Since few studies exist that examine the relationships between adolescent obesity and academic performance, the purpose of this study was to examine the impact of obesity on high school students’ academic performance in a low socioeconomic school district. The topics addressed in this study included prevalence of overweight and obesity in high school students and the impact of overweight and obesity on student academic performance. The potential population of this study consisted of 236 high school students aged 14 to 19 years old enrolled in a rural Mississippi school district in grades 9 -12. However, only 35 students had usable data in all of the categories that were examined, and, therefore, were used as the population for the final analysis. The participants studied in this study consisted of all students assigned to one physical education teacher. Each student was administered the Project Health Student Measurement Chart which was developed by Project Health, a research entity of the Institute of Epidemiology, Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi. The Project Health Student Measurement Chart was utilized to enable the participating students to be examined on characteristics that included Body Mass Index (BMI), blood pressure and pulse rate. Student information collected on their obesity status based on BMI level was also collected in this study. In addition, the students’ performances on subject area tests and/or end-of-course assessments in the academic areas of Algebra I, English II, Biology I, and U.S. History from 1877 were accessed from the school’s records. Based on the results of this study, 48.60% of the students in the Canton Public School District are overweight/obese. However, the findings of this study revealed that there was no significant difference between overweight/obese and non-obese students’ academic performance on subject area tests and/or end-of-course test by age, gender and grade, and no significant relationships in the academic performance of overweight/obese and non-obese students on end-of-course test scores for 10th – 12th grades, as measured by Algebra I, English II, Biology I, and US History from 1877.

A methodology to develop an easy-to-use toolkit for the preliminary design of high performance schools in hot and humid climates was presented. The toolkit proposed in this research will allow decision makers without simulation knowledge easily to evaluate accurately energy efficient measures for K-5 schools, which would contribute to the accelerated dissemination of energy efficient design. For the development of the toolkit, first, a survey was performed to identify high performance measures available today being implemented in new K-5 school buildings. Then an existing case-study school building in a hot and humid climate was selected and analyzed to understand the energy use pattern in a school building and to be used in developing a calibrated simulation. Based on the information from the previous step, an as-built and calibrated simulation was then developed. To accomplish this, five calibration steps were performed to match the simulation results with the measured energy use. The five steps include: 1) Using an actual 2006 weather file with measured solar radiation, 2) Modifying lighting & equipment schedule using ASHRAE's RP-1093 methods, 3) Using actual equipment performance curves (i.e., scroll chiller), 4) Using the Winkelmann's method for the underground floor heat transfer, and 5) Modifying the HVAC and room setpoint temperature based on the measured field data. Next, the calibrated simulation of the case-study K-5 school was compared to an ASHRAE Standard 90.1-1999 code-compliant school. In the next step, the energy savings potentials from the application of several high performance measures to an equivalent ASHRAE Standard 90.1-1999 codecompliant school. The high performance measures applied included the recommendations from the ASHRAE Advanced Energy Design Guides (AEDG) for K- 12 and other high performance measures from the literature review as well as a daylighting strategy and solar PV and thermal systems. The results show that the net energy consumption of the final high performance school with the solar thermal and a solar PV system would be 1,162.1 MMBtu, which corresponds to the 14.9 kBtu/sqft-yr of EUI. The calculated final energy and cost savings over the code compliant school are 68.2% and 69.9%, respectively. As a final step of the research, specifications for a simplified easy-to-use toolkit were then developed, and a prototype screenshot of the toolkit was developed. The toolkit is expected to be used by non-technical decision-maker to select and evaluate high performance measures for a new school building in terms of energy and cost savings in a quick and easy way.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the managerial leadership styles of school principals for school effectiveness at secondary schools of the Dutywa Education District in the Eastern Cape Province of the Republic of South. The literature review reflects theories concerning the managerial leadership styles of school principals for school effectiveness. In order to attain the aims and objectives of the study, the researcher used the qualitative research method, both in collecting and analyzing the data. The case study design was used to describe and access the phenomenon and the purposive sampling method was used to select (6) secondary school principals. An open ended interview schedule was used for the face-to-face in-depth interviews on the managerial leadership styles of school principals for school effectiveness at secondary schools of the Dutywa Education District. Themes were drawn from the responses of the participants and analysed. Some of the findings were: Democratic and participatory leadership styles were used by the school principals to achieve maximum co-operation from both experienced and beginning teachers and the learners in the schools. Laissez fair and autocratic styles of leadership