M. Tech. Education / The Department of Basic Education is extremely dedicated to developing its human resource's performance, to bring their practices to excellence for the benefit of the whole education system in South Africa. However, a closer scrutiny at the Department of Education reveals chronic ailments of lack of competency among teachers. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of Integrated Quality Management System on quality academic achievement and human relations in primary schools located in Ladysmith. The aim was to make a contribution to the policy makers in the department of education, for the betterment of the quality management system and the achievement of its objective which is quality education.

The importance of curriculum in education is uncontested. Nevertheless, this has not translated into a thorough examination of what constitutes a ‘quality’ curriculum. Extant educational quality models mostly investigated ‘quality’ from students’ perspective and were predominantly conducted in the business and engineering fields. Some of these models encompass curriculum quality dimensions, nonetheless, given their focus on student perspectives, emerging curriculum themes were limited to issues of interest to students only, such as the number of courses, and the courses enhancing students’ job perspectives. To date, only a few studies pertaining to quality and service quality have been conducted in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Thus, this exploratory sequential mixed-methods case study was conducted in an English for Academic Purposes programme in the State of Qatar to uncover teachers’ perceptions of curriculum quality and its attributes. Additionally, this study seeks to discover whether teachers’ perceptions of ‘quality’ affected their curriculum implementation. Qualitative data indicates that participants understood a quality curriculum as one that meets stakeholders’ needs in addition to meeting twenty-five attributes pertaining to curriculum design, course content, and resources. The findings reveal that curriculum design is the most important aspect of quality followed by course content and resources. Qualitative data also revealed that the exclusion of teachers from curriculum decision-making, students’ admission criteria, and lack of trust were detrimental to the quality of curriculum design. Curriculum relevance to students is of concern to some participants, since students and the wider community do not perceive the English for Academic Purposes courses as relevant. Although the participants’ do not deem quality of resources as an essential attribute of curriculum quality, it affects their curriculum implementation. Overall, the quantitative data supports the qualitative findings with respect to the importance of the curriculum quality attributes. Two curriculum quality attributes emerge from two participants’ comments related to curriculum design section in the questionnaire. Based on the study findings, it is recommended that the needs and situation analyses be modified at the study site to address concerns raised by the participants. It is also suggested that the university explores different options of English for Academic Purpose programmes to enhance students’ perceptions of the relevance of the English for Academic Purposes courses.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of the teacher educators about the merger between the University of Namibia and Namibia’s former Colleges of Education with regards to the merger's capacity to improve quality teacher education. The focus of the study differed from the various merger studies in that theirs has mainly been on technical issues of mergers to interpret merger capacity to improve change. Of importance about this focus is that the views of teacher educators were deemed important because of their 'agency' in the merger and its capacity to improve teacher education quality. The grounded theory of Strauss and Corbin of 1998 framed the study. The key question of the study was: "what are the perceptions of teacher educators about the merger of the former colleges of education with the University of Namibia's and the capacity to improve teacher education quality in the country?" A case study methodology was employed in which semi-structured questions were used to collect data. In addition, the study also employed observations and document analysis as sources of data.The key finding of the study was that all the participants' perceptions were that the merger has the capacity to improve the quality of teacher education in Namibia. The core of this finding serves as evidence of the complexities of mergers, particularly in terms of how participants perceive the merger's capability of improving quality. Firstly, the perceptions related to the contexts in which the participant teacher educators found themselves. Furthermore, the perceptions appeared to be associated with various contextual needs experienced by participants in the various institutions. The study analysis further suggested that the needs related to issues associated with input, process and output. These findings laid the ground for an emergent theory for understanding of teacher educators’ perceptions about the mergers. A conclusion drawn from the above findings were that the Maslow Hierarchy of Need Theory (with its biological/physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love, esteem needs, and self-actualization) provide better understanding of perceptions about mergers.

Submitted in partial fulfillment of a Masters Degree in the Department of Educational Planning and Administration in the Faculty of Education at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2007. / A number of sources and articles have been published on the subject of Total Quality Management (TQM). The majority of them have not been specifically targeted at how educators view TQM and how it could be used to improve teaching and learning in schools. The purpose of this study was to detennine the views of educators on TQM in secondary schools. The study aimed at finding out how TQM principles could be used to achieve quality teaching and learning. The focus was on TQM as a universal management tool for quality improvement in education. A questionnaire was administered to a total of eighty-eight respondents comprising ten principals, ten deputy principals, twenty heads of departments and forty-eight educators selected from ten secondary schools in the selected circuit. The data was analysed in percentages and recorded in tables. The results were also illustrated by means of the graphs to make interpretations easier.

