.

This study aimed to comparatively examine school management practices in the US and Turkey in light of the two distinct administrative paradigms:Anglo-Saxon and Napoleonic traditions. In this study, a comparative case study method was used. The study was conducted in a basic education school (grades 1-8) in Ankara, Turkey, and in an elementary school (K-5) in Madison, the capital city of the state of Wisconsn, US. The sample contained 13 teachers and 4 administrators in the Turkish case, and 10 teachers and 1 school principal in the US case. Data were collected through interviews, observations, and written document analysis. Findings revealed that at the Turkish school, school management practices were not carried out effectively mainly due to the centralized education system, poor physical conditions of the school, lack of participatory and collaborative understanding of the staff members, lack of communication among the staff and limited school budgeting. On the other hand, the management practices in the American school were implemented successfull owing mainly to the school&#039 / s embedded decentralized structure, participatory and collaborative understanding among the school staff, effective communication strategies of the principal, and various options of in-service training offered for the school staff.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the leadership decision making process associated with pursuing innovative educational programs. The study investigated the experiences of leaders involved in pursuing Tech Prep Demonstration Project grants at two early-innovator California community colleges. A qualitative investigation was conducted utilizing descriptive case study methodologies. The researcher conducted focused interviews with individuals in leadership positions at the time the decision to pursue a Tech Prep Demonstration Project grant was made at these two community colleges. The study was guided by a data-analysis spiral. The data analysis spiral enabled the researcher to organize and examine large amounts of data in a systematic fashion. The study found that the decision-making process was facilitated by eight factors: (a) Environmental scanning by a designated person or by middle management; (b) preexisting intersegmental long term relationships with key individuals outside their institution; (c) prior knowledge of a related innovation; (d) personal and professional experience and frustration with a lack of educational options for K-12 students; (e) educational values that aligned with the innovation being pursued; (f) preexisting structures that allowed leaders to expand existing programming rather than to initiate new programming; (g) early reservations and challenges; and (h) post decision-making issues. These factors each played a large part in defining whether an environment in which innovations are considered exists in certain community colleges, as well as in K-12 schools. The community college leaders who took part in this decision making process had a great deal of professional experience to build upon. They used that experience to form relationships with K-12 leaders, who became their partners in educational reform. These partnerships were made possible because the colleges possessed sufficient organizational slack, and utilized that slack to pursue innovative programming. An earlier federal policy, the Tech Prep component of the 1990 Carl Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act, may have had limited success in meeting its own goals, but produced the strong intersegmental relationships that the TPDP was built upon. In addition, the study confirmed the decision-making stages described by Rogers (2003) and defined a sixth stage, the "resolution stage," in which decision makers step back and take time to reflect on the innovation itself and the process used to make the decision to implement or not implement the innovation, as well as correcting early assumptions that proved to be false. The resolution stage provided leaders with time to step back and reflect on their original goals and on the progress of the innovation in order to make course corrections as necessary.