The aim of this case study project was to understand the factors that determine the effectiveness at Groupe Scolaire APEFE Mweya, a parent private school in Rubavu District, Rwanda. It was motivated by a persistent decline in school quality for many public elementary schools in Rwanda while on the other hand some private schools have recorded very good results in national examinations. The review of the literature revealed the important attributes of school effectiveness research in developing countries. An enquiry was conducted using personal interviews of a small sample of fourteen participants together with observation and analysis of school documents. The findings suggest that Mweya School owes its success to adopting the moral inclusion of Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups as a sign of overcoming historical racial discrimination, and secondly to its committed teachers (work ethos) and learners; organisation and accountability of teaching and learning; private supplementary tutoring; the recognition of work done and the motivation of the teachers and learners. The findings also found that the leadership style of the principal was not delivering according to expectations and suggestions were provided to maintain the momentum of good results.

No description available.

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction / F. Todd Goodson / This study investigates visual representation of three perspectives: the context of school, the pedagogy, and the teacher-student relationships when viewing photographs taken during the first half of the 20th Century of American Schools. Grounded in the understanding of visual culture, this image-based study utilized photographs as a rich source of data. The photographs collected for this study were taken between 1900 -1959 in American schools and were categorized by the Library of Congress as still images of classrooms in the United States. The Library of Congress collection was utilized to provide reliable categorized and documented images of schooling. The collection included 1,812 photographs archived in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs collections specifically labeled as Classrooms United States; the non-digitized Frances Benjamin Johnston Photograph Collection of United States Indian School; and, Look Magazine Teacher Issue Charlotte Brooks negatives collection. A three-layered analysis utilized an initial layer of analysis placing each of the photographs into four predetermined categories: Time Period (1900-1950’s), Urban-Rural, Wealth-Poverty, Active-Passive environment. The placement of each photograph into the above continua provided evidence of the balance of visual elements within the data collection. Seven themes emerged through an open-coding process within the second layer of analysis when each photograph was coded using a specific perspective: context, pedagogy, and teacher-student relationship. As themes were extracted, a third layer of analysis utilized a semiotic approach to identifying over 20 cultural icons representational of schooling within the photograph. Implications for further research are provided.

My dissertation features three essays in industrial organization. The first two investigate aspects of potentially anticompetitive firm behavior in differentiated product markets. Contrary to previous analyses, requirements tying and bundled rebates by a firm with a monopoly in one market that competes in another may increase total surplus when product differentiation in the competitive market is endogenous. This result is stronger for tying than for bundled rebates, and holds for both horizontal and vertical differentiation (essays 1 and 2, respectively). Under requirements tying or bundled rebates, a multiproduct firm (horizontally) differentiates its product less from its rival's product than it would under independent pricing, suggesting a new efficiency consideration for requirements tying: a reduction in transport costs. A similar result prevails under vertical differentiation: when the tying firm controls either quality niche, it reduces the quality of its tied product; however, the rival may invest in the quality of its competing product. Hence, the effect on total surplus is ambiguous when tying or bundled rebates arrangements are permitted. The second essay employs an empirical model typically used to analyze differentiated product markets analyze a different economic environment: parents' decision to home school their children. Home schooling has grown in popularity as an alternative to public or private schools; some estimates place growth at 15 to 40% per year in the U.S. I empirically estimate the demand for home schooling as an alternative to these other modes of education, focusing on potential network effects in household decisions to home-school. I find support for the hypothesis that home schooling 'support groups' mitigate the cost of home schooling relative to the alternatives, but only occur in areas with a critical mass of home-schooling households. The data also suggest that as interest in home schooling grows, the local community's school district spending per child declines, increasing the probability that more parents will take their children out of public schools. Both phenomena suggest the existence of network effects in the market for primary and secondary education. / text

A growing number of home-schooled students enter the nation's colleges and universities each year. Tinto (1988, 1993) presented a foundational model of how students transition from high school to college. In this model, students travel through three stages: separation, transition, and incorporation. Few studies have examined the transitional issues home-school students encounter as they begin their first year of college. This study, at a midsized public university in the Midwest, examined the transitional issues experienced by first-year college students who graduated from high school in a home-school setting. It specifically sought to determine if the issues experienced by the students were related to Tinto's theory of student departure. The study was qualitative in nature. Data were gathered through interviews with first-year students who matriculated in fall 2005 and persisted to spring 2006. The interviews were held in February and March 2006. Data was analyzed based on guidelines presented by Berkowitz (1997) and themes were discovered.The researcher concluded that there was little distinction between the transitional issues experienced by home-schooled students, and those experienced by traditionally educated students. Students experienced a wide range of transitional issues during their first year of college such as loneliness, meeting others with different values, living in the residence halls, and dealing with greater independence. The transitional issues the participants encountered during their first year of college were closely related to Tinto's (1993) theory of transition. The resources offered by the university, such as orientation, RAs, and campus programming, were influential in the home-schooled students' transition to college. / Department of Educational Studies

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 154-166).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (University of Texas Digital Repository, viewed on Sept. 14, 2009). Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Rowan University, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Graduate School of Education, Oral Roberts University, 2005. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-94).