published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Science in Information Technology in Education

published_or_final_version / Community Medicine / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This study investigated the relationship between four models of student laptop computer use and three components of teacher instructional behavior: planning, implementation of instruction, and evaluation of instruction. The four models of use: full access, dispersed, class set, and mixed, represented the numerous ways teachers in public and private schools and school districts nationwide implemented student use of laptop computers. Teacher planning behavior was investigated with regard to time, frequency, complexity, difficulty, the need for revision, and use of technological resources and materials. Implementation of instruction was examined with regard to student grouping, instructional strategies, instructional content/subject matter, teacher and student roles, assignments and learning tasks, and instructional activities. The evaluation of instruction component was examined with regard to assessment tasks, grading, and assessment of homework. Using a researcher-designed questionnaire, data was gathered in a single-stage cross-sectional survey from 356 teachers working in 74 public and private schools nationwide. Results indicated models of student laptop computer use had differential effects on teacher instructional behaviors. On average, teachers found planning to be more arduous, but more collegial, especially in the mixed model. The full access and mixed models were more likely to advance a constructivist approach to teacher instructional behaviors with regard to implementation and evaluation of instruction. Results from this study had implications for future research. The effects of student laptop computer use on the full access and mixed models of use should be given further study with regard to the implementation and evaluation of instruction.

The problem of this investigation was concerned with the effects that a computer-assisted and managed learning program had on the test outcomes of college students enrolled in a basic communication course. The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of participation in a computer-assisted and managed learning on the test outcomes of college students enrolled in a basic communication course. In order to facilitate the experiment, four hypotheses were formulated: 1. There will be significant differences in the posttest scores among the three groups. More specifically (a) the computer-assisted and managed learning (CAML) group will have significantly higher posttest scores than the teacher-assisted learning (TAL) group and the control group. 2. Computer apprehension will be significantly lower for students assigned to the CAML program, than students assigned to the TAL or control groups. 3. Computer complexity will be significantly lower for students assigned to the CAML group, than the students assigned to the TAL or control groups. 4. Computer utility will be significantly higher for students assigned to the CAML group, than students assigned to the TAL or control groups. Two experimental and one control group was used in the study. The experimental groups consisted of CAML (computer-assisted and managed learning) and TAL (teacher assisted learning). The control group was not treated with assisted instruction or practice testing. There were significant differences found among the posttest scores of the three groups. Students assigned to the CAML and TAL groups did have significantly higher posttest scores than students assigned to the control group. Although there were observable differences in the posttest scores between CAML and TAL, the differences were not statistically significant. Computer apprehension was significantly lower for the CAML group than the TAL or Control groups. Computer complexity was significantly lower for CAML than the TAL or Control groups. Computer utility scores were higher in CAML than the TAL or Control groups. The data supported the hypotheses. Several recommendations were made. A computer assisted and managed learning program should be used as a supplemental instructional, review and testing method in communication. Further research should be conducted in order to design a computer final exam for the basic communication course for purposes of review and CLEP testing. In addition, more terminals need to be employed for maximum efficiency.

Background: The most commonly reported side effects experienced by breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy are fatigue, anxiety and depression. Alongside psychosocial difficulties, evidence suggests chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer is associated with perceived cognitive impairment and that which is objectively detected in domains of memory, attention, concentration and executive function. As these concerns are becoming more prominent, research has shifted towards managing these side effects and helping to improve overall quality of life and well-being of breast cancer patients and survivors. To our knowledge, intervention studies have not yet considered physical activity as a potential for maintaining cognitive difficulties in breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Physical activity interventions are reported to be effective in alleviating emotional distress and fatigue in those with breast cancer. It has also been reported to improve cognitive functioning in the elderly, in those suffering with dementia and in children. It is proposed that physical activity could also help to manage cognitive impairment in female breast cancer patients and improve levels of psychosocial functioning. The aim of this PhD research was to implement a home-based, self-managed, physical activity intervention to alleviate cognitive and psychosocial difficulties experienced by female breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. The intervention was designed using goal setting techniques enabling patients to self-manage their walking schedules and minimise input from NHS staff. Method: The randomised controlled trial compared a home-based, self-managed walking intervention to usual care alone among breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy. Fifty participants were randomised to either the intervention group (n=25), receiving 12 weeks of moderate intensity walking, or the control group (n=25) mid-way through chemotherapy. Participants in the intervention group were provided with a pedometer and were asked to set goals and keep weekly diaries outlining the duration, intensity and exertion of their walking. Levels of psychosocial and cognitive functioning were assessed pre and post intervention in both groups. Primary outcome measures for this intervention were changes in cognitive functioning. Four domains of cognitive functioning were assessed using neuropsychological tests and subjective functioning was measured using The Cognitive Failures Questionnaire. Secondary outcome measures were on psychosocial functioning. Results: The self-managed intervention had positive effects on fatigue, self-esteem, mood, levels of physical activity and stage of motivational readiness but not anxiety and depression. Positive benefits of walking were also detected in perceived cognitive function but not in sustained attention, executive function, memory and visual spatial skills when assessed objectively. Qualitative data indicated that the self-managed intervention was feasible, adhered to and received positively during active chemotherapy. Conclusion: The home-based self-managed intervention was beneficial for improving psychosocial well-being and maintaining perceived cognitive functioning among breast cancer patients treated with chemotherapy.

