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The record failure of development aid, massive corruption, escalating poverty rates, resource-related conflicts, systematic exclusion, and general disenfranchisement across the East African Community (EAC) puzzle many development experts, as they do concerned citizens. Instead of espousing inclusive citizen participation, cyclic rounds of national leaders have governed EAC countries using retrograde ideologies, depictive of restrictive leadership interests. Underlying these interests is usually a deep-seated desire for self-entrenchment that crafty leaders impose on hapless masses. In the process, the leaders methodically personify state institutions and systems, rendering them acquiescent to their desires. Over time, destitute citizens also submit to the status quo, yielding a cadre of “acquiesced citizens”. With respect to the above, the three objectives of this study were to analyse how personified leadership styles influence governance and development policies in East Africa; to assess the degree of citizen involvement in public governance, and how this influences development in East Africa; and to develop criteria for citizen-driven development policies that transcend personified governance in East Africa. The findings of this thesis will enable citizens, academia, development practitioners and other stakeholders to unconditionally determine or guide national governance and development agenda. Most importantly, this study has unravelled a new approach for analysing national leadership, in a manner that can potentially enable a country to identify leaders who can champion effective principles of good governance and simultaneously achieve sustainable development. / Development Studies / D. Phil. (Development Studies)

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The purpose of this research is to empirically investigate consumers' health care decision choices in a dynamic market setting. The unprecedented demands on the U.S. health care system coupled with the mounting controversies surrounding health care reform suggest that consumers' health care decisions warrant empirical research attention. Toward this end, this dissertation empirically explored (1) the characteristics of consumers who possess a willingness to use non-conventional treatments over conventional treatments, (2) the characteristics of consumers who elect self-medication in lieu of health care practitioner-directed medication, and (3) the salient dimensions of consumers' channel choice for the procurement of health care products. Each of these decision choice factors were tested across two U.S. generational segments to assess whether differences existed across Baby Boomers' and Gen Yers' health care decision choices. The conceptual framework for empirical assessment is Bandura's (1986) social cognitive theory. From Bandura's social cognitive theory, a general model of healthcare decision choice is proposed to assess consumers' states of mind, states of being and states of action (decision choice). Results indicate that social cognitive factors (e.g., self-efficacy, objectivism) play an important role in each of the decision domains explored in this dissertation. Moreover, health value was found to be an important moderator between the social cognitive factors and health care decision choices. The predictors of the health care decision choices were found to vary across the Baby Boomers and Generation Yers on several dimensions, confirming the notion that generational differences may be a salient dimension of consumers' health care decision choice. The research offers several implications for practitioners, academicians and policy makers. Both descriptive and normative implications are gleaned from the research findings. Most notably, the results indicate that consumers' social cognitive factors and health value may be mechanisms for managing health care decisions.

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Obtaining a college degree benefits individuals and society, yet only 20% of students are graduating from community colleges. At many institutions, graduation rates have decreased over the last 5 years, including one historically Black community college in the southern United States. To explore possible causes of low graduation rates at this unique and understudied type of college, this correlational study examined the relationships among student engagement, academic performance, and grit-persistence and passion toward long-term goals. Tinto's theory of student persistence served as the theoretical framework for this study. The convenience sample included 116 college students who already had a first-year grade point average (FYGPA). Grit was measured by the Grit-Short Scale; student engagement by the Student Engagement Instrument-College, and academic performance by FYGPA. No statistically significant relationships were found between grit and academic performance, or between student engagement and academic performance, however. Recommendations included additional research with larger samples of students and other HBCUs. Recommendations also included exploring other non-cognitive constructs, such as academic mindsets, learning strategies, socials skills, and academic behaviors to understand those relationships with academic performance. Implications for positive social change include disseminating initial research findings to the college administration for continued research on efforts toward producing more graduates, thereby increasingly providing quality higher education to underserved groups of students.

A carefully constructed set of 16 graphical tasks related to key biochemistry concepts was designed and administered to a group of 82 students in their final year of B.Sc. study. The test mean score of 48,3% ( 12,1) was low and characterised by gender and ethnic differences. There was a moderate linear relationship between biochemistry grades obtained by the students over two years of study and their graphical literacy (r = 0,433). The majority of the students exhibited slope/height confusion and only seven students (8,5%) were able to answer the two items corresponding to Kimura‘s Level F, the most complex and difficult level of graphical literacy. Eye tracking data gave valuable insights into different strategies used by students while interpreting graphs and is a valuable tool for assessing graphical literacy. These findings confirmed other studies where researchers have found a widespread lack of graph comprehension among biological science students. / Institute of Science and Technology Education / M. Sc. (Science Education)

