No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2005. / "May, 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-218). Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [54]-61).

Thesis (M.Ed.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2001. / Bibliography: leaves 60-62.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2003. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 3312. Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as preliminary leaf iv. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 37-43).

China’s radical social transformation, brought about by its rapid economic growth, has placed more of its youth at risk. There has been an increase in juvenile delinquency, internet addiction, school bullying, and gang involvement. Research on this subject in China has attributed the problem to lower socioeconomic status of students’ families, faulty parenting style, academic failure, and aggressive personality. However, the dominant discourse virtually ignores the lives of young people within their context and fails to examine what a deviant lifestyle means to them. This research addresses this limitation by examining the process through which unprivileged students navigate through the problems they face in secondary schooling and construct a deviant subculture. This was accomplished through an intensive fieldwork in an urban secondary school in southeast China with participant observation and interview methods to collect data on a range of students, their parents and teachers over an eight-month period. The results of the data analysis reveal that school plays a critical role in the formation of students’ deviant identities. Its preoccupation with academic performance and bureaucratic management pushes students who bear with cumulative disadvantages inherited from their families and community to a more marginalized position. Deviancy develops from a label to a response. The key manifestation of this is the creation and development of a ‘muddling’ subculture as their strategy to survive schooling. Although the ‘muddling through’ strategy may not provide them with better chance of employment for them to jump out of working-class, nor give much hope for access to the cultural mainstream of society, it still has some positive aspects. The subculture not only offers an alternative way to safeguard their psychological well-being and hone their interpersonal skill, but also facilitates them to gain more social space and resource in the subordinate situation. This finding coincides with selected sociological studies of deviant students in the West but also aligns with the special context of contemporary China. First, the Chinese society is evolving even faster after the establishment of Deng’s economic model. It is a broadly accepted fact and a roaring public concern that the gap between the poor and rich in China is heading towards a new class structure. In this context, schooling doubtlessly plays a role in the social reproduction. This study claims that lower class students’ deviant subculture is not simply an oppositional culture to the value of school education as argued in Western literature; rather, it is a strategic negotiation with the social structure in order to ‘muddle through’ their lives. Second, the nature of this ‘muddling’ subculture has strong links with a pragmatic social ethos that glorifies monetary success. When “whatever works to become rich” is the dominant “Chinese dream”, other forms of social recognition, value and well-being attached to formal school education can appear as overwhelmingly irrelevant to the eyes of those students who inherited a social class they did not choose and an educational system that tells them little. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This study examines the mathematics education of youth at-risk in South Africa. It explores how two learners at the margin understand and perform in mathematics in two radically different educational environments. It also examines what provisions, if any, are incorporated into the mathematics curriculum to accommodate these pupils. One of the research participants attended Thuthukani, a residential school for youth at-risk and the other was based at Sanville Secondary, a mainstream school. The differences between the two contexts were in the scarcity of resources, limited space and class sizes. The qualitative case study, which was the preferred method of choice, was carried out in two stages. Observation of learners at the residential school was stage one. Stage two was the observation of a learner at the margin in a mainstream school. Observations were captured through audio and visual recordings and photographs. Pupils' written reflections and workbooks, combined with the information acquired through interviews, informal discussions and a research diary, supplemented the instruments to produce a rich data for analysis. The analysis suggests that each of the components of this study, namely: the educational environment (context), the mathematics curriculum, the teacher and the learner at the margin influence the teaching and learning in the classroom. The study concludes with the researcher's recommendations on the mathematics education of learners at the margin. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Durban-Westville, 2003.

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of three interventions on boys' peer relationships, self-perceptions, and undesirable behavior. In addition, boys' perceptions were compared to those of parents' and teachers'. Participants included parents and teachers of 29 students who were exhibiting aggression, noncompliance, or both. Schools were randomly assigned to one of three interventions: conjoint behavioral consultation (CBC), self-administered videotape therapy (VT), or conjoint behavioral consultation plus videotape therapy (CBC+VT). The three interventions improved boys' social interactions both directly and indirectly. CBC, VT, and CBC+VT impacted boys directly by reducing their aggressive and noncompliant behaviors, allowing them to get along better with peers. The interventions affected boys' friendships in an indirect manner by (a) improving parental awareness regarding the importance of children interacting with same age, same sex peers, (b) made parents more at ease about letting their sons play at friends' houses; and (c) reduced undesirable parental behavior which in turn modified the children's conduct with peers. At postintervention, boys perceived themselves more positively and exhibited fewer behavior difficulties. Moderate correlations were found between boys' and parents' perceptions of students' peer acceptance at preintervention (r = .545) and postintervention (r = .529). Findings are discussed in terms of the implications for school psychologists who work with students with behavioral difficulties.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-125). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-255).