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree DOCTOR OF EDUCATION in the Department of Educational Psychology of the Faculty of Education at the University of Zululand, 2006. / The aim of this study was to investigate educators' perceptions of quality assurance in education. During the quality assurance process educators are evaluated on the quality of their delivery inside and outside the classroom, in order to assess whether successful educational outcomes are achieved. Successful educational outcomes are dependent upon empowering, motivating and training educators. Quality assurance seeks to manage and support these processes. The evaluation process is essential to any ongoing effort to improve the teaching profession. Evaluation is part of the educational process, based on sound performance standards that are congruent to the delivery of quality education. The evaluation process is transparent, accountable, supportive, developmental and inclusive. There are three programmes, which together form the Quality Assurance. Each of these programmes has a distinct focus and purpose, and together they monitor the performance of the education system and develop the educator. These are: > Development Appraisal. > Performance Measurement. > Whole School Evaluation. The Developmental Appraisal process appraises individual educators in a transparent manner with the view to determining areas of strength and weaknesses. The Performance Measurement process uses scores achieved during the teacher evaluation exercise to evaluate individual educators for salary progression, grade progression and rewards and incentives. The Whole School Evaluation process, which is an external process, evaluated the overall effectiveness of the school. The empirical investigation commenced with a self-structured questionnaire which was distributed to educators. The data obtained from the completed questionnaires was processed and analyzed by means of descriptive and inferential statistics. The following are some of the recommendations made: > The educator evaluation instrument must focus on teaching time. > The quality assurance process must focus on developing the educator. > Further research should be conducted on the role of quality assurance in educator career paths.

Learning plays an important role in adopting new technology. While the role of learning in the decision to adopt is widely investigated in the literature, its role in knowing how to best use technology and the speed of learning is not. For instance, when farmers adopt groundwater extraction technology, they need to learn their private marginal cost and marginal benefit of extracting water. Comparing the extraction behavior of the owners of new wells with old wells, we explore the role of experience in shaping farmers' decisions. We use three identification strategies to test the hypothesis that owners of new wells extract more water than owners of old wells. Employing panel data at the district level in a fixed-effects model, we find that groundwater extraction rises as the growth rate in new wells increases. Our second strategy uses the exogenous variation in precipitation shocks in a double-difference approach. Employing census data at the well level, we show that more water is extracted from new wells than older wells and that the difference in extraction increases in areas that experience negative precipitation shocks. The third strategy is the nearest-neighbor matching method which confirms the above findings and indicates that old wells are more efficient in maintaining their inter-temporal extraction. We also provide evidence regarding the speed of learning about using technology. Our findings have important implications for discussions of common pool regulation. Firms are often considered entities with complete private information about their true abatement costs. Our findings imply that quantity instruments for regulating groundwater extraction fail to guarantee productive efficiency when farmers face uncertainty about their marginal abatement cost. This paper also provides new insights for optimizing climate change scenarios, in light of the importance of the learning lag in using new technologies. In chapter two, we discuss the effects of precipitation shocks on the rural labor market and migration. The welfare of both agrarian and non-agrarian workers in rural areas is highly affected by agricultural output volatility, caused in part by weather shocks. This paper examines the impact of precipitation shocks on labor supply and out-migration in rural Iran. We use individual-level panel data combined with station-based precipitation data at the rural-agglomeration level to study the intensive and extensive margins of employment. Our results indicate different types of responses to positive and negative shocks. Using a fixed-effects panel data model, we find that workers in agriculture and industry sectors increase their hours of work in response to positive shocks. At the extensive margin, we find that negative shocks reduce the labor market participation of women. We observed heterogeneity in responses based on the sector of employment, gender, and the roles of individuals in the household. We also show that positive shocks affect the division of labor at the household level. Our estimates for the probability of migration indicate that negative shocks raise the probability of migration for young men. We show that the labor-migration of the same group is also affected by negative shocks, but the impact could be explained by the local unemployment rate, implying the labor market is a channel through which precipitation shocks affect migratory decisions. In the final chapter, we investigate parents' investment in the quality of their children. While school enrollment at the primary level has been rising in developing countries to almost complete national coverage, international measures of education quality, especially in basic knowledge of reading and math, do not exhibit a parallel improvement. Since parents' expenditure is an important determinant of children's school performance, we investigate parents' investments in the quality of their children's education, measured by their spending on books and other school materials. We develop an overlapping generations model, in which we consider families' expenditure as an input to their children's human capital. Moreover, in our model, parents use the current status of their children's human capital as a screening measure for adjusting their investment, instead of the standard tradition of simply balancing the trade-off between future income and the current stream of direct and indirect school costs. From our theoretical analysis, our main hypothesis is that families consider better school performance to be a reliable predictor of future return, and this incentivizes them to invest more in children who are academically promising, considering other determinants of children's schooling output, such as school quality. Empirically, we use an instrumental variables approach to test our main hypothesis, and it is accepted using data for Ghanaian primary school students in rural areas. / Doctor of Philosophy / Adopting new technology need learning, either in the form of knowledge or by working with the adopted technology. While the role of learning in the decision to adopt is widely investigated in the literature, its role in knowing how to best use technology and the speed of learning is not. In the first chapter, we investigate the adoption of the use of groundwater technology. When farmers adopt groundwater extraction technology, they need to learn about how to best use the technology to maximize their profit in the short and long run. We use five sets of data from Iran to show the existence of learning in the use of groundwater technology. Our findings improve the discussion on the regulation of firms in using common resources. This paper also provides new insights for optimizing climate change scenarios, in light of the importance of the learning lag in using new technologies. In chapter two, we discuss the effects of precipitation shocks on the rural labor market and migration. Weather shocks affect the welfare of workers in rural areas. This paper examines the impact of precipitation shocks on labor supply and out-migration in rural Iran. We use individual-level and station-based precipitation data at the rural-agglomeration level to study the effects of precipitation shocks on employment. Our results indicate different types of responses to positive and negative shocks. We find that workers in agriculture and industry sectors increase their hours of work in response to positive shocks and negative shocks reduce the labor market participation of women. We also show that the labor market is a channel through which precipitation shocks affect migratory decisions. In the final chapter, we investigate parents' investment in the quality of their children. While school enrollment at the primary level has been rising in developing countries, international measures of education quality, especially in basic knowledge of reading and math, do not exhibit a parallel improvement. Since parents' expenditure is an important determinant of children's school performance, we investigate parents' investments in the quality of their children's education, measured by their spending on books and other school materials. We develop a model, in which we consider families' expenditure as an input to their children's human capital. We hypothesize that families consider better school performance to be a reliable predictor of future return. Empirically, we test our hypothesis, and it is accepted using data for Ghanaian primary school students in rural areas.