appeared to be undesirable for the management of schools. For school principals’ effective management, they need to do proper planning, organising and scheduling of activities, assigning duties to teachers and delegating some of their work to competent teachers. The reasons for school principals’ ineffectiveness in this study were: favouritism, over-familiar relationships with some teachers, ignoring teachers’ personal problems, workload, lack of support and co-operation from teachers. Incorrect interpretation of educational policies were seen to lead to chaotic situations, poor performance of both teachers and learners, division between learners and teachers, a lack of unity between school stake-holders, poor job satisfaction and lack of trust and respect for the principals concerned. Factors contributing to principals’ incorrect interpretation of educational policies and execution of management roles were: negligence, lack of knowledge and ability to interpret educational policies, lack of proper induction programmes and training of principals and lack of support on policy matters from the Department of Education. Contributing factors resulting in barriers to principals’ ineffectiveness in the management of schools were: failure to give proper instructions to teachers and learners, failure to effectively use of available funds in the school, failure to implement all educational programmes in the school including co-curricular and extra mural activities, lack of experience, lack of support from both the Department of Education and the parents, lack of resources, high staff turnover, favourtisms and failure to hold teachers accountable for poor work done. Mechanisms deemed to overcome the factors leading to barriers to principals’ execution of their management roles at schools were: making the effort to be knowledgeable about educational policies, timely responses to problems in the school, regular consultation with stakeholders, employment of SGB teachers, taking direct supervision of instructions in classrooms and endeavoring to have good relations and gaining support from the SGB and the parents. The researcher made some recommendations on the managerial leadership styles of school principals for school effectiveness at secondary schools of the Dutywa Education District.

The thesis is concerned to explore whether and how ‘value added’ data analyses can contribute to school improvement, and to identify some of the conditions under which this might be so. In the course of conducting the study, the author experienced a tension between the ‘research’ and the ‘development’ dimensions of her work, and this is used to inform the outcomes of the thesis. The thesis is underpinned by three related aims: first, to provide a historical and evaluative overview of how the idea of ‘value added’ came to enter and influence the debate on educational quality in England. The study of the literature demonstrates that the main principles of ‘value added’ were already well developed before the term was in common use; it also reveals that the ambiguities in the term are not merely reflective of disagreements about how best to calculate value added but actually central to how the idea has been made to function within a particular political agenda for education having to do with ‘raising standards’. Because of the relentlessness of that agenda, ‘value added’ measures of attainment have undergone considerable methodological development over the past ten years, to the point where sophisticated statistical data on pupils’ and schools’ performance is being generated and used by government agencies, LEAs and schools themselves to an extent virtually unknown elsewhere. However, this thesis indicates that the technical and conceptual issues involved in putting such data to practical use in schools are likely to test the interpretative and organisational skills of users. The literature search confirms that not much investigation has been done into how data is actually used, but that what there is suggests some important lines of inquiry. The second aim of the thesis is accordingly to explore, through a small-scale empirical study, the use by secondary school staff of value-added data as exemplified by the NFER’s value added service QUASE. The study was conducted in nine schools, with staff at senior and middle management levels, and focused on mathematics, English and science departments. The third aim of the thesis is to assess how far the case-study findings might shed further light on the issues entailed in using such data for school improvement. The evidence suggested that value added data are seen as complex and often ‘high stakes’ and that – at the time of this study – the uses of value added data were rather more limited than expected; furthermore, the meanings of value added would seem to be socially constructed by the political and institutional environment, and to be closely related to individual teachers’ values and attitudes. This in turn suggests that better insights into, and management of, ‘the psychology and sociology’ of how value added data are perceived and used are necessary. Nonetheless, the study concludes that there is potential for value added analyses to contribute to school improvement under certain conditions; crucially, the study indicated that these included a culture which emphasised self-evaluation – rather than external accountability – within the school or subject department, combined with input from a ‘champion’ or facilitator who understood the technicalities and significance of the data. Value added analyses seemed to be used most actively by,staff who were able to use them ‘heuristically’, that is, to pose informed questions about teaching and learning (rather than as literal truths or statistical fictions). The study argues that ‘value added’ measures of performance are accordingly better understood as a technology than a science – that is, a practical application of knowledge which interacts dynamically with its social and cultural environment.