Managed clinical and care networks (MCNs) have emerged in Scotland as a collaborative form of organising within health and between health and social services. Bringing together disparate disciplines and professions their aim has been to allow work across service and sector boundaries to improve care for patients. Whilst MCN prevalence has increased and policy has moved to centralise this method of organising, many research questions remain. These include: how can we understand the form, function and impact of MCNs, and further, what are the underlying motivations for practitioners and managers to organise in this way? Focussing in on the work of 3 voluntary MCNs operating in Scotland, the centrality of practice emerges. Practice is defined broadly to encompass both the interactions between practitioner-patient and practitioner-population. From this, the MCN becomes conceptualised as a set of activities focussed around ground-level clinical MCN service issues and top-level policy direction. Through considering work the interplay between ethics and scientific evidence emerges. The inherent uncertainty and suffering of daily practice comes to the fore, these concepts are brought together within a framework, morals-in-practice. Further, using the hermeneutic dynamics of alterity, openness and transcendence, MCNs can be understood as providing a space to foster creative responses to the wicked problems created by health and social service design and delivery. The organising opportunities provided by MCNs thus arguably serve several organisational and social functions, providing a forum to: mutually support and respond to the intrinsically challenging nature of practice understood; debate morals-in-practice helping to ensuring collective clinical governance; sharing of organisational knowledge; planning, delivery and audit of services; and creatively respond to wicked problems. By focussing in on the work, the practice particularities of each individual MCN are resultantly emphasised, whilst still maintaining recognition that much of the NHS operational context is more widely shared. Through this these voluntary MCNs, at least, can be viewed as an organising form which has emerged in response to the complexities of modern health and social service, care, design and delivery.

[pt] O foco deste estudo está na avaliação da indústria farmacêutica brasileira sob o ponto de vista de suas operações de logística e as relações entre as empresas que compõem sua cadeia de distribuição. Os objetivos principais desta dissertação são entender a dinâmica do setor farmacêutico nacional, desde a consolidação de suas operações em nível mundial e seus reflexos no Brasil, até as atuais tendências gerenciais no sentido de otimizar processos produtivos. A partir deste cenário competitivo estudar-se-ão técnicas modernas de gestão da cadeia de distribuição que visam um desempenho superior, possibilitando vantagens aos seus participantes. Em particular serão abordadas técnicas de reposição automática de estoques e o seu atual estágio de aplicação na indústria farmacêutica brasileira. Busca-se compreender, além disso, como as operações logísticas podem trazer benefícios a uma atividade sensível à saúde da população, bem como de que forma as empresas brasileiras estão se preparando para adotar novos sistemas de gestão de cadeias de suprimentos se é que elas estão. / [en] The focus of this study is to evaluate the Brazilian pharmaceutical industry under the perspective of its logistics operations, and the relations between the companies that work together in a distribution chain. The main goal of this dissertation is to understand the dynamics of the domestic pharmaceutical sector, since the consolidation of its global operations and their consequences in Brazil. To reach this objective there will be analyzed the most recent managerial tendencies towards the optimization of the manufacturing processes from raw materials to finished goods. In this competitive scenario there will be studied the new techniques of supply chain management that aim a superior performance. In particular, there will be reviewed systems of inventory automatic replenishment and its present stage of development in Brazilian pharmaceutical industry. Finally, we will try to understand how logistics operations can benefit such a sensitive activity to people s health, as well as how Brazilian companies are getting ready to adopt new systems of supply chain management - if they are.