Ugdymas yra vienas iš svarbiausių švietimo politikos prioritetų. Suteikiamas išsilavinimas turi būti modernus ir kokybiškas, orientuotas į savarankiško ir atsakingo asmens, modernios pilietinės bendruomenės, žinių visuomenės ugdymo tikslus. Ugdymas suvokiamas kaip asmenybę kurianti žmonių tarpusavio sąveika, kurios metu perduodamos žinios, patirtis, vertybės. Darbe aptariami psichologiniai, pedagoginiai ir vadybiniai ugdymo proceso kokybės pagrindai, išsiaiškinti veiksniai, įtakojantys ugdymo proceso kokybę bendrojo lavinimo mokykloje. Taip pat nagrinėjamas vadybos aspektų išskirtinumas bendrojo lavinimo mokykloje, analizuojama, kokią įtaką ugdymo proceso kokybei turi vadovavimo bei stiliaus pasirinkimas pozityvaus mokyklos įvaizdžio kūrimas. Siekiant atskleisti ugdymo proceso kokybės vadybos veiksnius bendrojo lavinimo mokyklose, darbe nagrinėjamas Vilniaus miesto mokyklose ir gimnazijose dirbančių pedagogų, besimokančių aukštesniųjų klasių moksleivių bei jų tėvų požiūris į gimnazijose vykdomą profesinį orientavimą. ištirti ugdymo proceso kokybės aspektus bendrojo lavinimo mokyklose ir gimnazijose. / Education is one of the most important education policy priorities. Education must be given a modern and high quality, oriented to self and the person responsible, modern civil society, knowledge society, educational objectives. Education is perceived as a personality developing human interaction, which at the time of transfer of knowledge, experience, values. The paper deals with psychological, pedagogical and management process, the quality of education in law, to clarify the factors that influence the quality of education in general education schools. We also examined the management aspects of uniqueness in general education schools, analysing the impact of raising the quality and style of leadership has the choice of the positive image of the school building. Education process in order to reveal the factors of quality management in general education schools, work the city of Vilnius in education and a teacher, training of students of higher classes, and their parents' approach to the gymnasiums in the guidance. Investigate aspects of the quality of education process in general education schools and gymnasiums.