abstract: Schools all around the country are improving the performance of their buildings by adopting high performance design principles. Higher levels of energy efficiency can pave the way for K-12 Schools to achieve net zero energy (NZE) conditions, a state where the energy generated by on-site renewable sources are sufficient to meet the cumulative annual energy demands of the facility. A key capability for the proliferation of Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB) is the need for a design methodology that identifies the optimum mix of energy efficient design features to be incorporated into the building. The design methodology should take into account the interaction effects of various energy efficiency measures as well as their associated costs so that life cycle cost can be minimized for the entire life span of the building. This research aims at developing such a methodology for generating cost effective net zero energy solutions for school buildings. The Department of Energy (DOE) prototype primary school, meant to serve as the starting baseline, was modeled in the building energy simulation software eQUEST and made compliant with the requirement of ASHRAE 90.1-2007. Commonly used efficiency measures, for which credible initial cost and maintenance data were available, were selected as the parametric design set. An initial sensitivity analysis was conducted by using the Morris Method to rank the efficiency measures in terms of their importance and interaction strengths. A sequential search technique was adopted to search the solution space and identify combinations that lie near the Pareto-optimal front; this allowed various minimum cost design solutions to be identified corresponding to different energy savings levels. Based on the results of this study, it was found that the cost optimal combination of measures over the 30 year analysis span resulted in an annual energy cost reduction of 47%, while net zero site energy conditions were achieved by the addition of a 435 kW photovoltaic generation system that covered 73% of the roof area. The simple payback period for the additional technology required to achieve NZE conditions was calculated to be 26.3 years and carried a 37.4% premium over the initial building construction cost. The study identifies future work in how to automate this computationally conservative search technique so that it can provide practical feedback to the building designer during all stages of the design process. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Built Environment 2016

Orientadores: Luiz Carlos de Freitas, Sueli Carrijo Rodrigues / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-14T17:52:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Almeida_IvaneteBellucci_D.pdf: 8095925 bytes, checksum: 5fa53a1b0cafbc3ac03539e6f70c5795 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / Resumo: Nossa pesquisa mediu a eficiência das escolas públicas cicladas e não cicladas do ensino fundamental, centrando-se nos municípios de Campinas, Belo Horizonte e Rio de Janeiro. Criamos variáveis categorizadas para entender a influência do trabalho pedagógico do professor em relação ao tipo de escola (ciclada e não ciclada) e, simultaneamente, interessou-nos associar esse trabalho pedagógico com um fator que, juntamente com as variáveis de proficiência média em leitura e matemática e a variável nível socioeconômico, tornaram-se determinantes para estabelecer a eficiência das escolas. Também foram igualmente observadas as aplicações de instrumentos compostos por itens utilizados ao longo do projeto GERES em períodos diferentes, os quais determinaram os impactos no desempenho da aprendizagem. Essas aplicações de instrumentos pré-testados e organizados em cadernos de testes de leitura e matemática respeitaram três fases distintas: a de março de 2005, considerada como fase diagnóstica (entrada de dados), e duas outras, a de novembro de 2005 e novembro de 2006, consideradas como de avaliações de desempenho (resultados esperados). Outros instrumentos de coleta de dados foram utilizados para diagnosticar as condições familiares, escolares e da sala de aula durante as etapas de aplicação dos testes. Enriquecendo esses processos, nossa pesquisa apresentou uma contribuição à avaliação de desempenho das escolas públicas, baseada na interação de técnicas multivariadas de dados, notadamente a partir da Análise Fatorial (AF) e da seleção das variáveis mais significativas para a aplicação da metodologia de Análise por Envoltória de Dados (DEA) nesse universo pesquisado. O uso crescente dessa técnica tem sido justificado pelas várias possibilidades de análise de dados que a metodologia apresenta. Tanto a facilidade de uso como a de elaboração de