This dissertation research focuses on investigating the incidence of student self-regulated learning behavior, and examines patterns in student affective states that accompany such self-regulated behavior. This dissertation leverages prediction models of student affective states in the Physics Playground educational game platform to identify common patterns in student affective states during use of self-regulated learning behavior. In Study 1, prediction models of student affective states are developed in the context of the educational game environment Physics Playground, using affective state observations and computer log data that had already been collected as part of a larger project. The performances of student affective state prediction models generated using a combination of the computer log and observational data are then compared against those of similar prediction models generated using video data collected at the same time. In Study 2, I apply these affective state prediction models to generate predictions of student affective states on a broader set of data collected from students participants playing Physics Playground. In parallel, I define aggregated behavioral features that represent the self-observation and strategic planning components of self-regulated learning. Affective state predictions are then mapped to playground level attempts that contain these self-regulated learning behavioral features, and sequential pattern mining is applied to the affective state predictions to identify the most common patterns in student emotions. Findings from Study 1 demonstrate that both video data and interaction log data can be used to predict student affective states with significant accuracy. Since the video data is a direct measure of student emotions, it shows better performance across most affective states. However, the interaction log data can be collected natively by Physics Playground and is able to be generalized more easily to other learning environments. Findings from Study 2 suggest that self-regulatory behavior is closely associated with sustained periods of engaged concentration and .self-regulated learning behaviors are associated with transitions from negative affective states (confusion, frustration, and boredom) to the positive engaged concentration state. The results of this dissertation project demonstrate the power of measuring student affective states in real time and examining the temporal relationship to self-regulated learning behavior within an unstructured educational game platform. These results thus provide a building block for future research on the real-time assessment of student emotions and its relationship with self-regulated learning behaviors, particularly within online student-centered and self-directed learning contexts.

by Tsui Yuen. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 144-151). / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Computer-assisted Education --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2 --- Motivation and Problems --- p.4 / Chapter 1.3 --- Objectives and Approaches --- p.7 / Chapter 1.4 --- Organization of Thesis --- p.9 / Chapter 2 --- Related Work --- p.10 / Chapter 2.1 --- Existing Research Projects --- p.10 / Chapter 2.2 --- Structural and Navigational Hypertext Presentation --- p.11 / Chapter 2.3 --- Multimedia Integration for Hypermedia Courseware --- p.13 / Chapter 2.4 --- Standalone Java Applets --- p.14 / Chapter 2.5 --- Software Tools Using Browser Plugins --- p.17 / Chapter 2.6 --- Chapter Summary --- p.18 / Chapter 3 --- SIS Education Scenarios --- p.19 / Chapter 3.1 --- Library System --- p.21 / Chapter 3.2 --- Groupware System --- p.24 / Chapter 3.3 --- Student-Monitoring System --- p.25 / Chapter 3.4 --- Management System --- p.26 / Chapter 3.5 --- Chapter Summary --- p.27 / Chapter 4 --- Software Architecture of SIS --- p.29 / Chapter 4.1 --- Client-server Model --- p.29 / Chapter 4.2 --- Software Configuration --- p.31 / Chapter 4.3 --- Software Design --- p.33 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Module 1: Access Authorization Identifier (AAI) --- p.34 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Module 2: Multimedia Presentation Tools (MPT) --- p.35 / Chapter 4.3.3 --- Module 3: Intelligent Questions Selector (IQS) --- p.38 / Chapter 4.3.4 --- Module 4: Online Examination Center (OEC) --- p.40 / Chapter 4.3.5 --- Module 5: Student History Recorder (SHR) --- p.41 / Chapter 4.3.6 --- Module 6: Student Performance Analyzer (SPA) --- p.42 / Chapter 4.3.7 --- Module 7: Electronic Mail Manager (EMM) --- p.43 / Chapter 4.3.8 --- Module 8: Result Querying Agent (RQA) --- p.44 / Chapter 4.3.9 --- Module 9: Group Activity Area (GAA) --- p.45 / Chapter 4.3.10 --- Module 10: Integrated Systems Logger (ISL) --- p.48 / Chapter 4.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.50 / Chapter 5 --- Demonstration --- p.52 / Chapter 5.1 --- Login Dialog Boxes --- p.52 / Chapter 5.2 --- Services Menu for Students --- p.53 / Chapter 5.3 --- Teaching Materials for Students --- p.54 / Chapter 5.4 --- Teaching Materials for Students ´ؤ Chinese --- p.56 / Chapter 5.5 --- Teaching Materials for Students - English --- p.60 / Chapter 5.6 --- Teaching Materials for Students - Mathematics --- p.64 / Chapter 5.7 --- Tests for Students --- p.66 / Chapter 5.8 --- Tests for Students - Chinese --- p.66 / Chapter 5.9 --- Tests for Students - English --- p.68 / Chapter 5.10 --- Queries for Students --- p.70 / Chapter 5.11 --- Discussion Area for Students --- p.71 / Chapter 5.12 --- Educational Television for Students --- p.72 / Chapter 5.13 --- Flow of Services for Students --- p.75 / Chapter 5.14 --- Services Menu for Teachers --- p.76 / Chapter 5.15 --- Teaching Materials for Teachers --- p.77 / Chapter 5.16 --- Teaching Materials for Teachers - Chinese --- p.78 / Chapter 5.17 --- Teaching Materials for Teachers - English --- p.82 / Chapter 5.18 --- Tests Papers for Teachers --- p.86 / Chapter 5.19 --- Queries for Teachers --- p.87 / Chapter 5.20 --- Preparation of Test Papers for Teachers --- p.88 / Chapter 5.21 --- Modification of Questions for Teachers --- p.91 / Chapter 5.22 --- Flow of Services for Teachers --- p.95 / Chapter 5.23 --- Chapter Summary --- p.96 / Chapter 6 --- System Implementation --- p.97 / Chapter 6.1 --- Characteristics of Java --- p.97 / Chapter 6.2 --- Platform Independence --- p.98 / Chapter 6.3 --- Integration with Existing Packages for Java Technology --- p.100 / Chapter 6.4 --- Cryptography of User Passwords --- p.103 / Chapter 6.5 --- Transmission of Data Packages --- p.105 / Chapter 6.6 --- Multithreading for Multitasking --- p.108 / Chapter 6.7 --- Management of User Interfaces --- p.110 / Chapter 6.8 --- Data Structures for Temporary Storage --- p.112 / Chapter 6.9 --- Messages Broadcasting in Chat Rooms --- p.116 / Chapter 6.10 --- Playback of Audio and Video Data Files --- p.121 / Chapter 6.11 --- Progress of System Implementation --- p.125 / Chapter 6.12 --- Chapter Summary --- p.128 / Chapter 7 --- Discussion and Future Work --- p.129 / Chapter 7.1 --- Wide Spread of the World Wide Web --- p.129 / Chapter 7.2 --- Communication between Schools and Families --- p.130 / Chapter 7.3 --- Pedagogical Uses --- p.130 / Chapter 7.4 --- Virtual Student Community --- p.131 / Chapter 7.5 --- Differences between SIS and Other Web-based Educational Systems --- p.132 / Chapter 7.6 --- Future Work --- p.133 / Chapter 7.7 --- Chapter Summary --- p.138 / Chapter 8 --- Summary --- p.139 / Bibliography --- p.144