The effectiveness of language requires that users of a language be provided with the right knowledge to cope with its complexity and demanding nature especially in the area of writing. In this sense, this thesis sought to draw attention to some of the important features of writing and speaking skills in the English language at two higher learning institutions in Namibia. English is a second language for students at these institutions. Articles 3 and 20 of the Namibian Constitution stipulate that the language policy must promote the use of English in schools (The Constitution of Namibia (1990). It is now 24 years since English as medium of instruction was introduced in schools and tertiary institutions, but some students’ English proficiency is still relatively poor, especially in writing and speaking communication skills. This study investigated the barriers that prevent students to write and speak English well at University A and University B. The writing and speaking skills were investigated through the lens of syllabi/study guides, and lack of practical teaching of oral communication and writing skills inter alia morphology and syntax. Fifty-seven respondents took part in the research, comprising Heads of Departments (Language, Communication and Language Centre), Course Coordinators, lecturers and students in the English field at the two institutions investigated. Students were deliberately selected for the questionnaire to illustrate the difficulties they face when writing and speaking English as a second language. The lecturers were also deliberately selected because they were the ones who were with the students in classrooms. This study used qualitative research to gather information through methods such as observation, interviews, open-response questionnaire items, document analysis and verbal reports. The following were the main findings. There was a lack of specific teaching objectives in oral communication and written skills in the syllabi, while the inability of students to write correct sentences, and the limited time allocated to these courses also played a role. The conclusion drawn from this study is that students’ communicative competency is very poor. Therefore, it is the opinion of this researcher that improvement is much needed regarding syllabi content, teaching approaches of speaking and writing skills, students’ admission criteria and the time frame allocated for the different courses. To answer the research question: firstly the time allocated to some of the English courses is short, there is lack of teaching and learning of oral and writing skills approaches and, the syllabi were planned and design in a way that do not enhance much the teaching and learning of the second language. There are not many activities in the study guides that could be used to enhance students’ communicative competency. Such activities should include subject and verb agreement, passive and active form, sentence construction, word-building using prefixes and suffixes, auxiliaries or activities which give the students a chance to practice a certain aspect of language. Also, since English is a second language for students in Namibia, the institutions must seriously look at the time allocated to the courses they offer so that lecturers can appropriately apply proper approaches to teach writing and speaking skills. / Curriculum and Instructional Studies / D. Ed. (Curriculum Studies)

The AEGIS Cruiser Air-Defense Simulation is a program that models the operations of a Combat Information Center (CIC) team performing the ADC duties in a battle group using Multi-Agent System (MAS) technology implemented in the Java programming language. Set in the Arabian Gulf region, the simulation is a top-view, dynamic, graphics-driven software implementation that provides a picture of the CIC team grappling with a challenging, complex problem. Conceived primarily as a system to assist ships, waterfront training teams, and battle group staffs in ADC training and doctrine formulation, the simulation was designed to gain insight and understanding into the numerous factors (skills, experience, fatigue, aircraft numbers, weather, etc.) that influence the performance of the overall CIC team and watchstanders. The program explores the team's performance under abnormal or high intensity/stress situations by simulating their mental processes, decision-making aspects, communications patterns, and cognitive attributes. Everything in the scenario is logged, which allows for the reconstruction of interesting events (i.e. watchstander mistakes, chain-of-error analysis) for use in post-scenario training as well as the creation of new, more focused themes for actual CIC team scenarios. The simulation also tracks various watchstander and CIC team performance metrics for review by the user. / Lieutenant, United States Navy

Effective knowledge sharing within project teams is critical to knowledge-intensive professional service firms. Prior research studies indicate a positive association between trust, social-cognitive factors, and effective knowledge sharing among co-workers. The conceptual framework proposed here builds on these studies, and draws from theoretical foundations from the organizational behavior, psychology, information studies, sociology, and management literature on organizational trust and knowledge sharing, and identifies the most significant factors found to influence organizational knowledge sharing directly and indirectly through trust. The study makes methodological contributions in the form of conceptualizations for knowledge sharing behavior, trust, and tie strength. Also, it provides a more nuanced and focused analysis, by factoring for knowledge type and co-worker working relationship. Data were collected from 275 knowledge workers (‘legal professionals’ and paralegals) engaged in shared legal project work, at one of Canada’s largest multijurisdictional law firms. The nature of their work required a significant reliance on co-workers, for both explicit and tacit knowledge. Multiple regression analysis, among other statistical techniques, was used to test the hypotheses and determine significant relationships. Of the factors examined in the study, the three found to have the strongest effect on respondents’ trust in their co-workers were shared vision, shared language, and tie strength. Furthermore, the two factors found to have the strongest effect on organizational knowledge sharing behavior were trust and shared vision. Overall trust was also found to have a mediating effect between shared vision and knowledge sharing behavior, and between shared language and knowledge sharing behavior. A significant implication for practitioners is that effective knowledge sharing among co-workers requires a nurturing manager to work on developing co-worker trust and shared vision. Furthermore, a manager wanting to promote trust between co-workers must nurture shared language and shared vision.