cenários podem ser considerados alguns dos motivos que fizeram com que a técnica fosse cada vez mais aplicada. O modelo DEA facilita a identificação de escolas eficientes e não eficientes e desse modo estabelecer comparações entre as cicladas e não cicladas. Por meio da Análise por Envoltória de Dados foi possível identificar uma baixa discriminação entre as escolas cicladas e não cicladas, portanto, não pudemos afirmar categoricamente que as escolas cicladas ensinam mais do que as não cicladas, mas podemos destacar entre as nossas conclusões, nesta base de dados, que as proficiências médias das escolas cicladas são significativamente maiores do que das não cicladas. Esse resultado não pode ser extrapolado para todas as escolas do ensino fundamental, pois não trabalhamos com uma amostra que representa fielmente o sistema educacional brasileiro; o trabalho pedagógico do professor, associado às proficiências médias das escolas nos testes de leitura e matemática e os seus respectivos níveis socioeconômicos, neste caso analisados pelo estudo longitudinal, valorizou o agrupamento das nossas análises no contexto educacional. / Abstract: Our research measured the efficiency of the cycles education system schools (schools organized by cycles of learning) and the grades system schools (traditional system organized by grades) of elementary public education concentrating in the cities of Campinas, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. We created categorized variables so as to understand the influence of the pedagogical work of the teacher in relation to the type of school (cycles system and grades system) and, simultaneously, we were interested in associating this pedagogical work with a factor that, together with the medium proficiency variables in reading and mathematics and the socioeconomic level variable, became determining to establish the schools' efficiency. Also, the applications of instruments composed by items used in the course of GERES Project in different periods were equally observed, which determined the impacts on the learning performance. The applications of these instruments, pre-tested and organized in reading and mathematics tests notebooks, respected three distinct phases: the March, 2005 one, considered as the diagnosis phase (data input) and two others, the November 2005 and the November 2006, considered as performance evaluation (expected results) phases. Other data collection instruments were used to diagnose families, schools and classrooms conditions during all the test application stages. Enriching those processes, our research contributed to the performance evaluation of public schools based on the interaction of data multivariable techniques, especially from the Factorial Analysis (AF) and from the selection of the most significant variables for the application of the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology in the researched universe. The increasing use of this technique has been explained by the several data analysis possibilities that the methodology allows. Both the easiness to use it and to work out scenarios can be considered some of the reasons which allowed the technique to be more frequently applied. The DEA model makes it easy to identify the efficient and the non-efficient schools thus establishing comparisons between the cycles education system and the grades one. By means of the Data Envelopment Analysis it was possible to observe low prejudice between the cycles system and grades system schools, therefore, we could not categorically state that cycled system schools teach more than grades system schools, however, we can point out among our conclusions, under this database, that the cycled system schools' medium proficiencies are significantly higher than the grades system schools. This result cannot be inferred to all elementary education schools for we do not have a sample that reliably represents the Brazilian education system; the pedagogical work of the teacher, associated to the schools' medium proficiencies in the mathematics and reading tests and their respective socioeconomic levels, in this case, analyzed via longitudinal study, valued the grouping of our analysis in the educational context. / Doutorado / Ensino, Avaliação e Formação de Professores / Doutor em Educação

Thesis "A professional care of children with school delay" is focused on the analysis of intervention for children with the recommended postponement of school attendance. in pre-school and preparatory classes in primary schools. The thesis also includes a scheme of a Special Education reeducational aids, which can be used for possible developmental disorders which limit children entrance into the compulsory school attendance in the prescribed age.