Final thesis deals with the Ministry of Education Strategy document prepared for educational policy of the Czech Republic till 2020 and possibilities of fulfilling its vision, which includes ensuring quality education accessible to everyone, oriented to student with the maximum use of its educational potential. The thesis is focused on the possibility of strengthening the traditional importance and impact of school for the whole society and the need for changes in the methods and forms of education that are used in the traditional way for decades without regard to the needs of a changing society. The issue is examined in the context of directors of elementary and secondary schools with regard to their level of knowledge and understanding of the document and their overall approach to the proposed interventions. The research finds if headmasters know what is expected from them and what conditions they see as an effective implementation and if they recognized challenges standing in front of them. It is also the base for the drafting of the implementation process and the possible fulfillment of their goals. KEY WORDS: The quality of education, equality, support mechanisms, evaluation, director

[pt] Este trabalho investiga a qualidade do Ensino Fundamental das capitais brasileiras no período de 1996 a 2005 face às mudanças expressivas que ocorreram na educação no Brasil, principalmente no que se refere à alteração no fluxo escolar, ao papel dos municípios na administração e ao modo heterogêneo pelo qual cada um destes fatores atuou nas diferentes redes de ensino das capitais. Inicialmente, o estudo analisa a evolução de três indicadores de qualidade do Ensino Fundamental - desempenho escolar, taxa de não aprovação e taxa de distorção idade série - das redes de ensino estaduais e municipais das capitais brasileiras, bem como o mapeamento das políticas educacionais implementadas pelos governos no período analisado. Em seguida, investigou-se a associação das políticas públicas sobre o desempenho das redes de ensino das capitais brasileiras, a partir dos dados para a 4ª série do Ensino Fundamental do SAEB 1999, 2001 e 2003. O resultado da estimação do modelo multinível mostrou que as políticas relacionadas ao processo de escolha dos diretores, à formação dos professores, ao atendimento à Educação Infantil têm associação positiva no desempenho discente. O trabalho também investiga, a partir do desempenho da coorte etária de 10 anos, a qualidade da educação considerando tanto o desempenho dos alunos quanto o fluxo escolar. Os resultados indicam, para o Brasil, queda de 7,5 pontos entre 1995 e 2003. Para as capitais brasileiras, o cenário para o período 1999 a 2003 é de estabilidade. Conseqüências para as políticas públicas na área de educação são discutidas. / [en] The present study investigates the overall quality of basic schools located in the capital of the Brazilian states, between 1996 and 2005, taking into account the extensive changes throughout Brazilian education system, specially major improvement in the Brazilian educational flux, the roll of municipal administration on education, as well as the different ways in which each of the aforementioned factors influenced municipal and state schools. At first, our study not only analyses the evolution of three basic schools quality indexes - school performance, retention rates, and overage rates - of both municipal and state schools located in capital of the Brazilian states, but also the mapping of government implemented education policies in the mentioned period. Subsequently, we study the relationship between the public policies on schools performance, using the available information of Brazilian Assessment of Educational Progress (SAEB), 4th grade, in data base for 1999, 2001, and 2003. The multi- level estimation results showed that policies related to schools principals choosing process, teachers´ education and childhood education are associated to an increased schools performance. Another object of analysis is the quality of education for the cohort of 10 year-olds. The results indicate stability for 10 year-olds advancement performance to the capital of the Brazilian states. Consequences for educational policy are discussed.

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar a importância da avaliação do livro didático feita pelos programas de governo e o impacto desse processo na qualidade de ensino na escola pública. A partir de levantamento bibliográfico e análise documental, como editais de convocação para o programa, guias de livros didáticos aprovados e textos acadêmicos relacionados ao tema, conseguimos perceber avanços na qualidade editorial e no conteúdo dos livros didáticos distribuídos para escolas da rede pública do Brasil. Para verificar o impacto do PNLD na qualidade de ensino, fizemos uma breve análise dos resultados das avaliações nacionais: o SAEB e a Prova Brasil. / This research aims to analyze the importance of textbooks evaluation made by government programs and its impact on the quality of teaching in public schools. By means of literature review and documentary analysis, as the public call for the program, approved guidelines for textbooks and academic papers related to the subject, we see improvements not only in the textbooks editorial quality but also in its content, considering they are distributed to public schools in Brazil. In order to verify the PNLD impact in the quality of education, we made one brief analysis of the results of the national evaluations: SAEB and the Brazil Test.