Saltmarshes in SE England are eroding rapidly and one potential impact is the loss of habitat for fishes. Saltmarshes have been created by setting back the existing line of flood defence through managed realignment. The use by fishes of natural and managed realignment habitats at Tollesbury, Abbotts Hall and Orplands was examined (2005-07). Three seasonal groups were apparent in the fish assemblages of the managed realignment sites: February-April (Pomatoschistus microps and Sprattus sprattus), May-September (Dicentrarchus labrax and Atherina presbyter) and October-January (Liza aurata and Liza ramada). The sites were used mainly by 0- and 1-group fishes and adult P. microps. The mean abundance (July - August 2007) was 558 0.1 ha' (range 76 - 2699 0.1 ha'). In summer, small (< 30 mm) zooplanktivorous D. labrax fed successfully at all sites. Larger (30-59 mm) D. labrax consumed more macroinvertebrates in the Tollesbury managed realignment and two established marshes than at Abbotts Hall and Orplands. By autumn there were no site-specific differences in gut fullness of D. labrax. Stable isotope ratio analysis and gut contents analysis revealed that small (< 50 mm) D. labrax, S. sprattus and A. presbyter assimilated zooplankton which eat detritus, resuspended microphytobenthos and some phytoplankton. L. aurata assimilated zooplankton and microphytobenthos. P. microps (20-50 mm) and A. presbyter (80-99 mm) assimilated benthic meiofauna. Larger (50-230 mm) D. labrax assimilated macroinvertebrates which eat microphytobenthos, Ulva spp., C3 plants and detritus. Some recommendations for saltmarsh restoration are provided with an estimate of the economic value of bass in saltmarshes,to highlight further areas of research.